The Diviner's Tale

by Bradford Morrow

  A slab of bluestone from the land was chiseled with his name, his dates, and Husband, Father, Grandfather, Diviner on its face and placed flat on the ground down by the pond dock, where we planted a large bed of magenta campions around the memorial.

  Just as I had done when I was pregnant, I moved back in with my mother for a while, along with the boys this time, so she would not be forced to suffer through a difficult season all by herself. Truth be told, I needed to recover along with her. She had taken me in while I awaited a birth—I would now take care of her while she adjusted to this death. Morgan was stunned by Nep's sudden absence and threw himself into his ballplaying as a means of getting through his grief. Jonah all but moved into his grandfather's barn, if not his life, spending productive hours out there fixing things from Mendes Road he deemed broken, that lawn mower for one. Rosalie gave Jonah full run of the workshop with the sole admonition he not hurt himself. If I didn't go fetch him to eat lunch and dinner, and to extinguish the overhead fluorescents at night, we might not have seen the boy at all. As for Rosalie, she relied on her prayers, her pastor, and her iron-strong belief in God and an afterlife to ease her through her mourning.

  "He's in heaven now," she said, in an unexpected, gratifying judgment of his final reward. The godless man she had always insisted was headed into infernal flames now rested his weary head on a silken pillow in heaven?

  "You think he's surprised to be up there?" I asked.

  We were alone, hanging his washed clothes on the line, readying them to be donated to the church thrift shop at his request, also in that letter, an olive branch extended to his wife, I imagined, as affirmation he respected her faith.

  "He's surprised, all right, surprised it's there at all. I can picture him looking around right now saying, This isn't so bad. Why didn't I believe sooner?"

  "If there's a heaven, Nep is in it."

  "There is and he is," she said, and this was the last time we ever discussed my father's fate beyond life. I admired her hardheadedness and softheartedness. I admired her, period.

  My own response to Nep's death was slow and sure as an orchid's blooming. I may have had a year to prepare myself for this eventuality, but the hard, pitiless fact of death was nothing that discipline or anticipation could curb. Preparation was as futile as hoping to avoid death itself. And yet, what I had learned from the man was permanent enough that, other than our not being able to add fresh experiences together, he was as alive as ever. It was like he simply happened to be in another room, out of sight and hearing. That said, I wasn't quite as consoled by my own life's activities or faith as my mother and children were. Many were the days when I found myself wishing he'd come out of that other room and speak with me about any little mundane thing. My aching for him to walk through the door and say something would abate in time, I knew, but never finally go away.

  Astronomers have a word for the uncommon occurrence of planets aligning in the sky. Syzygy, they call it. I've never seen one, though Rosalie and Nep did once when they were young. Newlyweds, they had come up to Covey to visit Henry Metcalf for the first time. Henry never traveled much farther afield than Ellsworth but wanted to meet his niece's man. One night during their stay, three planets lined up in the expansive starry sky. They saw it together from the balsam grove at the highest point on Covey not far from the family cemetery, the very grove where I now sit, a peaceful place which on a clear night is like a planetarium without walls.

  What Rosalie witnessed was an astronomical event she would tell entranced science students about for years. For his part, Nep said that in their audacious symmetry, where the rest of the universe of stars and worlds was reveling in pure disarray (—Like joy incarnate, as he put it, according to Rosalie), the row of silver planets seemed courageous to him, if a bit unnatural. A line, he said, like a person's life, only finds its value when plunged into the great whirl and movement of things.

  My mother told me about this syzygy sighting of theirs when we first arrived on the island last week, while we made our traditional mother-daughter hike around the island. She confided she was pretty sure that was the night Christopher was conceived.

  "Why didn't you ever tell me before?"

  "You never asked," she said. "Besides, maybe it's just another one of my myths."

  "A lovely one, if it is," I said, thinking about how Laura and Nep had formed two parts of a syzygy with me.

  Nep stood at the farthest end of our fragile lifeline, our throughline. Fading off the grid now. Laura was nearer its beginning. And I—who wept on Charley's shoulder while he whispered how sorry he was, how he had hoped good pilgrim Nep had a marathon of years left—was the link between them. I, the diviner who learned from her father and began to find herself by divining a stolen girl. The ancient Greeks, as ever, had it right all along. We understand our character by measuring it against and within the character of others.

  The news that emerged from Henderson's in the days after Roy Skoler's body was removed from the ravine below the cave cliffs was ultimately understandable but only if measured against some demonic ideal. Bones, some quite old and long defleshed, were unearthed by Klat's dozer, the one assigned the task of carving out a man-made lake in those lowest flats of Henderson's valley. A graveyard skillfully sequestered there for what would prove to have been years, a couple of decades. It was an unceremonious excavation, but the consequences were salutary in the long run. At least the remaining truth about Roy Skoler was brought into the difficult light. All the girls, and there were several of them who had called out to me that day when I sat waiting for Laura to be discovered, had died similar deaths. Broken necks indicated that hanging had been his preferred method, his fantasy of implementing death in the air going all the way back to Emily's fatal fall, it appeared.

