The Diviner's Tale (14 page)

I did wonder what animal might have made the noises, if they hadn't been Morgan and Jonah's work. There used to be a small population of deer on this island. Rosalie said that Henry Metcalf never tired of telling the story of how a black bear suddenly appeared on Covey many years ago and vigorously hunted this small family of whitetails—only a few generations of them—down to nothing, wiped them out. He surmised, puffing his habitual meerschaum pipe, that it must have swum across the cold Atlantic water from another of the islands. Then, once all the deer were gone, the bear disappeared, too. Probably swam back to where he'd started from, Henry would finish, with his broad, toothy islander grin.

And now they were all gone to dust. The enterprising bear. The hunted deer. Henry himself there beneath my rake tines. The earth would gather us up, circle its arms around all of us finally, and there would be rest one day for both hunter and all the hunted. But for the moment, even here at the heart of the island where its dead were cradled, such rest was not for me as yet. I was being spoken to, it seemed, by someone gone to dust and another who had not. As I gathered my things to return to the keeper's cottage, I had to acknowledge, if only quietly to myself, that my haven might not be immune to the wanderings of the dead or the living. All the way back down through the pines I kept looking over my shoulder.

T
HERE WILL NEVER
be a right moment to make my confession about James Boyd, so now might as well be the wrong one.

I met him a dozen years ago on one of the most sweltering days in a fiendishly hot summer. Early July, and Corinth County was powder. When you walked you raised puffs of dust with every footfall. Where usually healthy streams ran, now trickling ribbons of slow tired water edged downhill, stalling, often disappearing altogether before reaching the next tributary. With this drought came more work than I could ever handle. Divining for years by then, I had never been so overwhelmed. I barely slept that whole prior month of June. Found myself pulling all-nighters, sometimes sneaking in an hour of sleep after poring over maps, then putting in long days ranging the baked earth with my switch, more than once wondering why I bothered to keep up appearances. Not an easy season in my life.

Since finding Partridge's water, I'd developed a knottier perspective about my craft than I had before that strange moment at his hatchery. After all, I had discovered water on his stubborn knoll without knowing item one about the locale. Behind my assurances that I appreciated Partridge's conversion—not to mention his apologies for having ever doubted us Brookses in times past—lurked a profound confusion about what had actually occurred. What was more, it happened after that, again, then again. So, not having any better idea, I proceeded with my fourfold method of research and theater, of reading the landscape and truly divining, and met with my share of successful dowsings. I did the homework when I could, still not confident about relying on what seemed like quirks. But in the field, on site, when none of the background data was paying off, I'd begun to allow myself the gamble of moving beyond the knowable.

I had a better than modest reputation. Didn't hurt that Partridge, normally a dour and reserved man, sang my praises. —That woman diviner saved my hatchery, he claimed. His deliveries of stock took him all over nearby counties and across the Delaware to the south and the Hudson east, so my esteem among those who bothered to listen spread far and wide. James Boyd's father, Robert, heard about me down this quaint grapevine.

As fate had it, I went to the Boyd place every bit as unprepared as I had Partridge's. He's dying, was what I thought when I heard the despair in Robert Boyd's voice, and it tripped me into agreeing to come over before I'd had time to do my homework on the tract. I scolded myself for having had the audacity to go there without having studied first. Wasn't this, after all, what I told my students never to do? And yet I was my own worst student, working here on a wing and a prayer. Not even a prayer.

Given all this, I could have done without James Boyd's first words, as I shook his hand. —Don't think for a minute I believe in any of this. I'm only here because I was asked to be here. No offense.

He was standing in the deep shade of a dead-leaf-laden pergola by the porch and, having come from the already blinding sunlight, I could barely see him or anything else.

— No offense taken, I said, squinting. —Where's your father?

— He couldn't make it up today. So it's just me.

— Sorry to hear that, I said. —He sounded very concerned.

Making small talk.

— This place means the world to him. Me, I don't get it. I don't like the country. Too much nature, Boyd said as he let go of my hand. I'd almost forgotten he was still shaking it. —If that's what he wants, though, far be it from me to stand in his way.

