The Diviner's Tale (24 page)

"Maybe bent them a little so you could join late."

"That rocks," said Morgan, pumping his fist in the air.

"Off the charts," Jonah agreed, after a small hesitation.

"You sure about this, Mom?"

"
Mom
—?" Jonah asked Morgan, rolling his eyes.

Morgan, not looking at his brother, corrected himself. "Like, you're good with this?"

"It's not as if you're going to be away twenty-four-seven. You can save me during your off hours."

"You'll come to games?" Morgan asked.

"As many as you'll let us," I said, smiling at Jonah, who seemed a little lost.

Not hard to understand why. For Morgan, Covey was going to have been little more than a brief detour on the road to a version of the summer he'd been promised all along, but Jonah had no team to join. Math had never taken sufficient hold in our local consciousness to have inspired much by way of summer clubs. He couldn't even get his own hapless mother to successfully solve a sudoku puzzle with him—a game at which he excelled—let alone convince a single soul among his peers to play. What I meant to propose to him as an alternative went against sworn promises I had made myself, but new circumstances pleaded new ideas. Whether Jonah would be responsive or not was another thing, and, I had to admit, hanging out with his mother wasn't quite the same as swimming in a camp lake with a bevy of boys his own age. I waited for a moment when he and I were alone to run my idea past him.

"Jonah," I called out into the backyard not long after Morgan had his news and left to shag balls—the endless vitality of youth—with a couple of friends at a nearby field until the last of the sun died. "What are you doing?"

"Trying to fix this imbecile lawn mower," he grumbled. "Like have you noticed the grass?"

"Got a moment?"

When he came inside, I flashed back to the morning, long ago, when Nep asked me a similar question. "You have anything on the agenda tomorrow?"

"Let me check my book," turning through invisible pages on his open palm and pretending to scan them. "Guess not," he said, then closed his hand.

"Now you do, if you want."

I told him I had listened to the phone messages and was offered a job dowsing for, of all people, Partridge, at the hatchery. I suspected, but didn't say aloud, that this was sympathy work—Partridge was loyal—and if anybody else had inquired I would probably have declined. But witching his familiar grounds might reconnect me with myself. Besides, I needed the money. What I did say was that I wanted to know if Jonah would be willing to join me.

"In case you run into any more dead people?"

"Enough talk about that. You coming or not?"

He hesitated. "You going to show me how you do it?"

"If you're there you'll see for yourself, won't you?"

"I mean, are you going to let me try?" not missing a beat.

"We'll see what happens."

When we retired that night, I remained restless in spite of my road-weariness and the anxious homecoming. Much to the boys' bewilderment, I had secured the seldom-used side door downstairs with a chair jammed under the knob. Its lock, buried beneath coats of paint, was stuck, and I was sure it was this door that had offered our intruder his access to the house. Through my half-opened window and its curtains drawn tight, I could hear the shush of the occasional passing car on Mendes Road and the rustle of leaves in the trees. I wondered whether I was really going to let Jonah attempt to dowse. Wondered how to explain to Niles about Millicent without setting off a series of toppling dominoes that might lead to even more problems. Wondered what that vague creaking was downstairs, that mild twitch in the floor joists, knowing full well that these were the subtle percussives of an old house that had been settling for a hundred years and would still be making the same harmless sounds a hundred years hence.

I finally phoned Niles after breakfast the next morning and arranged to see him later in the day.

"The bench under the white pines, far end of the lake," he agreed.

My second call was to the local locksmith to outfit the doors and downstairs windows with new locks and latches, after which Jonah and I dropped Morgan off at the ball field and then drove out to Partridge's hatchery.

