The Diviner's Tale

by Bradford Morrow

  "Nothing'll happen, don't worry. Your divining, or whatever it was, did lead us here to this other find."

  "Bledsoe thinks I'm a hysteric."

  Niles kept walking. "Doesn't matter."

  "Who knows, maybe I am."

  He made no response. As we continued along the shoulder of the road, I had such an urge to take his hand. This was a feeling I hadn't experienced with Niles Hubert in well over a decade. And even as the stirring faded—as well it might—I could hear my mother's voice upbraiding me for having had the thought. But mine was less a sexual urgency than a need to reconnect with the tangible world. To hold a known hand. How ungodly and unusual could such a small desire be?

  We were not quite within hearing of Shaver and the man he was now talking to, either someone who had entered the scene while I was away or one of the men who'd gone into the woods and returned, when Niles took my arm at the elbow and said, gently, "I think, Cass, you need to be very careful of yourself. I think you may need some help. I'd like to try, if you'll let me. There's a very good woman I know who might be able to talk to you. And if she feels she can't, she knows some excellent people who probably could. Will you let me do that for you?"

  "But what about this camp?"

  "What about it."

  "You wouldn't have found it without me."

  Niles thought about that and said, "Occam's razor. You bring enough interested people to bear on any land or locale and they'll probably discover something there. Plus, here's another one you'll recognize. Curiosity breeds convergence."

  Occam's razor we'd learned from my mother. The second phrase? Nep. Niles didn't forget things.

  I needed badly to go home now. I started to ask him if it would be permissible for me to leave, when we heard a commotion below us on the road and saw one, then three, then all the men who had earlier headed down into the forested valley. They had emerged in a group from the woods and were standing together on the road, talking loudly, excitedly.

  Niles and I began to hasten toward them when we both caught sight of the uniformed woman. A girl was walking beside her, clutching her arm. The girl seemed afraid and dazed and exhausted, clothed in a dark dress that was wrinkled and filthy, as was her long pale brown hair. Though I was running now, I closed my eyes and opened them.

  None of it was a mirage. Just before Niles and I reached the others who were crowded around the girl, it began to sprinkle. Soon enough a misty rain blew down across the hills. The forsythias along the roadside, their many branches festooned with gaudy, cheerful flowers, sparkled with the fresh droplets and nodded up and down and side to side in the freshening gusts, as if offering a host of conflicting opinions.

  Part II

  IN SEARCH OF SANCTUARY

  8

  MY MOTHER'S FAMILY was originally from Maine. Mount Desert Island and environs with its stony coasts and steel-blue harbors and sea-scraggled pines. When Henry Metcalf, her father's brother, died, she inherited a handsome old quaintly decrepit lighthouse and its keeper's cottage on a small isle, really just a big bump of largely forgotten land in the ocean. On a clear day, if you squinted and looked carefully, you could see Covey Island from Otter Point on Mount Desert, midway between Baker—whose lighthouse still worked—and the eastern tip of Little Cranberry Island, farther out in the Atlantic than either. This inheritance came a couple of years after Christopher died. Rosalie, Nep, and I made the all-day drive to see to Mr. Metcalf's funeral arrangements, put in order whatever needed to be, and hear the will read. At Covey, a whole new world was opened to me, one in which water was anything but hidden.

  We instituted a family habit of going up every August when the heat and humidity crept from the coast into the mountains at home and made daily life difficult and sleep impossible. Too, Rosalie thought the change of scene would be good for me, help me to shake the forevisioning spells that had plagued me from time to time. Nep and I learned, after our own landlubber fashion, how to sail the white dory that had been bequeathed us, and my mother and I harvested mussels in low-tide beds that flourished along the virginal shores.

