The Diviner's Tale

by Bradford Morrow

  Last night's rain. Her clothing was neat and dry, which meant her hanging happened sometime this morning. I was seized by the sickening prospect that someone was nearby taking me in, deciding how to deal with this unexpected, unwelcome intrusion. Like him, or them, I needed to think what to do. Slowly, in a quivering whisper, I began to spell the word patience backward. One of Nep's many quaint and sane methods for clearing the mind before beginning to dowse. But this was not a usual divining, and I didn't make it through all the letters before realizing that the immediate world had gone quiet. It would have been comforting to hear some birdcall. No air moved through the trees to rustle their budded limbs and first leaves. Gone were the tree frogs' peepings I had heard. The dark tide of feeling that had engulfed me before now switched into another register. I became alert and focused and oddly unfeeling.

  A hasty breeze arose. The highest branches of the trees creaked like rusty harrow tines. I turned in place and looked back the way I had come. A narrow path to the south of the scrub flat, which I hadn't noticed before, led through the thick growth toward a copse of cherries and ironwood beyond. Deer trail, I guessed, nothing to do with this girl. I turned to face her again. What unspeakable terror she must have experienced. Yet it didn't look like she had struggled. She appeared shocked and forlorn, yet so eerily serene. Which was more or less how I felt, though not serene but rather momentarily emptied, blank. Seemed as if I should apologize to her once more, this time for having to leave her here alone. Her feet were only a stool's height from the ground carpeted with last year's dead leaves and long creeping lovely ribbons of staghorn clubmoss. Curious how the ground around her appeared completely undisturbed. As if she'd been put here by some creature with wings.

  Without thinking, I asked aloud, "Is anyone there?" My voice sounded smaller than I had ever heard it before. Hollow, reedy, and helpless.

  Faint as a half-forgotten memory, I heard a family of chickadees call to one another. Like distant silver bells chiming an hour, their song insisted it was time to leave. My feet began to carry me away from the clearing. I had the distinct sensation of being watched, if not by living eyes, then by her calm and accusing ones. Despite my desire not to, I kept turning, looking behind. I must have run part of the way. No one followed me, so far as I could see.

  My truck was still parked on the grass just off the washboard country road. Crazy that the sight of an obsolete Dodge pickup that needed new brakes and rotors and had way over a hundred thousand rough miles on it and no resale value could give me such a feeling of solace. I clambered in and started the engine. Couldn't have gotten a connection even if I owned a cell phone, which I didn't. The original Statlmeyer farm, which ran to thousands of acres when it was first settled, was the very definition of rural. They wouldn't be building any satellite towers around here for a country mile of years, despite how many developers rolled up their sleeves. My pickup jostled and jerked its way down the hill toward the paved road at the foot of the mountain.

  I was hyperventilating, nauseated. Had to get to a land line. The old logging trail was not meant to be driven as fast as I did. A ride that had taken half an hour that morning took me no time at all to get back home. Strange how fear works. The farther from any personal danger I got, the less safe I felt.

  "Could I get your name, please?" the woman on the other end asked again.

  "Is there any way you can reach him wherever he is?"

  "I told you Sheriff Hubert is out. Is this an emergency?"

  "Yes, it's—"

  "Hold on a moment."

  Squeezing my eyes shut so tight they hurt, I began e and c and n and e and—

  "Sergeant Bledsoe speaking," a man said. "You have an emergency to report?"

  "Yes, yes. I need to report a girl, there's a dead girl, I—"

  Bledsoe asked me questions one on top of the other. Did I know the girl? Could I give him the exact location? When was it that I made the discovery? Would I be willing to take them out there now? Was I all right, did I need medical attention, how soon could they send a patrol car by to pick me up, what was the name of the property owner again? I gulped out answers and he put me on hold for a long minute and came back on the phone to say they had contacted Sheriff Hubert and he'd already left where he was and would meet us at Statlmeyer's—no, Henderson's—within the hour.