The house did look unlived-in. Pollen and dust hid any shine the yellow clapboard might once have boasted. What seemed to have been a flourishing perennial bed was growing rampant, weedy. A length of picket fence around what had been their vegetable garden had fallen over. But one could see what a bucolic oasis this had been in its heyday.

My eyes had adjusted and now I could finally see his face. Prepared as I was to not like him for all his urban aggressiveness, I was thrown off by what I felt when I looked at him closely. He was the handsomest man I had ever met. Had an ideal, classic face with an aquiline nose, a clear brow that belied the tenor of his unattractive words. He was unshaven, with carved lines in his chiseled cheeks. Unruly dark brown hair. Dusty hazel eyes with irises finely rimmed as if by a fountain pen.

He was silent for what I took to be a disconcerted moment. Then, in a neutral voice, said, —You're not what I expected.

— You thought I'd be a warty witch from a Wicca coven, maybe? I said, raising my eyebrows. Hiding my stream of thoughts while fishing his.

— Touché, he replied, and offered a conciliatory smile.

We walked around the outside of an old springhouse where he thought the sick well was located. I was not surprised to learn, as he talked while showing me the rest of the land, moving from shade to shade, that the illness I'd intuited—the cancer I had heard in his father's ardent voice on the phone—had kept Robert Boyd from traveling or tending to the land he clearly had loved.

— What about your mother?

— She died a few years ago. It's only the two of us.

— I'm sorry, I said, wondering if he had his own wife and family. There was about him an air of detachment, isolation. —Now then. Your well's giving brown water or no water, or what?

—Just turn on the faucet and up comes a gruelly, stinky sludge. That and air.

— If you wait for this drought to pass your well will come back on its own, you know.

He shrugged. —My father doesn't want to wait.

Pointing to a peach tree that stood at the margin of the yard overrun by drought-crisped grape leaves and fleece flowers, I asked, —You mind if I cut a small branch off that?

— Take the whole tree, for all I care.

His voice was lightly gravelly, as if he were sifting through pea stone for his words. I knew from the first moment I shouldn't have been interested in him, let alone mesmerized, but I was. Still, how much I would have preferred it if he had at least made an effort to be genial.

— Look, maybe you'd rather I left.

— No, no.

— It's just that you, we don't know each other very well, and you seem very resistant to the idea of divining—

— We don't know each other at all, actually.

I approached the once-stately, now-shaggy tree which, if it housed a daemon inside its boughs and trunk as the Romans believed, would very much want to help me discover water somewhere near its sagging leaves. After searching for just the right forked branch, I cut my switch and, doing my best to ignore my host, who after a while disappeared inside the house without a further word, began walking the land in a simple herringbone pattern.

Midmorning gave way to late morning. Late morning gave way to early afternoon. More than once I felt the rod kick a smidgen, give me a hint, but each time it went idle again. It was always something of a conundrum to know, really know, when the divining rod was acting of its own accord, as opposed to reacting to its handler's fancy, antsiness, or distress. James appeared with a bottle of water, but I waved him off, thanking him but wholly centered in my concentration. In retrospect, there's little doubt the tide that day had turned, insofar as I had to be patient with him in the morning, but it was he who was forced to show patience with me later. And, with all the years I have had to winnow through my memories of that day, it astonishes me that I cannot identify just what happened or when it happened that James Boyd and I, two people who didn't know each other, had nothing in common, and were even mildly hostile toward one another, slipped into another register altogether.

James Boyd was not, for all his masculine attractiveness, my type. If I could be said to have a type. My ideal man was more solidly of the earth. He could peel a hard-boiled egg with one hand and knew the names of birds. Could do his own cabinetmaking and properly plant potatoes. But James Boyd was a through-and-through city person who preferred avenues to roads, restaurants to kitchens, art museums to county fairs. In his book, potatoes were for ordering
au gratin,
not planting in the ground. A warbler was someone on the stage of the Met, and a loft, his loft, had nothing to do with hay.

