Water Witches

by Chris Bohjalian

  Either that or a good friend of Patience.

  Normally when Roger Noonan says that he wants to talk to me, air raid sirens explode in my brain. The man is convinced that I have secret and profound connections with the state legislature, the judicial system, and big business (such as it is) that exists in Vermont, and that I can be an important source to him on every story that his newspaper prints. Roger is wrong. But he grounds his faith on the fact that over the years I have indeed lobbied for a variety of Vermont's larger corporations, and that as an attorney I have been involved with some relatively visible legal proceedingsalways, of course, as the proverbial black hat. I'm usually that fellow on the evening news explaining the need for a fourteen percent rate hike for the local utility.

  Today, however, the sun has made me drowsy. It has dulled

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  me just enough that I really don't care what Roger wants to ask.

  "Just here to see me, eh? Well, I'm flattered," I answer.

  "You want to join me for a bite to eat? No sense in bakin' out here in the sun."

  "Sorry," I shrug. "I've already eaten."

  He wipes sweat off his forehead with a handkerchief the color of dirty footprints. "Do you think this heat's ever going to break? Lately it's felt more like Mobile, Alabama, than Montpelier, Vermont. I'm sweatin' like a fat man."

  "You are a fat man, Roger."

  "I'm only makin' a point."

  "Sure, I'll join you for lunch," I tell the editor of the illustrious Montpelier daily, the Sentinel, as I stand up and stretch. "But I'll stick to ice coffee." I button my shirt and straighten my tie.

  With a grunt that marks almost all of Roger Noonan's physical efforts, Roger gets to his feet as well. "Well, the coffee will be my treat. I have some questions I want to ask you."

  "Imagine that."

  "I want to talk a bit about that mountain of yours."

  "Far as I know, I don't own any mountain."

  Roger looks over at the Green Mountain faculty, finishing their ice cream bars. Most people would be focusing on the women, but I believe Roger is concentrating instead on the ice cream bars: There is longing in his pinched, fat man's blue eyes. Abruptly he turns to me as we start to walk down the marble steps.

  "You know what I mean, Scottie. Powder Peak. The ski resort you're representing."

  "There's nothing to talk about. There's nothing you don't know, nothing you haven't already published."

  "I hear they're about one creditor away from bankruptcy."

  "The entire ski industry is about one creditor away from bankruptcy. It didn't snow a whole lot this winter, remember?"

  "So what I'm sayin' is true?"

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  "Roger, there's no news here. Half the ski resorts in this state are on the verge of bankruptcy."

  He shakes his head. "It's more than weather. Your boys have snow guns that make mother nature look like a pansy."

  "I wouldn't undermine mother nature around me," I tease Roger. "I have connections, you know."

  "I'm serious! Powder Peak makes snow on forty-eight of seventy-one trails. How can you folks blame a bad year on bad weather?"

  "No matter how many snow guns you have," I explain, "they don't work if the temperature doesn't remain below freezing."

  I follow Roger as we turn on to Elm Street, watching as the back of his shirt grows wet, and the fabric begins to cling to the rolls of fat that hang like riding breeches off of his sides, his shoulders, and the small of his spine.

  After work, I change in my office from gray flannel to gray fleece, and try to find meaning in the world with a divining rod of my own. A Hillerich & Bradsby softball bat, wooden and chipped and old. It is a piece of wood with which I will never find water, although I do now and then find a hole in the infield or a gap in the outfield.

  I swing the bat at the high school field that evening, our last practice before the season begins, an old man in a fast pitch softball league. I really am a dinosaur of sorts, as antiquated as my wooden bat. When I turn forty this fall, I will be able to look back on sixteen seasons in this league, all with the East Barre Quarry Men. Today I am no longer able to turn ground balls to third into singles the way I could fifteen years ago, but I still get my share of base hits.

  "Quick bat, Scottie, quick bat!" a fellow not quite eligible for the team yells from a perch by first base. He is not quite eligible for the team because he will not turn twenty-one for another two weeks. But he practices with us, and as soon as June fifteenthhis birthdayis behind him, he will take over

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  first base. He is still wearing the red and blue baseball cap he wore when he pitched the local high school team into the state championship three years ago.

  "Wait for your pitch, Scottie, wait for your pitch!" he continues, after I chop a ground ball into the dirt. I look over at the lad and smile. I will never understand why people who barely know me insist on calling me Scottie. Especially people half my age.

  But for all of my life I have been Scottie. It seemed appropriate when I was seven, and it will probably seem appropriate again if I reach seventy. But now, somewhere in between, it seems to me odd.

  "It'll rain," someone is saying near the backstop behind me. "There's a front in Chicago movin' this way. It'll be raining this time tomorrow," he says confidently.

