The Diviner's Tale

by Bradford Morrow

  That third night was the worst, crowded by nightmares. No sooner would I fall asleep than wake again, feverish from dreamed scenarios with Nep laughing at me, then baring fangs like some hairless wolf, and my mother giving all my clothes away to some girls I never saw before, saying that if they didn't fit go ahead and burn them because I never was much of a daughter, and another in which a man with no face was trying to push the stone into my mouth. The sun rose on an exhausted runaway, my fourth and last day in the cave. Whether from exposure or malnutrition, my skin felt every bit as on fire as the phantasmagoric clothes the dream girls were meant to burn.

  — You all right? I asked the stone. —I'm not.

  The stone was as mute as Millicent this morning. Maybe she had said everything a stone was able to say. Who knows, I thought, maybe she had died during the night.

  — I agree. You don't look too good, Roy said, instead.

  — How long you been here? glancing up in shock at hearing his voice again.

  — All your life, he answered. —You were sleeping. I didn't want to wake you up. Look, I brought you a blanket.

  He knelt beside me and wrapped the blanket around my shoulders. While the first part of his answer hadn't made any sense, he'd spoken with such unwavering conviction that I didn't argue.

  — That's better, isn't it? he said.

  I was shivering too much to speak but nodded my head yes.

  — I'll make a fire, warm you up.

  — No, I said, looking at the stone for guidance. The stone blankly stared back.

  — But you're shaking like a stick. Here, let me—

  — No, leave me alone, I cried out.

  — That's nice, he said. —Here's the thanks I get for helping you.

  — I'm sorry.

  — You just don't know what's good for you, he said, and took my hair into his hand, knotting it like he had that time when the gang was last together. —I'm trying to warm you up, is all. Nothing wrong with that, is there?

  — No, I said, trying and failing to move away from him.

  — See, that's better already, he hissed, snaking his arm around my waist and pressing his face against the side of my head. I felt too sick and afraid to tell him, No, it wasn't better. I wanted to flee, but he had my hands caught behind my back and forced me down against the rock where I'd been lying and dreaming terrible sleeping dreams only a few minutes before this waking nightmare began. Time twisted and broke, and what transpired was in a single, interminable gesture rather than several angry, awkward, violent ones. He had my mouth clamped under the weight of his palm. My jeans were forced below my knees, one leg off my kicking shoeless foot, searing pain, and I blacked out and remembered nothing more until I woke up a second time that morning being carried by Roy, cradled in his arms as if he were my savior, with his smiling dog, innocently full of life, bounding ahead of us. When he brought me back to the house, a transient hero for finding and saving me, it was he who lifted me across the doorsill, like some valiant groom bringing home his semiconscious bride. The police asked questions, mostly regarding where he'd located me and why I ran away. Since he obfuscated and postured with confident brilliance and I wasn't willing or able to say much to them, they left, reasonably concluding that the poor girl clinging to her dirty little doll was traumatized by the violent death of her beloved brother and had bought some time to grieve by herself at everyone's expense. No matter, she was home now. The doctor, who did little more than take my temperature, advised bed rest and nourishment. His patient made no noises of complaint because whatever had happened was already beginning to cloak itself in a mist of unreality. The episode slid into a deviation far out of the stream that was my life. It became over time an irrelevancy, without real cause or, I thought hopefully, when I thought about it at all, any ultimate effect.

  I went back to the cave once, hoping to find my sister stone. To see if she still had a voice to speak with and, if so, what she might say. But, like Chris and Roy Skoler and my mother for a time, she was gone.

  26

  THE TWINS AND I picked up Nep and headed out in his station wagon past Callicoon, crossing the span into Pennsylvania in search of fireworks, which were still legal there. My mother gave me some money to help with the purchase, which I could ill afford alone, but refused to come along with us on this, our shady annual expedition. We weren't allowed to transport fireworks back across the border into New York and weren't sanctioned to light them up at our Independence Day celebration. But a number of people in these rural reaches, where municipal fireworks displays were even more amateur than ours, went ahead with their own shows, and Niles both watched and looked the other way. A form of social protest, was how Nep saw it. One that the Founding Fathers would have applauded. The right to bear fireworks should be in the Constitution, he used to joke.

