The Diviner's Tale

by Bradford Morrow

  My phone rang early the next morning. I asked him what if anything he had learned overnight, and he told me about these conversations with Henderson and Statlmeyer.

  "Finally got nowhere," Niles said. "Because there was probably nowhere to go."

  He had stayed up late after that, studying a survey map of the area, and in fact there did turn out to be another possible path down to the spot where I saw what I saw. Much tougher trail, if a trail at all. Maybe another approach would render another result. Or, rather, any result. Would it be asking too much of my mother to take the boys again?

  "If you don't feel overly upset," he continued, "I think it'd be useful if you walked back in with me."

  "You believe me about the girl."

  "I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is you might see something I don't."

  "I'll call Rosalie right now."

  "You'll be waking her?"

  "She was up at five, guaranteed. Always is."

  The boys were sleepyheaded and grumpy until they found out they were going to spend their Saturday morning with Nep. The affection was mutual. He never failed to brighten and revert at least a little to his old self when the twins came around. For kids their age—turned eleven this eleventh of April, a couple of precocious Aries—they were quite sensitive to his disease. It both fascinated them in a boyishly morbid way—Jonah and Morgan could sit cross-legged side by side and watch a spider methodically anesthetize a web-caught moth until it was ready to devour its prey—while, at the same time, they drew from deep reservoirs in their spirits some profound sense of human mortality. They also held their grandmother in high esteem, despite their sense she was a bit too religious for her own good, and willingly embraced doing any little thing that might help her help him.

  "Hurry up," I urged.

  One of my worst mothering—or misguided "fathering"—mistakes was when I had allowed them, far too early on, to try a sip of my morning coffee. Now there was no going back. Like little demonic connoisseurs, they objected to the cups of Sanka I made to move things along.

  "What's the big rush?" Morgan asked, pushing his long brown hair out of his face. His hair, which he grew out the previous year after many evenings of family debate, was one of the few physical traits that differentiated him from his otherwise identical brother. That and the small acorn-shaped scar on his cheek, a badge of honor received during his one ill-starred season trying and failing to play hockey. Otherwise, both were tall, trim, strong, narrow-shouldered boys, with long hands and knobby fingers, and sharp-boned faces whose kind but keen hazel eyes were arrestingly wide-set—even more so than mine. When one of them looked at you, you knew you were being looked at.

  "I've got to be somewhere."

  "Somewhere where?"

  "Out at the Henderson place."

  "I thought that's where you were yesterday."

  "Well, I got to go back there this morning."

  "Something's not cricket. What's the deal, dude?"

  The moment offered me, for the thousandth time, a strong insight into what Nep must have faced when I was their age, although fortunately neither of them had shown the least interest in divining. I had privately concluded last July that I might best be the end of the line in that regard. The future would have no further need for people bent on dialoguing with the earth. In another generation or two, highly advanced versions of our by-then-medieval subterranean magnetometer technologies, our seismic refraction transmitters and VLF receivers, our shrewd machineries of prying and spying, would become so ubiquitous that a diviner might have as much a place in the world as an ostrich-plumed quill pen. Divining was a fading art few cared about anymore. Who could expect them to? Lost arts are by definition just that. Lost as Marcus Terentius Varro's play, Virgula Divina, which either satirized or celebrated divining, but because its manuscript disappeared centuries ago we will never know. What responsible mother would push her children to take up an ancient art fated to become another curiosity chucked onto the huge trash heap of outmoded human ideas?

  "The deal, dude," I called back from my own bedroom where I was slipping on my sweatshirt and jeans, "is I'll tell you later. And don't call me dude. Word?"

  "Way not word," said Jonah.

  "Yeah, why not?" Morgan asked, crunching pretzels from a bag his grandmother must have given him.

  "A dude's a man, that's why not."

  "You're wrong, Cassandra. Everybody who's anybody's a dude."

  "And while you're at it, don't call me Cassandra, either," I said, taking the pretzel bag from Morgan and handing him a peach, which he bit into without a pause.

