The Death of Annie the Water Witcher by Lightning

by Audrey J. Whitson

  A hush falls around the body as the first mourners gather. A hush and a hallow. At first, some are startled by her open eyes but then their eyes rest on the flowers. The roses from her garden bunched up in vases all around the room show lovely against the white linens of the bier. We cut as many as we could find. The air is heady with their fragrance. Mike pulls out his video camera, shoots close-ups of the flowers and the bier. The men said they wanted to record this for posterity.

  The mourners dip their heads to Annie, to me, to each other, “Sorry for your loss,” they say. I nod and take their coats. “Coffee’s on in the bar today,” I tell the men and motion for them to help themselves. I tell the ladies they’re needed in the kitchen, and they seem to understand. Suddenly no more fuss and nonsense, they are there to serve lunch.

  “A perfectly fine day for seeding,” cracks Buster. The other guests laugh nervously. People are late this year, waiting for moisture.

  “Good luck to plant on the day of a burial. Good crops,” someone else says. And that’s how the men come to gather in one corner of the pub, around Jack, just south of Annie’s feet.

  ALEX

  I spend my time attending — auctions, funerals, news on the radio, weather reports. I attend orientations on new agricultural regulations, stock breeder certifications, municipal planning. It’s all the same. Sometimes eleven at night or one in the morning, I pull in to home. Doesn’t matter. They’re what keep me going. Other farmers, the only people who understand why I stay on the land.

  What’s at stake? Waking up every morning to wind, birdsong, sunrise. Neighbours, family, roots. My grandparents’ homestead. All the oceans they crossed, the labours, the droughts, hoppers, hailstorms, the failed crops. They left everyone and everything to come out here alone, for a life of hope, a real home. I’d be no better off than those poor buggers that drift from bed to bed in the city at night, from heating grate to shelter, from cardboard to shopping cart. Majestic and these farmers are the only family I have.

  Bob’s a study in the future: city slicker turned gentleman farmer. After his wife died he turned right strange. Sold his business. Built a bigger greenhouse, the old one small and makeshift, just some recycled windows jigsawed together. This new one is state of the art, engineered with special plastic and fans for ventilation. The size of a large machine shed.

  He tells me he and Virginia used to watch for roses on trips. If she saw something, they’d stop and take cuttings. Might have been in the middle of southern Ontario or the coast of California. He would tease her, “Are you sure these are going to grow in northern Alberta?” She’d laugh. She kept the clippings alive in disposable coffee cups refilled with fresh water every morning. That was how she grew the roots. He got so he started to pick them up on his home reno jobs too, anything exotic. She’d grow it inside the first year or two, wait till it rooted, bloomed, decide if she wanted to keep it or not.

  He’s tried to keep everything the way it was. The house. The yard. Even the fence: the weathered posts and barbed wire rusted, but patched with new in places. He waters and fertilizes like she would have, took up where she left off. He sent to Manitoba for Morden hardies, to Ontario for some breed they call the Explorers. Mail ordered to Britain and China, tea roses by the bucket full. All roses. Darned if I know one from the other, but he knows all their names. Genus, species, Latin this and Latin that. Special permits and passes and customs arrangements. Took delivery of the roots via Canada Post in February, nursed them along inside his greenhouse. This spring he’s been spending all his free time in the garden, hoeing and weeding and transplanting. Wants to turn the whole yard into one giant rose garden. It’s why Annie ended up there. All he needed, he said, was one more good well. Puts bird feeders out everywhere on his property, summer and winter; peanuts for the bigger birds. Bet he’s never seen a magpie peck out the eyes of a newborn calf. “Waste of good soil,” I said to Annie at the post office last week, “this love affair he’s got with the roses and the birds.”

  “Oh, but what a beautiful affair, Alex, don’t you think?”