  "You look wrong today," Nep said to me when we pulled out on the road.

  "I didn't sleep that well last night."

  "She's wearing lipstick in case she sees Charley again," said Morgan.

  "What's Charley?"

  "I'm not wearing lipstick. You remember Charley, Nep. He was one of Christopher's friends. You always liked him."

  "Well, if it's not lipstick, what is it?" Morgan goaded.

  "Lip gloss. There's a difference."

  "Don't remember," said Nep.

  "Lip glue more like. Think of all the dust that's going to get stuck there."

  "Point for Morgan," said Jonah.

  "Point for nobody." Today of all days, on this Nep adventure I always looked forward to, I should have been in a livelier, lighter mood. But seeing Roy Skoler changed all that. I felt as if my life had been a jigsaw puzzle spilled on the floor, and a part of me longed to put it together to see what the picture looked like, while another part had grown used to it being unsolved and preferred it that way.

  "You're unhappy," said Nep.

  "I'm fine."

  "You're unhappy."

  "Well, look, I'm already doing a lot better with my three men here headed out to spend good money on bad contraband. How's that?"

  "That's the bomb" and "Rock on," the boys exclaimed at the same time.

  Which made Nep laugh, which made me try to smile.

  And damned if we didn't shoot the works. Roman candles and strobing fountains. Vampire rockets that came in their own gaudy coffins. Ones that promised to send up silver whistling tails. Ones that crackled into chrysanthemums and Man-o'-Wars. Bottle rockets of every variety our under-the-counter dealer, a fellow Nep had dowsed a well for, had in his inventory. Several boxes of the hardware were loaded into the back of the wagon and hidden under blankets. The return drives from Pennsylvania always elicited the same kind of crisp trepidation one might feel if walking across live coals on a dare. I had a sense this could be our last such run. The laws were getting stricter and it wasn't fair to ask Niles to compromise himself any longer. Besides, there was the matter of Nep.

  Early on during our venture he was bright as a sparkler. Yes, he voiced his opinion in his personal language of cobbled words sometimes—he told Morgan to get a haircut, saying he ought to cut off his hat—but when we crossed the river, he told the boys with perfect clarity about water boils and how dangerous they can be.

  "A vacuum of air stirs under the water and can rise up and pull a boat right under, like that," snapping his fingers.

  Yet once we had finished with the fireworks dealer, he seemed to slip into a passing coma. A transient death of sorts, asleep with his eyes and mouth open.

  "Jonah, give him a nudge on the shoulder. Real gentle."

  He did, and my father came awake. Said something incomprehensible. Then drifted off again. At one point when we were recognizably close to the house he had lived in his whole life, he asked why we were going back to Covey.

  "Everything all right?" Morgan asked him.

  "Right as ruin," he misspoke, craning to look at his grandson as if he didn't quite know who the boy was.

  Once home, we haul
ed our cache into Nep's workshop, where his old cronies Joe Karp, Billy Mecham, and Sam Briscoll—the three wise men, as they were known, though their wisdom was suspect over the years—were waiting to help sort through the munitions. Seeing them recentered Nep, grounded him back into his life. Their routine was sacrosanct. They drank a few beers, parsed the weather forecast for the hallowed event, decided on what order the birds would fly. Jonah and Morgan had been allowed to join this exclusive club when they turned seven. Same age Christopher was let in. Same age I was. We children of both generations weren't really asked to offer our opinions. Our role was more like that of a Greek chorus. When one of the wise men had a good idea, we sang its praises. In some ways, the half an hour of live fireworks after the barbecue was incidental to these more intimate preludes.

  As I entered the kitchen to help Rosalie set out a late lunch, she was sitting at the round oak clawfoot table, holding a wet tea bag over her cup, watching it swing from side to side like a dowser's pendulum. Her chin perched on a folded hand as she studied the bag swaying on its short string.

