The Diviner's Tale

by Bradford Morrow

  — Ain't that yummy, Gummy?

  Coughing as hard as I was, I couldn't speak.

  — Take it easy. You all right?

  I continued to gag as he clapped me lightly on the back.

  — What you need's another tug. That's what the pros do.

  — I don't want—

  — No, here. That's a girl.

  I could hear the engines racing wildly, crazed, as he held the flask to my lips with his right hand and, with the open palm of his left hand pressing against the back of my head, eased more down my throat.

  — There now. Much better.

  He must have worked swiftly because I cannot remember him setting down the flask, cannot remember any sequence of acts between that second drink and his moving one of his hands between my clamped thighs, kneading me with rough clumsiness. With his other hand he gripped mine and forced it on his hard pulsing lap. I bit his tongue when it pushed itself past my teeth into my mouth, and I remember hitting him as hard as I could on the side of his head with my fisted free hand, at which he slapped me right back with far more strength than I possessed.

  We sat stunned, silenced, each of us in our different way. Though I wanted to, I refused to allow myself to cry. It was Roy who spoke first.

  — That's not very friendly.

  — You're not my friend.

  — I thought you'd like that. You like watching it enough.

  — Do not.

  — You got a pretty good eyeful last week.

  — I never saw anything, I lied, heart racing.

  — Keep it that way, he said, and forced another hideous kiss on me, his thin tongue in my mouth once more. I didn't dare struggle again but blanked my mind of all thoughts and waited for it to be over.

  This can't have gone on for too long, but it might as well have been a vile eternity and only ended—violence interrupting violence—when we were abruptly torn away by shouts, though not at us. A pandemonium of yelling kids at the center of which were terrible shrieks like those of a rabbit being carried off by a fox to its final destruction.

  —Say a word about anything to anybody and you die, he told me, holding my head back with a tight fistful of my hair. —Believe that.

  I knew the screeches had to be coming from one of the gang, but I'd never imagined that a boy could produce such a high-pitched sound. I was finally crying as Roy and I ran in the ringing and shaded air to where the others were gathered, all gesturing wildly. There, under the headlights of Jimmy's four-wheeler, I saw Charley Granger writhing on the ground, clutching at his face, blood seeping between his fingers. Ben and my brother got him on the back of Ben's four-wheeler. With Christopher and me leading the way, the whole gang went racing down the mountain as the last light was giving over to nightfall.

  Charley did lose that eye, and Roy Skoler disappeared for a while from everyone's sight. He needn't have warned me not to tell a soul about what happened, because it was the last thing on earth I would ever have done.

  The gang essentially disbanded after that, which was fine since, as Christopher told me a few days later, home from visiting Charley in the hospital, it was time for all of us to grow up already, anyway. My parents didn't permit me to go see him. They felt the poor young man ought to be allowed his privacy and didn't need visitors who weren't his closest friends. Since no one could possibly understand what a close friend I considered Charley, I sat down and wrote him a long letter telling him how awful I felt about what had happened, that I was thinking of him every day and night and wished him a speedy recovery. I signed the letter Your devoted friend and never sent it.

  Part III

  REVENANT IN THE LIGHTHOUSE

  14

  HERE WAS ONE OF those mornings sailors loathed but I loved.

  Dense stringy fog wrapped itself around Covey Island, looking like exquisite silver scarves slipped by the breeze off the necks of mermaids, as Rosalie once said. Sea smoke, some island people called it. She and Nep were arriving today. Given there was no sun to tell us dawn had broken, it was lucky I'd set the alarm clock. The boys and I had agreed to get up early to clean and straighten. All three of us wanted the cottage to look picture-perfect for their grandparents. I can't have been the only one to whom it occurred that this might be our last family gathering on the island.

  "Good," said Morgan. "They won't be able to get here before the fuzz burns off."

  "I wouldn't count Mr. McEachern out no matter what the weather," I said.

  "But we're totally socked in."

  "Let's get to it anyhow, what d'you say."