  MIKE

  I pan the room as people arrive, one by one, zoom in as they come near the body, leave flowers, cards. Some cry, some remain stoic. If you lean close, you will catch a few words of the women in the kitchen. The talk is all about Annie, something she’d said to them, some way she had helped them. “What was that story about her early life? Where was she sent off to?” one of them asks. Just then, one of the guys yells at me from the other side of the room, teasing-like but serious too, “Are you getting ’er all down?” and a sign that they want to be recorded too. I move over to their corner, train the camera on Bob, who’s so upset he doesn’t even notice at first.

  “I feel sick,” he’s saying to them. “I know Annie’s death is my fault.” He stabs his thigh over and over again as he’s saying it. “It was fork lightning, miles away at first, but she was determined to finish the job. And then it came on all of a sudden. I should have insisted!”

  “She was as deaf as a post,” Alex interjects.

  “As blind as an earwig,” says Buster.

  “As stubborn—” Jack gives a sharp intake of breath, “as an ox,” he finishes, eyes cast down.

  Bob demonstrates now how he waved his arms, jumped up and down, the lightning crackling all around like a battlefield show. The birds still hawking bugs. The air not moving. “She didn’t see it coming.”

  “Terrible bad luck,” Buster chews on his cold pipe.

  “The more the gift, the more the loss,” says Alex.

  “The more the love, the more the loss, you mean,” says Jack in a long drawn out hollow voice, barely audible, as if echoing over a distance.

  We all let our glances fall on him, wondering about the catch in his voice, everyone except Bob, who needs to keep talking.

  “I called the ambulance right away. Gave her mouth to mouth. Couldn’t think of what else to do.”

  “A strong well she found you,” Alex says. “Flags still standing where the lightning struck. Thick, lots of doubles.”

  “She fell forward, but crouching.” Bob demonstrates from his chair. “Nothing broken.” He goes on to explain how if she’d been holding herself straight, chances were the lightning would have entered through her head. As it is the lightning went direct to the heart, right through the artery. Quicker that way, according to the doctor. “She died instantaneously.” Bob bites his lip, grimaces, the way men are bound to do when they are pained to the point of tears but don’t want to cry.

  “At least she didn’t suffer,” Alex says.

  Everyone nods.

  “She was getting up there,” offers Buster. “’Spect I’ll be joining her one of these days,” and he raps his knuckles three times on the corner of Annie’s table.

  “Those kids were out on the road again,” Alex says, “right where it happened. As soon as the lightning started to hit, they skedaddled.”

  “Usually Daisy spies the SUV when it passes through,” says Buster. “But no sign of it yesterday.”

  “I’ve seen them do the drops early, once a week, every week,” Alex continues. “Parked and waiting on the road out front. Could set my watch by it.”

  “Bea, at the gas station tells Daisy they stop on occasion. Always pay in cash, big bills. None of it counterfeit yet, but she feels better when she’s seen the back of them.”

  Alex leans forward now and lowers his voice. “I’m feeding the animals or working in the fields. Sometimes they sit there for hours till finally an SUV steals up the road. Two guys get out, one opens the hatch, the other guy shoves a package in the back. Sometimes they exchange a parcel for a cardboard box. Sometimes I just see a box in the ditch. No one has to tell me, ‘Don’t touch.’ ”

  “Right out on my quarter mile?” Bob grips both his knees.

  “That’s one of them,” Alex jerks his head back, and the group all turns to look at the young kid sitting by himself in the opposite corner, folding his baseball cap as if he
were trying to make a paper airplane out of it. “Kristian. Hans Mueller’s son.”

  “No use calling the RCMP.”

  None of them take their eyes off him.

  I point the camera in that direction, zoom in. Kristian looks away quickly, looks down. I zoom back to the Table of Truth, Alex, Buster, and Jack in the lens.

  “Ever since the Mrs. died,” Alex is saying, “the old man’s never been right in the head. Like he lost his reason for living. The boy’s just left to roam the farm, the roads. He goes to class when he feels like it. ‘Why isn’t he in school?’ I ask his old man one day when I’m over and I see Kristian walking around the yard with music plugged into his ears. ‘Kristian doesn’t need school. He’s got the farm,’ he says to me. Between us and the pillar there, he’s no farm boy.”

