Divining Rod

by Michael Knight

  When Delia’s mother greeted them at the door, he said, “Hello, Mrs.—It’s nice to finally—I’ve heard a lot about you, Mrs. Simpson.”

  “Oh, Lord,” she said, cutting her eyes to Delia as if they were sharing a private joke. “You can drop the missus. You’re too old even to be dating me.”

  “Mom,” Delia said, “be nice. Sam’s the man I’m going to marry.”

  “Is that right, Mr. Holladay?” she said. “Are you going to marry my daughter who’s too young for you by about thirty years?”

  “Yes,” he said, the words catching in his throat. “I love her very much.”

  Right at that moment, he thought of Mary Youngblood. Standing in the open doorway of Delia’s mother’s house, crickets ringing in the yard behind him like sleigh bells, he remembered the way her lips had felt against his hair and that she had forgotten her mitten and been too embarrassed to retrieve it because she had ended things between them the next day. He remembered, as well, the decision he had made—the sort of decision that only a young man can make, sure of the future and foolish with conceit—never to love another woman as long as he lived. He smiled at Delia’s mother and felt a sudden, sad surprise that he had kept his promise to himself for so long. He hadn’t done it deliberately. He’d forgotten it, in fact, with other women, at other times. But here he was sixty-two years old, unaccompanied and unloved for the better part of his days.

  Later, when Delia had gone to wash her hands, Mrs. Simpson said, “I don’t mean this in a cruel way, Sam, but one thing I’m glad about tonight is that you’re too old to leave my daughter.”

  She crossed her legs and looked at him, as though waiting for a reaction. He didn’t say anything for a while. He wanted to tell her that he would make another promise, not just the marriage vows but something more permanent and real. He loved her daughter—he knew that—and he would do anything in his power to keep them from ever being apart.

  Rabbit’s Feet, Religion, and Other Superstitions

  From my father, I inherited a house, a car, blue eyes, one arm that is slightly but not noticeably longer than the other, and an innate impatience for superstitious people. They tend to be overindulgent worriers, he told me, never responsible for their own mistakes. When he wanted to give me some advice, he would take me to the golf course across the street from our house, and we would walk along the soft grass of the sixteenth fairway, the last of the daylight catching in the treetops. My father would still be wearing his suit and tie, but he would carry his shoes in one hand, his bare feet as white as new golf balls, and a drink in the other, the ice ticking against the sides of his glass like sailboat rigging. We’d have the whole, discreet course to ourselves.

  “You can’t trust a wood-knocker, Simon.” He lumped all forms of nonscientific belief into one lamentable, amorphous school of thought. “Or a Bible thumper. Or a reader of horoscopes.”

  He did a broad expansive gesture, indicating the stars. My father had a funny, stilted way of speaking when he was telling me something he thought was important. He wasn’t a big man, but he moved like one. There was something in his bearing, his tendency to exaggerate. He occupied a considerable amount of space for a man of average size. He said, “If they had their way, we’d still be reading sheep guts to tell the future. Hell,” he said, “we’d still be sacrificing virgins.”

  “What’s a virgin?” I said. I was seven years old.

  Years later, the thing that would stand out about the way my father managed his advice and explanation—covering everything from sexual procedure to the historical significance of the virgin—was that he was able to deliver it without demeaning my mother in any way. Despite the fact that she went to church every Sunday and owned a rabbit’s foot key chain and lifted her feet whenever our car rattled across a set of railroad tracks, he somehow made it sound like she alone, out of all the superstitious people on earth, was worthy of love, regardless of what he told me about the world.

  I often wondered what it was that kept them together, what kept them whirling around each other like wild planets. When they argued, my mother would come to my room and sit on the foot of my bed and talk to me while she brushed her hair. We didn’t talk about anything important, just school or my friends or a movie I’d seen. She sat facing my desk and pulled the brush through her long hair, static bristling, until it was smooth and fine.

  Every Fourth of July, my mother had a party. They were mostly her friends, tellers from the bank where she used to work and couples from the neighborhood. My father wasn’t much for socializing. Everyone drank fruity cocktails, and my mother flitted through the crowd, pirouetting now and then to speak to one of her guests. After a few drinks, she went barefoot and no one cared. My father would spend an hour, maybe a little less, being nice, then he’d slip away and sit on the stairs and watch my mother. Her smile flickering, her fingers dancing on her hands. My room was at the top of the stairs, and I would hide in my doorway and spy on both of them, watch him watching her. After dark, the entire crew from my mother’s party would cross the street and spread blankets on the golf course to watch the country club fireworks. There was always someone who’d had too much to drink, who staggered around and made lewd jokes, who flirted with women who weren’t his wife. I remember once this guy with a soft paunch and broad shoulders and a kind face kept throwing his arm around my mother and whispering in her ear. My father told me to stay where I was—we were sitting together in the grass; I was always in his shadow then—and walked over to the man and my mother, stepping across the summery legs of lounging guests. Without a word, he punched the man in the stomach with his left hand. That was the last of my mother’s parties. The fireworks started up as my father was walking back to the house, bright sparks like falling stars.

