by Lloyd Zimpel
I have watched these water-witches practice their craft, and with the best of them it is a chancy business. Old Krupp claims his wife has the talent, although she will only mumble, maybe yes, maybe no; his Gladys, a fleshy woman, who a few years ago I watched waddle sweatily in a skirt of heavy brown ticking, in her hand a peach branch—the best kind, winked old Krupp—her goiter trembling shiny with dampness as she tramped the weeds in the parched field a mile behind Schneider’s barn, the sweating Krupp, anxious as Schneider that she make good, a few yards behind, muttering encouragements or threats, one; but neither of benefit as the peach rod failed to detect even an armpit’s moisture: and I remarked to the cast-down Schneider that he could as well follow Krupp’s ornery mule and at the spot it takes its first dump, there call in Radke. . . . But it was later said that Gladys and her peach twig succeeded a time or two north of here, though I cannot attest to any truth in that.
JUNE 1. They are off to aid in the digging, are the twins, saying Beidermann tells them to request my allowing their help; and given their admiration for our singular neighbor and his pursuits, which in general I do not share, to refuse such permission is to gain a brace of small enemies at my own table. Still, it is a factor in how young boys find their own ways to shape the lives ahead of them, that they have the chance to watch inventive energies at work, however queerly they are expressed; when else they would be at the drab business of following the dependable and far-from-eccentric Otto—and though saying this I bite my tongue, having given so much over to that fine boy that without his dependability we would all flounder.
So long as you do your chores, I tell them every time they ask; and these they do, even after the hard two-hour ride home: throwing down hay, washing the separator by lantern light. Weary as they are at supper, by dawn they pop up refreshed. . . . And in a week, we must realize, Radke the digger comes, and with his clever rig set into the shaft the lads with Beidermann have dug, will sink his pipe at fifty cents each foot. This they must see. And why not? For already they may well cast a proprietary eye upon all Beidermann’s water, in that they have taken a hand in bringing in nearly every pailful that flows off his homestead.
JUNE. 5. But is a single well enough for Beidermann, in whose head the spectre of drouth crouches like one of Satan’s imps? There is the water in the river, which has supplied what he has got by on in these last years; but now he will have more: he vows to the twins, who help him here too, that no head of his stock shall ever want for a drink; and with the twins assisting, he gouges a new canal to bring still more of the river to him. They lead his team—the massive Percherons—a treat for the boys, no work at all to play master to these handsome animals, for they are horses of a variety a boy seldom sees, nor do many men; the shining behemoths nosing the tops of the boys’ hats as they pull to Beidermann’s shouted directions, the water-seeker himself heaving the scraper—I lent it to him—through sandy soil, rocky soil, and finally mud; thus bringing to ditch a hundred acres of his bottom land, where water was already, but now he has more, and artfully channeled.
And if one well is insufficient to our gluttonous neighbor, surely a single canal is not enough; and the twins follow Beidermann high up the river, past the last edges of Krupp’s place, where grew—it grows no more—the last good timber axed down by Beidermann, then floated two miles downriver, there to be dragged up the sandy banks with a one-horse hitch, a twin to each horse, snaked there from over Beidermann’s north acres where they border my own, and on to his place; whipsawed there into boards for a flue—the likes of which I have not seen here, although they are familiar in the Wisconsin woods, but for a different use. This one by Beidermann, I will say, is ingeniously devised, as it somehow teases water off the river’s high bend at the loopy ox-bow where it last touches my northern range; and then by help of a funnel arrangement made of rocks, that portion of the river Beidermann makes his own, pours into the leaking zigzagging pig-troughs he and the twins have pegged together, over a small bluff into a draw and then, by God, seeming to defy gravity, out of it; finding home at last in an ancient buffalo wallow, fried by the sun to hold water, which it promises to do until midsummer.
Traveling up there a few days ago—where Beidermann has some fat heifers—and if he needs a few dollars for his well, I would take one or two of those animals at the right price—I see that my own cattle have learned the location of Beidermann’s water: so far there comes no friendly complaint of trespass from him, nor should it, the junior members of my family having given such a substantial hand in the raising of that installation.