  They dragged broom, mop, rags upstairs and I started in the kitchen. Rosalie had always been a more meticulous housekeeper than I. A kitchen I considered passable would to her be just this side of grimy. I wanted her to be happy. The soot-dusted coal stove was first, there in its antique black splendor, bathed in light from windows that radiated a translucent gray, and against whose panes a gently blown mist whispered. I pulled off the grates and began by emptying cinders and ash into a bucket. Again I thought, like up at the cemetery, I loved this kind of work. So gratifying to see immediate results. With students, you never knew. You work hard to teach them, then years go by before they might become heads of state, or wards of the state. And with divining you never were sure if you accomplished anything until the hole was dug. Things had certainly turned out well with my boys, mopping away upstairs now, though I remembered being so dismayed when the results of my liaison with James Boyd became as visible as the bucket of ash I carried to the fire pit.

  Since I was thin and tending toward tall, my pregnancy began to show—at least naked in front of my unwashed mirror—by autumn the year of my encounter. Show, I thought at the time. What a word. As if it were a performance, an exhibition of a work in progress with a collaborator nowhere to be found. I took to staying at home, keeping out of the public eye. My parents saw less of me than ever and I didn't return friends' calls.

  I was living at the time in a converted barn. Rent was cheap. Pastoral views were framed by every wheezy, breezy window. An ancient hornets' nest that put me in mind of a huge molten brain hung in the cherry tree outside my bedroom casement. The owners of the property allowed me to ride their aged horse that lived with a few goats on the floor below mine, in trade for my feeding them. My well-worn books I arranged on cinder-block shelves made with planks of rough hemlock, slivery wood that had been left in a corner downstairs when the board-and-batten building was raised.

  Mostly, reading was how I passed my hours. Reading and worrying. My three cats braved the times with me—Homer, so named because he was partially blind and loved to sing; Herman, in honor of Melville, whom I considered a late-born Roman epic poet; and Sybil, because the others followed her around as if she knew where the action was going to be. They had chickadees to stalk, mice to chase, and a big late-season vegetable garden to play in. How often, those days, I found myself wishing I were one of my cats. I used them sometimes as excuses for canceling further divining work that summer and early fall. I must have sounded daft or lazy. I can't make it there today, my Herman is lost. My Homer is sick. Sybil's about to have babies. I felt as free as a nail in the wall.

  Where I lived was only a short drive from my parents', which made my absence the more pointed. For all my autonomy, my childhood bedroom was still there, and I missed it. Missed Nep, missed Rosalie. Niles, of all people, would be the best friend outside my family I could possibly trust to have any insights as to what I should do. But Niles had married in June and we tacitly agreed to observe some decorum and distance.

  Instead of calling anyone I knew, one morning I telephoned an abortion clinic in New York. Made arrangements, set a date. The relief I felt when I hung up was staggering. What had I been thinking all August? That I was actually going to bear this poor doomed love child? An accidental embryo the result of a betrayal? It would be criminal to bring this baby into the world, I believed, terrified I might unfairly hate it from the moment I laid eyes on its face and
recognized its father's exquisite, treacherous features.

  Having now emerged from the stupor of not knowing what to do, I telephoned Rosalie and invited myself over for dinner. My mother and father had always been straight with me, and clearly the honor must be returned. I wasn't so foolish as to think either of them was going to like what they were about to hear. But I didn't have enough Boyd-like indifference in my heart to hide my disgraceful mistake from them any longer. I would need moral, or, as I imagined Rosalie would reckon, immoral, support to get through the abortion. The time had arrived for me to come clean.

  Nep greeted me at the door with a hug. —Been a while, stranger.

  —Is that her? my mother called from the kitchen where we joined her.

  They had decanted a special bottle of wine and their moods were buoyant, which made me feel all the more petrified.

  — Here's to homecomings, Nep said, raising his glass. We drank and my father and I sat down at the kitchen table while Rosalie continued with dinner preparations at the nearby counter. She asked over her shoulder about the cats. What a shame this one was sick and the other lost. So glad he found his way back home. Nep inquired about my dowsing. Would I be able to help him more before the snow flew?

