The Diviner's Tale

by Bradford Morrow

  "Don't worry, they won't," I said.

  "If I need to reach you—"

  "Don't forget you got to push pretty hard on the numbers to dial me up there, since the island has no phone service, land, cell, or otherwise. The mailboat still swings by whenever there's something to deliver, so you can get me a message that way, over sea waves instead of airwaves."

  Which was what brought me back to the present in my sun-drenched room. Those sea waves were shoving against the nearby shore, washing away what was left of the nightmare. They had fascinated me from the first time I came here, how unpredictable were their rhythms. Never set a metronome by waves, it occurred to me, unless you want to play the music of the spheres. I could hear the scuttle and scraping of stones as the water withdrew, and the deep thrumming of some fishing vessels out there in the distance. Could also hear the boys downstairs now, banging around. Smelled the bacon they were frying, savory against the brined air. I rose, dressed, sat by the window looking out at the ocean for a few more quiet minutes before I heard Jonah calling me down to breakfast. As I descended the steps I felt a surge of pity for Laura Bryant. Pity, and a kind of solidarity. After all, neither of us had convinced anyone of anything, had we?

  10

  FOREVISIONS. IT HAD BEEN a good long stretch since they had visited themselves upon me. In the wake of intuiting that my brother was in grave danger, I experienced what could be described as an unholy string of these forevisionings. My mother certainly thought of them that way—unholy.

  None were as monumental or significant as the one about Christopher. But I seemed, for whatever reason, to be able to know what was going to happen around me. I could and did predict the number of kittens Hodge Gilchrist's pregnant tabby would bear. Hodge was poor Ben Gilchrist's younger brother, and we were thrown together by our grieving parents after the accident that took both our older brothers, the idea being that our playing together would be healthy. I foretold the genders of all five kittens—two males, three females. And their colorings—three more tabbies, one marmalade, one chestnut. Hodge wrote down what I predicted, sealed it in an envelope, and gave it to his mother for safekeeping. At the time, the woman commented on how cute our game was. But when the litter matched what I had imagined, Mrs. Gilchrist, who must have heard the rumors about how I had foreseen my brother's death, and therefore possibly her husband's and son's, maybe even hex-murdered them both, didn't like me hanging around with Hodge quite as much as before.

  There were other things, small things that in themselves mattered not one whit, but that I'm sure drove my poor mother to distraction and provoked prayers this odd phase would soon pass. I knew who was calling when the phone rang. That's Griselda, Griselda from the school board, on the line. There's Margaret Driscoll, probably wants to know if we have plans to drive to the city so she can catch a ride with us. I'll get it, it's going to be Niles anyhow. I knew what time it was, within five minutes either way, day or night, whenever anyone asked. Sensed the bluebirds weren't going to nest in the box atop the wooden corner post of the kitchen garden this season, though they had every year for as far back as we could remember. And when they didn't, I silently predicted my mother would say, as she did, —So the birds took this year off.

  Equally easy to predict was Nep's proclaiming, —That's my daughter, the witch.

  Life went along like that.

  Yet much of what I could see, or foresee, had to do with death. These forevisionings—Nep's coinage, too big a word for me at the time, but it stuck—made me the most uneasy. I felt relief only when circumstances proved me wrong, and I felt none whatsoever, not even in some appeased private dark corner of my ego, when I wasn't. One could make an educated guess as to the size of a cat litter. Even predict genders and colors. But when I went over to the Gilchrists' house to visit the newborns after school, I didn't dare say that the chestnut kitten, who was rushing about and playing with every bit as much vivacity as the others, and who had such a healthy coat and winning personality, wouldn't live very long. I didn't say it and didn't want to think it. Her name was Lucy. I spent as much time as I was allowed, doting on her, giving her treats. Looking back, I wonder if Hodge's mother didn't insist he stay away from me after my little Lucy—Cassie's favorite kitty—was found lifeless one morning. It didn't seem fair that I could be seen as somehow responsible. In retrospect, though, it makes a kind of awful sense.