  We had but two neighbors on the island. One, Angela Milgate, was a thoroughly reclusive widow, a professional hermit of sorts. The other was a perennial absentee, even in high summer months. Often as not, it felt as if we owned the whole place, which until midway through the last century the Metcalfs still did. A small, unprepossessing family cemetery lay near the center of the just-about-thirty-acre island, its antique headstones surrounded by a weathered wrought-iron fence and a grove of pines. Here the lifelong islander Henry Metcalf rested in peace beside his son, his wife, his brother William and sister-in-law Winifred—my maternal grandparents—and other Metcalfs from earlier years. What with wild blueberry bushes and scented balsams, arrowwood and sweet gale, with broad Atlantic vistas in every direction across the ever-changing water, and also the lighthouse—deactivated around the turn of the twentieth century, its stairway passable but crumbling, its round tower so beautiful on its rock foundation—the island was nothing shy of magical. A true refuge.

  It was here I fled with Morgan and Jonah after school let out for the summer. I was well aware they didn't want to go all the way up to Covey, especially in early June when the black flies were out in stinging legions. Besides, camp was to start in a matter of ten days and this side excursion was a nuisance, not to mention that Morgan's baseball season was in full swing. But they weren't fools, my boys. They saw how frazzled their mother had become after the incidents at Henderson's. Saw me come home devastated the afternoon that girl was found. She was alive but dehydrated, with a story to tell but little or no will to tell it. Nor did she have any apparent grasp of the questions asked by the policewoman who had taken temporary custodianship of her after she'd finally appeared from behind an outcropping of monolithic stones that resembled, as Niles said, a tumbledown Stonehenge, where she had been hiding from the searchers and the police dog. She stared ahead at nothing visible, like a spooked, cornered wildcat. Ignored the water Shaver offered her. A candy bar that one of the men rummaged out of a pocket she also disregarded, utterly indifferent. If she had been standing there in some alternative dimension from which she couldn't see any of us, her response could hardly have been less engaged. We were like ghosts to her. Not merely ghosts, but ghosts she couldn't—or wouldn't—perceive. I had felt disconcerted before, but watching this girl only left me feeling lost. Bereft, even, and as alone as she surely imagined herself, no matter what her real circumstances would prove to be.

  Suppressing a mother's impulse to go comfort her myself, put my arms around the poor thing, I stood aside, at the perimeter of the concerned crowd who had rescued her. I didn't have the wherewithal to begin seriously to connect my vision of the hanged girl with this half-feral soul, but couldn't help myself. She looked to be in her mid-teens. A little older than the other girl. Strong cheekbones, full if pale and cracked lips. She was wearing a dark violet dress with a beige Bakelite or maybe alabaster pin above her left breast in the shape of a rose. Unlike the hanged girl, she was the opposite of pristine. Her dress was torn, and her pretty pin was muddied. Her cocoa-brown eyes were bloodshot. Her dirty hair was garnished with leaves and twigs like some wood nymph, a modern-day disheveled dryad.

  The immediate conclusion everyone reached, as became clear from the talk going around among the men, was that they had a runaway on their hands. Were they right, I thought, whatever she escaped must have been well worth running from. This was tough terrain under the best of circumstances. But to have lived out here for as long as it took to turn her into the dirty rag that she was now meant she had slept through some cold nights, and wet and chill days. She continued to peer before her with an intensity so staunch and focused that I found myself glancing in the same direction she was. I assumed if anyone could see what so engrossed her, it would be me. But she wasn't looking outward. She was gazing at something within. And what she observed there gripped her attention more than anything we offered her. Unlike the
hanged girl, she wore a pair of simple black shoes. They were mucky and one of the laces was missing, but at least she wasn't barefoot.

  Niles glanced back at me. I knew what his eyes meant to ask, a question he couldn't pose aloud without risking ridicule. What was happening here? he wanted to know. I wished I could help him, but with my own eyes tried to let him know it was beyond me. At least just then. With that girl. I felt every bit as lost as she seemed to be. Maybe more so, since she at least in theory understood what had caused her to be here.