  — And by the way, Rosalie added. —How many kittens did Sybil wind up having?

  — Actually, Sybil didn't have any kittens, I said, lowering my eyes.

  — That's sad, my mother said, setting her knife on the cutting board. —Stillborns?

  — No, Mom.

  — Maybe she just got fat. False alarm, Nep joked.

  — Well, Syb is a little fat. But she was never pregnant.

  — Pseudocyesis is what that's called, Rosalie said, ever the science teacher. —So it was a false alarm?

  — No, I knew she wasn't pregnant.

  — What in the world would possess you to say she was, then? That's not like you.

  — Don't worry about it, Ros, said Nep. —I'm sure Cassie here can explain.

  I glanced up at my father, then at my mother's worried face, before finally confessing, —Homer and Herman are fine. They've been fine all along. I feel horrible and ashamed to admit this, but I haven't been at all truthful with you.

  Rosalie came and sat down with us at the table. —What's wrong, Cas sandra?

  A hesitant silence intruded before I said, quietly, resignedly, —I'm pregnant.

  The look on Nep's face was one of such supreme dismay I can picture it in my mind with precision even now. I didn't dare glimpse at my mother to confirm her anger and humiliation. Now came a longer silence than before.

  Rosalie finally spoke. —Please tell me it's not Niles's.

  — It's not, I said, wishing like anything it was.

  — Well, whose is it? Her staccato voice was filled more with fear than hostility.

  — You don't know him.

  — Whose is it? It's hers is whose it is, said Nep.

  Pressing forward, my mother continued, —What's his name?

  I told them everything. Nep might have paused at the surname Boyd, I couldn't quite tell. We always kept each other informed about the various places we dowsed, and he had an elephant's memory before the Alzheimer's. He had already gotten up from his chair and had his arm around my shoulder, and Rosalie was holding my hands across the table, flexing her fingers hard and unconsciously.

  — So now what? she said. —Does he know?

  — No.

  — Shouldn't we contact him? Nep asked.

  — No, never. What's next is I'm going to have an abortion. By next month this will all have been a bad dream.

  — Over my dead body, Rosalie cried out, standing.

  Nep said, in a tight strained measured way I never heard from him before or after, as he sat again, —Let's all be quiet and be quiet right now. Let's not get ahead of ourselves, or behind, either. We're a family and we've had problems in the past and we'll have problems in the future and this is one more problem we will work out together. He folded his fingers together on the table before him and stared at his hands, as one might a chess piece before making a crucial endgame move. —I do have one question.

  — Yes?

  — Have you given consideration to keeping it? I think your mother already expressed her opinion about the matter. And you know she and I don't always agree on things of this nature, her church and mine being different—

  — What church? Rosalie said. —Where's an address for it? I'd like to attend one of their services sometime.

  —but, and not that this is anyone's decision but your own, I believe the three of us would be able to manage it if you went ahead. Who knows, maybe when the father finds out, he'll do the honorable thing and—

  — I never want to have anything to do with him again.

  — Devil's advocate's never my favorite role, my mother said. —But don't you have the ethical responsibility, if not a moral one, to inform this person he's gotten you pregnant? Aren't there maybe legal consequences involved in not telling him?

  Her points were well taken. But ethics, morals, laws simply weren't of overriding importance to me at that juncture. I think if James Boyd had left it alone after the one night of intimacy I might have felt less adamant about despising him. But driving up two days later and knowingly putting me through the paces a second time, aware he intended to turn right around, having told me nothing whatsoever of the truth, made me bitter. I could only imagine what a multitude of emotional games he was playing with others in his universe. Wasn't my business. But neither was my life, including my pregnancy, any of his.

  — I don't care, is how I responded to her question. —He abandoned any rights to anything having to do with me. Besides, I do know him enough to know that this is the last thing on earth he'd want to trouble himself about. He's not that kind.

