"Me, for instance?"
"Both of us, for instance."
How deeply unsettling it was that Charley, the best of my past, unwittingly brought with him the worst of it. Roy Skoler in Little Eddy—it wrenched my stomach, indeed I felt nauseated. Forcing myself to smile and try my very best to get back into the rhythm of this reunion with Charley, I said, hoping to change the subject, "If you're not sitting with anybody meantime, would you like to join me and my other son?"
We walked to the opposite stand, where I introduced Jonah. Before Charley could ask about a father, a husband, I explained with an abbreviated version of the same story I had offered the twins long ago, my old cover story that had begun to harden into a reliable reality. Hoping Jonah couldn't hear everything I was saying, I went on to paint a somewhat brighter portrait of life than facts would bear. Like a film editor cutting in postproduction in order to make the make-believe more believable, I allowed Cassandra Productions to screen for him my work as a teacher while downplaying my other vocation as a diviner. My documentary was mostly truthful, just there were a couple of scenes left out. The recitation calmed me some, and as we settled on the bench together my pleasure at seeing Charley gradually overtook the shock of having evoked Roy Skoler's name. More circles were closing around me, but I didn't need to be trapped by them. At least not here with my old surrogate brother sitting next to me after so many years.
We watched the game, the three of us now cheering, now groaning, but at the same time I caught up a little on Charley's life since the old days. After the four-wheeler accident, the surgery and long recuperation, the physical therapy to learn how to negotiate his way in a depthless two-dimensional world, he went to college in Boston, then migrated north, finally settling in a small seaside town.
"What do you do?" I asked.
"My liberal arts degree seemed the perfect launching pad for a career in antiques. Antiques, old books, folk art paintings. I've also become a decent cabinetmaker and restorer in the meantime. My shop's in Wiscasset, up in Maine. Most of my business is summer people, so this isn't the best time for me to be away, but there it is. What do you do besides raising these handsome guys?"
"Wiscasset, you mean on the Sheepscot?"
Nothing was more reliable than pure chance. I told him about Covey. How we used to prefer Route One, along the coast with its bustling little harbors and pretty villages, to the quicker interstate with its nonexistent vistas, straight corridors lined by indifferent trees. We had driven through Wiscasset many times, I said, floored to have been so near Charley over the years and at the same time chilled by the realization that Roy Skoler had been visiting Maine just as I was being tormented on Covey Island.
"Well, that settles that. You're a slow coastal highway traveler again from now on," he said, smiling and putting his arm around my shoulder as he might have done twenty-five years ago.
I looked at his face and realized I had been unconsciously averting my eyes. Charley understandably misinterpreted this as my wanting to avoid getting caught staring at the sightless flesh where—if my brother and the rest of the gang had chosen less treacherous ways of killing time—his other healthy eye would be looking right back at me.
"Pretty hideous, you're thinking," he said.
"No, that's wrong."
"I'm more than used to it by now, but it took a while."
"I don't think it looks awful, Charley. I was just thinking it's a shame how some things happen that are beyond our stopping them, is all," which was the truth, flat out.
In fact, Charley's manner as well as his face were both so youthful and mature that I realized that my childhood crush had never really abated. That said, I wasn't so foolish or impulsive as to think that the half-formed yearnings of a lonesome little girl had any purchase on the present. It was good sitting there with him, though, despite the fact I couldn't help but wonder—I refused to ask—which of the boys on the field were Skoler's sons. "You remember my father, Nep?"
"Never forget him. He was kind to me after the accident, gave me a ham radio and taught me how to use it. I still have the thing, works perfect to this day."
"Nep called what he did at his workbench, bringing old things to new life, the science of resurrection. Seems what you do is kind of similar."
Charley gave me an unabashed hard thoughtful look, then glanced away as the umpire cried, "You're out," and that was it for the game. The crowd had dwindled to relatives and diehards who would hang around until the last soul departed, taking in the warm evening air, analyzing the game, or others who, like my old friend, were standing in for absentee parents. I wanted to talk more but didn't know what to say other than "When is Roy coming to pick up his kids?" knowing that I needed to avoid encountering him if at all possible.
