The Diviner's Tale (7 page)

"Do you sense anything or anyone?"

I breathed in deep, cleared my thoughts away as best I could, but I felt no presence here. I told him I didn't and said I wasn't used to divining people, as such.

"I still think you should let me take it from here. I'll walk you up to the car."

"No, Niles. I appreciate your concern. But you know I need to be here, too."

He shook his head, said nothing further, turned his back on me, and continued along the trail.

The birds were riotous this morning. Warblers carrying on like some piccolo orchestra gone joyously mad. So noisy it was almost annoying. As I walked, looking right and left and above me, and sometimes behind, a fitful chill ran through me. Then a wave of curious fatigue as we made our way inevitably toward the central overgrown floodplain that lay at the bottom of the slope. Even though Niles was, while walking ahead, disturbing the fallen leaves and undergrowth, breaking dead limbs and branches where he stepped on them, it seemed clear that this had been a thoroughfare of sorts. Lightly used, yes. But used. So I was thinking, Who would bother but somebody who relished solitude, or who preferred that others not see their deeds, or both? But then, it could as easily be a poacher trail. Many were the evenings at my parents' farmhouse, which was much more remote than mine and indeed closer to Henderson's, when we heard gunfire during months not set aside for such activities.

I didn't mean to drift but drifted despite myself into watching Niles Hubert ahead of me in the scape. He and I had known one another since grade school. I climbed with him in trees, we broke arms together, played marbles, sword-fought with ash sticks, jumped side by side on his parents' tottery rusted rickety trampoline. He was my first kiss, an awkward and premature blunder that cost us the better part of the summer—we were all of twelve; summer was eternity—before we recovered from our rampant shyness to speak again, hang out, carry on. After that we reconnected as real friends. The purest kind you can count on. He became more worldly-wise than I did, for whatever reason, as we edged along, hand in hand, from our early through mid-teens. He wanted more from me than I was able to give him. But we were inseparable. How we loved to sit in a quiet remote place, backs against a maple tree, and kiss—having made it a kind of research project of our own, in light of that first debacle—kiss so long that our lips swelled, making us look like we'd eaten a bucket of warm Bing cherries. Nobody thought we would be with anyone else but each other.

Then, almost imperceptibly, my problems started up again. The monster took to whispering in my ear. Its voice sounded like fine-grained sandpaper rasping against stone. It seldom appeared in the form of a beast or being but came to me more like a mystifying cloud in my mind, a cloud of deep rich rose not unlike the color your hand acquires when you cup your palm to a flashlight in the dark. If the hanged girl was another instance of the monster, it had rarely revealed itself to me in such cruel and forthright form. The monster had always been simple and swift as a thought, the merest suggestion or outward trace of a thought. When I was in a period of—what to call it?—remission, I could easily keep these phantom thoughts to myself. But that wasn't always the case.

I remember once there was a teacher named Thomas Lowry whose wife was friendly with my mother; they did church business together. She spent a lot of time at our house doing committee work for church programs and brought her little girl along to play with me, even though I was too old for her. A conscripted babysitter, I recall thinking how much I'd rather have been out with Niles than stuck at home with this round-faced, freckled girl half a dozen years my junior. Still, an inherent loneliness in her drew me to Jenny, and so I did my best to entertain her. One day, having run out of other ideas about what to do with my charge, I invited her to swim in the pond.

— No, she said, afraid the fish would bite her.

— But there's only trout in there, Jenny, I assured her. —Brown trout and rainbows with their sides all covered with pretty spots.

— They'll hurt me, she insisted.

— They won't hurt you, honey. They don't even have teeth, not really.

She wouldn't hear any of it and yet I, for reasons that shall remain forever unclear to me, understood what really was going to hurt her. Because the monster was at work in me that time, I saw in a halo of understanding that I needed to let her know her mother wasn't well, she might be quite sick in fact. —You should take extra-good care of your mother, you know that?

— But I already do, Jenny softly replied, no doubt wondering what was the matter with me.

— That's good, it's important for you to keep doing that.