  During this time I became increasingly isolated. Hodge wasn't my best friend—Niles was that, though I'm sure he sometimes wondered what he was doing hanging around with this wobbling, spinning top of a girl—but Hodge and I had been close. And it hurt to lose both Hodge and Lucy in one fell swoop. My brother was gone as well, and with him went his gang of friends I loved to follow around, even Roy Skoler with his dog as friendly as Roy himself was not, and especially thoughtful Charley Granger, whom I always had a terrible crush on but never told a soul.

  —You're like gum on a shoe, Christopher taunted me, inaugurating the nickname Gummy which I was not unhappy to shed when the day came. I passed through a hard, friendless time after I stopped telling people my forevisions and before Nep took me under his divining wing. His loving aegis.

  Never an indoor girl, I spent much of this period outside wandering about, especially once the snow began to melt. Edging the east border of my parents' place was a rugged stretch of up-and-down land that was good for nothing except solitary tramping—a gnarly mess of steep slopes littered with stones and bottomed by soggy springheads chock-full of waterlogged dead trees, woodpecker trees. Just my kind of land, and I put in many hours ranging that world, which abutted what was then Statlmeyer's wilds. It was a pastime I never stopped enjoying, which later fed into my wanderings as a diviner. When we started coming to Covey I wandered even on this small island, starting with a wind-beaten footpath above the shore, then clambering down to tidal pools closer to the island's edge. I'd take that same walk with Rosalie when she and Nep arrived. This morning, though, I ferried with Jonah and Morgan over to Mount Desert. We picked up the old Dodge—still mud-splattered from my frantic drive out of Henderson's—and, good to my word, drove across the causeway to the mainland to visit used-car dealerships.

  "Now here's pure class," Jonah said in mock awestruck tones, standing next to a squarish enormous box of metal wider than it was tall, at once silly and sinister. Black as a coal chip, with coffinlike lines, its chrome glinting like cutlery.

  "The total wheels," Morgan agreed, running his hand along its grille, which made my heart sink. "A hummin' Hummer."

  I said, "I don't like it."

  "But Cass, this here's the ultimate road jockey."

  "Hold on. You guys don't think this is ugly?"

  "Work of art. Terminator's got ten of these suckers in his garage."

  "Look, it's a fake war toy, a tank without a turret. All show and crow."

  We test-drove it for a few blocks. First time ever I wished my sons had licenses. Let them drive this big dumb metal box that felt claustrophobic and clumsy as I steered it along. Even at that, their happiness made me happy, but fortunately the price exceeded any budget I might muster, so I wouldn't have to break my promise.

  "Well, what do you think?" asked the salesman, an earnest fellow with sad eyes.

  Morgan said, "Nah. Not for us."

  "Too military in its feel," said Jonah, with far too straight a face.

  Been had again. We looked at other offerings elsewhere. A silver contrivance all humped up in the back, some throwback to the forties. A mini-something too small for the three of us to fit inside. And everything beyond my means, no matter which dealership we visited. At the end of the day the boys announced they could live with the pickup. We never knew anything other than, so why switch now?

  "Just get it tuned up once in a while," Morgan suggested.

  "Like, uh, every other century?"

  Without directly responding, I surprised them by pulling into the first service station I saw along the main road headed back through E
llsworth. Tune-up, brake check, transmission check, new tires, whatever was essential—the works. Some dowsers out there would have taken a pendulum to the truck engine to divine what was needed. Some witchers would even have dowsed the integrity of the mechanic. For myself, I'd had just about my fill of divining for the time being. I read the man's eyes and liked his handshake, asked him a few questions and he gave me straight answers. He even razzed Morgan about his Yankees cap, Boston being the only team that mattered in these northern reaches. I trusted him, and that was divining enough for me. "By the way," I added, before we were given a lift to the ferry. "Would you mind washing this filthy thing?"

  Back on Covey, I experienced a sensation of the simplest joy. That of being a good plain adequate parent. What could be better? My feet were sturdy on the earth as I took a late-afternoon walk around the island, having left the boys at the cottage. A grounded solidity settled over me. All was well, and would be well—I could almost hear Nep saying the very words.

