The Diviner's Tale

by Bradford Morrow

  — Miriam's well was a gift of Jehovah and had nothing whatsoever to do with traipsing around in the sand with a magical wand.

  — What about Thy rod and thy staff shall comfort me? If that rod isn't a diviner's rod, what in the world is it?

  — It's a rod to smite atheists like you. Your father probably knew the old adage Spare the rod and spoil the child. More's the pity he didn't know one rod from another.

  Naturally, they endorsed opposing ideas about what I should do when I grew up, and I failed neither of them. Few if any make a living at divining. So I followed my mother's footsteps as a teacher, substituting in social studies and geography, though I could lead an even better class in Greek and Roman classics if needed. And, as well, I took what our friends considered the unusual step of assuming the diviner's mantle in the grand tradition of the family patriarchs. Usually I felt fortunate to be born into a century when diviners were allowed to practice their art. You might be derided but never damned, laughed at but not locked up. But given where it had taken me today, fortunate was the last thing I felt.

  Yet my father, whom I revered even more than the great Martine, had never betrayed any concerns about his own divining, or bringing his children into the guild. Divining was just part of his life and never bore with it the threat that always seemed to shadow me. The first time I tagged along with him on a dowsing job I couldn't have been more than eight, a redheaded beanpole of a kid. A summer morning, the year after my brother was gone, Nep knocked on my bedroom door.

  — You got anything going on today, Cassiopeia? he asked.

  — Nothing much.

  — Now you do. Get dressed, and put on your shoes for once. Wear clothes for a walk through brambles. We're going to look for water that's clever at hiding.

  As we drove in the orange sunrise, I knew I was entering a world I'd figured would never be mine even to visit, let alone explore with my father. Not a little terrified, I was given a forked stick fresh-cut by Nep, who took some pains telling me just why he picked the tree he hewed it from—in this instance, a single-seed fruit tree—and precisely how to whittle the Y-shaped rod. He also showed me other tools of the trade.

  — This is an L-rod, he said, reaching into a worn leather duffel and handing me a pair of television antennas bent at ninety-degree angles. —Some people call them elbow rods. You hold them out in front of you like so, having me grip them chest-high in my fists, their glinting tips pointed forward parallel to the ground.

  — What do they do? I asked, trying to keep them from wobbling in my unsure hands.

  — I let them show me which way the water runs when I'm bird-dogging a stream. You can make them out of whatever's lying around. Coat hangers, any kind of metal. My dad had a set forged out of solid brass, real nice.

  — Why don't we use those, then? I asked, only to be told that wouldn't be such a good idea since my grandfather had been buried with them.

  Next, Nep showed me what was called a bobber, a flexible wand weighted on the end that responded by living up to its name, bobbing up and down, or wagging side to side. —It's best for asking the stream yes or no questions like, You drinkable? Ready to be tapped? Water is smart, Cass. Doesn't like the words maybe or why. Why is a word for philosophers and water is wiser than philosophers. Got that?

  — Yes, I said, trying my best to stay with him.

  — Never insult water or anything else you're dowsing for by questioning it, Are you sure? Once you get good at it, the right answer's the first answer every time.

  He told me that diviner's tools are all extensions of yourself and nothing less. He finished by saying everything you divine is a reflection of yourself, and this, the only lecture he ever gave me, came to an end as he put all the paraphernalia except for the fresh rod back in the truck.

  Then he set out with me, marching across some pale hay fields and through a thicket, listening for vapors' voices that rose from the earth to be heard and interpreted by us only. Whenever I saw his dowsing rod quiver, jerk harshly downward, drawn by subterranean forces, I did my best to mimic his every gesture. I watched his unmoving hands. Studied his face as it pulled into pucker-lipped focus. I heard him moan a bit, give what later I came to think of as an almost erotic sigh. I walked in his wake while he circled the site he'd figured was most promising. After handing me his rod, he pulled a pendulum out of his back pocket, a heavy hex nut soldered neatly to a length of jewelry chain. I noted his head move left and right as he gathered confidence that this was it, the mother lode.