He peered around the throng. "Not here yet."
"Want to walk down to the dugout for a minute? I'd love for you to meet Morgan."
Jonah had said nothing to this point but was as fascinated by Charley as his mother. When we made our way to the wooden shed that served as a dugout, he finally piped up, asking, "So you knew my mother when she was my age?"
"Younger than you."
"It's probably hard to imagine me as ever being younger than you, but I was."
"Oh, no," said Jonah. "You still are, in some ways." He then asked Charley, "What happened to your eye?"
"Jonah—" but Charley was already answering him, and neither paid attention to my objection.
"I lost it in my early teens."
"It went bad?"
"No, I was playing a bad game," he said, then looked at me, perhaps weighing whether or not to mention that I was there that evening. He must have decided not to, because he finished, simply, "Lowest moment of my life, but also maybe one of the best things that ever happened to me."
"No way. How come?"
"When you can't see the same way everybody else does, it's your responsibility to see things others can't. Simple idea, I always liked it. Hard one to live up to, though. You know who said that to me?"
Jonah shook his head.
"Your grandfather."
Morgan joined us, cap slung on backward—a personal tic that meant his team had lost, his version of a black armband for mourning—and before I launched into any platitudes about sportsmanship, he warned, "Just don't say it, Cass. We blew it. It's just a game. No big stink," then stared at Charley.
"Morgan," I said, placing my hand on Charley's forearm. "Let me introduce you to an old friend of mine who was buddies with your uncle Christopher."
He shifted his glove to his left hand, wiped his right on his dusty white pant leg, and shook Charley's outstretched hand.
"Good game you played."
"Thanks," Morgan said.
How was it, I wondered, Charley could get away with saying this and I couldn't? The weight of a male voice in a fellow male's ears.
"You know Tick and Arlen?"
"Sure, so?" Morgan answered, his eyes darting over at Jonah, then down at his shoes.
"Their father asked me to corral them for him."
"I'll go find them," Jonah intervened, deciphering something on Morgan's face, and that conspiratorial glance he had shot his brother's way.
At first I attributed Morgan's mood to the fact he didn't like losing and didn't want to stick around. But as I listened to my son and old friend talk baseball, a universal language for people who don't know each other, the truth dawned on me. These were the boys who had been tormenting Morgan since we arrived back from Covey. It was clearer than the bristling stars above. I hurriedly asked Charley if he'd like to get together and talk more.
"I'd love nothing better," he said. "You all right?"
"My number's in the book," I blurted and gave him a hasty good-bye kiss, startling both him and Morgan by my abrupt rudeness. Grabbing my son by the arm—he yanked himself free and ran ahead of me toward the truck—I called over my shoulder, "Wonderful to see you again, Charley," as Jonah climbed by himself up the brief rise from
the field, where the floodlights were being extinguished one by one, having apparently not found the two kids he'd gone looking for. I waved frantically for him to go on ahead and join his brother, then turned around and walked straight into the one man I was hoping to avoid.
For an endlessly long moment I looked into the fixed and staring eyes of Roy Skoler, who with his sons beside him said not a word. His face had aged, the eyes sunk some into their hollow sockets, and even in this light it was clear he remained as pallid as ever. And yet his jet-black hair was still so dark that I even wondered passingly if he didn't dye it. Though the years clearly weighed on him, he was ever the same slightly statured man who exuded a tough, wiry confidence that made him seem larger than he was. He broke our brief frozen tableau with the faintest hint of a smile—this man whom I had never seen smile—before taking a drag from his cigarette and blowing smoke out of the side of his mouth. Pushing past them, I strode toward the truck, behind my boys who in the growing darkness had seen none of this, my heart racing and thoughts in a tangling blur, wondering how it was possible to have kept acts as shattering and central as those that rushed to mind, secreted for so long, unexamined and inarticulable.