  In places where the path was overgrown with low-lying inkberry, bearberry, and other weather-distressed scrub, I was forced to climb down toward the beach, slower going because of the rocks. The tidal pools that had been a grand obsession of mine when I was younger never quite lost interest for me after I grew up. I had my favorites, memorized from years of making this stroll, and I took time to glance into them, see if anybody was home. Though the tide was out, most of my holes were empty except for dwarf darting fish. Partway along, however, I came on a spidery iridescent crab left behind when the water withdrew. Trapped as it was, back-and-forthing in the shallow basin, it might have been cause for considerable fun in the old days. I would have looked around for just the right stick with a small fork on the end, like a pygmy witching rod, tried to scoop up the poor fellow and place him back in the surf. If I happened to be playing with a pail, I would have become a one-girl bucket brigade, filling the pool as high as I could so it wouldn't dry up before the next tide rolled in. Had I a sandwich, I'd tear off pieces, throw them into the water, and watch him tentatively pinch at them, his eyes on their stalks undulant. As it was, today, I took pity on him, wading into the basin, where I gingerly picked him up and set him back in the Atlantic.

  On the way back, as I collected some pretty volutes and a whelk, the eerie sensation of being watched came over me. Feeling the fool, I glanced around but of course saw nothing. The delusion did not last, fortunately. Why is it we sometimes like to frighten ourselves for no reason? I put the shells in my pocket to add to the collection on the mantel.

  In bed that night, as I drifted away into a dreamless sleep, I realized that for the first time since Henderson's, my world was showing signs of recovering balance. Or, that is, rediscovering balance. Just there, just then, for a blessed moment my corner of the universe seemed as stable as the granite the lighthouse had stood on for over a hundred years and which the ocean had pummeled and thrashed for eons. Sometime during the night, I woke, or believed I woke, and briefly listened to the waves below and wind above as stars waltzed across the window, and thought I heard the voices of those three girls singing, a trick the ocean and its breezes liked to play on me when I was a girl myself.

  Strange but nothing frightening. Instead, the oddly soothing music of nature imitating man, miming its own creatures. Wasn't it possible that a breeze had happened to flute its way through the partly opened windows of Niles's car back at Henderson's, to sing like this? What I would have given to convince myself of it. Even so, the hanged girl and the lost girl and the strange laughing voices were fading from my waking, and even sleeping, life. Niles was diminished, too. The Bledsoes of the world were deep at the bottom of the sea. Even my parents were reduced to the far corner of the canvas. It was just me and my twins.

  Morgan and Jonah made their own breakfasts next morning, peanut butter sandwiches and coffee, from what I could tell, and headed off to the shore even before I came downstairs. Couldn't blame them for finding something better to do with themselves, after I'd mentioned at dinner that I had to hike up to the cemetery to do the spring cleaning before Rosalie and Nep arrived. Another of the annual Covey routines. Make sure winter hadn't toppled any of the thin marble headstones or the wrought-iron fencing, clear out any fallen branches from nearby trees, tend to our ancestors' resting place.

  When I saw the reluctance on their faces—Morgan in particular had little patience with, or fondness for, this part of the Covey cycle—I told them they ought to go off and do their own thing in the morning, that I could get it done myself. Neither disagreed, though Jonah did allow himself a small jab about not seeing any more ghosts.

  If only to sidestep the issue, I told him I didn't believe in ghosts.

  "Good idea," he said, as a father might to a guileless child.

  Following suit with another peanut butter sandwich for myself and filling the thermos with the coffee they had left for me, I grabbed a leaf rake and a pair of gloves from the sea-grayed wooden garden shed and strode up past the lighthouse toward the center of the island. Before entering the pine woods that topped Covey, as they did Islesford, Cranberry, Baker, all the islands around here, I turned to look back at the steel-blue convexity of ocean and its few lobster boats out for the morning haul. It didn't seem at all fair that Henry Metcalf, who sought only to preserve this beauty for others, should be finally denied by death the chance to see once more what I myself could witness by merely opening my eyes. Ghosts ought to exist, I thought, if only to revisit such ineffable simplicities as this.

