Water Witches

by Chris Bohjalian

  Overhead, clouds continue to roll in, until, almost abruptly, there are no shadows left on the grass. It is possible these are the clouds due here late tomorrow or Monday, the clouds that are supposed to tease us with inconsequential sprinkles for perhaps half a day.

  Angel stops walking and looks up, her face registering sur-

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  prise at the suddenly overcast skies. She may have been so deep in concentration that she was unaware of the approaching clouds. After a moment she resumes her methodic shuffle, however, her feet never leaving the ground.

  When the dowsers have completed their survey, they have found three power centers. The six women surround Miranda while she stands over the third and final stake, dowsing its potential to salvage the Chittenden River. I stand up, brush some dry dirt off my suit pants, and start down the hill with the crowbars. I'll have to return for the sledgehammer.

  "So? Success?" I ask the group generally, not directing my question at any one of the dowsers. They are all watching Miranda intently, as she stands over the small piece of wood, trembling slightly.

  Of the six women, only Angel is smiling. When it is evident that no one else plans on answering my question, she whispers to me, "As far as power centers go, these are not very impressive."

  It has never seriously crossed my mind that these women will not succeed. Since the middle of last night when I first had the idea, I have been firmly convinced that between my wife and my daughter, between my sister-in-law and her friends, there will be sufficient dowsing prowess to divert all the water we want into the Chittenden.

  A half mile downriver, Reedy and Russ Budbill are waiting patiently, hoping to be able to gauge an increase in the water flow. In my vision last night, I imagined that the dowsers would be able to divert so much water into the river that before our very eyes the water level would begin to climb. It would begin to run over the tops of the dry stones in the riverbed, it would begin to inch its way up the bank, covering the exposed

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  roots of trees, the dirt that has become almost the color of sand. In my mind's eye, I saw it rising faster than runoff from the mountains after the first big thaw, I saw it climbing faster than the Winooski River rose that day in 1992 when ice jammed up the river in March, and the water flooded over the banks and into the state capital.

  I wonder now if my vision of water rising in the Chittenden riverbed was all just a dream. I wonder if I have set myself and my daughter up for yet one more defeat. In a summer with loss, perhaps there is no recovery in fall. Fall, after all, is no season for healing.

  I place the sledgehammer on the ground silently, laying it in the grass a few feet from the crowbars. The Y rod in Miranda's hands twitches, and then twists abruptly toward the ground. She asks it a question, and it responds. The sky above herthe sky above all of ushas steadily darkened. If the drizzle does arrive a day or two early, Patience and her bridesmaids might wind up doused at the receptionan irony that might be funny if this weren't Patience's wedding day.

  Finally Miranda backs away from the last vegetable stake, and drops her Y rod to her side. She looks breathless and tired, and that part of me that loves her as desperately as any father can love his daughter wants to go to her and hold her and tell her what a fine job she has done, but now she can relax.

  Somehow I restrain the impulse, somehow I remain still where I am. I watch as Laura kneels on the grass before her, and takes Miranda's free hand in hers. ''How many veins intersect here?" she asks.

  "Three. It's a better spot than the others," Miranda says, waving her Y rod in the general direction of the other two stakes.

  "Are the veins strong?"

  She shrugs noncommittally, unimpressed by what she has learned here.

  "Do they currently feed into the Chittenden River?"

  Miranda shakes her head no. "But they could."

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  "What about the veins at the other centers? Can we move them too?"

  "I think so."

  Laura stands up. "All right then. Let's see what happens." She then picks up one of the six crowbars and forces it into the ground as if it were a giant building nail.

  I don't know if Reedy and Russ Budbill can hear the sound of Patience Avery slamming the sledgehammer onto the top of the crowbar, banging it into the ground. I hope that they can, if only as a signal that the process has begun.

  Laura, again kneeling, holds the crowbar steady with both hands. Drops of sweat have begun to form along Patience's forehead, where only an hour before she was wearing a veil. Every time she hoists the sledgehammer back up over her head, the shoulders of her wedding gown fold together like an accordion, and then on her downswing stretch further than they were ever designed to. Any moment, those shoulders might tear.

  "Are you sure you don't want me to do that?" I ask for the third time.

  Patience has insisted on wielding the sledgehammer because she is a dowser and I am not. If Miranda were older and stronger, if the sledgehammer weren't perhaps fully one-third of my daughter's body weight, she would probably have Miranda swinging the hammer right now.

  Patience rests the sledgehammer by her side for a moment, and takes in a great swallow of air. "Was I speaking English when I said I was positive?" she answers, irritated with both my request and my persistence.

  "He was only asking to be nice," Laura says sternly to her sister, defending me. "The fact is, this is hard work."

  "And you do look ridiculous," I add undiplomatically, a reflex in self-defense.

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  Patience watches me for a long moment. "Fine," she says simply, about as close as she ever comes to a truce. An apology.

  A raindrop falls onto my hand, and I stare up into the sky. As I do, I feel a second drop splash onto my forehead, and then almost instantly a third.

  "Let's wrap this up, Patience," Laura says. "We need to get you to your reception."

  The clouds burst. Patience swings the sledgehammer down onto the third crowbar above the third power center for the last time, just as the skies are uncorked. It is as if the final wrought iron bang is the signal for the seams of the woolpack above us to be ripped open, and ablution to fall.

  No, not fall. This rain doesn't fall. This is not the "gentle rain" of Archer Moody's prayers. This is a rain that showers upon us in sheets, a rain that flows down from the clouds in waves, a river begun in the sky, a teaming stream that I know in my heart was formed in the heavens. The rain descends in literal curtains, shielding for whole seconds at a time the people standing beside each of us.

