Water Witches

  "Well, that's that," Gertrude says. "Let me go get the checkbook."

  Laura looks quickly over at her own sister, and stares intensely at Patience. Patience meets Laura's eyes for the briefest of seconds, and then tells Gertrude, "Don't bother. This one was on me." She nods at Laura, a slight motion that I believe neither of the Scutters noticed.

  "A person's time is worth something, Patience, especially yours," Gertrude says.

  "Maybe. But that doesn't matter. This one was on me."

  "Patience"

  "Look, if you hit water above two or three hundred feet, you owe me some jam, okay? Some of your blueberry jam. And I don't mean one small tin, I mean a couple good size jars. Okay? Enough to get me through the winter."

  "I just can't believe we'll have to go to the bank and ask 'em for our CD back," Jeanette says, and I realize she hasn't heard a word that we've said.

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  10

  When I come home from work, Laura is seated along one of the long sides of the kitchen table, surrounded by piles of invoices and receipts and small ledger books.

  "This looks ominous," I tease her, gesturing toward all of the pieces of paper with numbers. "What's up?"

  She sits back in her chair and folds her arms across her chest. "I got two really monster orders today."

  "Well, that's good news."

  She shakes her head. "No, I mean really monster. They're from catalog companies. One wants the candles shipped within ten days."

  I put my attache case down by the closet, and then, remembering Miranda's insistent warnings about noxious rays, kick it halfway across the hallway. "Not possible, huh?"

  "Nope."

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  "You'd need more help?"

  "Yup. I'd also need to buy lots more materialsincluding packaging. I'd need more of those little brochures we put in each box."

  I sit down in the chair beside hers. "Someday, you'll outgrow the barn. Someday, you'll have to move into town."

  "No. I will never, ever outgrow the barn. If the Divine Lights of Vermont ever got that big," she says, flipping her pencil onto the table and smiling, "I'd sell it to somebody like Hallmark, and we'd live forever like royalty. But, no: As long as I own this company, it never outgrows the barn."

  Outgrowing the barn is no small issue for Laura. Running her business from our home has always meant that she was available for Miranda. It has meant that she was there when Miranda returned home from school, and that she could help our daughter with homework, she could teach her to ski, she could watch her play on the porch. It has meant that she could take time out from candles to weed the garden when she wanted to, that she could take the time to plant bulbs, or wallpaper a guest bedroom, or simply bake a pie with the blueberries that grow along the south edge of our driveway.

  It has meant, essentially, that she could always view candles as more of a hobby than a business. A relatively lucrative hobby, but a hobby nonetheless.

  And while it is at least remotely possible that we could convince the local board of selectmen to give us the building permits we would need to expand the company right here on our property, Laura and I have discussed that eventuality perhaps a half-dozen times as well, always coming to the same conclusion. If the company were to get larger, we would no longer want it at our home.

  "Where's Miranda?"

  "She's playing with the Woolfs," Laura says. "Cynthia said she'd drive her home a little before seven, on her way to choir practice."

  She begins to gather the papers she has been examining on

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  the table. "Patience called today. She and Reedy have begun to finalize the wedding plans."

  "A September wedding?"

  "Yup. Saturday, September ninth, one o'clock sharp. It's going to occur during the annual convention."

  "Oh, God. Poor Reedy. Getting married before a thousand dowsers."

  "Not true. They're getting married at the Congregational Church here in town, and there will be invitations, just like a ..."

  "A normal wedding."

  "Right. Just like a normal wedding."

  "Trust me. The idea that the world's greatest dowser is getting married will draw a crowd."

  "Nope. She and Reedy chose one p.m. because that's when the convention's 'Earth Energies/Earth Mysteries' field trip to a sacred site is scheduled," Laura says, only half serious. "The only dowsers who will be at the ceremony are the dowsers that she and Reedy invite."

  "Will it be a big wedding?"

  Laura smiles. "Well, yes. After all, Patience knows a lot of dowsers."

  Archer Moody's corn has begun to poke its way through arid beaches of sandsmall withered plants with sickly parchment-like leaves. His fields, which never get all the moisture they should, are long plains as dry as dust, the ground thirsty, scorched, baked to a hungry, cracked moonscape. In a good year, the corn is supposed to be knee-high by the Fourth of July. That isn't likely this summer.