  I hung up and went to the bathroom. Washed my face with cold water and looked into the mirror. The visage I saw there was so contorted and distraught it seemed like that of a sister I never had who'd led a very hard life filled with chaos, setbacks, and secrets more terrible than my own. I had never before seen myself in such a harsh light. It was as if I had done the hanging.

  Bledsoe drove me back out. He grilled me with questions I answered as best I could from within my daze. At least I had the wit to call my mother and ask her if she wouldn't mind dropping over so the boys didn't come home from school to an empty house. I thought it better not to explain what had happened. Other than the fact of that image of the hanged girl, I barely knew what happened myself.

  "You're friends with Niles Hubert, I gather. He said to take good care of you."

  I nodded. Not that Bledsoe saw me. He was driving fast with his lights flashing, no siren.

  "How did you meet Henderson?"

  "He was referred to me by Karl Statlmeyer."

  "And when was that?"

  "Two weeks ago, three."

  "And what did he say?"

  "He called me up and told me he'd heard good things about me and wanted to hire me to walk his land, dowse it, and give him some proposals about siting a pond and some possible building lots."

  "And you do what?"

  "I'm a diviner."

  "And what does that mean?" His voice was low and flat, as dismissive as a slow flick of the wrist.

  I was trying hard not to dislike Dennis Bledsoe with his shaved head and thick black eyebrows, one of which remained raised as if in a state of constant skepticism. Trying hard not to feel crushed by the way he seemed not to believe one word I said, and what he did believe, seemed to scoff at. He was just doing his job, I reminded myself, making necessary inquiries and all. But I had been to a few psychiatrists over the years, attempting to cope with the trauma of my brother's accident, and more than one of them sounded like him. A little unbelieving, and not a little patronizing.

  "Did you notice what time it was when you found the body?"

  "I don't wear a watch, but it must have been ten-thirty, or a little after that. I left home after my boys went to school, got there and spent a minute cutting myself a witching rod, and started walking." I recalled the angles at which the cloud-softened sun shadowed her face. "Between ten-thirty and -forty."

  "You can tell the time that closely without a watch?"

  I didn't respond.

  "So you only met Henderson that once. What's his first name again?"

  "George Henderson. We didn't meet. He called me up out of the blue, offered me the job, and I took it. I can give you his number. I'm sure he's not going to be happy about this."

  "No, I guess not."

  Niles was there with another man when we arrived. He opened his arms and held me close for so long that if Bledsoe suspected Niles and I had a history it was confirmed. He released me, stepped back still clasping one hand, said, "Of all people for this to happen to."

  "Nothing really happened. That is, to me."

  Niles finger-combed his hair, an old nervous tic of his. Prematurely streaked white against brown, no doubt because of his stressful work. He gave me one of his cherished frowns—the kind of frown that between friends is really a smile. It was a mute conciliatory scolding, as if to say, Something happened to you all right, who do you think you're kidding?

  This was already midafternoon. The many clouds had flown out to sea, it appeared, and the sky was a cool, pristine blue. We walked down the wet declivity, away from the road. A family of finches peeped and bounded in short acrobatic bursts through the air as we left behin
d the upper field and entered a fairly dense forest of second-growth maples and hemlock. We had to step over and around fallen branches strewn like uninterpretable I Ching yarrow sticks tossed at random by snowy winters.

  I was trying to keep my mind smooth. Back when Bledsoe first picked me up, I had decided I couldn't afford to see her again. I would escort them as close as possible, get them through that scrub flat to the edge of the stand of trees where she was suspended, and send them ahead by themselves. A lone veery called somewhere above us, sounding for all the world like a diminutive alien transmitting its code name back to the mother ship, eerie, eerie. Spring peepers were carrying on in a lowland off to our left. I could hear Niles breathing more heavily than a man his age ought to.

  "How much farther you think it is?" he asked.

  "Not much."

  We hiked down through a kind of amphitheater of bluestone boulders shaped like huge loaves, which opened up into the northern end of the long scrub plain. I told Niles we were almost there now and in his kindness he anticipated me. Said, "I'm going to leave you with Shaver once we're close. No need for you to see this again. Sergeant Bledsoe and I can take it from here."