  “No indeedy.” Buster laughs and slaps his knee. “Doesn’t know the top of a pail from its bottom and that’s no word of a lie.”

  “Well, he’s smart enough. Built himself a little shack in the barnyard. Insulated, wired, even hooked up to the well.” Alex goes on. “I don’t know what he’s got cooking up over there, but it sure stinks.”

  Bob has started to sweat. “A little shack? What do you mean?”

  “Keeps pretty strange company for a country boy,” Buster says, untangling his tooled leather boots from each other, leaning forward and grinding his right toe into the hardwood floor for punctuation. “Those devil-fingered friends of his like their little black fast cars. Ride awfully delicate on our gravel.”

  “Yeah, that and their white-walled SUVS.” You can tell Alex is wanting to spit as he says it.

  “The ones that pass through town are rough-looking customers all right, tattoos up and down their arms. Devil skulls on their fists, knuckle breakers.”

  By the time I pan the room again, the kid has abandoned the paper airplanes. Now he’s wringing his cap with his hands, over and over again, holding it up as he twists it, as if he’s studying it for something. I remember now when the Mueller family used to attend Church, before the mother died, how Kristian could never sit still.

  “Yeah, I was over to the Mueller farm last week,” Buster says, lowering his voice, “talking to the old man about borrowing his bull.

  “‘What do you feed your wildlife?’ I asked him. ‘Quite the odour.’ He ignored me, kept squinting into the sun. The guy can hardly stand straight anymore. He uses a walking stick; one of his legs is buggered. Says his ticker’s offbeat. Wouldn’t be surprised if one of these days it’s his funeral we’re attending.”

  “I’ve asked him about the smoke coming out of the pumphouse.” It was Alex’s turn again. “That’s what he calls the shack. Struck me as right strange. ‘What are you curing in there?’

  “He said he didn’t know. It was some experiment Kristian had to do for the school.”

  “Yeah, the land is full of experiments these days.” Buster presses the crease on the top of his Stetson with one hand.

  Alex leans forward again. “I tell you, I’ve never felt this way before, but I feel fear living here now.”

  Bob moves to the edge of his chair. “What do you mean?”

  “Someone’s been dipping into my fertilizer tank. Leaves the cap off sometimes. The dog stays under the porch, doesn’t even bark. I’m not sure what they do to get past her. Lucky the wind’s been from the right direction.”

  “Who would be crazy enough to do that?”

  “Must be someone you know to get by the dog.”

  “And I know a lot. Probably every kid ten miles in four directions has been my summer help at one time or another. None of them stayed long. Too much work, not enough money.”

  “It’s getting so you can’t leave anything unlocked anymore.” Buster shakes his head. “Can’t trust your neighbour. If they can move it and it don’t talk, it’s fair game.”

  Alex keeps his eyes on the kid. “There were foot tracks by the tank,” Alex continues. “Fingerprints where the hose had gone in. Certain tire treads. I have my suspicions.”

  “Hans Mueller’s probably the most afraid of us all,” Jack says suddenly as the old man comes through the door.

  “Still,” Bob manages finally to get a word in edgewise, “Kristian’s got every right to pay his respects. If he was out there yesterday morning like you said, he’d have seen the whole show, and I bet it would have shook him up.” He grimaces hard as he says it, and you know he’s talking about himself as much as anyone.

  Jack says nothing. Shifts his posture from time to time but mostly keeps an eye on Annie.

  ANNIE

  I was walking Bob Taylor’s front garden, near the road, zigzagging, making my rounds. I had told him to go to the back garden and stay there. He’s always got so many questions. I need all my powers of concentration for this, I told him.

  I was listening for the rush of the water beneath me, the roaring of oceans in my ears. I was attentive to the stirring of the waters inside me like I always am when I’m witching, following the streams like I am wont to do, leaning into the earth, maybe more so because of these trying days, compensating for the distraction of the bishop’s coming. I didn’t notice the charged air rising. Only that my bones were aching — a sign that rain was close. I could smell it, but it was nothing that would hurt the witching. So I widened my radius, followed a path like a spiral, looking for the centre at the edges, looking for the source.

