Divining Rod

by Michael Knight

  “Funny,” I said.

  The Fine Art of Foul Language

  From her front porch, Mrs. Fowler could see his house. In the evening, at what had been the time of Simon’s regular visit, the sun would throw shaky white light against the windows and sometimes, if she let herself, she could almost mistake the light on glass for motion inside. She imagined that it had been like that for Delia and Simon, a trick of the light. They had allowed themselves to look away from their lives for a moment and the world seemed different in the peripheries of their vision, everything harmless and electric, trembling with possibility. Even now, when he came to her in her sleep, she could hear Simon saying, Funny, in this surprised, saddened little-boy voice, like he should have known better, Funny, like he should have seen it coming from a mile away.

  Every afternoon, she had waited for him on her porch. They’d talk and wait for the sun to slip behind her house. Simon promised to teach her how to use profanity, but whenever she tried cursing, he’d blush and fidget in his chair. It hadn’t much mattered to Mrs. Fowler whether she learned to curse or not. She enjoyed the company, particularly the company of this young man. He had a way of looking at you that made it seem as if your words were the most interesting and engaging anyone had ever spoken. His father had been the same way, leaning forward in his chair, his eyebrows raised, his watery blue eyes a premonition of his son’s. She found that she couldn’t keep her mouth shut around either of them.

  “You know what word I like? I like that word Fuck,” she said. “I read it in a book. I think that’s the filthiest-sounding word in the English language.”

  It was evening, Simon just off work, still wearing his tie, his jacket draped over the back of the folding chair. He laughed uncomfortably and rubbed his knees, the skin at his hairline going pink.

  He said, “It’s nasty all right. But I don’t see how you’re going to work it in the next time you hear from that little girl. It wouldn’t make any sense.”

  “Why not?” she said. “I might say, ‘You little fuck, get the hell on out of here. Leave an old woman alone.’ Now, why wouldn’t that make sense?”

  “I suppose it’s grammatically correct and everything. But you’re missing the point a little. Curse words, like all the other words in the English language, have very specific meanings and implications. Just because a word is dirty, doesn’t necessarily make for a quality insult.”

  “You should have been a college professor,” she said.

  “Or an attorney,” he said. “Two professions equally full of . . . ”

  He looked at the ground and waved his hand in a circle to indicate that there was more, but he didn’t say anything else. A breeze moved across the porch making her wind chime tick like bone.

  “Shit,” she finished. “There’s a good one.”

  “What? Shit?”

  “Full of shit,” she said. “It’s a good one. With a specific implication, like you said. It’s not literal. But everybody knows exactly what you mean. That one I’m familiar with.”

  It was getting dark beyond the screen. Streetlamps were blinking to life. Cars rolled by pushing headlights, the neighborhood settling in for the evening. Simon asked if he could turn on the table lamp, and she said that would be fine. He kept glancing over his shoulder in the direction of his house. When he left, she would close her eyes and hold his face in her mind for a long time, keep the sound of his voice in her ears. But he was still there, at that moment, even if his thoughts were somewhere else. She brushed a lock of hair back behind her ear.

  “Do you need to go?” she said.

  “No. This is nice,” he said. “Your turn. Tell me about divining. How does it work? Better yet, what is it exactly? That’s how little I know.”

  “Can I ask why you’re interested? I’m just curious is all.”

  He shrugged, said, “I don’t know really. I see you out there all the time. I know people sometimes still use divining to locate underground springs and whatnot. I saw this thing on PBS—it was about sorcery and witchcraft and whatever else—and they had this diviner who could find anything. I mean anything. The guy would do these parlor tricks where he’d have somebody fill three glasses with different kinds of dark liquor, right? And he’d find the scotch every time. He claimed he could even find non-physical things, like he could tell if somebody was sad or if somebody was in love. That sort of nonsense.”

  “Are you in love?” Betty Fowler said, not certain what made her ask.

