"He did what he thought was best for his students," I said, marveling at Jonah's vehemence.
"Did what he thought was best for his own ass."
"Don't use that language. You're too smart for words like dickweed and ass."
"If I was smart, you'd listen to me."
"I do listen to you. You're my compass. But I need to make money to pay for the mortgage, the eggs and orange juice, and the best way for me to do it is to get my job back."
"This is because of yesterday. You didn't like the Bryants."
"Actually, I did, Jonah. But this is because I realized I haven't been myself these past couple of months, ever since I was out at Henderson's—"
"And saw that girl."
"—and thought I saw something I didn't really see," I said, wishing I could tell Jonah about the other three instances that continued to plague me, so he might have a better chance of understanding my position. "I'm glad my mistake caused something positive to happen, but it would have happened anyway. Laura's an intelligent girl. She would have climbed back to the road and flagged somebody for help soon, anyway. My being there was total coincidence."
"And you believe that."
"Sure do. You should, too."
He rose from the table with extreme dignity and left the room without a further word. This was not going to be easy, I realized, and empathized with Jonah to my very core. But my course was set, and I had to husband, as they say, my resolve.
That same Saturday morning, before we left to collect Morgan, I telephoned Matt Newburg at school, expecting to leave a message that he might or might not choose to return. Instead, I found him in his office. I explained that during my time away I'd had a chance to think about our conversation and some of the concerns parents and prospective students had conveyed to him earlier. I told him I understood their worries. Appreciated as well his awkward position and his need to view things with the big picture in mind. I asked if it would be possible to meet to discuss my status.
He said, much to my surprise, "Why don't you come in Monday morning."
I thanked him, hung up, penciled the appointment on the kitchen wall calendar. A good first foray, I thought, wandering into the front room and looking out the window at our horse chestnut for some vision of another ghostly boy or girl that would contradict my mood. But no, only a woodpecker working its way up the bark, pecking for bugs. On an impulse, I opened the phone book and looked to see if Roy Skoler was listed. He wasn't.
At the bus terminal, the glum look on Morgan's face as he threaded his way through the crowd spoke volumes. Jonah and I, models of reserve in light of all the handshaking and hugs, glanced at each other, guessing in the second game he must have made the last out with the bases loaded, or errored on some clutch throw that handed the other team victory. Unceremoniously, Morgan chucked his gear bag in the back of the truck, climbed in, and grumbled, "Let's get out of here."
"What's happening, man?" Jonah asked, as we pulled out.
"Nothing."
"You can't win them all," I said, as trite as a stale fortune cookie.
"What're you freaking talking about?" Morgan challenged.
"I mean, it's clear from your mood the team lost."
"We killed them. They couldn't've sucked worse."
"So what's the problem? No 'hello,' no 'good to see you'?"
"I'm not in the mood, Cassandra, so spare me."
"Easy, dude," said Jonah.
"You can shut up, pipsqueak."
Without a further word being spoken, I realized what was wrong. "You didn't get into a fight, did you?"
"I'm too smart for that. They'd have benched me the rest of the summer."
"Who was it?"
"Who cares? Screw them, anyway."
"We'll talk later," I said.
"Forget it."
The rest of the ride home was tense. And here I had wanted so badly to listen to my twins do their routine, jousting and joking, but neither of them had much patience with me at the moment. Still, this incident—which, predictably, turned out to be a couple of the boys taunting the team's star player about his mother, new kids trash-talking him in an effort to secure a place in the hierarchy and drag him down a notch—further steeled my resolve. Morgan was right. It didn't matter who ridiculed me with another tired accusation. What mattered was we move forward. One of Rosalie's pet clichés was Consider the source and rise above it. As clichés went, a decent one.
After lunch, the boys recovered some of their fraternal rhythm. Morgan's spirits revived as if he had shaken off an umpire's bad call and had to go on with the game. Suppressing my urge to tell them to lock the doors while I was out, I drove over to see my parents. Here I told them—sitting on the back porch, looking at the meadow that cupped the pond as if in the palms of its hands, a vista as familiar to me as my own palms—about my decision to take a hiatus from divining, my request to be reinstated at school, my desire to simplify life and get more into the swim of things.