  As we made our way through the thicket of mountain laurel, it occurred to me that here, of course, was Henderson's pond. A respectable lake, in fact, if he wanted to go to the trouble of paying for dozers to displace the earth beneath our feet. I glanced around. The flat was hemmed by impressive hills. Wondered if it mightn't even have been a shallow basin long ago that silted in like many do over time. Such irony. Had I thought of this earlier, I might not have bothered to wander farther. And if I hadn't, well, then what? I realized I had been somehow drawn away from my purpose here. This morning, without knowing it, I left off divining water and instead had begun to divine the girl.

  I saw we were near and told Niles this was the place. She was just up ahead. Not even a hundred feet. Right at the curtain of woods. He told John Shaver, a thin, relaxed, kindly young man whose long white face reminded me of a pony I used to ride when I was a kid, to stay here with me. They'd be back in a little while.

  Shaver and I didn't have to wait long. The two men returned in no time. By the look in their eyes I could tell something was awry.

  "Nothing there, Casper," Niles quietly said.

  How jarring his pet name sounded then, no matter that it went all the way back to our childhood together.

  "That can't be right."

  "You'd better come and show us where she is. We don't find anything."

  Hurriedly we made our way in single file through the tall foliage. I was slipping into a panic because I didn't want to see the hanged girl again. But I knew I couldn't leave her out here unclaimed for another minute. She needed to be taken down from her gibbet, wrapped in the rolled tarp Bledsoe had carried in for the purpose, and taken home to her mother and father and family. I was soon enough running and had left the others behind when I emerged from the undergrowth to stand breathless and gasping at the edge of the woods just where I'd stood hours earlier.

  There was no barefoot girl in a floral print blouse and denim skirt hanged with a rope by the neck. Everything looked exactly as it had that morning except for her not being there staring at me with those quizzical eyes.

  I wheeled around and shook my head as Niles came up behind me with a face full of questioning. I turned toward the wooded cove again. Nothing. I walked swiftly to the very spot where I had held her in my arms, light as gossamer, but nothing remained of her. This wasn't possible. Niles was saying something about how we must not be in the right place, and I desperately wanted to agree with him and even began to say so. But when I glanced down, I saw my divining rod lying there among the leaves just where I had dropped it when I first saw her earlier, gazing ahead, so impossibly familiar.

  2

  ONE OF THE EARLIEST known female diviners in recorded history was something of a wild woman. Her name was Martine de Berthereau, the Baroness de Beausoleil. She was on my mind that afternoon, flickering in and out of it like the light through the budding trees as we climbed back out of the valley and I was driven home. Deep into the evening I couldn't shake the thought of her and what it sometimes meant to be a diviner.

  Headstrong and wily, Martine was as tireless as a migrating hummingbird, fluent in several languages, a gifted mineralogist, an aristocrat who had no fear of dirt under her fingernails. A formidable character, she also had a weakness for alchemy, astrology, and dramatic flair. There have been other female diviners down the years, even famous ones. Lady Judith Milbanke, the mother of Lord Byron's wife, was well known for her gifts as a water witch. But to my mind none matched Martine de Berthereau. Her story has always fascinated and terrified me.

  She made what some dowsers consider her most significant discovery the very year before Galileo claimed the Earth revolved around the sun, an idea that landed him in front of an outraged Inquisition. Theirs were heady times, the roaring twenties of the seventeenth century. Shakespeare's generation had only recently passed, and Francis Bacon was a rising star. Fresh, untamed ideas and their creators, like exotics freed from a zoo, were suddenly running free, many of them threatening to storm the papal walls. And the Baroness de Beausoleil was seen by some as one of those very escapees. A unicorn, maybe. Or a female griffin.