  "You call your mom Rosalie, am I right or am I right?" his mouth full.

  "Keeping it real," Jonah approved, laughing.

  "Just because I do it doesn't mean you have to. What's the matter with Mom?"

  "What is the matter with Mom?" Morgan asked Jonah.

  "Got me, dude. Something in the water."

  They were dressed, fed, and in their grandmother's car by a little after six. Rosalie gave me a far more afflicted look of questioning what I was about than she might have meant to. I think she was accusing me of a transgression over which she needn't have worried. She never liked the idea of my overnight infatuation with James Boyd, but neither did she like it that I remained a single mother with no clear prospects or much evidence that I was looking. I dated from time to time, out of the human need to hold and be held, to be able to tell myself that I was yet among the living. Still, though I respected Niles too much to pursue him, he and I made my pious mother nervous.

  "Thanks for this," I said, kissing her on the cheek before she drove away. "You know I wouldn't ask unless it was important."

  "When will you be back?"

  "Shouldn't be later than lunchtime, but I don't know for sure."

  Niles pulled up not long after they left. This time he was in the cruiser. I couldn't decide whether or not it was peculiar that we didn't say much more than hello to each other while we traveled down Mendes Road, past houses, trailers, horse and cow pastures, out toward the rural county route that would take us back to Henderson's. He seemed preoccupied, so I left him to his thoughts. Besides, I was feeling apprehensive and didn't mind the silence. He was wearing civilian clothes today. Plaid jacket over a blue jean shirt, worn chinos, even more worn hiking boots. Our drive was quiet but for the news station on the radio. Suicide bombing, roadside car bombing. Brutal rape, a murder. Our never-ending catastrophes followed by the weather forecast, traffic, sports. Then the same cycle all over again. By the third repetition that today would be partly cloudy, sixty degrees, with a chance of afternoon showers, I asked Niles if I could switch it off.

  "No problem," he said.

  We drove past the widened logging road I had taken the previous day that led into the old Statlmeyer farmlands. Continuing up the two-lane for another half-mile, Niles slowed to a crawl.

  "Somewhere 'long about in here," he said, and without looking handed me the folded map that'd been nesting in the rubble of paraphernalia—walkie-talkie, notepads, a holstered pistol, sunglasses, handcuffs, the works—between his seat and mine. It occurred to me, and so I said it, "Your cars are such junkyards, Niles."

  I side-glanced a sort of acknowledging smile, then spread the map on my legs to study it. Given my own devotion to maps, I was surprised at myself for not having done the same thing he did. But with all that land at my disposal, I hadn't thought I would need to go in with any preliminary homework under my belt. Counted on experience to carry me through. There was the line of dashes on the topo he must have been referring to. Another logging trail, it seemed, although it didn't look like these woods had been timbered since way back when leather tanneries proliferated in the region and razed the hillsides to harvest hemlock bark used in the process of turning cowhides into shoe soles. It was, in fact, a pretty out-of-date map. I mentioned this and he said, rightly, that's what made it valuable.

  We drove too far, not having seen the least hint of an a
ccess. He pulled a U-turn and crept back along the rough shoulder of the paved road on the wrong side of the median. Not that it mattered on an empty stretch like this. I studied the tangle of roadside foliage, much of it not yet fully leafed, though there was a patch of large leggy aged forsythias all abloom, like a wall of gaudy fire that we passed by, quite lovely even in their decrepitude. We kept going but there was no sign of any former entranceway.

  "Maybe the mapmaker made a mistake," Niles suggested.

  "Cartographers are mortal, too," I said, and as I did it simply dawned on me. "The forsythias. Turn around."

  "What?"

  "Let's go back. Those forsythias. They're not native. Telling by their size they must have been planted a pretty long time ago. That's where our other trail's going to be."