. . .
JUNE. 6. Again, the lads are off at dawn, hastening to catch another day of Radke’s profane efforts. Refraining from use of his language, they describe Radke addressing a crimped pipe, and as I know Radke, I fill in the words in my head.
They are at their hasty breakfast, and I seek the last of the coffee from the swimming grounds in the pot, and Harris, leaving the kitchen, calls back: Why do you let those boys help that lazy bastard all the time? Let him dig his own wells, like everyone else does. When you dug that well—and he points out the door at ours—did you get Schneider’s little children to haul away the dirt?
He points across the table to the twins half-standing as they dab at the last bacon grease on their plates with wads of dried bread. You can come help me drag that whole mess on the east line. I got all those rocks to haul out. Bring your damned ponies up there tomorrow and do a little work for me for a change and not that damn Beidermann.
Heads down, without a word, they swallow the last of their food, and race away.
Without a word myself, I raise only a quieting hand to Harris, which to his quick temper is bad as a rebuke, and he rises from the bench, his eyes glancing elsewhere, face reddening to send the strawberry mark on his neck and cheek a dark purple; the mark being an inheritance from Ma’s grandpa, an ignominious man of whom no one on her side speaks willingly, who carried that same mark. Of seven boys with that same blood, Harris is the only one with the mark. We watched him grow with it, a large and sturdy boy, sour as a pickle, with nothing of his brothers’ humor and ease. Before he first tried shaving—and on the mark no hair grows—he already harbored in his breast a sinkhole of rancor. The question is there in my mind, and has been almost from the beginning: Does the mark bring the Devil, or does the Devil bring the mark?
Ma has her own explanation for her son’s spleen: You must watch what you say to Harris, she says. He has a thin skin.
I know this, although I have never said it to Ma: if a man ties a red rag to a chicken’s leg, every other bird in the flock will run in a minute to peck it to death. And I am sure in my mind that the marked chicken knows a moment before the murdering flock descends—it realizes in that moment that it is marked and sees what is coming. . . . That is the moment in which Harris lives.
I try telling myself: It is not enough to tolerate him, you must like him as well.
He pounds across the porch floor, slams the screen door.
JUNE. 7. How deep is he now? The twins relay to me Beidermann’s progress, or rather that of the vituperative Radke, and damned if I do not find some interest in their chronicle. Ten feet? Fifteen feet? Sandstone? Bedrock? Some of the twins’ infatuation with the event is catching.
But they will go on. . . . This evening, as he washes up on the porch, Harris listens through the screen door and calls out: Why it sounds like Mister Beidermann himself is making water. Ho ho!
He comes in wiping his hands and slaps one of the unamused twins on the back; while the other boys, having little practice in enjoying Harris’ cleverness, chuckle faintly.
Radke, it appears, now reaches one hundred fifty feet. And Beidermann has costs still ahead: the pipe itself, the pump, some sort of wind-driven mill to bring the water up—if it is there to bring up. Maybe Beidermann will indeed care to sell off a few fat heifers at a bargain price to his good neighbor.
JUNE. 8. Across the room from my table Ma sorts rags for her
next rug—or perhaps the one after that: quilts and rugs, they do not end. We are alone, the boys outside, on the porch perhaps, the twins quickly asleep, and I say: Well, Ma, maybe the lads will pick up some water-witching tricks from Beidermann. They could make some money on it, eh?
As lightly as I meant it, Ma does not take it so, as if she has thought this prospect through. Well, they are twins, she says in her calmest voice, busy with her rags; and so they have the special ways of twins. They know each other’s thoughts. We have seen it since they were born. My cousin Bertha’s twins had the same way, before they died. It marks twins, the different ways they have.
I look at her in surprise as she goes on: But money, no, if they have a gift, they cannot take money for it. No. A gift is pure and simple God-given, and he who receives it must give of it back.