  The infield tonight is as hard as asphalt, and the grass is as brown as tobacco. Ground balls skid over the dirt like bullets, setting off small firecracker puffs of smoke wherever they skim the earth.

  When I leave the batter's box, I start toward the pile of gloves in which mine is now resting. And then I stop. For a long moment I stare at the small drops of condensation that run slowly down the plastic water jug that sits on the bench, and I realize just how thirsty I have become.

  When I get home that night, a little past seven thirty, Miranda is in the kitchen with Laura. The pair are hunched over the kitchen table, mother helping daughter with her fourth grade geography. Spread out on the table between them is a colorful map of South America.

  I leave my sneakers by the coatrack just inside the front door, and toss my glove and baseball bat in the hall closet. After I kiss Miranda on the forehead and Laura on the lips, my daughter says to me, "I'll bet you don't know the capital of Paraguay!"

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  I think for a moment. She's correct, I haven't a clue. "I'll bet you're right."

  "Asuncion," she tells me. "What about Uruguay?"

  "Nope. No idea."

  "Daddy! It's Montevideo!" she says, folding her arms across her chest. "Do you know any of the capitals?"

  "In South America?"

  "Uh-huh."

  I think for a moment. "I know a few."

  "Name one."

  Behind her, Laura is smiling. She is clearly relieved that I have replaced her on the hot seat. "I know the capital of Argentina. Buenos Aires."

  "That's an easy one," Miranda says.

  "Hey, I named one."

  "Mom at least knew Quito," she mumbles in disgust, standing up and folding the map in half. "I'm never going to need to know this stuff after tomorrow's quiz, am I?"

  The question is not directed at Laura or me specifically, but Laura answers quickly, "That all depends, sweetheart. It all depends upon what you want to be when you grow up. It all depends upon what you want to do."

  Miranda places the map in her notebook, and starts toward her room. "Well, unless I want to be a teacher and torture nine-year-olds with the capitals of South America, I probably won't need it."

  She stops by the hall closet, and pauses for a moment in thought. "Daddy, did you put your bat in there?"

  "Sure did."

  She rolls her eyes in frustration. "I've told you, you can't put it there if you ever want to get any hits! There are noxious rays under there!" she says, pronouncing the word "noxious" exactly the way her Aunt Patience has taught her, stretching out the N into one long, almost independent word. She then opens the door, reaches i
nside for the bat, and leans it beside the coatrack nearby.

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  3

  Once, when Patience was Miranda's age, a fellow moved to Landaff from Concord, New Hampshire, and took over the small farm three-and-a-half miles up the road from the Averys. The farm received water from a well atop the foothill behind the silo, with gravity feeds descending into the barn as well as the house. The well was sourced from a spring about fifteen feet below ground, and pumped a good five gallons of water per minuteenough to support a family, a couple of horses, and at least a half-dozen dairy cows.

  Unfortunately, the Concord farmer wanted more than a half-dozen dairy cows. He believed he had the land to manage ten times that number.

  Consequently, he retained an engineer from Boston to help him determine where he should dig a second well, one that might be able to offer ten-plus gallons per minute. The engi-

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  neer surveyed the land, and concluded that if the farmer dug a second well at the base of the foothill, he would only have to tunnel somewhere around five hundred feet below ground before he found a spring with the kind of power he needed. At that time, most well companies charged about six dollars per drilled foot, meaningthe engineer saidit would only cost the farmer a little over three thousand dollars to dig his new well. Only.

  The farmer groaned, paid the engineer his fee, and then added the three thousand dollars to the figure he had told the bank he would need to start his dairy farm. The loan officer, a local boy from Landaff, listened calmly when the farmer said he planned on digging a good five hundred feet underground, and then shook his head. In and of itself, the officer said, another three thousand dollars wouldn't queer the deal. But three thousand dollars for a five-hundred-foot well might. That seemed a mite excessive, and showed pretty piss-poor judgment. He told the fellow that before he did another thing, he should call up Mrs. Anna Avery, and ask her if she would mind bringing her nine-year-old daughter Patience by the farm.

  Patience, the banker said, could probably find a spring a hell of a lot closer to the surface than five hundred feet below ground.

  The farmer was skeptical, but he also was desperate. He wanted his money. So passersby the next day could see from the road a little girl with dark eyes and deep brown hair that hung to her waist, holding a Y rod in her hands. The child was walking from the spot the engineer had marked, across the yard to the house. About halfway to the house she stopped, nodded at the farmer and at her mother beside him, and then said simply, ''Here."

