Water Witches

by Chris Bohjalian

  That was why the fire trucks weren't back yet. They were all trapped on the far side of the ditch.

  And there had been a fatality. It may have been smoke inhalation, it may have been a heart attack or a stroke or perhaps even despair. At six thirty, Patience did not know the details.

  But the old man whom Patience Avery had loved above all else, old Elias, had died in the middle of the night, as he had stood beside close to forty firefighters, men one-quarter and one-third his age, and watched the woods that he loved and the sugar house he had built burn to the ground.

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  16

  The Plainfield pumper sits on its side on a slab of cement, half in and half out of the stream, the rusted metal supports of the bridge squashed beneath it. One of the cables, a thick braid of rusted metal, shattered the pumper's windshield when it snapped.

  "A wrecker's on the way," someone says to me from behind. Evidently, Laura and I have been staring.

  I turn around and nod at the fellow, a young Landaff fire-fighter whose name I cannot recall.

  "What somebody thinks a wrecker can do with that mess down there is beyond me," he continues. "But anyway, a wrecker's on the way."

  On the near side of the stream, the side on which I have parked, there is a virtual used car lot of state and private automobiles and trucks: all of the vehicles that arrived on the

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  scene after the old bridge collapsed under the weight of the Plainfield pumper. Between the cars that belong to the members of the Ladies' Auxiliary, the State Police, the experts from the Medical Examiner's office and the state's Fire Prevention Division, there are probably twenty-five vehicles parked on the street side of the collapsed bridge.

  There is even an ambulance, with an oxygen tank set up on the ground beside it. According to Chester Woolf, Cynthia Woolf's husband and the chief of the Landaff Volunteer Fire Company, this is the very same ambulance that took away Elias Gray's body over six hours ago. It returned about four in the morning.

  Already the sun is high in the sky, although it's not yet seven thirty in the morning, and it feels to me too hot to be a Vermont sun.

  "It doesn't look like that bad from here," Laura says quietly, referring to the area where the fire occurred.

  "No, it doesn't," I agree. Just past a bend in the dirt road, however, perhaps a hundred yards up the hill from what's left of the bridge, I can see that the tips of a long line of spruce have been singed. The sugar house wasn't far from those trees.

  At some point in the night or the early morning, the State Police strung a line of bright orange tape around the wreckage of the pumper. It may have been the two officers standing now beside the long and wide pieces of plywood that span the stream at the bottom of the ditch, surveying them. Most people could probably jump across that stream without much difficulty.

  "Was anybody hurt?" I ask the firefighter, motioning toward the pumper.

  "One guy bruised his shoulder. Other guy got a mean-looking cut on his forehead. But nothin' major. They were lucky."

  "Let's hurry," Laura says, looking up the hill toward the forest. "I'm worried about Patience up there."

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  Most of the firefighters haven't yet bothered to strip off their bunker pants or boots, but they have tossed their long yellow jackets unceremoniously into piles beside their trucks. Although all of the hoses have been retrieved and rewound, there are at least a half-dozen airpacks still scattered around the remains of the sugar house, and three or four now ash-black axes.

  Some of the men are naked from the waist up, as they chew on the donuts and sip the orange juice being handed out in tall paper cups by the Landaff Ladies' Auxiliary. I gather none of the men have slept.

  "I was just eatin' smoke," a Landaff fellow named Barton Lutz says to an older firefighter. "It was worse than bein' caught upstairs in a house fire."

  Landaff's pumper and the seven fire engines belonging to the companies that fought the blaze last night are lined up bumper to bumper along the dirt road, as if preparing for a vehicular conga line or parade. Until a temporary bridge is constructed, however, they can't go very far.

  "It looks like a friggin' battlefield," Lutz continues, wiping a strand of black hair that keeps falling across his face.

  The older firefighter steps on a small pile of ashes that is still smoldering and shakes his head in disagreement. "Nope. I've seen battlefields. This just looks like a forest fire was here. And if it hadn't brought down Elias's sugar houseand old EliasI'd say it wasn't even much of a forest fire. 'Specially compared to what they get out west."

  Evidently, the flames never exploded into the sort of fire-storm that instantly engulfs whole sections of forests, or leaps between treetops in seconds. There was no wind last night. Nevertheless, the woods here have become a small world of tall black toothpickstoothpicks that almost crumble at the touch. There are no leaves, no shade to block out the sun, and our shoes sink into ash wherever we walk.