  — Dig here, he told the neighbor who had hired him to dowse, after several deep percussion drillings by the professionals had turned up nothing but pulverized crusher run and sulfuric air. —Hundred and forty-two foot, he said, emphatic as natural law.

  I waited, quiet and full of admiration, not quite knowing what I was witness to here.

  — That's all the deeper we got to dig? the man asked.

  — Strong vein, too.

  — But we drilled the better part of a thousand foot in other spots.

  — Makes you feel short, don't it.

  This was the dairy farmer down the road, from whom we would get free fresh milk and guano-dappled eggs and home-cranked lamb sausage in perpetuity, thanks to Nep the local water witch—I'd later wonder why they weren't called water warlocks—having discovered the plentiful underground stream in his otherwise dry upper pasture. He's dead and buried now, is good Mr. Russell. He was the one who gave me that little white pony who was a hobbler but as smart as a quirt.

  3

  STARRY NIGHT, THE DIPPERS high above. And the moon rising, bleaching the evening air so the grass looked like it had been dusted with bone meal. Moon reminded me of a peach pit. It was chilly out. Cold enough for me to see my breath, like a bit of March in May.

  Rosalie had already given the children supper when Niles dropped me off. After a couple of hours of a gentle if numbingly repetitive deposition, he concluded by assuring me he would personally go back to the scene, or site rather, since it did not appear to be the scene of anything, in a legal sense. Said he would drive up after dawn, on his own time, before work. Look around again. My conjecture that the hanged girl had been there when I saw her—held her in my arms, in fact—and was removed during the time I left to return with others, might have carried weight but for the very real and problematic detail that the woods appeared untouched.

  Not one overturned leaf was to be seen. Not a disturbed twig. The bark this time of year was tender, as pliant as kindergartner's clay, after all the wet spring weather. But we couldn't pick out a single branch that showed the least sign of damage from a rope supporting the weight of a girl's body. The sharpest-eyed forensic expert would, it seemed, have come away with nothing, not that they had the least intention of sending one out. My work in the archaic, quixotic field of divination—a realm populated, in the eyes of many, by dreamers and schemers, hoaxers and head jobs—didn't help my credibility in the first place. I sensed, too, that had Niles not been my friend, the matter would have been categorically dismissed.

  We'd sat together in a conference room at a long table. Its mahogany lamination was curling at the edges, and I found myself nervously picking at the corner of the table while I answered questions. In my life I had never been in such a stuffy, closed room. The overhead fluorescents buzzed like hovering wasps. The two men went over the events of the morning must have been half a dozen times, and half a dozen times I told them the same story. Then Niles, not Bledsoe, surprised me with an unexpected query.

  "Can I ask you something of a delicate question?"

  Startled by the shift in the rhythm and timbre of his speech, which was much more tardy and lower than his usual voice, I glanced up and nodded.

  "Are you on any medications? Taking drugs for anything?"

  "No."

  "Nothing at all?" Bledsoe pressed, that dark eyebrow of his raised. "We're not talking illegal drugs, just for instance an antidepressant or maybe a sedative at night to sleep?"
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  "I sleep fine without. The answer is no. I'm not on any kind of drugs, prescribed or otherwise."

  "You have been in the past, though, isn't that correct?" the sergeant continued.

  I repeated, "I'm not on any medications now."

  "Nothing to drink?"

  "You can't drink while you're divining."

  "Has anything like this ever happened to you before?"

  "If it had, you'd have been the first to know," answering Bledsoe's question while only addressing Niles.

  "Casper, just another couple things I need to ask. Bear with me."

  With these words, Niles offered me a smile of sympathetic complicity. Under any other circumstances that smile, which deepened the crow's-feet at the edges of his beryl-green eyes, would have been gratifying and made me believe the world was spinning properly on its axis rather than out of control. But at that moment, for that instant, I feared his smile. If it were a chalk drawing on a blackboard I'd wipe it away.