Well, say I, taken up short by her strong opinions. It is a pity there is no money in it. But as for those marks—maybe I have one myself. How do I know? What is Gladys Krupp’s mark—her goiter? Take old Beidermann; what is his?
Without a moment’s thinking she says: No, you do not have one or anything near it. Yes, Gladys has her condition. And Leo Beidermann has the big finger of his right hand cut off. You know that. She glances at me in reproof and goes on, all the while tearing up one of my old shirts, tattered thin as paper, into strips one inch wide: No matter the gift, she says, if you take money for using it, it turns into a curse, a terrible curse.
I look over at her. This is not territory we have gotten into before. Well, well, I say. You sound so certain, you must have proof, eh, how this gift God generously hands out to people shy a finger from some fool accident, goes bad, eh? I want to hear about that awful curse.
Outside the kitchen on the summer porch I hear chairs drawn back to be tipped against the wall, to each side of the screen door, out of the light from the kitchen lamp. Otto and August have come to listen, having finished milking: a few mumbled words pass between them; then a little stirring—they are piqued that my sarcastic way may put Ma off from telling a fancy tale.
Calm as she pokes amongst her rags, Ma’s mind is in full lope, and she says only: Don’t be smart. Yes, I have proof. It was in my own family, which was my second cousin Ethel, who was a twin with Esther, who died of the whooping cough around three years. It was Illinois, and Ethel, just when she got her growth, found her gift. People knew it was there all along, her being a living twin, and it did come out, too, but it was not the water-witching, it was the healing—
That’s fine with me, say I with a grand wave. It sounds like a better gift anyway—especially if you are only sick and not thirsty.
From the dark porch comes a snickering buzz which Ma ignores, perhaps does not hear, being intent on her rags and story. How Ethel came by it, she says, the poor girl was lost in the sloughs by where they lived for three days, gone picking berries, and everybody gave up hope for her. And then one of the old dogs, big old black one-eyed hairy thing that could kill a bear, which was out in the sloughs catching frogs or snakes, well, this old dog found her, and she came wading through those bogs holding the dog’s tail, the both of them all stuck with burrs and—
You know something? I put in: I had an uncle once who used to say, Dog spelled backward is God, and he died a miserable death with screaming fits, yelling how sorry he was, which everyone figured meant he was sorry for saying that.
You might be sorry for saying that, too, says Ma mildly, as suppressed titters sound on the porch. She shoves the rags to the side of her rocking chair to make room for her feet, and says: Ethel was all bit by bugs and starved and sick from swamp fever and bloody from sawgrass cuts and swollen up with nettles, and she lay in a bad fever for seven days and six nights; and on the seventh night all her close kin gathered at her cot, as she appeared to be lost. And then—lo and behold—it was a miracle, and she was delivered, and woke up, and on her face was the smile of the purest angel—
Wait a minute, say I. Were you there?
Oh my, no, this happened before I was born. Cousin Ethel was an old woman when I knew her—fifty years maybe. But people were there who saw it all, my own ma saw it, and how Ethel had this smile like she had the queen’s look at Heaven, and this smile never left her lips after that. She was made into a different person, like Gunnar Quist’s wife, when she went crazy, became a different person. But Ethel was different in a good way. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. And then what happened was, a week after she rose up from her deathbed, well, that old dog who had fetched her from the sloughs, he stepped in a wolf-trap and snagged his leg about halfway up, looked to be broken. My ma saw it dangling. Ethel’s pa, his name was Fritz, took up a single-tree to club the dog out of its misery, but Ethel threw herself on that dog and hung on and would not let her pa do that terrible deed. So Fritz figured to let her pet the dog a little and when she wasn’t looking, he’d do away with it. But she fell asleep right on the porch, hugging the dog close and there was no way Fritz could knock it in the head without hitting his own daughter, too, so he just gave up. Now, in the morning, when Ethel and that dog woke up, why that old dog just walked away on every one of his four legs, pretty as you please. You could see where the fur was scraped, is all. His name was Hitch, and everyone said that now he could see out of his bad eye, too, which he never could before. He lived a couple more years—
A muffled chuckling comes from the dark porch, then a waitful silence.
