The Diviner's Tale (5 page)

Sunny late afternoon. One of those overwhelmingly clear days when the ceiling of the Earth looks like it's painted with lapis lazuli. I took his wide gritty hand and down we went, as we had so often when I was growing up. Strolling the shore lined with vesper iris as purple as plums, with butter-and-eggs and wild basil, he told me he had a secret he needed to let me in on. But first he had to tell me something important. I didn't like the sound of any of this, despite the neutrality that shaded his voice.

—Is this going to be good news or bad news?

—Just news, is all. There's nothing to be done for it.

He shared with me in simple, flat words his doctor's diagnosis of probable early-stage Alzheimer's. The symptoms were classic and, I realized looking back, clear as the cloud-free sky that stretched above. How is it we sometimes neglect the nuances of what's happening right in front of us? He'd been missing appointments for no good reason, he who used to keep his personal calendar in his head and never wrote down a telephone number in his life. When I told him he ought to jot things in the handsome leather notebook I gave him for the purpose, he did, reluctantly, but then forgot to look at what he had written. He lost his way to dowsing locations a few times, this man who knew every square inch of the county where he was born. His speech wasn't impaired, but sometimes he paused to search out the right word. Or would use curious clusters like
my food-rake
when he meant
my fork,
or
basement oven
for
furnace.
He had always loved wordplay, so these curiosities seemed more like unfunny jokes than indications of underlying illness. Slowness of mind was not in evidence that July day, however. Down by the pond any hint of dementia seemed light-years away.

— No, he said, answering my next question. —The doctor wouldn't speculate about time frames. Sometimes these things go on a very gradual track. Other times, not so slow.

— And in your case?

— They have no way of knowing, one of those deals just time will tell.

I hugged him tightly, told him how sorry I was and that I'd do everything possible to help Rosalie and to be there for him. He didn't respond other than to rest his chin on my shoulder. We stayed like that, out of view of the party back up at the house, for a minute or so. Then he took my arms with both large hands, gently pushed me away a little to look me hard in the eyes. Astonishing, I thought, to see that he already appeared older than when we first wandered down. How the idea of something makes its image manifest itself. Those blue eyes of his seemed more cumulus-gray. I had the same wide-set eyes, the exact color, Nep once said, of the Earth's oceans when photographed from space. At that moment they must have appeared sadder than at any other time in my life. How I wished, just then, my divining rod was a caduceus.

— Look at it like this. It's a sort of independence day for me. Everything I did in my life that I don't want to remember? Stuff that's bothered me over the years? Things people have done I'd just as soon forget? There's a humane side to the disease. A great erasure of all that went wrong.

— What went right, too, though, immediately regretting I'd said it.

— Well, there's that.

— It may just be pathetic wishful thinking, but maybe the good stays with a person.

Nep didn't give me much berth for such sentimentalism.

— The good is probably erased along with the bad. Tell you what, daughter. When I've arrived there, if I have any way of getting back to you on it, I will.

Made me smile a little. That was my father all over. I thanked him for telling me and, knowing it wasn't in his nature to dwell on things, asked about this secret of his.

He squinted at the horizon, then down at the placid face of the water before us. And told me that like his father, my grandfather Schuyler Brooks, and his grandfather before him, my great-grandpa Burgess Brooks, and his great-grandfather whose name was Jeremiah Brooks, and the patriarch of the family tree, Henry Hurlcomb Brooks—diviners all, and highly respected by anyone who prized water and minerals and every kind of thing that was lost and needed to be found in this county—he was a fraud.

I stood there waiting for the punch line, the interjection that would make clear what he'd said. He looked me back and forth in both eyes, unsmiling and unflinching. For want of some better response, I asked, but not as a question, —A fraud.

— You heard me.

Another pause. I watched a dragonfly come to us, hover for a moment, zip away.

— I don't understand, I said.