  "Ask whatever you like, but the girl was there. I touched her with my own hands."

  My defensiveness couldn't have been more crystal clear. I was feeling attacked, and now all of us knew it. Bledsoe started to say something more, but Niles raised a hand, palm down, in the sergeant's direction, and the room remained still.

  "When you're divining—" Niles continued, in a mild but serious voice.

  "Yes," staring at the wafer of artificial hardwood in my hand.

  "—do you get into some kind of state of mind, say, that's not what you would think of as being your normal state of mind?"

  "It'd be hard to differentiate. I don't really think about it since I'm too busy doing it."

  "Is it like a euphoria, or dysphoria I think the word is?"

  "I suppose it's safe to say I'm more sensitive to things around me."

  "You're in a kind of heightened state of sensitivity?"

  "I try to be. Extra-sensitive, extra-perceptive."

  "You feel like you're communing with some alternate world, something like that?"

  "I don't think of it in those terms. You know I'm not into mystical hocus-pocus."

  "Is it like sleepwalking?"

  "My father put it like this once. Dowsing is like drowsing, except you're asleep and intensely awake at the same time."

  "What's the process?"

  I sighed, placed my hands on my knees. "There is no process, if I understand you right. It's a science that can only be explained in metaphors. You remember when I visited Greece that time?"

  Niles nodded.

  "Watching the fishermen repair their nets was one of my favorite pastimes there. I loved the idea that you could take something straight and limp, twine and twist it on itself, and turn it into a completely different object. A big loose basket strong enough to hold whole schools of slippery wild fish. Pure wizardry. That's what I try to do. Just, my thread is so fine you can't see it. I'm weaving a net to angle for whatever I'm looking to find. It's my job."

  Bledsoe allowed himself a quiet laugh. I refused to offer him a frustrated glance.

  "Don't be offended," said Niles. "I'm trying to do my job, too."

  "I'm not offended by you. But it's obvious your associate doesn't believe a word of what I've said."

  "You're getting tired."

  "I am, but that doesn't change what I saw."

  Bledsoe stood, stating in a tone that showed he felt more sorry for me than perturbed, "All right, I got to get back to work."

  That was half an hour before we finished at the station. Well, I thought, nodding as respectfully as I could manage at Bledsoe when he left, who could blame the man? He hadn't overly troubled himself with masking his disdain for the whole misadventure, but why should he? Anyone who heard what I was attempting to explain would think I was mad, no doubt. I felt way out of my element, both frightened and foolish.

  "Cass, do you remember that time you called me in the middle of the night and said you'd had a dream that I was in a house fire? You were very shaken up. You seemed almost, what, shocked that I was even able to answer the phone, that I wasn't covered in burns."

  "I was glad I was wrong," looking down at my lap and back up.

  "Now don't misunderstand me, I'm not impugning you. What I'm trying to say here is you're a person of deep-felt intuitions who doesn't always get it right. I think you already know I don't doubt your prowess as a diviner. Some doubt, others don't. I'm one who doesn't."

  "Thanks, Niles."

  "No need to thank me because I choose to believe in proven instincts. I remember all too well about your brother. I remember another time when you told me not to go camping in the Adirondacks and I wound up getting shot, nearly killed, by some idiot hunting deer out of season. There are plenty of instances when you seemed able to see better than anybody what was waiting around the corner in people's lives. I can't explain it, but I don't need to. You know me. I'm a boringly practical, down-to-earth man—"

  I started to disagree, but he waved me off.

  "—who tries to be as objective as humanly possible. Your mother was the teacher who told us about Occam's razor, remember? Simplest solution's usually the right one? A lot of people out here try to bullshit me. Hell, almost everybody I deal with does. You're not one of them."

  "What are you getting at, Niles?"

  "What I'm wondering is this. Do you think it's impossible you sometimes suffer from hallucinations? Don't answer yet. Let me finish. Let's say sometimes you hallucinate things that are there. Underground streams, for one. That quartz deposit at Mossin's. The time little Jamie Schultz ran away and you helped find him. Doesn't seem inconceivable to me that you might see things that aren't there sometimes. Things that should be, even could be, but aren't in any provable way."