  Building history backward, as investigative and forensics experts of such tragedies can do, defying time and its most coveted secrets, it came out that Roy had collected girls from far and wide in counties a day's drive from Corinth. Missing persons no longer missing but uncovered by the dozer's blade had been held, it was determined based on date of disappearance versus presumed date of demise, for a considerable period of time. No reason to think he hadn't kept them, his unfortunates, in captivity in that same hunter's cabin, although it would appear he knew very well what he was about, given how bare of any evidence that shanty was. No reason also not to conclude, as time would tell, that his modus operandi had all along been to prey, scavengerlike, upon the female siblings of lost boys, having researched the disappearance of brothers and then approaching them with the promise of reuniting them. One theory suggested he would go into periods of remission after successfully carrying through one of his adventures from abduction to death, given how many years apart these girls' deaths had occurred, or so their remains proposed in the scientific theater of odontology, DNA, and decomposition analysis and extrapolation. In other words, I had saved Laura's life.

  This moment of finally knowing what the hanged girl meant marked the end of my quest to conform. My foray into the ordinary hadn't lasted long, but I knew it would not bring me to a better life. Besides, there was no ordinary in this world. I had tried my best to stop divining but understood that it was in my blood. No, it was my blood. I missed myself and wanted her back. Laura, too, would emerge from all this, I knew, and that was a triumph. She, with all her poets and journals, would, as I had, find her voice. Say herself. And I am here voicing what I know now. Saying myself. A different sun rises each day for every set of eyes that watches it. Mine, scanning the horizon to the west where it breaks through the fog banks, are now searching out the bow of Mr. McEachern's ferry.

  The balsam fir grove gives off a mild green scent. A welcome smell that never fails to remind me of Christmastime, even in August. A gift-giving scent, a celebratory perfume that transcends any season or religion. This promontory of tenacious, hardy shrubs and pines is scarcely a couple of hundred feet above sea level, but the views are commanding both toward the open ocean
out east and Mount Desert south and west. Baker Island and the Cranberries are still shrouded in morning mist but I can distinguish their outlines, conifer-capped pink granite plates in the green calm water, and see Baker's lighthouse beacon flashing. It won't be long before the fog banks roll out to sea, into oblivion, and the gentle curve of the Earth is plainly visible once more to the naked eye. When I was young I used to bring a book here and while away hours by myself, sometimes watching for bald eagles and ospreys overhead, or a pod of whales running along in heavy swells, other times tracing that horizon-curve way beyond what my eyes could see and imagining how very big the planet is. And how small.

  I hiked up here this morning so I could be the first to see Mr. McEachern's mailboat rounding the edge of Islesford on its passage out to us. Last night, I asked Rosalie if she didn't mind getting the boys fed and off on their blueberry-harvesting excursion, as I wanted to take a walk before dawn, head up to the balsams, spend an hour or two by myself before Charley arrived for his first sojourn here with us, with me. She loved taking care of Jonah and Morgan, especially when we were on Covey, so my request was granted without a moment's hesitation. The twins had always filled the great absence of her Christopher, the loss that would haunt my mother all the way to her heaven. Now, with Nep gone as well, she was more than welcome to indulge herself as my fellow loving custodian of the twins. Besides, the boys missed their grandfather. What better proxy could they have than this woman who knew him better than any of us?

  Nep did manage to escape a funeral in church, but he couldn't escape the inevitability of a large memorial service at home. All the same faces he had seen on Independence Day, and many others besides, gathered once more on the rampart, again in the early evening, on a Saturday later that July. Charley—shattered by the revelations about Roy Skoler—drove back down to be present, and it was then our childhood friendship matured. The night before the service, he came over to the house to help us set up the folding chairs that were loaned to us by Rosalie's pastor and arrange tables for the reception after the memorial. Once Rosalie declared everything ready enough and thanked us all, hoping we would excuse her as she was exhausted and wanted to go to bed early, Charley and I dropped the boys off on Mendes Road and went for a drive to the river to take a walk in the glowing twilight. I myself was anything but tired. Wired, sad, fearful, yes, but also at peace with what a rich life I had experienced with my father. If Jonah and Morgan felt a tenth of the love and loyalty he had shown me—and which I did my best to match—they were fortunate sons. Charley took my hand and we roamed along. Some furry brown bats, the birds of the moon, coursed out over the slow-moving water, snatching up mosquitoes and other hatchers.

  "I need to tell you about something, Charley," I began.

  "Whatever you want," he said.

  "You know about my divining."

  "I'd be interested to know more."

  "Well, it's usually a mundane exercise—"

  "More mystery than mundanity, it'd seem to me."