  A path led up between boulders, then leveled out through a forested plateau to the cemetery. Winging overhead, a young osprey. Underfoot, bluebead lilies like tiny bursting stars in first bloom that would grow pretty berries in a month capable of making you very sick if you ate one. Bluebeard flowers, Nep called them. The dense, ever-present perfume of balsam fir and white pine pitch. In the distance, hidden by rock and foliage, the purring engine of a boat. Not so unaware as to have forgotten I was alone in the womb of the woods for the first time since seeing what I saw, I reminded myself that this was Covey Island, not Henderson's valley. I had been coming up here for years, for decades actually. This was where my mother's people lay at rest—and therefore my own gentle ancestors—as unhaunted a place as I could imagine.

  Winter hadn't been quite as rough on the cemetery as on the cottage, which was far more exposed to the ravages of icy wind and snow blown fast across the winter ocean. While warm sunlight pooled into the flat clearing ringed by conifers, I had a sip of coffee before getting down to work. Thanks to heaving frosts, some of the headstones were leaning at various angles, but none had fallen over. I pried open the creaking gate as wide as its rusted hinges would allow and began raking the corners of the fenced enclosure where leaves, twigs, ends of branches had collected.

  This was the kind of work I loved. Nothing open to tortured second thoughts, nothing psychologically chancy, nothing ambiguous or risky, just pure and simple labor whose results you could see transpiring before your very eyes. I must have worked for an hour or more, lost in the act of clearing debris from this sacred mortal space, piling it on a huge flat stone at one end of the clearing where we could burn it later.

  Sitting down to take a break and eat the sandwich I had brought with me, I wondered how Nep was faring this morning back home while Rosalie began packing for their trip north. As I ate I fantasized what it would be like to live on Covey full-time, try my hand at the same sort of subsistence farming and fishing the Metcalfs had managed over that last century. The obvious impossibilities of such a life soon flooded the fantasy and capsized it like a matchstick rowboat swamped by a freak wave. There was nothing here for Morgan and Jonah, nor any paying work for me who, at any rate, couldn't farm or fish my way through even the mildest Maine year. Still, as passing fancies went, it was a nice one. I stood, tossed the sandwich crust into the woods where a chipmunk or rabbit might like to finish it, and returned to my raking. Another half an hour would do it, I figured. This would please m
y mother, I knew, as she sometimes liked to come up to this peaceful and secluded spot to pray. I could see the appeal. Perhaps raking and praying weren't such dissimilar acts.

  Soon a human rustling, a muted cough, caught my attention and I glanced across the cemetery clearing. Some pine boughs scythed the air, though there was no breeze to push them. Didn't mean anything necessarily—I had seen this curious phenomenon many times in the woods, as if supposedly inanimate trees got it into their heartwood heads to conduct an unseen orchestra. Another noise followed, though, a pebble plucking its way across the earth behind me like a skipped stone but on dewy grass instead of flat water. I begged myself not to look back at where I had heard the sound, but couldn't suppress my curiosity and so I did, a not quite involuntary reflex.

  No one and nothing stirred. My first thought was, Please, no more madness, but then I realized that of course the boys must be having fun at my expense.

  "Morgan," I rebuked, and then a little louder, "Jonah, that isn't funny."

  I leaned on my rake and listened for a moment. Was that a snort I heard?

  "Boys, stop it already."

  Neither I nor whoever it was just inside the shroud of leaves and needles moved or made any sound. I placed a deliberate hand on my hip to show them I was not amused.

  "Instead of playing tricks, you two ought to get over here and help me."

  More silence, followed by a thickish branch snapping deeper in the woods. Then came a sharp grunt lower in timbre than I had ever heard either of their preadolescent voices make, though I knew it had to be them. Nobody else on the island ever came up here.

  "Guys?" into the ether.

  The pitiless games boys will play. They would hear about this later, I decided, and continued with my work, pausing now and again to look up and listen. Naturally, it passed through my mind that this might have been another manifestation of the monster. But—how to explain this?—it just wasn't. My heart didn't beat with the same flutter, my breath didn't scallop and shallow itself. No divination was at play here.