  I had said to Bob when we arranged this, “The full moon is not for another two weeks,” the days either side of it, the best time for planting and for finding water — that’s when the waters are highest, like the tide. The force field, strongest.

  But Bob didn’t want to wait. “Now’s the time to be putting in the roses, to establish their roots,” he said. They need a long season the first year and for that he needed water.

  “You’re going to have to get electric fences,” I said, when I got there, “to keep out the deer and the hares.”

  “That and more,” he’d agreed.

  Then he saw the thunderheads and he got worried.

  “No matter,” I told him. “It’s a long ways off. Can’t but help the wand, give it a little extra tug.” Still, a freak of nature so early in the morning. One that I marked as a portent of the times we’re living in, when the weathers are all mixed up, the air currents confused between times of year and times of day.

  He offered me shelter, nervous suddenly, a cup of coffee, and a later start.

  “Water is witched best at the break of day,” I reminded him, “and anyways, that storm is still a distance.” That’s when I sent him behind the house.

  The moment the bolt hit, I had a vision of the world laid new on the land, the fields flooded as far as the eye could see. A vision that I’ve only had a couple of times in the flesh, when by a peculiar trick of the season, the ground stayed frozen through a cool spring, heavy winter snows lay thawing, pooling slowly on the surface, water on the prairie as wide as an ocean. People might have believed they were saved, that a miracle covered everything, that the drought had been reversed by God, global warming trumped. But the older ones knew the trick. A northern mirage. Everything makes its way into the ground eventually.

  That morning, in the middle of an early day thunderstorm, I knew it was a vision of the end.

  Did it hurt? Just a prick of the skin, a split second and then I was flying.

  BUSTER GOODCHILD

  I’ve been keeping an eye on the young fellow off in the corner by himself, the one who looks like he hasn’t slept in days. I’ve heard enough of Daisy’s side of the conversation on the phone the last couple of months about young Kelsey’s situation to know their relationship. Bob’s right of course. Kristian Mueller is in need of friendship as much as the rest of us, maybe more. I stop to introduce myself as I’m on my way to the Mens to relieve myself.

  “Good of you to come out to pay your respects,” I say.

  “Yeah, well, it was the least—”

  I know that look.

/>   And then he almost loses it, blows his nose hard into a napkin, tips his head back and forward again, wipes his eyes with the back of his hands.

  Lovesick. I decide to pull up a chair for a minute.

  I nod to the corner of the bar where Daisy and Kelsey have the quilt bee going. “That your girl over there?”

  He barely glances in Kelsey’s direction. “She was, but I’m history now.”

  He’s picking at some scabs on his arm.

  “She sure is pretty.”

  “There’s no way I can take care of her, let alone a baby.”

  I let that settle between us. Give him a pat on the back, and nod.

  “It is a big responsibility, raising up another human being. There was a time when I was in a similar predicament, and in the dog house for it, so to speak.”

  He gives me a quick look.

  “But my girl had the opposite problem. She couldn’t have babies.”

  The young fellow stops picking at himself.

  “Darned if I could figure that out. A young and healthy woman like Daisy, not that many years older than your Kelsey here at the time.”

  “She’s not mine.” He shakes his head vigourously side to side.

  I ignore him.

  “We went into the city, saw specialist after specialist, and got all the tests.

  “For the longest time, I thought there must be something wrong with me because I’m a fair bit older than Daisy. That didn’t make me feel very good. It also meant I wasn’t much of a partner to her. Partnership, you know, that’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned from marriage.”

  The young fellow screws up his face and starts to clear his throat and cough again and again, like he’s got a big frog stuck down there.

  “We kept trying and trying, but when it came to feeling the loss she was feeling, I wasn’t much help to her. I kept thinking this problem will go away. Nope, didn’t go away. Just made me feel worse about myself. And the losing was eating her up inside.”

  “I don’t know.” He’s gasping for air.

  “But here’s the thing I’ve learned. Contrary to popular belief, women can be quite reasonable when given the chance. They’ll usually tell you what they need if you listen.