The Diviner's Tale (30 page)

"No."

"I didn't mean to see what they were doing. I was just playing around in these cliffs where we used to go and heard people arguing. She was really furious, it seemed to me, but you know how a valley tends to exaggerate sounds. Anyway, I have a terrible feeling that whoever stole Millicent and hung that thing in the lighthouse is the man who kidnapped Laura, and maybe even knew Emily and Chris."

"Chris? There's Chris right there," Nep said, pointing.

My heart sank.

"You mean Jonah?" My son was at the far end of the pond, past cattails where this year's redwing blackbirds were nesting. He was striding deliberately around the bank with the rod he had cut in the meantime, having brought a pocketknife with him for the occasion.

It was impossible. Lots of little words strung together on preposterous, coalescing ideas like so many glass beads on a Moebius necklace.

"Christopher's a witcher now, look at that," Nep continued.

Jonah came running up, a serious smile on his face. "You see what I've got, Nep?"

"That a boy."

"You probably know every underground stream from here to China, but I found one, too. Tell him, Cass."

Two generations of Brooks men stared at me, looking for their mother and daughter to bring this news into focus, to articulate it, and thereby make it real. I felt the tears welling in my eyes, wiped them away, and smiled as best I could under the circumstances. Pull yourself together, I thought. Be here with them now.

"Jonah came with me to Partridge's, and against my better judgment I let him give a try at dowsing."

"Partridge."

"The man who runs the hatchery. Big guy with huge frothy sideburns," I said, wriggling my fingers at either side of my head as if I were scratching my own muttonchops. Nep seemed to be drawing a blank, so I pressed forward, "Doesn't matter. Here's the point. It looks like there's another diviner in the family. Not that the world needs us and not that Jonah's going to make it his life's practice, but he's got the gift, it seems."

"The gift," Nep echoed.

"You want to see, Grandpa?"

"Let's keep it short, Jonah," I said. "We don't want to tire him out."

He went about with his divining rod held before him, awkward but game and earnest. Nep and I watched. The distress I had been feeling, trouble I badly wanted to discuss with my father, was overwhelmed by my raw insights into his own wayward head. Here before me was a mind whose memories had released themselves from their moorings, free to float wherever momentary whimsies carried them.

"No, I want to see Christopher do his thing," Nep announced, as if reading my thoughts and proving my point. Jonah walked with his virgula outstretched before him, gripping the rod a little too tightly.

"I'm not sure you're going to find what you're looking for here, Jonah."

"Let him try," Nep said under his breath.

Jonah walked away from the pond and out toward a field brimming with orchard grass and bellflowers, purple and white, that a neighbor farmer would be haying in the next couple of weeks. He zigzagged up and down the land while Nep and I tagged along at a distance. A redstart flickered across the tops of the long grass, its black and orange feathers creating the illusion of a thrown cinder from a flame.

"Jonah," Nep said. "Come here a minute."

The boy looked up in the way a deer will when interrupted in its browsing. He walked over to where we were standing, about a hundred feet distant.

"Let me see how, how you're holding it. Walk back and forth here," his articulation returning some along with his focus. Jonah obliged, and Nep, letting go of my hand, said, "That's not—here, like this."

I hadn't seen my father holding a diviner's rod in what seemed like ages, even though it had been perhaps only a couple of years since I last dowsed with him. Jonah passed him the forked branch. Nep took it in his hands, palms facing upward as he'd always preferred, and he walked, slowly, deliberately, while Jonah shadowed alongside, watching every last nuance of his posture and movements as if life depended on it. I stood there under a sky unmarred by the slightest cloud and marveled at this small perfect moment, all other worries and concerns having temporarily flown away like that heron. Here was my father teaching my son a craft as basic and mysterious as the very pools of water that lurked in the stony clay beneath our feet. What, I thought, could be more harmless and precious than this? A dying man and a child on the verge of manhood practicing an old art together. Jonah had taken the virgula from Nep now and was walking the field on his own again, his hands lightly grasping the forks of the rod, palms directed skyward. I watched Nep watch him.

Jonah didn't divine any treasure that day other than his grandfather's heart. As for myself, when I got back to Mendes Road, another postcard awaited me in the mailbox. No stamp, no postmark this time. Just a photograph of a lighthouse bearing the legend "Cranberry Islands, Maine."
Last warning to stay away from the girl,
the handwritten note read.
How easy to slip and fall.

O
UR ANNUAL INDEPENDENCE DAY
festivities were fast approaching. Nep probably wasn't equal to it, was Rosalie's opinion, despite his staunch refusal to cancel. It was tradition, he told her in his way, and traditions are to be kept and cared for. This was less than a week before the big date. Our family hadn't missed throwing the Fourth of July party in any year going back as far as I could remember, including the year after Christopher died and even that uncomfortable summer when the twins were three months old, blinking infants in matching cribs. I didn't know what to tell her. If Nep wanted to proceed, I thought, let's go for it. His friends knew he wasn't well. If they hadn't seen him recently, here would be a chance for them to reconnect. On the other hand, maybe he wasn't the best judge of what he could and couldn't manage anymore. Thinking this way made me feel like a traitor to his lifelong free spirit, though. Like some well-meaning Judas.

It was Jonah who took me under his wing. "You worry too much," he said.