  "Are you saying is and isn't are the same thing?" I tried to smile.

  As a way of protecting me from having to explain to my mother why I arrived home in a police cruiser, he drove his civilian car. Niles was like that, a gracious man. He asked after Morgan and Jonah on our way back to Mendes Road, where I lived. I told him the twins were fine but weren't happy they hadn't seen their godfather in a while.

  "I've been remiss."

  Jonah continued to excel in his studies at school, I told him, especially math. His was the kind of mind that noticed, when we were talking one day about Noah and the ark, that the name Noah was hidden inside the name Jonah, just as Jonah was once hidden inside the belly of the whale.

  "Bible stories? Isn't that a little out of character for you?"

  "I'm not some rabid atheist, just we don't go to church, is all."

  "Well, Jonah's always been ahead of the curve when it comes to smarts."

  "Just the other morning he heard me use the phrase born and bred, and he asked me, 'Aren't you bred before you're born?'"

  Morgan, it looked more and more, would turn out to be the family athlete. "Coach Mosley thinks he has state-champion-level play in him. With just a little more discipline."

  "Has he outgrown that glove I gave him last year?"

  "You can almost see through the leather on the palm part of it."

  "I'll look into getting him another one when I get a chance."

  The tedious subject of James Boyd—had the boys asked about him again as I feared they soon surely would?—he bypassed altogether.

  The interior of his car was, unlike the spare and spartan Niles Hubert himself, a clutter of broken toys, empty plastic bottles, paperback books, a purple plastic squirt gun, a cardigan sweater, a small blue rubber boot. The phrase ought to be You are what you discard. I asked him how were Melanie and their daughter?

  "All's well," he said. "Adrienne's interest in photography's grown into a full-blown obsession. She doesn't go anywhere without her camera. She has shots of me shaving, eating, taking out the garbage, you name it. She even takes abstract artistic photos of the garbage."

  We were used to this. These were the fond exchanges we made on normal days when we saw one another, so it made sense to
conclude this abnormal one with our more habitual How's it going? reassurances. I knew Melanie Hubert was upset to this day about my having had the audacity to ask, despite the fact her husband and I were engaged once upon a time and never went through with it, whether he could see his way clear to being godfather to my twins. How could I fault her? Yet I will always be grateful to Niles for answering my request with an uncomplicated, brisk yes. Fatherless, at least the twins would have him around for birthdays, a couple of hours on Thanksgiving afternoon or New Year's Eve. To give them their modest, clumsily wrapped, but deeply appreciated presents on Christmas. Knowing full well this might cause strife with Melanie, he honored his role with grace.

  But Niles couldn't help me further that night. Neither could my mother. After I thanked her and saw her off and put the boys to bed, I would have given anything to be able to call my father. See if he had an hour for a glass of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, his favorite.

  Nep was the only person I knew who might have been able to bring deeper insights to the table, share at least a strong sense of the physicality of the experience I'd had at Henderson's that morning. He didn't need to shoulder my burden, though, and had his own problems to contend with. Instead, I put on an old vinyl of Duke Ellington, one I'd borrowed from Nep, cracked the casement window a few inches so I could hear "Mood Indigo" on the porch without waking the boys, and poured the wine for myself. Wrapped in my barn jacket, I sat back in one of the squeaky hickory chairs and did everything in my power to keep the image of the girl from overtaking my mind, or worse, my imagination.

  4

  THAT DAY BEGAN the fifth great turning in my life. A jolting addition to what I had considered my elemental four. Just as there were four directions and four winds, and just as Plato identified four virtues and Hippocrates four humours, my private little cosmology used to have its own four-cornered form.

  My first turning had been Christopher. The unwelcome prophecy of his premature death and the opening up into other planes of risk it marked. Second was my genesis as a true diviner, which didn't happen until I was almost twenty. Third was the birth of my boys.