  "Self-hypnosis?" I asked.

  "I didn't hear you come in," flushed like quarry out of her reverie.

  "What were you divining just now?"

  She laid the tea bag on a saucer and drank. No steam rose off the cup, so I had to wonder how long she had been there. It never ceased to amaze me that a woman whose life was so closely driven by a belief in the holy divine always recoiled when she heard the word used as a human verb instead of an ecclesiastic noun.

  "Charley Granger called looking for you. Haven't seen him in years."

  "He left Corinth a long time ago."

  "A good guy, wasn't he?"

  "I always liked Charley," I agreed, hoping she wouldn't divine me and my girlhood crush in retrospect. I told her where he lived now, what brought him back to Little Eddy, and asked if it would be all right to invite him and his mother to the holiday gathering.

  "Of course," she said, and after a pause, "How'd he look? His eye, I mean."

  "Looked like it was shut, is all," I told her, wanting to change the subject. "Speaking of which, have you seen Nep sleeping with his eyes open?"

  "I don't like to talk about it. Did you get all your bombs and firecrackers?"

  "Enough for four Fourth of Julys."

  "He married?"

  "Charley?" I asked, disingenuous, wishing for all the world I could open up with my mother about Roy Skoler and the forevisioner's intuitions I had begun to have about him, all the while knowing a lifetime of unspoken rage and humiliation over what he did made any thoughts I might have about his current activities wildly suspect. "We didn't talk about it one way or the other."

  She picked up her spoon, stared blinking at it as one might a hand mirror whose face was tarnished, then startled me with words as plain and frank as I had ever heard from her. "I just don't know what I'm going to do with myself when your father goes," and looked up at me, her face as stoic as my long-lost river stone's, but her eyes damp.

  As surely as she knew me, I knew my mother. She would not want me to break down in tears with her. Early on after Nep and I bonded in the wake of Christopher's death, Rosalie had conceived of the two of us as suffering from some sort of folie à deux—a mutually shared or stimulated psychotic disorder—whereas I had often thought she was afflicted by a folie à dieu. She always considered herself the sanest of our tribe, and as a matter of fact her position wasn't easily assailable, although she too had her faults and demons. Though Christ took over where Christopher left off, I know that my mother had passed many of those years much more lonely and bereft than Nep and I had been, and no prayer group or Bible circle had been able to rectify that. They wouldn't now, fully, either.

  I sat beside her and said, "This illness can be slow, can go for years, and you know there are stretches when he does really well," then waited for Rosalie to say something, but she didn't. "I haven't been much help to you since all this other business happened, but I'm doing better now. You can see that, can't you? And I promise to look out for you and Nep as best I can."

  "Thank you, Cassie. Have you talked with Niles about that man?"

  "Yes, everything will be fine."

  "What about the postcard?"

  "Don't worry over it," I said. "Why don't we get lunch ready."

  At that, my mother managed to compose herself, pull her public persona back into place. I tossed a salad as she dished cold gazpacho into big cups. By the time Nep and the others joined us, our spoken and unspoken words were gone like the spent sparks of a pyro fountain. I watched her during lunch and thought how admirably strong she was for keeping up appearances in the face of such mortal trouble. On the other hand, neither Rosalie nor anyone in her ken was equal to taking on my memories of Roy Skoler's assault, another piece in this abhorrent puzzle. Nep couldn't do it. Certainly not Jonah or Morgan. Not even Niles. Nor could I burden Charley with such an old nightmare, Charley who had remained at least distantly friendly with Roy. I was as isolated as my father must often have felt during those days of deepening illness. I ate and spoke with the others, but knew I was simply left with what happened. No dowsing my way out of it, no fixing it in Nep's workshop.

  Once Rosalie and I had divided up final cooking responsibilities—she would marinate the mixed grill, I would make various salads—I drove the boys back to Mendes to ready things for the next day. Both offered to help in the kitchen and I welcomed their company. In an exchange with Morgan that was as delicate as a water spider dancing across a puddle, he confirmed the Skoler boys had been the troublemakers on the ride down from Binghamton. They kept it up during practice, before and after games, even off the field whenever they could.