  They wrapped a gray wool blanket around the girl and helped her into the back seat of Niles's car. The policewoman climbed in beside her. I sat in the front. The rest of the officers and investigators returned to the field to glean what they could. Ours was a quiet ride back toward town. Only the woman spoke. She asked the girl her name, speaking to her in tones and words that seemed more appropriate to someone much younger than this, handling her trauma with kid gloves.

  Where were her mom and dad? Were they at home? Could she tell us where she lived?

  Nothing.

  Okay. Was there anyone else in the woods they should look for who needed help? Did she have a brother or sister who would like to know she's safe? Wouldn't she change her mind and have some water or this candy now? Was she feeling warmer? Nobody was going to hurt her.

  The girl stared ahead as if in a vacuum.

  Cómo te llamas? the officer even tried, just in case. De dónde vienes?

  There was nothing for it, but I admired the woman's tender persistence. Before we reached the station—the ride seemed to take forever—an ambulance intercepted us on the road and some paramedics took over. I caught a lift in the ambulance to the hospital and from there Niles had arranged for someone to drop me off home. He said he'd call once the girl was examined, and the child welfare people and a counselor arrived to begin the process of getting her entered into protective custody. He wished he could take me to Mendes Road himself but he had to get back to Henderson's and afterward to the station.

  "You going to be all right?" he asked.

  "I don't understand any of this."

  "The girl's safe. She's in good hands now. You should be happy, Cass, not stressed."

  "But I don't get it."

  "Something good happened here, that's all you need to get. Imagine if you hadn't seen whatever you saw yesterday, imagine if we didn't go looking this morning. She couldn't have lasted much longer by herself. And she seemed bound and determined not to come out of there on her own. As far as I'm concerned, you saved her life."

  I shook my head.

  "Take care of yourself, go easy. Patience forwards and backwards, don't forget."

  Once home, I took a long hot shower. Made myself a cup of tea and sat with it as it grew cold. My evening didn't promise much more peace than the day had given me. Rosalie was driving the twins over within the hour. They were all but manic, she warned me. As it happened, my fantasy about them playing poker and watching baseball with Nep was wishful thinking. My father had suffered through one of his badly disoriented days, it turned out, and wasn't up to playing anything. He might have sat with Jonah and Morgan and watched, or at least looked at, a ball game, but none had been broadcast.

  What was I doing all day? the boys wanted to know the moment they walked in the door. What about yesterday? What was going on? they asked over and over, and these were not needy children. They demanded to be told what and who we were up against. For them, it was never just one or the other of us in our small family left to face the harsh world alone. We three were always a unit. An us, a We.

  More than once they had been in fights at school over some classmate's accusing them of having a mother who was crazy as a loon. Screws loose, bats in her belfry, the madwoman of Mendes, all that clever, contemptible nonsense some kids—too often practicing to become clever, contemptible adults—are so good at ladling out. One time Morgan was suspended for a week after blackening the eye of a boy who had called him a bastard, son of a witch. Without a doubt, some sniping parents condoned at least the spirit of their children's accusations. If I had been teaching Darwin rather than such—to them—harmless subjects as geography and ancient mythology, more than a few would have been after the school board, arguing at the top of their Creationist lungs to have me removed from the premises. A number of Rosalie's fellow congregants at church felt the same way, but since I went to church mostly just for weddings, funerals, and the occasional baptism, they could hardly throw me out.

  Secretly proud of Morgan for fighting back, I canceled all work scheduled for that week and homeschooled him, as my mother had me, once upon a time. I like to think he learned more during our days working together than he'd ever have learned in class. Either way, unless Niles managed to keep this recent incident quiet, rumors were about to fly rampant, thanks to these same gossips, of my discovering a dead girl who not only was not the same girl they found alive and lost in the woods, but who wasn't found at all. I could already imagine some of the things they might say.

  I made the whole story up to get attention for myself.

  The girl was my secret daughter whom out of shame I had forced to live in the forest since infancy and in a fit of rage I personally hanged her.