  The orange tape that I saw being wrapped around the pumper already guards the remains of the sugar house. The

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  metal evaporator, now blackened by flame and filled with enough water to fill a wading pool of perhaps Olympic proportions, is all that is recognizable.

  Sitting on the hood of one of the trapped fire engines, his raincoat draped across his lap, is Elias's thirty-year-old grandson, Anson. His tee-shirt too has been blackened by smoke, and he is still wearing his fire-resistant pants and boots. Every so often he stares at a small piece of paper in his hands, then folds it in half and in half again, and rubs his eyes.

  The sweet smell of burnt wood is everywhere, an almost hauntingly pleasant aroma that I equate usually with wood-stoves and fireplaces.

  From now on, it will remind me of Elias Gray, and I put my arm around Laura's shoulders, and pull her against my chest for a long moment.

  "I was sure Patience would still be here," she says finally, her voice almost numb. "I was sure she would have stayed until we got here."

  Never has Laura felt so small in my arms, her body so fragile. I kiss her once on the forehead, whispering, "She probably went to Reedy's."

  "Maybe," she murmurs.

  "Let me see if anyone knows where she went," I suggest, holding her close for one more moment. I am almost afraid to release her, as if she'll melt into the ashes as soon as I do.

  "You'll be okay?" I ask.

  "I guess," she says, pulling slowly away from me, sighing. "We should also say something to Anson. It looks like no one else wants to."

  Anson runs the back of his arm across his forehead, replacing the sweat that had been there with a black smudge of soot.

  "I'm sorry," he says, apologizing for a yawn, and then twists his head away from us when a second one overtakes him. "I guess I'm beat."

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  "No, we're sorry," I tell him. "We're so sorry about Elias. About your grandfather."

  Anson nods. "I suppose there are a lot of ways to go when you're his age. But I wouldn't have expected this one. Nope. I surely would not have."

  He slides off the front of the truck, and before he can open his mouth to say a word Laura wraps her arms around him. Through Elias, she views Anson as a distant cousin of sorts.

  "I'm a mess," he says awkwardly, looking over her shoulder at me. "You're gonna get your clothes filthy doin' that."

  Like much of Landaff, Anson too works for the mountain, Powder Peak, in the winter. Some days he grooms snow, some days he runs a lift. He has, on occasion, fixed the tables in the snack bar and repaired the railings outside of the restaurants. Essentially, he doesas Elias often said"whatever needs doin'."

  This is true at Powder Peak, this is true on the hundreds of acres and dozens of outbuildings that comprise the Gray property.

  As Laura pulls away, she asks, "Were you with him?" The front of her shirt and her shoulder, where she touched Anson, are black with ash.

  "Yup. I was. I went with him in the
ambulance, and came back here when the ambulance did. Wasn't nothing anyone could do at the hospital."

  "How's Giannine?" I ask.

  "Okay. Not great. But at her age, I guess, you expect this. Not this way, maybe. But she was ready."

  "Is she home now?"

  "She's with dad and mom," he says referring to his own father and mother. "There's where most everybody is right now. They're all over at mom and dad's place."

  "I'm glad," I add, shuffling my feet. "I'm glad she isn't alone now."

  He shakes his head. "Nah. No chance of that."

  "And yourself?" I ask. "How are you doing?"

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  "I'm just beat."

  "Really?"

  He shrugs. "Sure."

  "Did Elias ... How did Elias die?" Laura asks softly.

  Anson looks down at a long thin burn mark on his arm, and gently runs a finger along it. "He went fast, if that's what you're worried about. He just passed out." He starts walking toward the wide ring of orange tape that surrounds the evaporator, and motions for us to follow him.

  "The fire began right around here," he says pointing at the spruce that bordered the sugar house on the south side. "The chief said it probably didn't spread to the sugar house till it had been burnin' awhile. It probably got here a little after we were all tonin' out."

  On the ground of the forest is one of the metal hinges that once held the huge doors of the sugar house in place. Anson picks it up, scrapes some of the ash away from one side with a fingernail, and then throws it into the pool of water in the evaporator.

  "Grandpa got here 'bout the same time we all did, a few minutes before the roof went. One minute he was lookin' at it all in disbelief, the next minute he was fallin' against one of the trucks."

