Water Witches

by Chris Bohjalian

  "Don't be an ass."

  "Simple question."

  "You know the answer to that."

  "You'd rather make snow, right?"

  "Of course."

  "Then I have a deal for you, Goddard Healy," I tell him, trying to imitate the voice of a television game show host. "I think we have something worth talking about."

  Angel Source Brandy stands on the top step of the Landaff town hall, a Georgian brick box that sits across the commons from the church, with the sun high overhead. Reedy stands on her left and Patience on her right, while the rest of the bridal party is lined up on the steps below them, forming an arcor, to use Patience's description, a phalanx. Because I will give Patience away during the actual ceremony inside the church, I too get to walk the labyrinth: a series of squiggles and circles that Angel has drawn in white lime on the grass between here and the front doors of the church. In theory, there is a pattern to the labyrinth, and if I were to look down at Angel's work

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  from the top of the church steeple, I would see an oval, with paths inside it that are shaped vaguely like a chalice.

  ''At the Cathedral of Chartres," Angel says, a smile of almost unbearable happiness on her face, "the labyrinth occupies almost the entire width of the nave. The diameter alone is almost thirteen thousand meters." She shakes her head in blissful astonishment.

  The design of Patience's wedding dress is fairly conventional, and would probably be perfect for a bride half her age. It is a floor-length gown with a train that must be fifteen yards long, sleeves that puff at the shoulders, and a bodice of flowery lace. What makes the dress unique, however, is that Patience has dyed it a deep and dark blue, the color that was dowsed and chosen by bridesmaid Sas Santoli. Blueaura blueevidently represents both balance and power, and it emits a positive atmosphere the size of a football stadium.

  "... and so I believe that the translation of that name for the labyrinth was the 'path to Jerusalem.' When people walked the labyrinth at Chartres in the thirteenth century, they were walking a metaphoric path to God."

  The bridesmaids are wearing white, because their support of the marriage is pure and vestal and chaste. Unsullied. Much to Laura's chagrin, each dress is identical, a mid-calf sack without adornment. They have sleeves, but might otherwise be mistaken for grocery bags with holes cut for a head and two arms. Patience vehemently denies it was her intention to create the single ugliest bridesmaid dress in the history of marriageshe says she was merely after simplicitybut this was the result. There can be no question in the mind of anyone attending this wedding: The bride is the star of this show.

  "... our path here, the bridal party's path, is a path to kindness. And serenity. For those of us supporting their bond, it is a path to love. For Patience and Reedy, it is a path to passion," Angel says, raising an eyebrow mischieviously at the word passion.

  Reedy tugs at the cuff of the sleeve of his jacket, pulling it

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  down closer to his wrist. He is wearing the sort of navy blue business suit that is perfect for the first marriage of a man about forty. Unfortunately, he probably hasn't worn this suit in close to ten years, a decade in which both his shoulders and his stomach have broadened.

  "... and so it was during the burning times that we lost our heritage. It was during the burning times that we stopped dancing in moonlight, and moving intuitively over the power centers of the earth."

  Two older dowsers, men much closer to Elias Gray's age than to mine, flinch at the words, burning times. Angel is one of a growing number of new age dowsers who believe that many of the women New Englanders burned three centuries ago as witches were actually practicing dowsers: not water dowsers (or, ironically, water witches), but forerunners of many of today's intangible target dowsers, the breed that dowses for auras and vitamins, noxious rays and radon gas, and the pollutants and pesticides that may lurk in our foods. The two older dowsers, men who probably knew Patience through Elias, exchange brief but appalled glances.

  "It wasn't hard to design this labyrinth. It wasn't hard to find a power center here in Landaff. All of you from Landaff have probably suspected all along that this town is filledfilled!with sacred sites and power centers. Is it any coincidence that so many wonderful dowsers come from right here? Just look at the people assembled for this ceremony. Look at our bride, Patience. Look at her maid of honor, her sister Laura. And Laura's daughter, Miranda, I am told, may have the greatest gift of all."

  Laura smiles down at our daughter, who preens just the tiniest bit at the compliment.

  "And let us not forget that the master dowser Elias Gray was born in Landaff, he lived his entire life in Landaff, and he died here in Landaff. There may have been no dowser, ever, who helped as many people as Elias Gray, who lived as fine a life of service."

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  Automatically, almost everybody nods in agreement. Angel lets her pause grow into a short moment of silence and remembrance, in which we all may recall our own special memories of the old man.

  "Let us begin," Angel says finally, the joy that seems almost always to envelop the woman returning to her voice. "Let us begin our short journey. And let Patience and Reedy begin their long one."