  Not two weeks later, my father rented a house on the Gulf of Mexico for the rest of the summer. Close to where my mother died. The house was two-story, raised on sandstone pillars to let the water pass beneath it during storm tides. He made the two-hour commute to and from the city every day. He didn’t leave us a second car, so Mother and I dawdled on the beach, building elaborate sand castles, looking for shells. She swam an hour every morning. She was a strong swimmer and that summer her shoulders broadened, her arms got hard and lean.

  My father brought her horror movies from town. We grilled hot dogs and hamburgers and my father bought a device for making your own ice cream. Everyone was trying very hard to have a good time. On weekends, my father stood in the shorebreak and cast fishing line out over the sandbar. My mother and I sat on the sand and watched him, cheered him on, but he never caught anything. His shoulders burned in the sun, skin flaking away like parchment.

  The walls of the house were thin and sound traveled through them as easily as over water. I could hear my father getting himself ready in the morning, running water to shave, thumping around in the kitchen. He’d wake me up and fix me a bowl of cereal or scramble an egg, and the two of us would sit in the kitchen as my mother got herself together. We listened to her singing in the shower. At night, I could hear them in the bedroom, their voices and other sounds. I couldn’t sleep one night and wandered into their room, and there was a great heaving beneath the sheets. My father sat up, panting, and said, “What’re you doing, boy? How ‘bout a little privacy here.” His voice sounded angry, but I didn’t think he was angry with me. He looked old in the moonlight.

  I could hear them arguing other nights. I couldn’t make out everything, but I once heard my mother say, “I feel like a prisoner.” And my father said, “You did what you did.”

  A few minutes later he appeared at my door, his shape a silhouette against the light from the hall. “You awake,” he said. He got me out of bed and into a pair of swim trunks. “Night diving,” he said. “Get us out of the house. It’ll be an adventure.” We carried his scuba diving equipment down to the beach, floated the tank out past the sand bar on the buoyancy vest. He strapped me into a weight belt, and I rode his back out to the deeper water.
When he was satisfied with the depth, he pushed the regulator against my lips and told me to breathe. He began letting air out of the BCD and we sank like a pair of stones. The Gulf was so dark and heavy with all the summer rain that we could barely see each other, couldn’t really, just a sense of not being alone, but I froze the first time he took the mouthpiece from me to get a breath for himself. The water was soundless but for the bubbles, and I forgot myself in panic, in the sound of the bubbles and my heartbeat, forgot even where I was or why I was so afraid, there, ten feet underwater with my feet pressed firmly to the sea floor with the gravity of my father’s weight belt. Until he forced the mouthpiece between my teeth and the bone dry air into me.

  Later, safely in my room, my mother sat beside me on the bed and touched my forehead. I could hear the ocean, could still feel it in my arms and legs.

  “Your hair’s wet,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “I’ll catch cold.”

  “That’s right,” she said.

  When she didn’t say anything else, I lay back and closed my eyes. After a few minutes, I felt her shifting on the mattress, stretching out beside me, our shoulders touching, the way she did when I’d stayed up watching one of her horror movies and couldn’t sleep for dreaming.

  I told Delia all of this during our first week together, told her how I couldn’t be sure that my mother had had an affair, that my father was often quick to suspect other people’s motives and even swifter and more definite in his response. I told her about his union busting—though he was right about that—and about the time he discovered fifty dollars missing from his wallet and accused me of stealing it. He was mistaken and he had no proof, but he made me do hard labor around the yard anyway, working me from the end of school until darkness every day for a week. The money turned up a few days later in his dry cleaning and he gave it to me, said he was sorry, told me that I was a hard worker and deserved an honest week’s wage. Fifty dollars seemed a little short for that much work, but I didn’t complain. An apology from my father was a rare thing indeed. He almost never second-guessed himself, even when the thing he might have put at risk with a false accusation was his marriage. Plus, I didn’t believe for a minute that my mother had it in her to love another man.

  During the summer, Sam Holladay taught an evening class at the community college so the hours between five-thirty and nine o’clock belonged to Delia and me. I gave her a spare key and sometimes she’d be waiting when I came home from work, arranged in my bed with a movie on HBO, one hand holding the sheet over her bare chest. She liked to watch me undress, said she wanted me to pretend that I was alone and go about my business the way I would have if I wasn’t sleeping with my next-door neighbor’s wife. I kept my back to her, took off my tie and draped it on the rack, found a wooden hanger for my suit, desire building in me all the while.

  “Why couldn’t your mother have been in love with another man?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said over my shoulder. “Because she was my mother.”

  “That’s no reason,” she said.

  I worked the buttons on my shirt, my eyes on the neat row of shoes in the closet. I heard Delia gliding out of bed behind me and padding across the carpet. She ran her hands over my hips and linked her fingers on my stomach. Her breasts were warm against my back. I said, “Are you all the way undressed?”

  “I still have on underwear,” she said. “Do you want me to take it off?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Don’t turn around,” she said. I heard her rustling, the whisper of fabric on skin, then the tiny thump of her heel hitting the ground. “You can’t look until you tell me something else about your mother.”