We had finally been invited to one of Morgan's games and I found myself wondering, even amid a new impatience with myself as aspiring paradigm of normalcy, what to wear. How would other moms dress, should my hair be up or down? I also wondered, far more cogently, which of the kids had given Morgan such grief about me that he'd all but shunned his mother after our return from Covey, and how should I act toward them or their parents if they got it in their heads to identify themselves? How should I respond to anyone who might ask me about witching the hanged girl? I had been second-guessing myself about everything under the sun—this vaunted damn sun that was the same as everybody else's—and I was beginning to drive myself to distraction. Were those really fresh tire tracks in the drive when Jonah and I got home from my parents' or was I seeing things again? Was it conceivable that someone had breezed through the new locks and lain down on my bed? The pillows seemed crushed and the bedspread rumpled.

Unaware of the postcards and my concern about another intrusion, Jonah nevertheless saw right to the heart of the problem. "You should go back to being yourself."

"You think?"

"I know."

The party was moving forward if for no other reason than to honor Nep's admirable stubbornness. This year a lot of the preparation was going to fall to me, so I decided I might as well get a jump on it and was doing some baking. Jonah had joined me and was sitting at the kitchen table, sorting pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters in rolls, having decided it was high time to get rid of his childhood piggy bank in favor of adult bills. Without looking up from his piles of coins, he concluded, "I believe in you, okay? I know you can handle it."

I glanced over at him with a grateful smile.

"Thanks for the advice, man," I said.

"Any time, man."

That evening Morgan's team would lose despite his three base hits and some deft fielding. Jonah and I sat in the bleachers on the third-base side to get the best view of him on both defense and offense. The crowd was large and loud. Parents and grandparents had settled themselves in folding chairs along the chain-link fences and siblings filled the stands, tracking every pitch as if the fate of humankind depended upon it, shouting advice to players and admonishments to the umpire. Some families had done tailgate partying, and the smell of burgers grilled on hibachis lingered in the air. A buggy summer evening.

Sometime late in the game, I noticed his familiar face. He was sitting in the first row of the bleachers opposite ours, and I wouldn't have seen him had I not walked to the truck for the insect repellent I kept in the glove compartment. On my way back, I recognized Charley Granger in profile and was surprised by how surprised I was.

He was by himself, it seemed. Maybe it was the yellowish sodium ball-field lights playing tricks, but I could have sworn there was a little silvering in his brown hair at the temples. He wore glasses. Charley, my Charley, middle-aged. This must have been the childhood friend the pastor had mentioned. Obsessing about Roy, I'd forgotten about the obvious.

Charley was dressed in a faded moss-green T-shirt and black jeans. His elbows planted on spread knees and his palms tapping together as he followed the play. Without thinking, I drifted in his direction. I found myself wondering if he would be wearing an eye patch—I couldn't see one from this angle. Wondered what his older voice would sound like, if he would even remember me. I knew we would have to exchange some reminiscences about Christopher, make the sort of small talk I had never excelled at. As I hesitated, having drawn close, the crowd made a raucous sudden roar, and I turned to look at what was happening on the field behind the ghostly diamond grid of the backstop fence. I saw Morgan dive, make his catch, pivot like some avant-garde dancer, and throw the runner out at first. Cheering with the rest, I walked forward and placed my hand on his shoulder.

"Charley?" I said.

"Yes?" looking at me with his serene eye, the ruined one sewn closed in such a way it seemed merely shut in a benign, perennial wink. "My God, Cassie?" He rose to his feet, broadly smiling, and we reached out to embrace each other, not a little awkwardly, finally settling for a four-handed shake, a tentative kiss cheek to cheek, and palms grasping each other's forearms. "Look at you."

"I can't believe it."

"What brings you out here?" he asked, the same question I had for him. I pointed toward Morgan, who was jogging back to the dugout with the other players, the visiting team having been retired. Charley had returned to Corinth because his mother was moving from Little Eddy after years of complaining about the harsh long winters and how lonely she'd become in the wake of her husband's death, Charley's father.

"I'm sorry, I didn't know."

"Thanks, Cassie. She asked me to help her pack, oversee the closing on the sale of the house, be with her while she wrapped things up. So here I am."

A brief silence settled over us while we looked at each other, calculating the years, I supposed, reconciling the person before us with separate memories of the one we'd known. I broke this by asking if she was at the game. No, he said, he was here because two boys who were children of a friend, an old acquaintance, were playing. Their father would drop by later to pick them all up and asked Charley to watch on his behalf. "Roy Skoler, you remember him?"

Speechless, I nodded.

"He was living downriver a ways, near his wife's family in Port Jervis. Seems he and his wife broke up and Roy's moved back to Little Eddy, rented a place down by the river until he can find something more permanent. He's got his boys for the summer."

"That's nice," I mumbled, as an icy panic raced through me. "That he's got his boys, I mean."

"Well, of all the kids in the old gang, Roy's the only one who hasn't really caught much of a break in life. Bibb, Jimmy, Lare, they all got themselves good jobs, families, they're doing fine. Roy called out of the blue and came up to visit me a few weeks ago, before he took custody of his kids for the summer, and it was a less than pleasant experience. I feel kind of sorry for him. But then, you know I've always been partial to outsiders."

"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.