  "Well. Normally what I find is water, because that's what I was taught to look for and that's what people in these parts call on me to locate. But this spring when I was dowsing in the middle of nowhere..." and told him everything I had never before shared with any one soul. He needed to know whose hand he was holding, whom he was about to embrace.

  Several friends spoke at Nep's memorial service. Niles recounted the ways in which he had been a father to many of us gathered here, himself included. Charley recalled with warmth how Nep's ability to see what others failed to see had inspired him over the years. Sam Briscoll, representing the three wise men, praised his old friend's unearthly skill at fixing the broken things people brought him. If he'd been given enough time, Sam said, and if people had wisdom enough to let him, Nep could have gotten this whole world of ours running quite nicely, thank you very much. Partridge spoke about how he had always thought the Earth was round until Nep proved it had other dimensions.

  Speaking last, I thought it best the man be allowed to express himself to those who loved him. I repeated some of the many truths Nep had told me over the years, reprised my favorite Nepisms. What you divine is a reflection of yourself, he always said. Divining is one of the great chances a mere mortal has to reach out and touch the sacred. Divining is a human rather than a divine experience since it only works when a man or woman stretches so far into their humanness they allow themselves to be exposed to the deep simplicity of everything. When you're divining you're talking to a part of yourself that knows what you knew all along.

  He believed, and I agreed in the closing words of my eulogy, "Divining is finally just another form of prayer."

  Afterward there was a reception that Nep himself would have loved to attend. I couldn't help but remember the conversation we had, speculating about whether the good was erased along with the bad when one's memory was gone and how Nep promised he would get back to me with the answer if he could.

  Nep, I thought, I'll always be listening. While we mourners, we sad celebrants, conversed on the lawn beside elegant tables laid out with food and drink, and while Jonah and Morgan played Nep's beloved jazz albums on his record player, which they'd brought out to the back porch, a woman I had never met walked toward me, where I had wandered down by the pond. She had a hard face, kindly but creased as a piece of paper crumpled by mistake and then smoothed flat again. One of the few at the gathering who wasn't wearing black, she had a solemn air like a dark veil about her anyway. Hers were quick searching eyes, the eyes of one in need, but who was nervous to ask for help.

  She introduced herself. Her name was Grace Sutton, she said. She was deeply sorry about my father's death and wasn't sure whether this was the right moment to discuss such matters. I invited her to tell me what was on her mind. She said Nep had hoped to drive over to her place when he got to feeling better, see if he could help her. They had spoken about a year ago, perhaps a little longer, about his coming by again. She lived up north past Cooks Falls. A ways up the side of the hill above the town and river that ran through it. My father had divined her place once, she told me, kneading her hands and looking down at her feet. He really helped her family out of a bad situation.

  I assume this had to do with a dead well and so asked her if she and her family had running water, or stagnant, just now.

  "No, nothing like that," was her response. Without getting into details, there was more that needed doing.

  "If you think you could see your way clear to coming up," she faltered.

  Before she even fully finished asking her question, I told her yes. I couldn't promise her I would find what she sought. But I would be honored to try.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe a great debt of gratitude to Marty Cain, David Royer, and Jim Linn of the American Society of Dowsers, wonderful and patient instructors from whom I learned basic dowsing techniques in Danville, Vermont. Anyone interested in the multifaceted art of divination might do well to join ASD, which has chapters across the country. It should be noted that most practitioners refer to their work as dowsing more often than divining, but I found the myriad implications of the term divining irresistible, even necessary to my own art.

  I would also like to thank the sociologist Robert Jackall, who has done extensive fieldwork with police and detectives and generously offered me thoughtful insights and ideas about crime and investigation. Peter Straub and Mike Kelly gave close readings to early drafts and made a number of crucial suggestions, for which I thank them with fraternal affection. Books I found especially helpful while writing The Diviner's Tale are V. S. Ramachandran's A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness, Andrew Lang's Custom and Myth, George Serban's The Tyranny of Magical Thinking, and Christopher Bird's The Divining Hand. TomáŜ Joanidis helped me believe in the path anew when I got lost. Others who encouraged me along the way are Henry Dunow, Lynn Nesbit, Howard Norman, Robert Olen Butler, Micaela Morrissette, Douglas Moore, and Glenn Erts. I thank them all. Thanks also to Andrea Schulz, Tom Bouman, Rac
hael Hoy, Summer Smith, Michelle Bonanno, Laurie Brown, and the whole intrepid Houghton Mifflin Harcourt team, as well as my eagle-eyed copyeditor, Barbara Wood, for their kind support. My editor, Otto Penzler, is a natural-born diviner whose wise guidance through the many valleys and fields of this project has been true-compass every step of the way. Finally, without Cara Schlesinger the first word here wouldn't have found its pendulum arc to the last.