A warm azure sky. The air thinner than what we'd been breathing in Maine, drier. We listened to music on the radio, some candied country stuff on one of the few stations we could receive static-free in these rolling mountains. We were quiet. Whenever Morgan wasn't around to trade competitive verbal repartee with his brother, Jonah reverted to the same outsider's reticence his mother had displayed through most of her youth. I deeply, fiercely, and completely loved both my sons, but long before Jonah set foot on Partridge's land that day I had understood that he—for better or worse—was more like his mother than Morgan. Since I never really knew James Boyd, I had no concept of whether or not Morgan shared traits with his biological father. Early on, I had determined not to torture myself with inscrutable questions like this. Nor would I, by proxy, torture my twins. But this morning I did allow myself to accept what I had known for years. Though Jonah harbored much more potential than to become just another Brooks diviner, I knew there was no point in standing between him and this aspect of his heritage. He was destined to go to college—both boys were—I was convinced. I didn't want either of them to be stymied in this rural community forever if they desired a different kind of life. Wanted to see them spread their wings. Still, it was going to be interesting to walk in Nep's shoes this morning and witness Jonah in mine.

Partridge probably looked like an old man from the day he was born. One of those people who has an antique demeanor from crib to crypt. Even so, he had aged eons since last I saw him at an Independence Day party he came to a couple of years back. It wasn't so much his majestic bald pate or his muttonchop sideburns, whiter than a trout's gills. It was more about how he moved. Glacially slow, top-heavy on a pair of slim pins, he strode with a painful limp across the flat from his house to where we parked, hand extended and a kindly frown on his face. A frown that would have been merely a frown but for the smiling eyes and pronounced crow's-feet at their corners.

"Good of you to come," he said.

"Good of you to ask me. I'm profoundly grateful."

Partridge only harrumphed.

"I should have phoned ahead, but you said to drop by whenever I could. This is my son Jonah."

"We've met," shaking the man's slab of a hand.

"So," Partridge said, looking at me as he asked precisely what I hoped he wouldn't. "This's the next Brooks diviner?"

"Don't think so, no," I said at the same time Jonah said, "You never know," our two same-sounding last syllables landing right on top of each other.

Partridge was amused. "At least you disagree in harmony." He chuckled, maybe at his own cleverness, then just like that the grin faded and he looked ancient again.

I fully expected him to bring up the doings on Henderson's land, but instead he got right into talking about his job. Maybe he hadn't heard, or didn't care, either of which was fine by me. Turned out he was expanding and needed two more wells. His granddaughter had recently gotten married and planned to build a house farther up the road, as her husband was going to join the hatchery business. "They got it marked out with stakes where they want to site. Opposite that old apple orchard across the pavement. You want me to come with you?"

"I can find it," I said, grateful this turned out to be real, not contrived charity work. Also that Jonah and I would be by ourselves. "We'll go see what there is to see and come back to let you know."

"Good luck there, Jonah," he said, gnarling one of his eyes into what was meant to be a conspiratorial wink.

We walked along the shoulder of the road.

"Don't I need a rabbit's foot or something to do this right?"

"Nep sometimes carries a little bottle of water in his back pocket, at least he says it's water. To encourage the spirits. He calls it priming the pump. I don't do anything like that myself, but everybody's got their own way of going about it."

I had a lightweight backpack with everything in it I would need. My knife, a thermos of coffee, peanut butter and marmalade sandwiches, a roll of bright blue flagging tape, a small sharp hatchet with its leather sheath snapped on tight. The blade end of the hatchet I used for cutting marker stakes and the hammer end for driving them into the ground.

"I like him," Jonah said as he took off his sweatshirt and tied it around his waist. "Seems copacetic."

Copacetic.
Where does he get these words? "He is."

"How about you?"

"How about me what?"

"You copacetic?"

There was no dissembling possible when Jonah was around. The boy was already a diviner. Beneath my façade of maternal tranquillity, I was in fact sharply conflicted about holding a witching rod in my hands, given what had happened the last time I did, and equally apprehensive now about my impulsive decision to expose Jonah to my diviner's world. What had I been thinking? But there was no turning back now. Jonah would never forgive me, and I owed it to Partridge for believing in me. Moreover, the underlying idea was to regain my footing here, display courage, not knuckle under. Yes, I was going to try to be copacetic.

"See those apple trees?"

"Those ones that look like dead Ents?"

"Dead ants?"