  He shrugged again, gave her a smile.

  “I’m the one asking the questions around here,” he said.

  So she told him what she had read in the library book. How you could make a divining rod from any forked object, a coat hanger or a branch or a section of bone. Sometimes diviners didn’t even use a rod, just followed the perambulations of their heart. She described how to hold the rod, your hands loosely on the ends, the shaft pointing horizontally away from your body. She explained how it was supposed to work, that often the diviner had only to stand in one place long enough before something registered in him, a tremor, a hidden pulse, like a memory of magnetic attraction, and the divining rod set about leading him where he was supposed to go. Sitting now on her front porch, the wind chime playing its familiar ghostly song, she wondered what her husband would think about her divining. He never mentioned it in her dreams. When he spoke to her at night, it was to talk about the old times, when she was young and beautiful and he was still a success and the world was all a pleasant place to live. Sometimes, faintly, she could smell his cologne on the air-conditioned breeze and she wondered if he was returning to her in the dark or if the dead just hung around this long.

  All the Unsolvable Riddles

  Simon had to work on his birthday. Delia woke with the sound of his alarm and watched him shuffle groggily off to the shower, then got up and made coffee for the two of them, feeling vaguely disoriented and out of place. She found herself lost in his kitchen, looking for supplies, filters and coffee cups, in the places they would have been in her house. Sam would be home tomorrow. She sat in the living room and waited for Simon to finish dressing, smiled at him when he emerged from the back of the house, his hair still wet, his fingers working his tie into a knot, and wished him a happy birthday. He kissed her and she walked him to the door. Simon was pleased with the morning and wouldn’t let go of her hand. He opened the door, tried to drag her outside after him, and right then she saw Bob Robinson pitching a briefcase into his car. Bob turned to look in their direction and she wrenched the two of them back inside just in time.

  She said, “Stop it, Simon. Bob Robinson is out there.”

  “Sorry,” he said. He wiped his mouth and smoothed his tie, shifted the knot side to side on his collar. “Do I look normal?”

  Delia hid behind the door when he stepped outside and closed it behind him and listened to him greeting his neighbor in the driveway, their voices pleasant enough. Both of them shouted hellos to the postman as he made his neighborhood rounds. She crept to a window along the front of the house and pushed it open just a crack so she could hear them better, Bob Robinson saying, “Maddie tells me she’s learning to play the piano. Delia Holladay’s teaching her. Maddie wants to be in the Junior Miss, you know.”

  “Is that right?” Simon said.

  They were quiet for a moment and she eased the curtain back to watch them, Simon with his eyes on the ground, Bob Robinson eying Simon. Delia felt a pressure around her, the air thick, her veins going tight. She held her breath. Bob said, “I hear she’s a terrific teacher. I don’t know the Holladays particularly well, but I always liked Sam. He seems like a sweet old guy. Lucky bastard, wife like that.”

  “Yes,” Simon said. “I guess so.”

  A dog barked down the street and both of them turned their heads in the direction of the sound. After a moment, Bob reached up and put his hand on Simon’s shoulder. He said, “Don’t worry, pal, you’re still my favorite neighbor. You’ll always be my favorite neighbor.” H
e smiled and took his hand away and looked at Simon a moment longer, then climbed into his car and closed the door. As he was backing out of his driveway, Simon looked at his house, his eyes flicking from window to window, and Delia curled her fingers at him, though she knew he couldn’t see her.

  For the rest of the morning, Delia felt nervous and lightheaded. The phone rang while she was in the shower, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. She thought it might be Simon and stepped dripping onto the linoleum, then froze, afraid that it was someone else and if she answered the phone everything would be discovered. Standing there, water going cold on her bare skin, listening to the phone ring in the other room, she remembered the man they had followed home. She wrapped a towel around herself, found the pictures in her purse and checked them against her memory It was him, she was sure. This man had known Simon’s mother, had loved her perhaps. And it seemed possible that he might even know how she had managed to go on living her life despite what she had done.