  Archer Moody will be lucky if his corn is even alive on the Fourth of July.

  I find myself adapting to the heat wave in small ways, even as I drive past the Moodys'farm each morning on my way to work in Montpelier. I no longer wear my sports jacket or suit coat in the

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  truck, tossing it instead onto the passenger seat beside me. I have purchased a half-dozen short-sleeve dress shirts, although I am confident that Gentlemen's Quarterly would not approve. And I have begun to drive with the front window all the way down, despite the fact this makes it harder to hear the radio, and I dangle my left arm in the breeze.

  And as I drive, I try to concentrate solely on the road before me, so I do not have to see yard after yard that is burned short and brown, I do not have to see toasted corn plants with shriveling leaves.

  Even our little garden, despite the love and ministrations of Laura and Miranda, has begun to look droopy. Not exactly ill, at least not yet. But the flowers forming on the peas and the pumpkins look dry, and the mounds for the squash and zucchini and the cucumbers look parched. And everything looks a little bit sunburned.

  And still there is littleif anyrain in the forecast.

  I gather before me on my desk all of the newspaper stories from the past two days about Reedy McClure's rally at the State House, and survey the damage. Roger's Sentinel gave the event front page coverage, but most of the newspapers relegated the story to their local news sections.

  The Vermont wire reporter filed a tiny, four- or five-inch story that was buried in back pages of the Boston Globe and the New York Times.

  In the story in the Sentinel, the story that shared the front page with news from Moscow and Washington and a volcano in South America, is the one piece of information that I find disconcerting, the one piece of information that surprised me when I first read the news Tuesday morning.

  The chairperson for Vermont's District Five Environmental Commission, Liza Eastwick, told Sentinel reporter Rosamond Donahue that she was moving the public hearing on the resort's requests for building and land use permits from the

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  community meeting house in Bartlett to the Hammond Auditorium in Montpelier. The meeting house seats about forty people; the auditorium seats close to four hundred.

  I went to college with Eastwick, and I know she is about as open-minded as anyone who sits on a state environmental commission; I find it disconcerting that she has decided our hearing might draw that large a crowd.

  I look for the calendar on my desk, buried under three or four of the newspaper clippings. The hearing is set for Thursday, a week from today.

  Sometimes Roger Noonan is right about me: Sometimes I do have profound connections with the powers that move and shape Vermont.

  I run into Peter DuBois, the Governor's administration secretary, at the variety store around the corner from the statehouse, while buying felt for Miranda.

  Peter too is buying felt. His daughter and Miranda are in the same Brownie troop. ''I have a terrible feeling thi
s has something to do with butterflies," Peter says apprehensively, holding in his hands a large swatch of blue. Peter has been a fixture in state government for over a decade, as a legislator, a lobbyist, and now as Governor Florence Webster's right-hand man.

  "It does. It has everything to do with butterflies."

  "I have a terrible feeling this beautiful piece of felt is going to be covered with butterfly goo. They're going to mount the little critters on this stuff all summer long, aren't they?"

  I shake my head no. "I think they're going to cut the felt into the shape of butterflies."

  "This isn't for a biology badge or something?"

  "Nope. Just arts and crafts. I think it has to do with their float in the Fourth of July parade."

  "I'm relieved."

  "You look relieved."

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  "I didn't want butterfly goo all over the kitchen table." He takes a large square of black from the shelf. "Think they have orange?"

  "Somewhere," I nod, envisioning the monarch butterflies that descend every year onto the milkweed that grows along one side of our garden.

  "I thought you handled that rally thing very well on the news," he says, reaching across me. "The Governer did too."

  "Thank you. Thank her," I add, referring to the Governor.

  "She was relieved to see someone talking about jobs."

  "It's important."

  He jumps away from the shelves of felt, as if burned. Eyes wide, he says quickly, "Don't tell Reedy I said that. Governor Webster has purposely kept a low profile on the expansion."

  "I understand."

  "She only said she was glad to see the employment issue raised. She wants to see the environmental impact statement before making up her mind."

  "That's fair."

  "So you won't tell Reedy?"

  "I won't tell Reedy."

  He sighs. "Thank you."