  She had been traveling through France when her son fell ill. While he slept off his fever behind the louvered windows of their room in the Fleur de Lys, an inn not far from the central square of Château-Thierry, she set out on foot to explore the village and surrounding landscape. Her actions would not have seemed out of the ordinary, except that rather than taking her parasol to protect herself from the sun, she carried something the locals had never seen before. Wherever she went, Martine took a trunk carefully packed with all manner of dowsing rods, known as virgulas, made of hazel and forged metals, an astrolabe, and other curious divination instruments. Followed by a few smiling children and scowling adults, she walked the narrow cobblestone lanes behind her virgula, speaking to no one. As a crowd grew, she retraced her steps and circled back to where she'd begun. There in the courtyard, as onlooking villagers murmured, the diviner announced that right beneath their feet ran an underground stream of mineral water, fortified by green vitriol and pure gold, with fantastic healing properties.

  A local doctor, Claude Galien, bore witness to what happened next. Some questioned her; some denounced her. But rather than run to the relative safety of the Fleur de Lys, the baroness demanded that the villagers form a committee of their most respected elders. The mayor, the apothecary, the judge. Let them dig at just the spot she had chosen and discover for themselves whether what she claimed was false or true. The hole was dug and waters rich in minerals were found, as promised. Galien was so impressed he was moved to write a treatise about the incident, which was published in Paris, in 1630: La découverte des eaux minérales de Château-Thierry et de leurs propriétés. Though he suspected the baroness might have noticed the green discoloration on the courtyard stones and deduced that seepage water leaching up to the surface would necessarily be high in ferrous sulfate—my mother the science teacher might say she used accurate data to reach verifiable conclusions by falsified means—he admired her strength of conviction.

  For myself, I always believed Galien's eyewitness account of this miracle should have been the first step toward Martine de Berthereau's beatification, toward Rome's sanctifying her as St. Martine, patron saint of dowsers. How nice it would have been for me to point to her in my defense whenever Rosalie found fault in my divining. Instead, as the baroness and her husband dowsed many more mines on behalf of the royal house, and presented their findings to the court of Louis XIII and in particular to the infamous Cardinal Richelieu, her life began to spiral downward.

  She had traveled the world—Scotland to Silesia to Bolivia, not to mention every corner of France—in search of ore deposits, silver, gold, iron, and other treasures hidden inside the Earth's bowels, and had discovered some hundred
and fifty mines. More often than not her work went unpaid and discoveries unprospected. But when the good cardinal read in her reports that the deposits—many of which would later prove to be rich and viable—had been located using a forked wand, she was in for a fall. Accused by him of witchcraft, Martine de Berthereau, the baroness of "beautiful sunlight" as her name would have it, was remanded to the lightless state prison of Vincennes. There, with her daughter to whom she'd taught the art of divining, she would die in abject misery, separated from her son and husband, himself condemned to live out the rest of his days behind the iron bars of the Bastille. Not a pretty ending for what was otherwise such a strangely modern life. A woman of science. A world traveler, an adventuress. A working mom. An independent thinker willing to tread way outside the beaten path. Martine was what I always intended to name my daughter, had I ever given birth to a girl. I liked her nervy spirit, and before I knew much of anything about the dark days of the Inquisition, I hated Cardinal Richelieu for his cruel narrow-mindedness. If that was how religious men behaved, I didn't want anything to do with them.

  Divining was always a bone of contention in our household. My mother and Nep, who was ten years her senior—forty to her thirty the year I was born—agreed to disagree early on in their romance about the scientific merits, or lack thereof, of the gentle art of divining. I always found it ironic that she who espoused verifiable facts was devoutly religious, while he who inhabited a world embraced by both postmodernist spiritualists and God-fearing old-timers wouldn't be caught dead darkening the doors of a house of worship. He could talk about the role diviners played in the Bible until he was blue in the face, but my mother would not be budged off her firm opinion that dowsing was a pagan practice at best.

  — But what about Moses getting water out of a rock on Mt. Horeb? Nep might ask.

  — That was a holy miracle, not dowsing, she would counter.

  — How would the Israelites have lasted all those years in the desert unless Miriam was a diviner?