My rod was now directed at its own diviner's heart.
Part V
THE FIFTH TURNING
25
I REMEMBER MAKING friends with a small stone. A smooth black river stone that fit in the palm of my hand like a little animal, yolk-shaped and fast asleep. She had a face, for sometimes it was a she. Blurry white smears on one side of the stone suggested eyes and a quizzical mouth that at times smiled and other times frowned. Quartz lodged in granite, maybe. One of my shoes had gone missing, but that didn't matter much since I went without a lot of the time back then. I was cold and shivered that first night even though it was August. I had brought Millicent with me but hadn't taken a blanket. Millicent was cold, too. She didn't say as much—Millicent never spoke in all the years I had known her—but we always shared similar feelings.
Dew settled over the predawn outdoor world where I resided those days and nights, so my hair and clothes and doll companion were damp when morning came. I didn't worry since I knew the sun would dry me off if I lay down on the rock that served as a kind of porch floor to the shallow scallop of a cave, out of sight of anyone who might be searching for me. I was sure they were searching, but I wished they wouldn't bother, for a while at least. I needed to be by myself.
—They're looking, though, aren't they? I asked the stone, waking her.
The stone agreed my parents were searching for their runaway daughter.
— Others, too?
— Others, too.
During the day, I didn't move around much beyond this cave, little more than the intimation of an open mouth in the rock really, where my brother and I had fantasized Iroquois warriors long ago lived with their squaws and papooses. Nobody would have known they were here, we figured, and so they'd have been protected from anyone who wanted to find them. Just as I was now.
I asked the stone, —Is anybody nearabouts?
The stone said, —No.
— So I'm safe?
— No.
— Who do I have to be afraid of?
The stone said nothing. I held Millicent close.
This was the place Christopher and I came when Rosalie and Nep were away for their wedding and funeral day that once. The secret place where some of the other kids in the gang would join us. Though I was always brought here on the rope leash and with a bandanna tied over my eyes, these precautions didn't finally fool me. By listening to birdcalls and the telltale crunch of the earth, the particular rustle and feel of its grasses as we walked, by sensing how my brother maneuvered past this patch of thorny wild rose and that tangle of ironwood, as I pictured them, I visualized roughly where we were. Nobody told me the way. What was more, I'd tramped my whole young life through these forests and possessed a moving picture in my mind of its dips and rises, meadows and streams, where the poison ivy was and where the wild leeks proliferated. He wasn't going to fool me, and he didn't. Until the day Emily died, he never knew that his secret was also mine.
Looking back, I see it was the very first place I ever divined.
My brother was dead and his funeral was over. My mother was mute and hysterical, and though my father tried to comfort me, I wasn't yet able to hear him over the mournful, dirging bagpipes that were caught in my head. I couldn't stay in the house another hour. So I left.
I was hungry that second day, sick with hunger. It didn't seem right for me to be hungry, especially since I allowed myself the indulgence of drinking a bellyful of water from the stream. The pebble I'd found in my hand down at the brook when I dipped for water asked me, did I know what I was doing? Was this really where I wanted to be?
No, this was not where I wanted to be, I silently told the pebble. But my brother's lost and I don't want to be found.
— When did you see him last? the stone persisted, speaking in a whisper.
— I told him he shouldn't go.
— He shouldn't have gone, then, should he.
The stone's voice was flat as its face, uninflected, and very sure of itself. It was as astute and reserved as royalty.
— We both know that, I said.
For a period of time the stone, trying to be a friend, went back to sleep, leaving me in peace. I didn't know which was worse. Talking to the stone or talking to myself. Because when I spoke with myself, I felt unforgiving, whereas when I spoke with the stone, she offered advice like, —Maybe you should go home, Cass. None of what happened was your fault. Nep and Mom are worried. Go on and get out of here.