Yet something was happening. I could feel him watch my progress from the window across the long field. When I glanced in that direction I saw his face dart away from the glass. I wondered whether if he weren't there staring at me I would be more focused. But soon enough, having walked through a thin copse of raspberry bushes, looking for a tonal variation in the plants and grasses, then back some paces to the north of my tracks, I realized I was misplacing any possible blame. This whole misadventure was my own doing.

What I would feel next, I assured myself, would be akin to what the Greeks meant by the word
eureka.
In my quasi delirium, I talked myself into believing I would discover water at any moment now.

I was mistaken. I couldn't even formulate an idea of where to walk next. I'd have given my eyetooth for a fracture trace analysis of the substrate just then, but failing that I began to think there really was no water here. Now that the day was coming toward its close, I faced plodding to the house to tell James Boyd—who had driven from downstate expressly to supervise on his father's behalf this water witch, this impostor as he viewed it—that I couldn't locate what they wanted. I dropped my stick on the ground and meandered dizzily toward the sullen red sun, my back running with sweat, my arms and legs clammy with the heavy whiteness that had settled over the scape. Even the crickets had gone mum.

— You don't look so good, he said, after I knocked on the screen door.

— I'm sorry, I whispered. Coming out of the thick hot air into the relative cool inside the house only made me feel more ill. Two James Boyds, each interposed on the other, were helping me down a musty hallway.

Most of the furniture in the house was sheeted, though he had undraped the living room leather sofa, which felt sticky against my skin. Before collapsing on it, I had caught a glimpse of myself in the pitted pier glass next to the fireplace and saw I looked as pale as one-percent milk. How foolish of me to have refused the water he had brought for me earlier in the afternoon.

— This sort of thing never happens to me, I slurred in the spinning room.

— Look, it's a furnace out there. Maybe you've got sunstroke.

I must have passed out, because the next thing I knew he had brought me a glass of water, helped me hold it, much as one might a sick child, and was smoothing my damp hair from my forehead and kissing it gently. Instead of pushing him away, I just lay there and felt him touching me, and let him.

What we did together was so natural and simple. He was unlike any lover I'd ever known. Gone was all his belligerent arrogance from earlier in the day. I was kissing the real James, I told myself. Not that other incarnation. Tender, yes, but also thoughtful, daring. I was swept away into a new dizziness under the touch of his fingers and tongue. We spent the night together in his parents' room, as his own was still outfitted with only a twin bed. On the dresser was a framed photograph of James's mother. Sitting in a gingham dress under a parasol, smiling as if her happiness and the world would never end. Before we switched off the lights, I held the picture in my hands.

— I think I would have liked your mother, I whispered.

Though we opened all the windows, the heat did not give way much during the night. The full moon seemed like another sun. To this day, I believe we believed we did love each other for those few hours.

We woke long after dawn, having scarcely dozed, and made love again with even more conviction in the hazy sunup light than when we'd been hidden from each other's eyes in the dark. Having barely eaten the day before, I was ravenous, and despite my lack of sleep felt much better. He did his best in the kitchen. Stale toast and blackened bacon. Bachelor cooking, but I relished it.

— I want to give your land another try, I told him. —Today I've got promises to keep at other places. But I can come back in a couple of days, if that's all right with you.

— More than. You've made a convert of me.

— No, no. You ought to stay a nonbeliever until you have reason to change your mind. Let me find your father his water and then you can convert.

— I think, speaking of him, we should keep what's happened to ourselves.

He had to get back to the city and took my phone number, after making tentative arrangements to come back up to meet me for my second attempt. I recall driving home, bedazzled, a little afraid of myself and him and where this might lead.

The weather let up some by the next time I saw him. A heavy downpour struck during the night and the long grasses were dripping wet. I had allowed myself to hope he would call to confirm our meeting. Or at least say hello, acknowledge somehow the bond we had formed, however tentative and new it was. I contemplated phoning James's father to ask for his number but thought the better of it, trusting James would show up as promised.