"Like racerats swim," I could swear Nep said under his breath as he swatted at an invisible fly. "Churchrats."
"What was that?" I asked.
"Churchrats."
"Be nice," Rosalie interjected.
He looked out toward the woods and pale horizon beyond.
"Ever since Henderson's," I continued, trying not to reveal my distress at the strength of Nep's disease this afternoon, "I've been flying backwards and upside down and I'm tired of it. Hummingbirds can do that but I'm no hummingbird. An albatross more like. I have to pull myself together for you and the boys, if not for myself."
Rosalie sat as silent as a Trappist nun, clearly caught between a dawning optimism that her daughter had been visited by some archangelic clarion voice of wisdom, after so many years of wandering in darkness, and an apprehensive concern that there was some catch lurking behind this sudden transformation. "I've even been thinking," I continued, "that if it isn't an imposition, I'd like for me and the boys to come to church with you tomorrow."
"Imposition?" she said, breaking her silence with a beaming smile. "It'd be wonderful. How long has it been since Morgan and Jonah saw the inside of a house of worship?"
Nep stared into the distance.
"I can't guarantee they'll go along with it—"
"You're their mother. Tell them and they will."
"That's not quite how it works. They've got heads harder than anvils and I can't force them. Besides, how many times did you tell me to go and I didn't?"
"Your father was the reason you got away with that."
"Either way, I'd like to go to church tomorrow. I want to see if there's something there for me."
Nep shook his head. An unpleasant cast settled over his face. He wasn't in pain, so far as I could tell, but neither was he comfortable. He appeared pinched, as if some errant facial muscle had seized up. I glanced at Rosalie. To her, it seemed, nothing was unusually amiss. When she walked me to the truck, I asked about him. He seemed to have taken a sharp downturn since returning from Covey.
"Bad days, better days," she told me. The dementia flowed under the influence of its own unseen tides.
Dementia. Such an ugly word, like death, decay, despair. But his mind was losing itself, his words sculpting themselves into curious shapes. While I'd avoided thinking of his illness as dementia, strictly speaking this was precisely what was chasing him away from himself. Driving along an empty road to Mendes, I tried to imagine our lives without him striding around competently, modestly, in it. What a weatherless world it was going to be.
My proposal after dinner that the boys accompany me to church was met with a resounding hush at first, followed by a storm of raucous, disbelieving laughter.
After asking, "You're kidding, right?" and seeing I was quite sincere, Morgan shifted into one of his mock characters, the Minister of Sinister. "My deareth brethren," he lisped with sham melodrama. "Blessed be heeth that passeth through the eyeth of the needleth."
"Amen," his brother intoned.
As ever, the routine descended into playful sacrilege.
"Oh, Joneth, my childeth."
"Yea now, Minister Sinister."
"Thou hath sinneth and now must payeth for thy sineths."
"Boys, come on," I said.
Morgan grabbed a broom that was leaning in the corner behind the kitchen door. With grinning solemnity he raised it like a crosier in both hands, saying, "Prepareth to meet thy maker, you sinful scummeth."
"God save me." Jonah laughed and fled the room, perhaps a touch worried that Morgan, still moody, might take the joke too far. "Save me from the fire and brimstone—"
Running after him, Morgan shouted, "Minister Sinister's coming to punish you."
The screen door slammed. They horsed around outside, yelling and yapping. One of those moments when I was grateful our nearest neighbors were hundreds of yards farther down the road, unable to hear us.
And yet next morning, after all the hijinks, without another word exchanged about the matter, they donned their blazers and ties and accompanied me to the service. We sat toward the back of the nave on one of the long mahogany pews, beside Rosalie who was in shock over our actually being there. Flanking me, the twins shifted some and stifled yawns but were otherwise on good behavior. The pastor gave a sermon on the healing power of soul-cleansing. Like most such sermons, or so I guessed, his was generic enough to feel tailor-made for my personal predicament. That was the genius of good preaching. The imagery got a bit out of hand—I couldn't picture running my soul in the Laundromat of the Lord's love, or drying it on the clothesline of contrition—but many of his points made sense. Whose spirit couldn't use a good scrubbing once in a while?