  Reverend Russell Taylor believes in dowsing for water. Electrical currents is his explanation for the phenomenon. He believed in Elias Gray's powers, andwhen they dowse for drinking water at the site itselfhe has faith in the powers of all of the Avery women.

  He is, however, merely tolerant when Patience or her friends start dowsing for chakras. He explained to Patience and Reedy when they were planning the ceremony together that he would allow "some dowsing mumbo jumbo" into the service because he loved them and he respected their opinions, but he himself did not intend to start dangling pendulums all over the sanctuary.

  Consequently, that responsibility fell to Carpe Tiller. Before the service began, with her ruby pendulum she dowsed exactly where close friends and family should sitwhich pews should be reserved for the Averys and which for the cousins, aunts and uncles of Reedy McClure. She pinpointed the locations of the positive ley lines under the ground, and carefully dowsed the inside of the church for noxious rays, evil emanations, and something she called malevolent attachments.

  Happily, there were none.

  "What I have found most reassuring about your love," Reverend Taylor says to the bride and the groom, "is that it is a love I have seen grow over time. It is a love I have seen mature and age like a magnificent wine."

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  Taylor is the sort of man who talks a lot about fine patinas. The metaphors may have great appeal for Anna Avery's generation, but I doubt that Patience, at forty-two, was thrilled to hear her and her fiance's love compared to old wine. She and Reedy are facing the minister, however, so if she allowed herself a small look of disgust, I was unable to see it.

  "But it is a love that has also retained the enthusiasm and ebullience of youth," he continues, more aware of Patience's sensibilities than I had realized.

  Of the six bridesmaids, Miranda's posture is best. She is standing at rigid attention, head high and shoulders squared, an earnest smile upon her face. The white grocery bag doesn't look as bad on her as it does on the adult women: On Miranda, it looks merely like the bloomers students might wear to gym at an old-fashioned Catholic girls' school.

  "And that is no small accomplishment. A love that somehow manages to combine both the boundless enthusiasm of youth with the ... patience ... of age, is something rare."

  The congregation smiles at his use of the word patience, and some of us allow ourselves a small laugh.

  Laura glances at the couple, and then looks toward me. We were married in this church seventeen and one half years ago, we stood exactly where Patience and Reedy stand now. Twice before Laura has stood as well in her current spot, beside her older sister as Patience's maidmatron, technicallyof honor. She knows this ritual by heart, and she allows herself a moment to look into my eyes: Unconcerned w
ith whatever anyone in the congregation may think who should notice, she winks.

  There will never by anything matronly about Laura Avery.

  The bride and groom race briskly down the aisle, as something that sounds like trumpets blares from our church's small organ. The pair are followed with somewhat more dignity by Laura and Reedy's brother, arm in arm, and then by the remaining bridesmaids.

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  Anna Avery in turn takes my elbow, and together we follow the bridal party outside into the sunlight, and toward one of the three waiting Lincoln Continentals ("Limousines look stupid in Vermont," Patience explained) that were planning originally to take us to the reception at the hotel in Montpelier.

  "Is everything all set?" Reedy asks me, as if he were oblivious to the fact he just got married. Patience is already seated in the lead automobile.

  The driver opens the back door of the car for Anna. "Congratulations, Mr. McClure," I tell Reedy as I shake his hand, "and welcome to the Avery family."

  "I'll take that as a yes. I'll assume we're all set."

  "Yes. We're all ready."

  "Has Ian told his people to let us onto the mountain?"

  "Grudgingly. But we'll have whatever access we need."

  "And you've told the drivers?"

  "Sure have."

  He nods his head, murmuring, "Good, very good."

  Behind us Patience bangs her fist on the inside of the rear window of the Continental, and gestures for Reedy to get in the car that very second.

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  32

  And so it begins. In spirit an incantation, in practice a diversion. The ultimate test for a dowser.

  I stand about one hundred yards up the hill at the base of the mountain, in a wide patch of cleared land where a half-dozen trails converge in the winter. The hill feels steeper to me now than it does in February or March, when I ski down it after a run from the summit; then, this part of the mountain feels almost flat. It is the runway on which I slowly coast to a stop. Now, at moments, I feel almost as if I am falling forward.

  Below me, on the flats at the foot of the mountain, the dowsers amble, trancelike, across the grass. Five women and a little girl in white, and one woman in something she calls aura blue. They are all using Y rods, even Carpe Tiller, who says that normally she prefers L rods. In the interests of harmony

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  and convergence, however, she has agreed this one time to work as part of the team with a Y.