  He turned around again, drove us back to the bright yellow partition of flowering bushes, and parked. I felt I had now earned my berth. We paced up and down the hedgerow. No gap anywhere. Just a long cheery monolith of odorless blossoms. Only after we'd hiked around the top end where the forsythias petered out and made our way along the far side of the flower wall did we find some hint of what we were looking for. All sorts of trees. Some were native; others were cultivars clearly planted. Tulip poplars, black walnuts, a few stands of white paper birch, dogwood, jack apple, black haw.

  "People lived here once," I said.

  "Seems like."

  We saw it at the same time. About a hundred feet into the woods, a vague but distinct trail. Another hundred feet along the curving path—a human path, much too meandering for deer—was a Styrofoam cup lying on its side, half-hidden by young fiddlehead ferns.

  "Could have been Townsend's people," Niles said.

  "Surveyors don't get to where they have Townsend's reputation by dumping on the land they're supposed to be measuring and marking. Besides, we haven't crossed the property line yet. No ribbons."

  "Still, doesn't necessarily say a thing. You know what, though. I'm having second thoughts about you hiking down in here with me."

  "No way. You asked me to come along and I'm coming."

  "I made a mistake," he said, then surprised me by pulling a small digital camera out of the shoulder-slung rucksack he'd carried with him, which I assumed had only a bottle of water in it, or an orange, and took a few pictures of the cup. He produced a clear plastic bag and what looked like forceps, knelt, plucked it up by the lip, and looked at it closely before stowing it and marking the position with bright yellow plastic tape, pulled from a spool that was also in the sack, which he tied around a branch above the spot. Methodically, he spent the next minutes circling the area doubled over, looking, he told me, for a cigarette butt. "Tobacco and java are like hell's version of peaches and cream. Anybody who'd be sloppy enough to leave a cup here wouldn't have the horse sense to field-strip their butt. I'm seeing nothing, though." When he stood back upright, he looked me in the eye and asked what struck me as a strange yet obvious question.

  "Do you sense anything or anyone?"

  I breathed in deep, cleared my thoughts away as best I could, but I felt no presence here. I told him I didn't and said I wasn't used to divining people, as such.

  "I still think you should let me take it from here. I'll walk you up to the car."

  "No, Niles. I appreciate your concern. But you know I need to be here, too."

  He shook his head, said nothing further, turned his back on me, and continued along the trail.

  The birds were riotous this morning. Warblers carrying on like some piccolo orchestra gone joyously mad. So noisy it was almost annoying. As I walked, looking right and left and above me, and sometimes behind, a fitful chill ran through me. Then a wave of curious fatigue as we made our way inevitably toward the central overgrown floodplain that lay at the bottom of the slope. Even though Niles was, while walking ahead, disturbing the fallen leaves and undergrowth, breaking dead limbs and branches where he stepped on them, it seemed clear that this had been a thoroughfare of sorts. Lightly used, yes. But used. So I was thinking, Who would bother but somebody who relished solitude, or who preferred that others not see their deeds, or both? But then, it could as easily be a poacher trail. Many were the evenings at my parents' farmhouse, which was much more remote than mine and indeed closer to Henderson's, when we heard gunfire during months not set aside for such activities.

  I didn't mean to drift but drifted despite myself into watching Niles Hubert ahead of me in the scape. He and I had known one another since grade school. I climbed with him in trees, we broke arms together, played marbles, sword-fought with ash sticks, jumped side by side on his parents' tottery rusted rickety trampoline. He was my first kiss, an awkward and premature blunder that cost us the better part of the summer—we were all of twelve; summer was eternity—before we recovered from our rampant shyness to speak again, hang out, carry on. After that we reconnected as real friends. The purest kind you can count on. He became more worldly-wise than I did, for whatever reason, as we edged along, hand in hand, from our early through mid-teens. He wanted more from me than I was able to give him. But we were inseparable. How we loved to sit in a quiet remote place, backs against a maple tree, and kiss—having made it a kind of research project of our own, in light of that first debacle—kiss so long that our lips swelled, making us look like we'd eaten a bucket of warm Bing cherries. Nobody thought we would be with anyone else but each other.