After a haphazard but earnest rendering of "Arise, All Souls, Arise," much of the congregation departed, but my mother insisted we join her in the annex, where they served coffee, juice, and doughnuts. I knew this meant getting in over my head, and the boys urged me with strident whispers to skip the reception. But I was drawn along by the stream of talking worshipers and the unvarnished enthusiasm of my mother who, it was plain to see, reveled in all this. The congregants were upbeat. That is, until a few of them noticed me and gave me some of the looks I'd anticipated. What-is-she-possibly-doing-here looks. Even Hodge Gilchrist, once a bosom buddy but now grown up and married to convention, and his wife, Jane, gave me a condescending nod.
Many of these people would have heard the rumors of my fantasized discovery of a hanged girl in the woods. More than a few may have preserved a low opinion of my morals based on my having given birth to a couple of illegitimate children. Others disapproved of or were amused by my heretical divining. Part of this was surely paranoia. But part of what I was seeing—the turned heads, the mild grimaces, the shallow smirks—was as old as the hills surrounding this village church.
As I began to search out more friendly familiar faces, ones that might offer an encouraging smile, I realized—despite my teaching and Morgan's games—just how much an outsider I had become. Amazing how if you seldom attended the volunteer fire company's annual pan-cake breakfasts, or never went to the big June tractor parade in Callicoon, and if you avoided the various roast beef dinners at St. Joseph's and religiously skipped church, you really could live in a community and know almost no one at all.
Niles was not there, but Melanie was. So was Adrienne, who gave me and the boys a double take as if wondering where was her camera when she needed it to document a paranormal sighting. The twins stood next to me, eating glazed doughnuts topped with sprinkles and taking in the scene with mild impatience as my mother brought Melanie and her daughter over to say hello.
"Good to see you," I said. "Boys, say hi to Mrs. Hubert."
They mumbled something and stared at me, mutely imploring, Can we leave yet?
"Cass decided to give church a chance this morning," my mother explained. "What did you boys think of the sermon?"
They shrugged and glanced at me again for direction.
"Cass, can I have coffee?"
"Me, too," said Jonah.
"One cup each. Not another drop."
"I want some, too," Adrienne now begged, but was quickly and quietly told no.
The pastor walked straight up, took my hand in both his weighty ones, and greeted me by name. When the boys returned holding their paper cups of black coffee, he directed his fatherly compliments at each, to which they responded with suspicious nods. It was clear even from our brief conversation that Rosalie must have telephoned him beforehand and given him advance notice her wayward daughter and godless grandchildren were going to be in attendance, and to make sure to be a welcoming shepherd. There was little point protesting to her about it. I knew her purpose was to help me, and if in times past I would have groused about such blatant interference, these weren't times past. Everyone standing in this church was looking for help, and I was no different. We were all deeply tattooed by the most basic perplexities, I reminded myself, and my mother had sought her solace here from the days even before Christopher's death, surely spending hours now each week praying for Nep's health and my sanity.
"You ought to join us more often," the pastor said. "It's my understanding some of your friends from childhood are parishioners. One of them even asked after you recently. Seems he just moved back to our area. I told him your mother said you were going up to the family place in Maine a little early this year. He seemed eager to catch up with you."
"Who would that be?" I said warily, feeling ever less safe in this uncomfortable room. What childhood friends did I have beyond Niles and Hodge, neither of whom had moved away from Corinth County?
"I don't feel so well," Jonah interrupted.
"Me neither," said Morgan. "Maybe that coffee was rotten."
Appalled by their bravura performances, but also feeling I myself had now reached a new dead end, I said, "We'd best be going."
Rosalie naturally wanted us to linger but must have registered urgency in my eyes, so walked us outside where we said our goodbyes and fled. On the way home, the boys launched into a chorus of complaints.