  No, she wasn't my daughter, she was someone I kidnapped, then hexed so she couldn't incriminate me, struck her deaf and dumb, and abandoned her that night in the woods so I could support my earlier absurd claim that—and so forth.

  Variations, some milder, some wilder, of these stories would find their way along the grapevines out there in the community, especially among children Jonah and Morgan's age. I was determined to remove us from the vicinity the very day after final classes and not return until the twins started camp. Between now and then, I could only hope that the supposedly runaway girl's situation was resolved.

  Our truck barely made the drive north. We overheated twice on the way up and had to stop along the interstate to give the engine a chance to cool down. The boys informed me that this was its swan song, its farewell performance.

  "Adiós," Jonah said.

  "Goodbye, cruel world," echoed Morgan.

  They were laughing so hard about the steam coming from under the raised hood, while other cars on the highway cruised past, that my frustration about it soon gave over to laughter as well.

  "All right," I said. "When we get there—"

  "If we get there," said Morgan.

  "—we can look into selling it—"

  "For about fifty cents."

  "More like we give them the fifty cents."

  "—and get something new."

  "New used, you mean."

  "We can afford what we can afford," I said, trying to stay with the mood. "Tell you what, though. I'm going to let you two pick the car."

  "Now you're talking—"

  "—turkey."

  We laughed some more as the engine whined, coughed, complained, then finally turned over again.

  "I set the budget, turkeys. But you pick the wheels, dig?"

  Both groaned. They hated it when I tried to talk hip.

  "We'll see what there is to see and our people will get back to you on it," Jonah finished.

  What contrarian minds we come equipped with. At that moment, when my two bastions of strength were picking up the slack, trying to help me move past problems, giving me good advice with humor and their personal brand of quirky respect, I found myself shadowed by a feeling of having let them down. I couldn't help but think that if they had a father, another provider in their life, they would be riding right then in a real car. Not this absurd smog-belching artifact. Though they might put brave faces on it and insist otherwise, they deserved a father. Someone accomplished in the world who would love them as much as I—well, almost as much—and show them how to fix things that were broken and make things that weren't there before. Nep had served as a surrogate. Fathered them like they were the sons he never had. Or rather, as he had fathered Christopher during his short life. And he'd alw
ays been brilliant in his understudy role. But now he was sometimes there, sometimes not, and I felt his absence to the marrow of my bones, as both daughter and mother.

  "You all right?" Jonah asked, after some miles in silence.

  "You bet," I assured him, and briefly grasped his hand.

  Once we grocery-shopped, then rolled past the stores selling cupolas with their weathervanes turning in contradictory directions and fields of lupines by the ragtag tourist zoo, we stopped for crab rolls at a pound in Ellsworth, where we also bought ourselves live lobsters plucked from a holding tank. Crossing the causeway from the mainland onto Mount Desert, I could smell the salt air and my heart quickened. Toward the end of the long day, we finally parked our poor limp truck in the municipal lot in Northeast Harbor and boarded the Bunker & Ellis launch that would carry us out to the island.

  For all their initial reluctance about coming north, the twins were happy to be on the mailboat that doubled as the ferry here, and so was I. Familiar coastal islands glided by, pine-haired rocks with their pink pobblestone beaches in the bundling water. Out in deeper water, lobster buoys looked like gaudy painted Easter eggs. Henderson's woods, with its perplexing vision and voices, could not have been farther away, and that realization set my spirits flying. I gave Morgan a spontaneous hug from behind. Instead of wriggling away he hugged me in return, wrapping his wiry strong arms around my lower back while still facing forward toward the ocean. In another year he would be almost as tall as his mother. Jonah leaned against the rail beside us at the front of the mailboat, pointing as harbor porpoises lunged and stitched the ocean swells some hundred yards to starboard. His cheeks were lit up from the sea winds.

  This was a moment people long for in a lifetime. The Greeks didn't have a word for it, they who had words for everything. Not a single word in English could compass such equanimity. I believe the Buddhists refer to it as a peace which passeth all understanding. It was like that.