— A person who knows anything knows when he's experienced success by traveling down avenues of luck as opposed to roads of actual achievement. Mine's been a walk of pure chance.

— I thought you always said you create your own luck.

— Sometimes yes. More often no. Good luck is, well, it's something attained as a result of chance. The wind blowing in the right direction. Placing your foot on a path that will lead you to something. Just like bad luck comes to good people. South wind luck.

I frowned, waited for him to move beyond this posturing and get to whatever deeper point he was going to make. —I can't believe you're serious.

— Believe me, I'm telling you what I think.

— But how do you explain all those years of getting it right?

— A fraud, he said, and went on to explain to me that his father had made the deathbed confession, hoping his own son wasn't a fake as he felt he had been, despite his own work divining the parched and droughty world.

What about all the others with their respectable and dramatic names?

— I doubt but they were all frauds and fakes, to a man.

Had mere chance rather than mastery, I wondered, passed down the line from father to son, father to son, through generations of luck-blessed shams?

— You, though. You're the real deal, Cass, he said. —Sometimes women have powers men just don't. Either way, keep it to yourself. Our family has a good reputation, despite the naysayers, and many's the person trusted in us all these years.

— Many's the person who hasn't.

I was awestruck to think those outspoken critics of our family might have been right all along.

— But they aren't the ones that matter.

— I don't believe you, by the way. You have the gift.

He looked at his shoes and then up at me with a quizzical smile, as if we were in a dream, just as a crow shot noisily out from behind a stand of cattails across the ruffled pond.

— Wanted to set the record straight, he finished before starting to ramble back toward the house with me.

I don't know why I chose not to more fully engage him, address him with deeper sincerity, tell a truth of my own. But I didn't. Instead, I rewarded his honesty with some further hesitant glossing about how it wasn't possible for him to have been so successful and at the same time a fraud. Regarding myself, I was too terrified to offer him any insights. He said nothing more on the subject that summer and into the fall as he embarked on his journey into the shadowy waters of Alzheimer's.

By the new year, his condition having deteriorated more steadily and swiftly than I could have imagined—which made me wonder if he hadn't known for a bit longer than he'd admitted—my father was, on off days, beyond discussing what I should have pursued that afternoon. He was still very functionally Nep. Active, just slower. He labored away in his shop but didn't finish repairs as quickly, and he turned down jobs having to do with electronics since for some reason that field of interactive circuits befuddled and therefore annoyed him. His work in divination was all but finished, and the torch now passed to me. I felt, because of his malady, I shouldn't trouble him with my own shortcomings and difficulties.

One of my problems was I still had my own business and reputation to maintain. The mammon in me? Not really. But being the only female diviner in the region, reputation was everything. With the exception of Madame Beausoleil and those occasional others, diviners were until recent times traditionally men, going back to the sixteenth century when Agricola wrote of miners using the
virgula furcata
to search for gold. I didn't dare admit, even to my mentor, that I believed I myself was a mere charlatan blessed with odd good luck. I had mouths to feed and a house that forever needed paint. It was too late for me to consider any other vocation than the ones to which I had devoted my life. Neither divining nor my part-time teaching would alone satisfy the monthly mortgage, modest though it was, never mind my sons' appetites, which weren't. So I cobbled together a living as best I could. No going back, fake or not.

The thing was, for whatever little techniques I had developed to enhance my chances of, as it were, swimming along with the Brookses—my own confession will come in due course—nothing I had ever done could explain my fore visions, as we called them in our family. Forevisions, of which there had been many more than the one about my brother, though forevision had utterly failed me in divining Nep's condition. I had been a self-doubter behind my witching stick, but technique couldn't explain how sometimes I just knew what logic would lead me to believe I shouldn't know. The two worlds of diviner and seer felt different to me, but like the prongs of a dowsing rod itself, there was some unifying connection between them. I had walked out on both limbs but couldn't swear I understood either. Was the hanged girl some forevision I couldn't yet translate into meaning? The very idea left me suddenly exhausted and wired at the same time. I didn't want the monster back ruining my life. The monster: shorthand from my youth for a state of mind I couldn't avoid, understand, or bear.