  Reedy has left me to assist Russ Budbill, the hydrologist who recommended against tapping the Chittenden River The two of them are now a half mile downriver, by a spot in the riverbed where the shallow waters barely look like they're moving.

  There is something like a method to the efforts of the women on the flats. They are searching for power centers, sites where two or even three underground springs intersect. Three women have begun on one side of an invisible square, and three others on the adjacent side, hundreds and hundreds of yards away. The two groups of women are walking toward the center of that square, moving with small, slow, and infrequent steps. Eventually, the women will meet each other in the center of the box.

  It's a good thing that Patience and Reedy have rented Montpelier's Hotel Havington for the entire day. At the pace the dowsers are moving, I doubt the bridal party will arrive at the reception much before four.

  And then there is Miranda. Whenever the six adult women find a spot where veins intersect, she will dowse that spot's true potential for diversion. Can a vein be moved? Can it be used to feed the Chittenden River? In her bright red knapsack are perhaps a dozen of the wooden vegetable stakes that she and her mother use each year to mark the garden. Today she is using them to mark instead those power centers with potential.

  The evergreens that border the ski slope wave in a small breeze. Ever since we emerged from the church in Landaff, the sun has been disappearing with increasing frequency behind clouds: puffy cumulus clouds that rise like whipped egg whiteslike white sea foaminto high, dark blue skies.

  There is, however, no rain forecast for today, and I have no reason to believe that these clouds will grow into thunderheads of hope, that they will darken from cumulus into cumulonimbus. I reach for one of the crowbars beside me, one of the six

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  that Reedy and I managed to track down this morning, and hold it disinterestedly in my hands like a baseball bat.

  Laura stops walking, and Miranda races across the grass toward her and plants a vegetable stake into the ground. Her mother said nothing, and I hadn't even realized that Miranda was watching her.

  By now, the guests must have arrived at the reception. Most of them are probably finishing their first drink, savoring their first watercress sandwich. Most of themsince most of them are dowsersare probably toasting with great earnestness to our success.

  In addition to a half-dozen crowbars, I have carried a sledgehammer with me to the ski slope, a twenty-five pound monster that I had to borrow from a builder who lives near us.

  I swing the crowbar through the air once more, and then toss it back onto the pile with the others. The sound of iron upon iron echoes across the mountain like a gong, and the women look up at me, annoyed. I have disturbed their concentration. Until the crowbar crashed onto the pile, I hadn't realized how quiet the hills had become. How still.

  For Powder Peak to increase its snowmaking capabilities, the Chittenden River must rise. Water must again race through the bed in which it winds, water must flow at a pace and a depth that will allow what the experts callcoldly, in my mindthe aquatic environment to return to normal. There must be a healthy ecosystem of trout and mosquitoes, of walleyes and flies. The water must again rush at a pace of one full cubic foot per second.

  The deal I have, to use Reedy's word, cut with Powder Peak is really very simple. If the Chittenden River's water flow can be restored to normal, which will in turn allow the resort to draw water from it to make snow, then Powder Peak will clear no more land on Mount Republic. Any new trails the resort builds will be on either the eastern side of Moosehead or

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  Mount Chittenden, the areas of the resort furthest away from the National Forest, the wildlife habitat, and whatever catamounts remain in the area.

  How the Chittenden is restored is irrelevant, as long as the method is legal and the river remains viable for snowmaking for thirty consecutive days. The fact that I am counting on a group of dowsers to pump up the water flow by diverting underground springs into the river is my business. Goddard said he didn't give a damn if I wanted to spend all afternoon jumping up and down on the mountain, doing a new age rain dance with people in tie-dyed nightshirts.

  From the comer of my eye I see Miranda pushing a vegetable stake into the grass in a spot dowsed by her Aunt Patience. As Patience and Carpe and Angel continue past her, Miranda holds her own Y rod directly over the stake in the ground, its point raised almost straight toward the sky, and begins whispering to herself the key questions.

  Reedy has less faith than I do that Goddard Healy will keep his word to me if the dowsers do indeed succeed. But that is because Reedy hasn't worked with Goddard for over half a decade. I have. And in all those years, in all of the business deals we have been involved in together, I have never seen Goddard go back on his word. He has always been a tough negotiator, but he has also, as far as I know, never lied.

  The two groups of dowsers are perhaps within twenty-five yards of each other, as they each approach the center of their invisible box. Unfortunately, there are only two stakes in the ground. Given Patience and Laura's confidence this morning, I would have expected the ground to look like a slalom course by now.