— Maybe tomorrow, I said.
There were other things I could have done but didn't. I could have made a daisy chain for Millicent, as I'd always enjoyed making them in the past. A wide rock-ridden field loaded with wildflowers that bloomed without fear of the farmer's hayer was farther north of the cave and full of daisies. I didn't make a fire with the matches Chris kept inside a plastic bag out of the rain at the back of the cave. I didn't go looking for that lost shoe, though I wanted to, because I knew I might be seen. I didn't cry. This I wanted to do, too, but couldn't bear the thought of giving in to something as cowardly and weak as crying. My brother, if his ghost was watching me, and I admit I did believe it was, would have either cracked up laughing or been angered by such drippy behavior. I could have been afraid in the pitch dark but was numb rather than fearful.
The stone said, —On the other hand, maybe it's better you stay here. You're in a lot of trouble, you know.
She whispered that advice to me during my second night, a breezy night in which the trees conversed with one another, their leaves talking nonsense with abandon. Her warning grabbed hold in my head and repeated itself like a mantra, again and again, and was doing so a little after the sun rose and the birds' dialogue took over where the night wind and woods' left off. I would never have guessed her words— maybe it's better you stay here, you're in a lot of trouble —would be the same I'd hear from the first human voice I encountered during the madness of my flight and hiding.
The words came from a boy's mouth. Roy's mouth. They may or may not have been the first he spoke when he found me asleep on the long flat rock, sunning myself dry.
— I knew you'd be here, he had said.
I was so shocked by his crashing into my sequestered world that I hoped he and the panting black dog next to him were just some bad dream.
— Don't worry, I didn't tell anybody.
My blinking into the sun over his shoulder didn't make him disappear.
— Look, I brought you some food, he said, now very clearly in focus and quite real. He opened up a rucksack and offered me a paper bag that was inside, backhanding away the dog that nosed toward it. —Bologna, peanut butter, some bread. There's chips in there, too, and a couple of apples. I'll bring better stuff tomorrow, just tell me what you need.
— I don't want anything.
; — You need to eat some bread at least. Even convicts get bread and water.
— Maybe I'll have a piece of bread.
— What happened to your shoe?
— Lost it.
— I can break into your parents' house and bring you another pair.
— No, don't, I said.
He sat beside me on the rock and observed me with the same open curiosity a cat might show a cornered mouse.
— How'd you know where this place is? I asked.
— Chris showed me, he claimed, but I knew he wasn't telling me the truth. —So now only you and me are the ones that know. You're safe here.
I remembered what the stone said about me not being safe, but Roy wasn't unkind or threatening in any way. Instead, he was nice and thoughtful and didn't do what I expected the first person who found me would do. That is, order me to come home this instant. He didn't shame me by saying my mother and father were half out of their minds with worry. All he did was offer to help me survive a little better until I decided on my own what to do. This is what I told both Millicent and the stone, after Roy heeled the hound and left, saying he'd be back tomorrow, promising not to tell a soul he had found me. —You'll be wanting more supplies. I'll take care of everything.
When I asked the stone what she made of all this, she demurred. I thought she might have been a little jealous, but the stone didn't care for Roy.
— We'll see, she said.
For all my stubborn abstinence, my martyr's will to fast, to starve myself until I was as pure as the stone in my hand, I couldn't help but eat some of the food Roy had brought. I fingered peanut butter from the half-full jar and ate one of the apples. When I hiked down to the stream to drink some more water and wash my face, I sensed I was being watched. I hid myself behind a hemlock and trained my eyes, sharp as a fox's, back up the hill and across its cragged ridge. Sunlight danced everywhere, near and far, in puddles and flashes where the thick leaves parted to let it in, then closed and playfully parted again, projecting what looked like a million fat blinking stars against a green sky. Nothing moved but light and leaves. No one was there. The stone suggested I was afraid because a person had broken in on my fragile, desperate peace. She was right, I was sure.
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