  Then, almost imperceptibly, my problems started up again. The monster took to whispering in my ear. Its voice sounded like fine-grained sandpaper rasping against stone. It seldom appeared in the form of a beast or being but came to me more like a mystifying cloud in my mind, a cloud of deep rich rose not unlike the color your hand acquires when you cup your palm to a flashlight in the dark. If the hanged girl was another instance of the monster, it had rarely revealed itself to me in such cruel and forthright form. The monster had always been simple and swift as a thought, the merest suggestion or outward trace of a thought. When I was in a period of—what to call it?—remission, I could easily keep these phantom thoughts to myself. But that wasn't always the case.

  I remember once there was a teacher named Thomas Lowry whose wife was friendly with my mother; they did church business together. She spent a lot of time at our house doing committee work for church programs and brought her little girl along to play with me, even though I was too old for her. A conscripted babysitter, I recall thinking how much I'd rather have been out with Niles than stuck at home with this round-faced, freckled girl half a dozen years my junior. Still, an inherent loneliness in her drew me to Jenny, and so I did my best to entertain her. One day, having run out of other ideas about what to do with my charge, I invited her to swim in the pond.

  — No, she said, afraid the fish would bite her.

  — But there's only trout in there, Jenny, I assured her. —Brown trout and rainbows with their sides all covered with pretty spots.

  — They'll hurt me, she insisted.

  — They won't hurt you, honey. They don't even have teeth, not really.

  She wouldn't hear any of it and yet I, for reasons that shall remain forever unclear to me, understood what really was going to hurt her. Because the monster was at work in me that time, I saw in a halo of understanding that I needed to let her know her mother wasn't well, she might be quite sick in fact. —You should take extra-good care of your mother, you know that?

  — But I already do, Jenny softly replied, no doubt wondering what was the matter with me.

  — That's good, it's important for you to keep doing that.

  The psychological anatomy of this behavior, the neurobiology that ranged behind it in my frontal lobe or wherever it came from in my brain, to this day I do not fully understand. I hadn't meant to be cruel or unthinking, but of course she went to her mother crying. And, of course, Rosalie stormed down to where I was sitting on the short dock cooling my feet in the slimy duckweed and scolded me for being so mean.

  The girl's mother, it would soon be re
vealed, was ill. Not because of me. The poor woman had her stomach cancer for some long time and even knew about it. She and Mr. Lowry had decided to keep it a secret. A terminal tumor. What point was there in darkening everyone else's spirits around them? They figured they would keep up a brave façade for as long as they could. In retrospect, I admired them entirely and, even after all the therapy, could not help but detest myself. It was one thing to know. Another to say.

  I shared what had happened with Niles, who thought I was acting weird again, like during the time after my brother died. He distanced himself after that, I believed, although he has sworn it wasn't so. We saw less and less of one another as I saw more of city doctors. In my immaturity, I wrote it off that we somehow staled on each other. Probably was my fault because, for reasons I couldn't then comprehend, reasons I didn't have any will or way to talk about, I wasn't ready to do some of the things he, with his hormones raging at the hot high tide of adolescence, openly desired. I feared he grew tired of waiting.

  I also wondered if he wasn't a little afraid of me. Niles, not generally the fearful kind, was nervous that his beloved girl was possessed, touched in the head. He might have thought it uncanny and even useful when I told him he ought to study for a pop quiz coming up in our history class—it did, but he wrote it off to my mother knowing ahead of time from a colleague and letting me in on the knowledge. He considered me clever perhaps for telling him his truck clutch was about to go—it did, but I might simply have noticed a different sound when the gears shifted, nothing more. But when I told him that I could have sworn I saw dead Emily Schaefer walking along in the moon-cast tree shadows down by the stone rampart one night when I couldn't sleep, saw her turn and look up at me in my window, and that she was disappointed in me, that did throw Niles off. It would have anyone. And as he withdrew, my mother filled the vacuum left in his wake. When I mentioned Emily to her, she had even less patience with me than Niles. She preferred, quite wisely, that I weather this aberrant season out of the public eye and even took a term off teaching so she could homeschool me while I improved.