  "No problem."

  "I probably seem a little jumpy."

  "No more than usual. You always seem a little jumpy."

  "There's going to be a press conference tomorrow. I hate press conferences."

  "What's on the governor's mind?"

  He looks around him, as if we were standing in the middle of Red Square in 1965, trading secrets about nuclear weapons. He folds the felt in his hands into small, crinkled squares. "I shouldn't tell you."

  "Does it have to do with the ski industry?"

  "Nope."

  "The environment?"

  "You can keep a secret, right?"

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  "Of course I can."

  He sighs. "It's about the drought. And we won't know for sure until this afternoon. But we're expecting a call from the White House, or from Senator Lurie. Lurie is ninety-nine percent sure that the Governor and he have convinced the President to declare Vermont a disaster area. A drought disaster area. And that means we'll be eligible for millions of dollars in aid. Millions!"

  "Millions of dollars" still means a lot in Vermont, a state with an annual budget that has never exceeded seven hundred million dollars.

  "You're going to make a lot of farmers happy," I tell him.

  "Damn right," he says.

  "Of course, that won't bring back the corn. Or give them a second cutting of hay."

  "No, but it will keep them in business for another year. And it seems to me, that's a major victory in this environment," he says, shaking his head, and I can tell that he chose each of his words with care.

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  11

  Aunt Patience is taking me to see the sugar house Mr. Gray is building today," Miranda tells me over breakfast Friday morning.

  "Don't you have to work on your float for the parade?" I ask her. "How did you escape butterfly duty?"

  "I didn't. We have a meeting this afternoon."

  "Well, when you go by the sugar house, say hi to Elias for me."

  "Yup." She jumps up from the table and races to the pantry, and takes down from an inside peg on the door her mother's Y rod.

  "Aunt Patience dowsed the spot to build the sugar house, but I get to find the place for the holding tanks."

  "That's a lot of pressure."

  "Yup." She sits down in her seat, holding the forked stick in her hands so that it points upward. "Know what?"

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  "What?"

  "When I was playing with the Woolfs the other day, I heard Mrs. Woolf tell someone on the telephone that the forests are so dry right now they might all burn up." I know by the way Miranda is scrupulously avoiding eye contact with me that this idea petrifies her, and she is trying to downplay her fears. I'm sure the fact that it was Mrs. Woolf who made this remark, the woman who is married to the chief of the Landaff Volunteer Fire Company, made it seem especially ominous to Miranda.

  "I wouldn't worry too much about our forests. Want to know why?"

  She nods, staring up at the divining rod.

  "A hundred years agoeven more than a hundred years ago, right after the Civil WarVermont had very few trees left. The forests had been almost completely cleared for sheep farms and dairy farms. Only a little bit of the whole state was forest. But now, so many trees have grown back that it's the other way around. Only a very little bit of the state is clear, and we have plenty of trees."

  "But that doesn't mean they can't all burn down," she says, finally looking at me.

  Gently I push the tip of the divining rod down with my fingers, and then lift my daughter on to my lap. "We'll lose some trees to forest fires this summer, sweetheart, just as we do every summer," I tell her softly, almost murmuring. "That's part of nature. Maybe because of the drought we'll even lose a few more trees than usual. But I promise, we won't lose very many."

  "What about what Mrs. Woolf said?"

  "I don't think Mrs. Woolf thinks we're going to lose all our trees either. She's concerned, as we all should be. But no, she doesn't think our forests are going to disappear either."

  Miranda sighs. "Well. I just wish it would rain."

  "Me too."

  We hear Laura returning from the barn, where she was setting up the Scutters' work for the day, and Miranda slides off my lap and starts toward the front door.

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  "You know what I wish?"

  "What?"

  "I wish mom and Aunt Patience and Mr. Gray could find water in the sky. I wish they could find water in the sky as easily as they find it underground."

  Governor Florence Webster reminds me of Laura and Patience's mother, when she was fifteen or twenty years younger. She moves with the same, almost confident carelessness I will always associate with the Anna Avery I met when I was twenty-one years old: a Vermont earth mother's faith that her movements cut a literal swath through the world, her belief that perfect poise is presumptuous. Her gestures are wide, her mannerisms extravagant, her smiles are broad.