Words such as
patience,
forward or backward, and
virgula
—words Nep had known so well—now eluded him every once in a while, as if they were butterflies and his net had holes in it, flaws in its webbing he didn't know how to fix. I wondered if he remembered the word
halcyon.
Not that many people would know it in the first place, unless they'd been forced to. It was in my thoughts tonight for good reason, jogged there unwittingly by one of Niles's questions. A word I hadn't considered for the longest time, Halcion carried a real resonance for me in my mid-teens. Widely prescribed in the eighties, the drug was later proven, for all its benefits of inducing sleep in troubled insomniac souls such as mine, to drive some to the edge of the edge, and yet others right over. I don't remember ever having apocalyptic feelings when I was, as I privately named it,
halcyoned.
Yet I do recall more than once having an impossible conversation with Christopher when everyone else in the house was still slumbering.

What's it like there in the land of the dead, Chris?

Like nothing, like floating in warm flowers.

Can you see me?

There's nothing to see except your worries and hopes.

What do they look like?

Knives hovering over you.

The hopes, too?

The hopes especially.

These dreams were as vivid to me then as the smell of my red wine and the distant, majestic hooting of a great horned owl counterpointing the Duke felt to me now, sitting on the night-chilled porch. They had been so real to me, in fact, that I occasionally lapsed by mentioning them during casual conversation with my parents, who were naturally alarmed. Their concerns over my mental health became an incessant subject for a time. Switching doctors was their approach when things didn't seem to be improving. After Nep refused even to consider allowing some priest-friend of Mother's to perform an exorcism, they turned to Dr. McGruder, the next in a string of psychiatrists in the city I wound up visiting once a week. He proposed I continue the sedative for a time at a higher dosage, and they sanctioned it, innocent of its contraindications. Nep harbored doubts but didn't have enough magic within his powers to propose a different course of action. I recall thinking that
halcyon
was such a beautiful sound for a word, even though its first syllable bears the worst of all possible images while the other carries so much promise.
Hell. See yon.
On the one hand,
see hell yonder?
On the other,
see beyond hell.
It was a drug I used for about a year to retreat for a few hours from my waking life.

I never threw out any leftovers from the pharmacopoeia that was prescribed to me over the years, and, of all things, having dug through my pillboxes looking for some light sedative before sitting outside with my thoughts, I discovered a few powder-blue Halcions from the bad old days. I weighed them in my palm and marveled at the lengths to which Nep and my poor mother had gone, back when I was not so much older than the girl I saw that morning at Henderson's, to help me step away from the unhappy world of forevisions. This Halcion was just one of the many means they were forced to explore in the quest of driving my monster away. They loved me dearly, I knew, but I couldn't have been the easiest daughter to raise. I dropped the pills into the toilet, along with all the rest of the old cache, and flushed. If I was fated to go through a dark phase again, I was going to do it on my own, no doctors, no drugs, no fake halcyons.

I was tired, couldn't feel the cold anymore. Couldn't see the girl anymore. And I couldn't hear their questions. The moon and stars gave off a generous nocturnal calm. I sank into myself, blessedly thoughtless, and, after a while, driven inside by my cold feet and fingers, I shut the window and lifted the needle off the clicking, spiraling groove of the vinyl disc which was all played out. Before I went upstairs to face my pillow, I stood in the dark with a hand on the newel post. Stood there quite some time listening, all but asleep on my feet. Everything was silent, tranquil. No voices from the past, nor any mirages. The boys hushed and untroubled in their rooms down the hall from mine. Not a mouse moving in the wall. A dense, serene stillness. I climbed the stairs, fumbled off my clothes, crawled into bed. I doubt I dreamed, although I, like Nep now in his different manner, wouldn't remember one way or the other next morning.