The psychological anatomy of this behavior, the neurobiology that ranged behind it in my frontal lobe or wherever it came from in my brain, to this day I do not fully understand. I hadn't meant to be cruel or unthinking, but of course she went to her mother crying. And, of course, Rosalie stormed down to where I was sitting on the short dock cooling my feet in the slimy duckweed and scolded me for being so mean.

The girl's mother, it would soon be revealed, was ill. Not because of me. The poor woman had her stomach cancer for some long time and even knew about it. She and Mr. Lowry had decided to keep it a secret. A terminal tumor. What point was there in darkening everyone else's spirits around them? They figured they would keep up a brave façade for as long as they could. In retrospect, I admired them entirely and, even after all the therapy, could not help but detest myself. It was one thing to know. Another to say.

I shared what had happened with Niles, who thought I was acting weird again, like during the time after my brother died. He distanced himself after that, I believed, although he has sworn it wasn't so. We saw less and less of one another as I saw more of city doctors. In my immaturity, I wrote it off that we somehow staled on each other. Probably was my fault because, for reasons I couldn't then comprehend, reasons I didn't have any will or way to talk about, I wasn't ready to do some of the things he, with his hormones raging at the hot high tide of adolescence, openly desired. I feared he grew tired of waiting.

I also wondered if he wasn't a little afraid of me. Niles, not generally the fearful kind, was nervous that his beloved girl was possessed, touched in the head. He might have thought it uncanny and even useful when I told him he ought to study for a pop quiz coming up in our history class—it did, but he wrote it off to my mother knowing ahead of time from a colleague and letting me in on the knowledge. He considered me clever perhaps for telling him his truck clutch was about to go—it did, but I might simply have noticed a different sound when the gears shifted, nothing more. But when I told him that I could have sworn I saw dead Emily Schaefer walking along in the moon-cast tree shadows down by the stone rampart one night when I couldn't sleep, saw her turn and look up at me in my window, and that she was disappointed in me, that did throw Niles off. It would have anyone. And as he withdrew, my mother filled the vacuum left in his wake. When I mentioned Emily to her, she had even less patience with me than Niles. She preferred, quite wisely, that I weather this aberrant season out of the public eye and even took a term off teaching so she could homeschool me while I improved.

Improve I did. I sometimes suspected her of pulling invisible strings behind my back, such that her handiwork may have lain behind Niles's absence. This I now doubt, but I'll never quite know for sure. At any rate, I do recollect being in bed one frosty autumn night a few months into my exile, staring up at that same pale meniscus of a moon that had cast shadows on poor Emily, and deciding I'd had enough of forevisions. Even if I believed some special knowledge had lodged itself in my heart or head, that's where it was going to stay. And, if it were possible, I would gird heart and head against such fantasies which, even when accurate, brought little peace or succor to anyone. Myself included. That night I made my first covenant to do my very best to become, for lack of another word, normal. To unpleat, smooth, and ease the patterns of thought in my mind.

Even now I didn't experience a regretful wistfulness following Niles into Henderson's land. I never indulged in any bitterness toward him for moving on with his young life. What else should he have done? Occasionally, I allowed myself to remember the ways in which Niles and I made love—yes, we did have a brief, predestined season together in our twenties, after I matured some and before he became enamored of Melanie—and cherished the images of those times. He even asked me to marry him, in part, I always thought, because that was what everybody naturally expected, including us. Our engagement, however blissful, was short-lived, and that was that. I still felt so strongly connected with the man that regret was not a word in my emotional vocabulary. What I felt was comfortably safe as we headed toward what I believed, equally strongly, would be an abyss of some kind. A dead end that was quite alive.