  Rosalie came and offered an embrace. She did so with such a painful smile I was petrified. —There are other solutions to the problem, she said, her voice cracking.

  When Nep rose again and put his arms around both of us, we reached the end of the dialogue. We managed to eat. Back at the barn, I had left plenty of food and water for the cats, figuring there was a chance I wouldn't be home until tomorrow. I spent the night in my old bedroom.

  Even in the safety of this childhood haunt, surrounded by old familiars like my worn doll Millicent and my frayed Pooh and my favorite books like The Runaway Bunny, whose pages I leafed through hopelessly, and all the other comforting childhood memorabilia, I was wildly restless. As were Rosalie and Nep. I heard them through the wall, getting in bed, getting back up. The house would fall quiet for a time, then more muffled discussion would ensue. Talk, whisper, moan, talk.

  Somewhere in the midst of it all I experienced a profound recollection. Here was precisely the consternation and gut pain I felt that night, so long ago, when we learned Christopher had been in his fatal accident. Death and the promise of life. It was hard to imagine they could inspire such identical responses in me. Although I can't begin to reconstruct the sequence of thoughts that led me to this conclusion, it was sometime after I connected my dead brother with my as-yet-living fetus that I decided to have the child.

  If my parents were willing to suffer the temporary indignities of gossips who were going to have a field day with me, the unwed, unattached mother, then so could I. Let the backstabbers have at my back. Wasn't like I hadn't been their mark before. What was more important, I had the chance to turn a wrong into a right. To take the ugliness out of what had happened by besting it, maybe even transforming it, with something the absolute opposite of ugly. These thoughts may have trodden across the line from realms of cold maturity into those of rather fanciful idealism, but in retrospect, they led me to make the right choice.

  My drafty, quasi-converted barn might have been habitable for a single woman but it wasn't the best environment for a mother and her newborn, so I moved back home that fall. Reluctant initially to accept my parents' offer to stay with them for a while, I did have to adm
it that I craved the company, if not the comfort, that being with them afforded me. At night, I settled down in my childhood bed facing the dormer windows with my mewling gang of cats and stared sleepless at a moon-and-starlit view memorized into a personal mythology over more than seven thousand nights.

  The months dropped away as I swelled and sphered. The scandalmongering came to pass and then faded. I spent more time reading about the rearing of children than anything by Euripides. Told Niles over lunch at a local diner what was happening, Niles whose wife was also pregnant, I thought ironically, even though there was no irony involved. He, as ever, avowed a heartfelt loyalty, a lifetime bond that neither this nor anything else would sunder, and offered to support me in any ways he reasonably could. I made an excursion to the city to buy all sorts of baby things. Sewed infant clothes with Rosalie. Built a crib with Nep. And then built a second, identical one after learning from the obstetrician that I was expecting twins. For all my stack of self-help textbooks and admonitory advice from my mother, I could never have anticipated how much physical labor—far beyond the labor pains of delivery—was part of rearing babies. I was a total neophyte, and no forevisioning or divining would wipe that basic deficit away. Like every new mother, I improvised my way through their infancy.

  Not one day or night went by without my worrying that James Boyd would suddenly appear to disrupt my life all over again. But he never turned up, never called. By becoming such a thorough absence, he allowed me to stretch him, as it were, like a canvas on a frame. With provident care, I molded a new father for these boys, and amazingly, Rosalie and Nep didn't contradict me, even though they must have known I chose to fill in some blanks with pure invention.

  What my boys grew up with was that their father was a handsome and hard-working man whose job forced him to be on the road more often than he'd have liked. When he finally had to make a choice about whether to settle down or stay on the road, he chose the road. We lost touch. The last I heard, he was successful. A rising star in his own life, but a shooting star in mine. No, I don't have a photograph of him. He always said, A photograph is yesterday, a person is now. And now is better, just ask yesterday. I never met his parents. His mother was deceased, though I spoke on the phone with his father. A dignified voice, a kindly man I thought, also dead now. And that was that. My boys and I had each other and we were a trinity to contend with.