  Delia dressed quickly and drove across town and parked a discreet few blocks away from the house. He lived in one of the older neighborhoods down along the Arrowhead River, rows of stately homes, lawns sloping gently down to the water. She wanted to take a closer look at his house, peek between his curtains, and maybe, if the opportunity presented itself, she would find an unlocked door, a window open against the heat, and sneak inside for a look around. She knocked on the door, thinking that if the man was home, she would just ask him outright about Simon’s mother, but there was no answer. She tried the knob—locked—then went from window to window along the front porch, but all of them were locked as well. Inside, she could see a dinner plate and crusted utensils scattered on the coffee table, the floor littered with magazines, and she could see a television, the old kind set back in a heavy wooden cabinet, finger marks streaked across the dust on the screen.

  A little dog eyed her curiously from the sidewalk as she made her way around the side of the house. She didn’t think anyone had seen her on the porch. She took off her shoes and stuffed them in her purse, then climbed up on top of the air-conditioning unit and peeked in through the window there as well. It was his room, the bed unmade, the blankets a twist of fabric on the mattress, the wallpaper yellowing with age. She could imagine how the house had looked twenty years ago, the wood floors polished and gleaming, the rugs swept and shelves dusted for when Simon’s mother came to visit. The place was a wreck now, this man gradually fading into age while his house decayed around him.

  She hopped down and took another look around to make sure she was unobserved, then crept around the back of the house. Just as she was turning the corner, the man stepped out of the shadows. He aimed a squeeze trigger garden hose at her like he was holding a gun and said, “Hold it right there, little lady. I’ve got you covered.”

  “It’s you,” she said, catching her breath. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “What you’ve been doing is spying in the windows of my house,” he said. “I called the police the minute I saw you coming up the walk. We’re gonna wait right here until they arrive. All right? That suit you, miss?”

  She followed the hose with her eyes to a spout on the side of the house, a faint mist escaping the connection and making prisms in the summer air. The man was wearing plaid Bermuda shorts and a golf shirt and leather sandals, his legs spindly and fragile-looking.

  Delia said, “You don’t understand. I want to talk to you. I want to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind too much. Look, I’m going to get something from my purse—it’s a picture, a photograph—don’t spray me, okay?”

  He nodded slightly and she felt around inside the purse until she found the picture of the three of them on the boat. He took it from her without lowering the hose. She said, “I wanted to ask you about your affair with that woman, with Elizabeth Bell. I’ve been seeing her son and—”

  “I’ve never seen this woman before in my life,” he said.

  “But that’s you in the picture,” she said.

  “This isn’t me,” he said. “It looks like me a little. I knew the other man a long time ago. That’s Simon Bell, used to own the tractor plant, but I’ve never seen her before. This woman his wife?”

  He lowered the hose and passed the photograph to Delia, pushed his glasses back up on the bridge of his nose and studied her, his eyes running her up and down. She could see the river from here, a coal barge pushing along the surface, seagulls turning circles in the air. In the distance, she could hear the whine of a motorboat. She felt vaguely queasy and slow, the air around her dense with heat.

  “Are you sure?” she said, softly.

  “You’re a good-looking woman,” he said. “You wouldn’t be interested in coming inside would you? All I’ve got nowadays is dirty magazines. I didn’t really call the police.” He laughed a little, almost shyly, but Delia was already moving away from him, turning the corner and heading back toward the car, the earth shaky beneath her feet. He said, “Wait a minute, girl. I knew her. I’m remembering now. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know,” but Delia was gone, the little dog trailing behind her on the sidewalk, no closer to the truth than she’d been that morning.