  Delia was always asking about my mother. I didn’t mind talking about her much. When I told the stories to Delia, they began to seem less like something that might have happened in my own life and more like the sort of thing you would see in a movie. We traded stories—my childhood for hers—and made love, daylight going scarce beyond the windows, the two of us winding together in the guest room of my parents’ house. I had tried sleeping in my old room when I first moved back into the house, but the bunkbeds felt childish and confining and the walls were covered in Alabama football pennants and posters of rock bands that embarrassed me now. And I couldn’t sleep in my parents’ room. It still smelled like them, his cigarettes and her perfume and that other more familiar smell that people leave on their pillows and clothes. The guest room was decorated in that neutrally tasteful way that all good guest rooms have, designed to make just about anyone feel at home, beige curtains and matching comforter on the double bed, maroon dust ruffle, framed Audubon prints on the walls. The window looked out over the pool and I could see it, when I forgot to turn the underwater lights off, glowing in the darkness like a giant radioactive lozenge.

  Some days, Delia would ask me to drive her around Sherwood so we could keep an eye out for the alleged other man. She’d point at men on the sidewalk or in passing cars and say, “Could that be him? Could that be him?” But when I tried to imagine the man for Delia, he began to resemble an aging film star whose name I couldn’t recall, gone to fat by the time I was born and put out to pasture in television and low-budget films. “Don’t you want to know who he is?” Delia said. “He’s the only person who knows what really happened.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Let’s go home and get in bed.”

  It was raining hard outside and we were parked across from The First Bank of Sherwood, because Delia had the idea that my mother must have met the man while she was still a teller. The bank was closed but there were a few lights in the offices upstairs. Every now and then a man would come through the revolving doors huddled in a raincoat or hunched beneath an umbrella, but we were too far away to make out physical detail. Delia hung her head out the window and eyed them through the rain. When she pulled herself back inside, her cheeks were running with water. She pushed her hair back, flattening the rain out with her palms, and licked rainwater from her lips.

  “I can’t see a thing,” she said. “Can’t we get closer?”

  “He’ll see us if we try to cross the street,” I said. “Besides, the man my father punched was taller than that guy. He’d be a few years older, too, I think.”

  I propped my head in one hand and traced my fingers along the line of her neck, over her cheeks, down her nose, the way a blind person figures out what someone looks like. My insides were going crazy, but I forced myself to be gentle. She closed her eyes. When I touched her lips, she smiled and said, “You’re just humoring me aren’t you? You’re making all this up as you go along.”

  “Maybe a little,” I said.

  “Asshole,” she said. She leaned over and kissed the side of my face, the tip of her nose cold from the air conditioner and the rain. “This could be important.”

  Later, I kept thinking of the word adultery, running it through my mind in search of euphemisms and synonyms but I couldn’t think of another word that matched what we were doing, lying side by side in bed now, naked and pleasantly exhausted and adrenalized by a surprise visit from Louise Caldwell, who was collecting for the neighborhood watch. Criminals don’t wait for good weather, she had said, when I wrapped myself in a robe and met her at the door. She was wearing a clear plastic rain hat, though the shower had tapered off by then. We had both agreed that vigilance was a good thing, rain or shine. Delia shifted on the mattress, said it was almost time for her to be getting home, and I wanted it to be possible for the two of us to have been drawn together by a set of emotions altogether different from the usual bitterness and despair. A longing gorgeous enough to be worthy of the sin, an excess of capacity in the heart.

  The day was closing palpably beyond the windows. I sat up and moved to the end of the bed and pulled on my pants. Delia linked her hands behind her head, lifting her breasts, flattening her stomach. She said, “Have you ever seen that optometrist’s commercial where the fat woman is trying on new glasses and when she
looks in the mirror she’s skinny and beautiful all of a sudden? When she goes outside her shitty old car is a Porsche and her kids are quiet and well behaved and don’t have chocolate all over their faces anymore?”

  “I told you I don’t watch television,” I said.

  “Maybe that’s how it was for your mother,” she said. “Not that your father was bad, but that this other guy made the world look different, see what I mean? Not better or worse, just different. That’s something I could understand.”

  “This conversation is making my stomach hurt,” I said. “Can we talk about something else? Let’s talk about you for a while.”

  She sighed and pressed her toes against the small of my back. “I once killed a man just for snoring too loud,” she said, doing some kind of twangy gunslinger voice. “I once killed a man just to watch him die.”

  “That’s John Wesley Hardin from the Time Life Books commercial,” I said.

  “I thought you didn’t watch television,” she said.

  She sat up behind me and draped her arms around my shoulders and pinched my earlobe between her teeth. I said that I had to watch TV sometimes to know for certain whether I liked it or not and she told me happily that she would never believe another word I said.

  When Delia was gone and night had settled in, I walked out on my front steps and found my neighbor Bob Robinson outside rooting through his trash can. The houses were dark and pretty, their residents asleep. The golf course as neat and quiet as the moon. I could see the blue light of a television in a dark room, streamers of toilet paper in the Caldwells’ trees.