  "It's raining!" Angel Source Brandy screams happily, twirling amidst drapes of water. "It's raining!"

  It is indeed. It is a downpour. But although it is not the gentle rain prayed for by Archer Moody, nor is it the punishing rain of a monsoon or a hurricane. It is a good rain, a windless rain, a rain without gale, a storm without gusts. It is the rain that is not due for days, but the rain we have needed for months. And I know now it will continue raining for days, I know it with the confidence of a life lived among the fantastic, a life lived among the astonishing, the wonderful, the unexpected, the bizarre.

  Laura rises slowly to her feet and stares up into the tidal wave, smiling, as her eye makeup begins to run down her cheeks and neck, dripping in splotches of blue onto her snow-

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  white dress. "Where did this come from?" she asks, yelling to be heard over the torrent. "Where did this come from?"

  It is a question asked rhetorically, a question asked because while we all think that we know the answer ... none of us, not even Laura or Patience or Miranda, is prepared just yet to verbalize it.

  Katherine Whiting, a respected and dignified physician, is transformed before my eyes into Katie, a girl/woman hopping in place in the grass, her arms raised over her head in victory and success.

  "You know the answer to that better than me!" Katie screams hysterically at my wife. "You know, you know, you know!"

 
; Laura stands still for a brief moment, then nods her head that she does. In one swift flurry of motion she turns to our daughter and takes both of Miranda's hands in hers, giggling, and mother and daughter start to spin, jumping and dancing amidst balneal waters of hope. Patience looks at them, and then at her bridesmaids, and thenwith a wide-eyed smile of astonishment on her faceshe too starts to laugh.

  The water surges through grass and dirt into the earth, it fills underground veins and cavities and springs. Manna. The drops pelt our faces and hands, the rain soaks almost instantly through our clothes, moistening, refreshing, soothing our skin. Holy water. Drenched, Carpe Tiller and Sas Santoli fall together into each other's arms, twins clad in white, a mirror, squeezing each other and pounding each other's back.

  "Believe it, Scottie Winston!" Patience commands me, shouting over the tempest, her voice euphoric.

  "I do!"

  "Believe!"

  "I do!" I shout back, as rainwater courses through my hair and down my back, as it fills my shoes and overflows the cuffs on my pants. But I believe not just in the power of these women, each an enchantress, a wizard, a magician, a witch; I believe also that the rain falling now will continue falling for days. It will slow, once it has rewarded these womenthese

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  women and me, these women and Reedy McClurefor our faith, but it will continue. It will continue to rain until the Chittenden River flows as it was meant to, it will continue to rain until the springs deep below us are strong and healthy and powerful, until those springs are able to sustain the Chittenden River for ... ever.

  This too is my faith.

  From the woods just beyond the base lodge, Reedy and Russ Budbill start running up the hill, splashing whole puddles of water into the air with every step.

  "The river! Scottie, you won't believe it!" Reedy is screaming, smiling. "You won't believe it!"

  I shake my head that he is wrong. "I sure will!" I scream back, unsure for one moment whether the water running down the sides of my face is rainfall or tears, but never for one second caring. "I sure will!" I scream again as loud as I can, yelling louder than I've ever yelled in my life, yelling as I spread wide my arms and stare up into the sky.

  "I ... Will!"

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  PART THREE

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  33

  Neither my father nor I ever saw catamounts again.

  We looked for them. We looked for them all the time, we looked for them everywhere that we went. But we never saw one again, and as the years grew into decades our memories likewise grew dimas did our conviction that the creature we had seen was without question the catamount.

  Once, wemy father, my mother, and Ireturned to Powder Peak, and we visited the area on Mount Republic where we had seen the animals. It was in the summer, a year after the resort had reopened the tramway to tourists, and people could again hike freely throughout the mountains. My father had started his new practice by then, one he would run for twenty-plus years without any partners (it was, he would say, just him and his shingle).

  We wandered all the way to the top of the mountain, and we hiked deep into the evergreens, following the path we assumed the cata-

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  mounts had taken. We even had a picnic on the rocks where another small familyin our wanting eyes, a mother and two cubsmay have watched my father and me disappear on a chair lift down the mountain.

  Goddard Healy kept his word to my father, and to this day no ski trails wind into those woods. I don't believe Ian Rawls ever forgave my father for his stand, but I think his old law partners and many of his old friends did. At least they acted that way when they ran into him on the streets of Montpelier, or at the county fairs and parades that pepper a Vermont summer.

  My mother refuses to move in with my family these days, just as her mother refused always to move in with her. She lives still in the house that she and my father bought in Landaff soon after they were married, although the place has begun to look pretty tired.

  Unlike my mother and my grandmother, I actually married a local boy. My father said it spoke volumes about Vermont, and perhaps something about our abilities as a people to heal and forgive and to love, but I married the son of the man who cross-examined me one day years ago in the statehouse cafeteria. I married John Bussey's son Parker (a name that means, ironically, "guardian of the park" in Middle English).

  My father never learned to dowse in his life, but I think that he could have if he had wanted to. He died a believer. When he would watch his granddaughter dowsedowsing with more assurance than me, more success than my motherhe would shake his head and smile. "Natural selection," he used to say. "We're breeding a generation of extrasensory giants."

  He never took credit for his role in that evolution, attributing it all to an Avery dowsing gene. But there is no doubt in my mind that what makes my children as fine and wonderful as they arewhat makes them kind, what gives them faithis attributable as well to the heart they received from my father.