  "Have you thought about talking with the coach about this? Maybe he'd want to have a word with their father."

  "Ratting to the coach would be total death."

  "It's no good for me to talk to him either, is it."

  "Answered your own question," he said, and continued slicing celery, carrots, and cucumbers, dropping them into a bowl of ice water where they would spend the night in the fridge.

  "They said their father told them you'd been a psycho from the day you were born."

  "He didn't know me the day I was born. He doesn't know anything about me, as a matter of fact."

  "Then why did you run so fast last night when you found out the Skolers were coming?"

  "I didn't run. Besides, they were meeting up with Charley, not us."

  "You cut out pretty quick."

  "Plus you barely said goodbye to Charley," Jonah added.

  "I'll call him and apologize. It's just we needed to leave. I knew we had a long day today and tomorrow being the Fourth—"

  "Seemed weird to me," said Jonah.

  "But we like you weird, Cassandra."

  "You're kind of weird yourselves, you know," I said, attempting some of Rosalie's courage.

  "Thank God for weirdness," said Morgan, looking heavenward.

  "Not him again," groaned Jonah.

  "That reminds me. I want you to show extra sensitivity toward your grandmother right now. Not that you haven't been, just she needs your support more than she may be letting on. We may need to go with her to church again. Can you do that?"

  They agreed.

  "And to finish what we were talking about, Morgan, if I thought any good would come of speaking with the Skoler boys' father, I'd do it. But I know it would make things worse. Besides, you're too smart not to see what's right and who's wrong here. From what I can tell, you're doing everything right."

  Morgan kept moving the knife across the butcher-block, proud and embarrassed. His cheeks blossomed a charming warm crimson. Looked like beautiful birthmarks, lovely blotchy flowers.

  Later that evening I did speak with Charley. He was kind, even prescient enough not to mention the abrupt rudeness of my departure after the game. My fears that Roy Skoler might have poisoned Charley against me appeared unfounded. Perhaps all this was a little
too close for his comfort, too. He asked if I wanted to go out to dinner later in the week, continue our conversation, and I said sure, passing along an invitation to join us at the Independence Day celebration.

  After locking the doors and downstairs windows, my new nightly ritual, I undressed. In bed I lay in a darkness softened by the night-light I had lately taken to leaving on and sifted through memories of Charley, in particular how hard he had tried to comfort me after my brother's funeral. Curious to have forgotten until now that he was the only person I had allowed in my room while the otherwise interminable reception went on downstairs. He respected me enough not to interfere with my grief by coddling me with trite clichés about death and love and divine will. He didn't try to coax me off the floor. Unlike the false and twisted sympathy that Roy Skoler would show me a few days hence, Charley's was true caring. Had I been capable of accepting his support, I might not have needed to run away.

  As these thoughts began dwindling toward sleep, a dream image of Christopher, Ben, and Roy smoking cigarettes—their supposed calumets at the Indian caves—rose to mind. In the dream, I turned to Emily and asked, "What's that smell?" but now awake realized I had spoken the words aloud. The faintest trace of cigarette smoke hung in the room.

  "Who are you?" I asked, the question stuck like a wishbone in my throat. I swung my legs around and put on my robe. In the feeble glow of the night-light I saw that I was alone. On hands and knees, hardly knowing what I was doing, I crawled to the open window and peered down into the front yard. There was a figure under the tree. Leaning against the trunk, looking up in the leaf-shuddering darkness. The tiny burning tip of the cigarette flared orange as the man—I knew it was a man, and I knew who it was—took a drag. "What do you want?" I called down to him and, hearing nothing by response, said, "Leave me alone," echoing the very words he had written on his first postcard. Without saying anything, he filliped his cigarette to the ground, turned, and left in no great hurry. Around a curve on Mendes Road and out of sight, an engine started up and he drove away.