Okay, say I, fulfilling the role my invisible audience expects of me: your cousin had the gift of life saving—of a dog. I would say that’s a veterinary gift, but I want to know how it gets to be a curse.
She has finished my shirt, every usable bit of it in narrow strips by her slippers, and she starts on a flour-sack tea towel frazzled with holes. There is a lot to this story, she says. It is not so simple to tell in a minute. It is the whole life story of that woman, Ethel.
Ah then, let me not hurry the telling. Give us every glorious detail.
Quiet for a minute, Ma finally says: If you want to turn up your nose, that’s fine, but then you should not ask me in the first place.
Again, the displeased stirring on the summer porch as Otto and August—and with a loud clump of boots someone else joins them, Henry perhaps—grow more impatient with my interruptions.
Ethel, says Ma, filled out into a good-looking woman. No one understood why she never got herself married, but she didn’t. One thing, she had a mole on her chin, a big one, like the picture of the witch in the boys’ fairy tale book. She went for a nurse in the army, traveled along the Arkansas border in the fighting, and there are stories of her saving a lot of lives there, too—
Wait, say I. Now you have made her into a double-marked woman—being a living twin, and now this mole. And, besides, being a nurse to soldiers does not mean a God-given gift for healing.
It was not just her being a nurse, it was more. When she come back from the battlefields she lived in White Bluff, which was her pa’s place, and they had a neighbor, Hamm—they all moved to Minnesota right after—who had a boy, about the twins’ age, his name was Alvin, and he come down with the typhoid. Well, she was a real nurse besides her gift, so Ethel went over to heat up some milk and honey and vinegar for him, and he was on his feet in one day. One day. Everybody else who caught the typhoid—one of the Hamm girls did—were laid up two months, even more. It was worse than the cholera. But in one day Alvin Hamm was up and walking.
I would not sell short the milk, honey, and vinegar, say I.
No, it was Ethel. Her touching him did it, her hand on his feverish brow—
Wait, wait, Ma, say I. The feverish brow—where are you getting this stuff?
Off the dark porch comes a deal of shuffling and coughs and muffled guffaws, the boys lurking there knowing as well as I that Ma, for all that she greedily reads her Bible and tiresome old Scott and those others—indeed, taught their reading to all our boys when the school board, with Krupp feebly running it, failed to find or afford a teacher—but
still she has a softness for the ripe tales in the newspapers and magazines swapped with the Widow Jenssen every few months; and some measure of that latter reading, I would say, sneaks into her story.
My question ignored, she says: Now, having saved the Hamm boy, Ethel was called over to Minnow County, where there was a woman had a stillborn and the milk-fever come on her. This was a Polack woman, name of Anya something—I never could pronounce it. Well, now, Ethel was there for one day and one night, and that woman was on the edge of dying, but two days later she was on her feet and cooking for a whole threshing crew—twelve or fifteen men. And she herself vowed all the rest of her life that it was Cousin Ethel who did it—the cool touch of her hand on the brow. The Polack woman said it was like a smiling angel of mercy had come from a dream to rescue her. That’s what she said, herself.
Ma, say I, admit to us: you have been doing some dreaming yourself, eh?
Ma looks straight at me. Yes, I have, she says; and none of them are dreams it would make you comfortable to hear about.
Silence from me, from the porch.
Now, says Ma, not long after Ethel raised that Polack woman up, she was called into the worst of the winter storms that part of the country had ever seen, to nurse a man, he was in the woods, cutting timber, who slipped and fell on his ax blade; the workers with him took him to a cabin where a woman and her little girls lived, which was closest to the woods. And one of the little girls—it was so brave of her—rode through that storm to fetch Ethel, and she come through this storm to the cabin and found this man with an awful cut across his stomach—terrible—so that his innards were pushing themselves out, like you get when you butcher a hog: a wonder that he had not bled to death already, but the men with him had tied him up with shirts and handkerchiefs. It was terrible, terrible, a test of Ethel’s gifts like she had never seen. . . .