It was like this. Years ago, in my early teens, I bought for fifty cents a huge fat folio of a book at the annual local library sale. I wanted to find a Greek or Latin dictionary, but all they had on the table was Mathews's
Chinese-English Dictionary.
I told myself, with all the sense of pride that accompanies such an outlandish purchase, that for half a buck I was going to be the only person in this whole damn county who could speak Chinese. When I got home, I cleared my little oak bedroom desk and sat the tome down before me. I opened it up to a chance page,
Lu.
Page four thousand something. The first entry, in bold type, showed what I later learned was an ideogram. And beside it, the English translation: "A bad road; the road is bad." Not too promising. The next word translated to "A sacrifice by the way, before a funeral." Nervous, I read an other entry. "Dangerous ways; dead end," and closed the volume. What came as a grand disappointment and revelation was that I would never learn Chinese, but I would always navigate difficult paths. This was my nature, I believed, and serendipity had brought me certain proof. I never opened the book again. But I still own it.

"Niles?"

He had gotten pretty far ahead of me, or rather, I had fallen behind. I could just make out his red and purple jacket through the crowded mesh of tree limbs. In another week or two, he would have been invisible behind a thick scrim of leathery green leaves.

"Niles, slow down."

He walked a little farther and then I saw him stop, not necessarily because of me. It wasn't as if he turned and shouted back my name or acknowledged my calling out to him. I hurried down the path, through zigzags of toppled trees, huge trunks fallen so long ago that moss and wild mushrooms had taken up residence on their woody carcasses. He was standing over a knit cap, his jaws flexing as they habitually did whenever he was upset. Bright pink, with a black tassel. It wasn't clean, but neither was it so dirty that there was much chance it had languished here lost all winter. He photographed and bagged it, marked the location again with tape. I was speechless. Without exchanging words, we both searched the forest floor but found nothing else.

Niles said, "Your description didn't include a pink cap."

"That's because she wasn't wearing one."

He was weighing what to do. "Any sense of how far we are from that grove where you allegedly saw her?"

"Allegedly?"

He didn't respond.

"I'm guessing we're not that close," I answered into the quiet. "Another three, four hundred yards."

"I know I asked you yesterday, but are you absolutely sure you took us back to the same exact spot where you'd been earlier?"

"No question. Besides, you saw my divining rod was there."

"That doesn't prove much. You could have dropped it anywhere along the way."

"Niles, I didn't lead you to the wrong place. She was there before. I swear it on the twins' souls."

That took him aback. Did me, too. In a life of dealing with doubters, this was, I realized, the most I had ever longed to be believed. I began to understand why it was that he decided to bring me along. It wasn't because he needed my help. To the contrary. He had intended to try to help me with a serious display of earnest regard on his part—the calls, the map, the off-duty time reexamining a place that wasn't in any official way of interest to him. No crime seen, no crime scene. He wasn't humoring me. Niles wouldn't bother. More that he wanted to help me regain balance and come around to accepting the fact I'd suffered some kind of phantasm or waking nightmare as I had when I was young. But the pink cap plainly scuttled his purpose some.

We walked on. The birdsong thinned out. Just some complaining crows floating by overhead. The trail disappeared, then reappeared now and again, and we managed to stay on it, more or less, all the way down. I had no reason to believe it would lead us to the hanging ground, but when it did I remembered this copse of ironwoods and black cherry trees with razor clarity. Niles did also. We hiked, him first, along the same narrow path I had surmised was a deer run and quickly came upon the clearing where, on its farther verge, stood the beetle-branched tree. It looked for all the world like a photographic negative of a lightning mass, St. Elmo's Fire done up in black.

She was as absent this morning as yesterday afternoon. The walnuts and maples glistened in wan filtered sunlight. Niles and Bledsoe had combed through this scrub before, but he went searching again now while I stayed behind, in a blind of bushes. How was it that the birds were so voiceless in this spot? Birds always were to my mind the very freest of all creatures. Why they avoided singing in a landscape so naturally suited to them was beyond me. As if their silence were condemnatory.

I stood just where I had the day before. While I could mentally paint the hanged girl right where she had been, there was no willing her back into being. For the briefest moment I felt remorse, and not a little shame for having dragged Niles down here in the first place.

I had to admit to myself it must have been a cognitive slippage, a gross delusion. To have held her in my arms, though? I was mired in confusion. Wanted to leave here now, go home to my boys and forget any of this happened. I was wasting everybody's time. Niles, my mother, Nep, the twins, even Bledsoe and Ponyface, had all been put out for no good reason.