  She told Simon about the old man when he came home from work. At first, he was angry with her for going over to the house, but when he saw how saddened she was by the whole thing, he sat beside her on the couch and brushed the hair out of her eyes. Delia had stopped off at the bakery on her way home to buy him a cake, a leftover from another party that had never been claimed, with the words HAPPY B-DAY TYRONE spelled out across the top in green icing. She dipped a finger into the icing along the side and brought a dollop to her mouth. The days were impossibly long during the summer, and it was only now, at almost nine o’clock, beginning to grow dark outside. Birds were still chattering in the trees. Simon got up to turn on the kitchen light, and Delia cut two slices from the cake. He said, “What were you doing going over there? He’s just some old man. He might have been armed and dangerous.”

  “He was only armed with a garden hose,” she said. “I thought maybe he’d be able to tell us something about your mother.”

  “I don’t care about that stuff,” he said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Of course, you care. I care.”

  Simon sat beside her on the couch and balanced his plate on his thighs. He said, “Tell me something about yourself instead. Tell me about your first boyfriend.”

  She smiled at him, dipped her finger in the cake again, and touched his face, streaked icing across his cheekbone. “You’re sweet to ask, but nobody can compete with first loves.”

  “C’mon,” he said. “Tell me something.”

  Through a part in the curtains, Delia could see flashes of Bob Robinson’s children but mostly she could hear their voices, high-pitched and excited, and the low voice of their mother. She said, “That was awful this morning.”

  Simon nodded and studied his fork.

  “He knows, I think,” Simon said. “But he won’t say anything. Bob wouldn’t say anything.”

  The children’s voices swelled abruptly outside, a little desperate and anxious, in response to their mother calling them in for the night. Delia said, “It sounds like they’re hunting Easter eggs or something over there.”

  “They sound great, don’t they,” he said.

  Delia smiled and patted his belly. His face was flush with the last of the daylight, his tie loosened and thrown back over his shoulder like an aviator’s scarf. He said, “When I was a kid, my mother would have this elaborate Easter egg hunt for me. I could never find all the eggs and she would forget where she had hidden them. My father would spend half the night cursing and waving a flashlight over the bushes, but he couldn’t do any better. The yard would reek of rotten eggs for days after.”

  She kissed his shoulder.

  “We had cats,” she said. “One year, my parents decided they didn’t want to get up early in the morning, so they hid the eggs the night be
fore and our cats got into them before my brothers and I could. I remember going out in the backyard and just being devastated by the sight of these colored eggshells scattered over the grass.”

  She pressed her wrist to her forehead, imitating her childhood devastation. She laughed and leaned into him at the memory. They were nice memories.

  “Happy Birthday, Tyrone,” she said.

  Her husband called from the history conference every night at nine o’clock. She would leave Simon’s house and sit in her living room with a cup of coffee, waiting for the phone to ring. But on this night the call was late. Nine o’clock came and went, then nine thirty, then a quarter ‘til ten’. The windows went dark and Delia had to turn on a light, the room mirrored precisely in the glass. Delia had three cups and was feeling jittery from all the caffeine, and she couldn’t help wondering if something had happened to her husband. She couldn’t imagine what could possibly occur at an academic conference, but the worry was real all the same. Her chest felt tight, her bones watery. She checked the phone for a dial tone, then worried that he’d been trying to call at the exact moment when she had the receiver at her ear. She called the hotel, but there was no answer in Sam’s room. She walked to the front of the house and looked out the windows, like she was waiting on his car and not a phone call, but she didn’t see anything. Just as she was letting the curtains fall shut, the doorbell rang and Delia jumped, then took a few steps in the direction of the phone before she realized where the sound was coming from.

  Maddie Robinson was standing at the door in a ballerina tutu, gold with silver sequined trim, her face made up in an amateurish way, too much eye shadow and gaudy lipstick, blush so heavy on her cheeks that she looked like she had been slapped. She said, “I thought I could wear this when I play piano at the Junior Miss.”

  Delia laughed and said, “Oh, Maddie, you look beautiful. Come on in. I’m waiting for a phone call. We’ll work on your makeup a little.”