"Ents. Fangorn Forest? Never mind, Cass."

"There are some live ones in there, too, and that's where we start looking for a rod."

"
A
-Rod? You think he's out here in Fangorn?"

"Very funny. A Y-rod is what we need."

"Only one?"

"A couple."

"Now we're talking."

We crossed the road and looked around in the ruined orchard. I found and cut myself a decent virgula and hunted with Jonah until we located another. Jonah insisted on doing the selection, cutting, and whittling himself. Then we made our way back toward the proposed building site.

"There's all kinds of divining," I said, and held my rod directly before me, its tip pointed just above the horizon, elbows at my sides. "A remote dowser might grip his rod like this to test a direction. Deviceless dowsers use the palm of their hand, no tools at all. Map dowsers who work with the police on missing-persons cases wouldn't even bother to be out here. They'd lay out a topo at the station and use a pendulum to find who they're looking for. Nep and I aren't into any of that. Our family's tradition has always been pure field divining. We prefer to walk."

"So, Cassandra, let's walk already."

My attempt at a little lecture had fallen flatter than a floodplain. There was a proper way to handle this, and I just learned it from my student. I rested the rod forks against my face-up palms, hooked my thumbs over the ends of each stick with a firm light grasp, cleared a sudden unwelcome memory of the hanged girl from my mind, and determinedly began mending the flats. Jonah studied my hands and the way I wended along. I could hear his steady progress as he stirred the grasses and wildflowers, and wanted to warn him to be careful of the stinging nettles, but thought it best not to hover over him.

The sun warmed my hair, which still smelled of ocean. I traversed the zone back and forth but wasn't cluing in to anything. How I hoped no one would chance to drive past and witness us performing this ritual as old as the pyramids. There they go, crazy as crumbs, I could hear them wag their tongues. The Brooks woman and her sad little boy. You can see she's deluded him into believing all her twaddle.

Any wonder, I thought, why I'm divining nothing. Too many noisy discouragements yammering away inside for me to be able to listen outward.

When I began again, my head quieted, I realized I hadn't heard Jonah for a while, so I stopped dowsing and saw he was working a part of the field farther away from the site than would be comfortably within Partridge's budget. No matter. He was so lovely out there, a tiny figure sailing across a patch of earth, hay field with low mountains backgrounding the scene, straight out of some Brueghel painting in one of my art history volumes. Part of me wanted to run and hug him. Another part wanted to march over and take that problematic, useless stick out of his hands and break it in two. Instead, I stood stock-still as I saw him lurch to a halt. I was certain I heard him calling out, but the breeze was behind me and lofted his voice away in its wing.

"What's that?" I shouted.

Again I heard but a scrap of sound and began to imagine the worst—a cornered snake, a rabid red fox—as I set out, jogging at first, then running full bore, my pack thudding heavily against my spine. The grass was knee-high so I couldn't see what he was staring at, frozen like a sculpture there.

"What is it?" I called out, doing my best not to betray my fear.

"I don't know." His voice was squeezed back tight into his throat.

No snarling fox, no snake curled like a spring ready to strike. His rod tip pointed down at a forty-five-degree angle and quivered as if some thrashing leviathan out of an old fable were hooked at the end of his invisible line.

"My God, Jonah, don't scare me like that."

"What's going on?" he asked, ignoring my mild hysteria.

"If I could answer that question I'd be the wisest woman this side of the rainbow," I said, kneeling to catch my breath, shocked by the implications of what I was seeing. By rote I hauled the pack off my back, unsheathed my hatchet, and cleaved my own rod in half to fashion a stake. Awestruck, Jonah tied the flagging tape to the end, leaving a couple of streamers that reminded me of the tails on his coastal kite. He pushed the stake into the soft loam to mark the spot. When he stood away, the plastic tails fluttered.

"Blue ribbon, dude," I said, masking my shock at what had just occurred. I asked if he was interested in me showing him how to circle, triangulate, verify the find.

"But you wrecked your rod."

"Yours seems to work fine. You all right?"

"Let's keep going."