  Behind us somebody shouts that the wrecker has arrived, and many of the firefighters race down the hill to see if the pumper can indeed be liberated by Timmy Hinesman's tow truck. Anson remains in place, watching the ripples he has caused wash against the steel walls of the evaporator.

  "Grandpa died right here. I tried CPR, the rescue people tried CPR. But I think he was gone in an instant. Poof. Not a bad way to go, I guess. I jus' wish the last thing he seen wasn't" he says, waving his arms across the black dirt where once the sugar house had stood.

  "Wasn't the sugar house going up in smoke," I offer, trying to finish his sentence for him.

  "Ahh, sugar houses come, sugar houses go. He musta built a

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  half-dozen of 'em in his life. I meant the woods. Grandpa loved this forest. I jus' wish he hadn't died seem' it on fire.''

  "You guys wanna join us?" someone shouts at the three of us. "They're about to start hitchin' up the pumper!"

  I watch Anson for a response, planning to follow his lead as a courtesy. "I'll be there in a minute," he calls back. He reaches into his pants pocket and removes the piece of paper he has folded into a tiny square. It has been folded so many times that it may be thicker than a small pile of change.

  "Wanna see somethin'?" he asks, unfolding the paper.

  He starts to hand the paper to me, and then realizes it would be more polite to show it first to Laura.

  "You ever hear of that place?" he asks Laura, evidently referring to the name at the top of the paper. I look over her shoulder and can see the words Niemann-Marcus.

  "It's a department store," she answers. "A pretty snazzy one."

  She passes me the note, and as soon as I take it in my hands I understand what it is. It's a purchase order for maple syrup from the store's gourmet foods buyer in Boston.

  "An order that big," Anson says, a half-smile on his face, "I wasn't even sure I'd be able to deliver. We woulda needed one heck of a run."

  "You would have made it," Laura says.

  "That's what grandpa said. Man, what an order." He crinkles the paper into a small ball, and tosses it into the ashes on the far side of the orange tape.

  "Why did you do that?" Laura asks, stepping into the ashes to retrieve the purchase order. "You still have plenty of time to build another sugar house!" She picks up the paper and brushes off the black residue.

  "I don't know."

  She flattens the order against her bare thigh, despite the fact the paper is filthy.

  "Take it," Laura commands, handing the paper back to

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  Anson. "Take it! I don't mean to sound angry, but I don't want to see you give up."

  Anson nods, and looks down at his feet. "I know."

  Down the hill we can hear the sound of the chains and hooks being attached to the pumper. "Anson, come on!" one of the firefighters yells. "You guys got to see this!"

  "Have you seen Patience?" I ask Anson, as together the three of us start down the dirt road.

  "Yup, she was here. She went somewhere with Reedy. I guess either his home or hers."

  "How was she doing?" I ask.

  "I don't know," he says, rubbing the back of his neck. "Patience can be pretty hard to read. My sense is she was either doin' real well, and was just sort of pensive about it all. Or ..."

  "Or?"

  "Or she just shut down. Boom, all systems off. She musta been here fifteen minutes, and in that time I don't think she said one word."

  "That doesn't sound like my sister-in-law."

  "Sure doesn't. I mean, I grew up with Patience baby-sittin' me, and I got to tell you, I didn't think she could go five minutes without talkin'."

  Around the bend in the woods Timmy Hinesman starts his engine, and the wrecker begins attempting to yank the Plainfield pumper out of the ditch that once held Elias Gray's brook.

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  17

  There is a phantom trail on Mount Republic called Ten-Hook Brook. It is one of many designed by Ian Rawls's grandfather, a pioneer in the ski industry, back in the early 1930s. He named the trail for the stream that ran near it, and for the number hook he would use when he would fish the waters at the base of the mountain.

  The trail was abandoned in 1948, when the tramway was built on the other side of the mountain, and it can no longer be seen from the air.

  Some of Ian's childhood friends and their parents still ski Ten-Hook Brook at least once every season. It's a tradition of sorts, and usually one day between Christmas and New Year's, they will leave the immaculately groomed slopes of the new Powder Peak and ski the phantom trail instead. After the first

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  run of the day, they toast to themselves, and to Ian's grandfather, with homemade blueberry brandy.

  Then they toast to Mount Republic, which to this day remains the least developed of the three mountains that comprise Powder Peak.