  The farmer brought in a backhoe, and they began to dig. They stopped at exactly twelve feet. By nightfall, the twelve-foot hole was filled with six feet of water. And the farmer had a spring that could pump six hundred gallons an hour.

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  When I come home from work Wednesday night, the yard smells of verbenasoft and sweet and just a bit like talcum powder. The Scutter twins, two of Laura's pieceworkers, are still hard at work in the shed, rolling the beeswax candles that my wife wants to ship the day after tomorrow. I park the truck by the barn and wander over to the pair, hunched over the long cafeteria table Laura purchased from the elementary school last fall.

  "Evening, Gertrude. Evening, Jeanette." I have no idea which old woman is which, and direct my greetings at the thin air between them.

  "You got no business bein' out here 'n those noice shoes," the woman on the left says, chastening me, as she places a wick in a thin strip of beeswax.

  "Shoes aren't much good if you can't walk from your truck to your shed in them," I answer.

  "Then those ones ain't worth old pudding!" her sister says, looking up at me and squinting. The sun is over my shoulder, just about to fall behind Camel's Hump for the night. When the old woman squints, the thousands of lines on her face crack like dried mud, moving away from her eyes like the ribs of a fan. The Vermont climate has never been particularly kind to a woman's skin, and the sixty-five-plus winters the Scutter twins have spent before their family woodstove have finished the job the state's natural cold and wind started: Their skin might be parchmentwithered and shriveled and mummified. What is most astounding to me about the Scutter twins, however, is the fact that as they have aged, they have somehow remained identical. All of the changes that nature has wrought on the pair, it has wrought with an exact and indistinguishable care.

  "You two are working late," I tell the sister on my right, trying to change the subject from my shoes.

  The sister smiles. "Your wife may be pretty, but she's tough."

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  "You kept the Scutters here pretty late tonight," I tell Laura, as I dump the pasta into the colander in the sink, watching the water rush through the drain like a whirlpool.

  Beside me Laura is grating Parmesan cheese, the block disappearing bit by bit between her long, soft fingers. "Oh, they wanted to stay. They're afraid the spring that feeds their well is going to dry up, so they're trying to earn some extra money to drill a new well someplace else."

  "I can't believe they have anything to worry about. The Scutters have been on that land longer than Vermont has been a state."

  "Well, Jeanette's worried."

  "I didn't hear the weather on the way home. Isn't it supposed to rain tomorrow?"

  "It was. But it looks like that front will end up going south of us. Some towns down around Bennington and the Massachusetts border might get some rain. But that's about it."

  She tosses the fettuccine noodles back into the pot.

  "Who's the order for?" I ask, referring to the candles the Scutters were producing.

  "Some lingerie stores in California and the southwest. A chain. I don't know much about the stores, but the company looked fine on the credit check. Seventeen shops, mostly in Los Angeles and San Diego."

  "How did they hear about you?"

  "The gift show in New York last February. They came by the booth, and liked the line. They said they remembered the name of the company," she adds, punching me lightly in the ribs because I have always teased her about the name. The Divine Lights of Vermont. It has always sounded too spiritual to me, too much like a new age religion.

  "They would," I tell her. "They're from southern California."

  In the bedroom above us I hear Miranda rearranging her

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  furniture, pushing her bed or her nightstand or her toy chest a few feet to the right or the left. Miranda rearranges her furniture fairly often, usually in response to evil emanations from the earth. Sometimes she simply uses a pair of her angle rods to disperse the emanations, but sometimes she decides it's easier to push her bed eighteen inches further from (or closer to) the window.

  Often, I've noticed, she determines there are evil emanations rising up through the earth on the nights before or after a school quiz.

  "How did Miranda do on her geography test?" I ask.

  "She thinks she did fine. Which means she probably got a hundred."

  I nod, and smile with pride. Miranda has not simply been blessed with her mother's beautywith goldenrod hair and bewitching blue eyesshe has as well her mother's brains.

  Some say Senator Reedy McClure is an environmentalist. I think he just likes to see dead birds. Reedy is one of the two state senators from our county, a nativelike the Avery clanof the town of Landaff. When the Vermont legislature is not in session, from May through December, he will often volunteer his time to travel around the world to the site of the latest, greatest, most ecologically devastating oil spill he can find (usually there are a half-dozen spills from which he can choose, a half-dozen bodies of water he can see in despair). And then he goes there at his own expense to scrub rocks and birds and plants. In his forty-two years, he has cleaned crude oil off of sea otters, cormorants, penguins, a baby walrus, dozens of seals, and perhaps hundreds and hundreds of sea gulls. With his brushes and lotions and cleansers, he has visited the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Mexico, California and Ba
ja California, Alaska and Alabama and the coasts of Venezuela.