"Please let it drop," I snapped, sorting through my memory for a childhood friend who would bother to ask about me. "It was a good idea for us to attend church."
"Well, I don't see what good there was in it."
"Trust me, it was good," I said, grateful neither of them pressed me for a reason why.
23
LEFT BY MYSELF that afternoon, Jonah having accompanied Morgan on bicycles to a pickup game over at the school grounds, I rummaged around in the garage and found some empty boxes. I knew what I needed to do if I was going to stay this course. Moving with the steady deliberation of an automaton, I went around the house and gathered my divining rods, my pendulums, my accumulation of geological maps, anything tangible that had to do with dowsing. I retrieved my favorite dogwood Y-rod from the shed out back where I had been soaking it in a bucket of distilled water and clove oil to keep it limber. Then I carefully wrapped all my virgulae, bobbers, and L-rods in remnants of sheets I kept in a rag bin in the pantry and layered them in the boxes, like little shrouded corpses placed in a paupers' graveyard. The pendulums I put into brown paper bags and noted down which one was silver, which was fabricated from stainless steel, which from brass, even one that was simply an acorn tied to a string. I unloaded the hatchet and other necessaries from my backpack and placed them in the cardboard boxes as well. Part of me wanted to linger over each of these precious old companions, but I knew I couldn't bear it.
Once I had everything crated, I sealed the boxes with packing tape and marked each in black ink on the lids with the Chinese symbol for divining——an ideogram that looked for all the world like a headless, armless dancing stick figure. With some effort, I pulled down the attic ladder, a wobbly wooden skeleton I never allowed the boys to climb and shouldn't have used myself, and hauled the boxes up under the rafters next to other paraphernalia left behind by former owners of the house. It smelled somehow of death up there. I couldn't move fast e
nough to finish the task.
As I folded the ladder back into the ceiling, I felt an overpowering, nauseating mix of grief and joy. It was nothing short of the burial of an old friend, an honored if wily muse. It represented the abandonment of one form of searching I trusted but didn't understand for another I understood but didn't necessarily trust.
In light of my mother's long tenure in the district and my own decent record on the job, I was rehired for the fall term. "You've always been a good teacher," Matt Newburg said, being far kinder to me than I anticipated. Given I had suspended my other occupation, he promised to try to move me into as full-time a schedule as he could manage. For no particular reason, I had never really connected with the principal. But here he was being unexpectedly generous toward me, a normal guy being nice. Granted, he was not the appropriate man to be forward with, but wouldn't a regular, normal Cassandra Brooks think Matt Newburg—who wasn't married like James Boyd or Niles; who held a responsible job; who wasn't unhandsome, but a sincere, solid fellow with large blue eyes—was someone to have dinner with one night?
"I appreciate your generosity."
"Just because you're going through a rocky time doesn't mean we're going to abandon you," he said, shaking my hand before I left.
That night, after sharing the good news with the twins and my parents, I found myself thinking, Why don't I put in a little effort to be less of a recluse, an overgrown tomboy dressed in the same worn jeans and faded flannel shirts I had become accustomed to wearing when not teaching? Revise my uniform of a tatterdemalion? At minimum I might ferret out a couple of blouses that would look presentable with unfrayed blue jeans. Wear some nice shoes instead of my dusty cowhide boots for a change. Present a portrait of a woman interested in being part of the world around her.
This phenomenon of the new Cassandra labored along in fits and starts through the balance of June. Dressed in what Rosalie deemed "a pretty outfit," I went to a midweek vesper service and even exposed myself to a small social afterward while the twins and Nep stayed home to watch a ball game on television. There was no further mention of this supposed childhood friend or any sign of him, and I chose not to ask more about it. For all my effort, I went to bed more often than not feeling like I had gone about my day as a woman in disguise, a woman I scarcely recognized. Not someone I necessarily disliked, but neither was this new Cass I had fabricated someone with whom I really wanted to spend much time. My experiment, undertaken to prove the hypothesis that a person who donned new garb and attitude might acquire a new direction in life, had already shown signs of failure.
The Diviner's Tale Page 22