Water Witches

  The members of the group maintain the trail themselves, pulling up the periodic spruce that falls in the way in the spring, and cutting back whatever small bushes grow tall enough to peak through the snow. But the trail has nevertheless grown thin, and in some points the treetops cover the path like a tunnel.

  Until Ian was named general manager, he joined his friends on their annual homage to an earlier era in the ski industry. Now, however, he must disavow any knowledge of the trail's continued existence, and post signs in the area that insist no one trespass. Three years ago, he even fenced off parts of Ten-Hook Brook.

  The insurance company demanded it.

  Moreover, he has consistently refused to tell me the names of his renegade friends who still ski the phantom trail on Mount Republic. He says he's afraid I would join them.

  I had expected to find Patience in the arms of Reedy McClure, but I should have known better. Reedy sits on the porch beside Patience, but it is into Anna Avery's arms that Patience has folded herself. Mother and daughter sit together on the wicker couch that Patience purchased years ago, at the auction held when the old Tuckerman Lodge went bankrupt.

  Her dogsCocoa the Lab, and two of the ugliest mutts that I've ever seen in my lifelie on the porch in the shade. The mutts, two puppies from the same litter that Patience rescued on the same day, are brown and white and look something like pigs. Even their tails are pig-like, even their eyes. But, like Cocoa, they are unfailingly sweet and loving, and they worship

  Page 159

  the smell of Patience's sneakers and shoes. They are named Astral and Aura.

  Although Patience's house sits squarely in the center of Landaff, with houses on either side and across the street, from her back porch she has an unobstructed view of Powder Peak. That means, ironically, that she has a magnificent view of the ski trails the resort has carved into the sides of some of its mountains. In the winter, the trails look like wide, white riversnot white with foam and waves, but white as if they were actual rivers of paint. In the summer, on days like today, they look as if a giant took a monstrous jackknife and gouged out whole strips of the mountain face. It looks raw, painful.

  Laura sits at the edge of one of the wicker chairs surrounding the couch, and leans in toward her sister and mother.

  Anna smiles at Laura, and says, "Your sister here just never thought Elias would die."

  Patience turns toward her mother and glares at her. "Mother!" she hisses, "How can you say that?"

  Still smiling, Anna pats her older daughter's shoulder. "Because it's true."

  "I knew he was going to die. I gather I'm not allowed to be sad in my own house?"

  Reedy glances over at me, and in the brief moment when our eyes meet, we each try to gauge the depth of the anger that has remained from yesterday's lunch. He stands up and wanders to the column beside me, evidently assumingincorrectlythat Elias's death has softened me.

  "Your mother-in-law has been trying to get a rise out of Patience for about fifteen minutes now," he whispers, his conspiratorial tone his attempt at a truce.

  "I think she just got one."

  "How are you doing?" Reedy asks me.

  "Oh, I'm pretty blown away," I admit. "Hell, what Mrs. Avery just said made sense to me. I didn't think Elias would ever die either."

  Page 160

  "I'm kind of surprised by Patience," Reedy continues, as if yesterday's fight had never happened. "I always expected when this day came she would fly into overdrive. I expected her to choreograph the most impressive funeral Landaff has ever seen."

  "She still might."

  "Doubtful. She was okay until we went to the woods. But ever since then, she has been almost catatonic," Reedy says. He stares at me for a moment, then glances down at his watch. "I'm sorry about yesterday," he adds.

  My instinct is to tell him he should be, and leave it at that. If we weren't standing right now on Patience's back porch, I probably would. But we are at my sister-in-law's house, and this is the man that she plans to marry. Moreover, I cannot escape the fact that the closest thing my wife and my sister-in-law had to a father for most of their lives has just died. Reedy's and my fight may continue, but I can't allow it to drone on right here.

  "Me too," I mumble, with little conviction.

  "I was probably a little heavy-handed."

  I look over at Laura, unwilling to meet Reedy's eyes. "Don't worry about it. So was I."

  "We should stop by Giannine's this afternoon," Anna says to her daughters.

  "Can I get you more tea, Mrs. Avery?" Reedy asks.

  "That would be nice."

  "Get me some too," Patience demands, pointing at her teacup.

  "That's two rises," I tell Reedy. "Take heart."

  "Years ago," Anna begins, speaking to no one in particular, "four or five years after Mr. Avery died, Elias came by our house with a truckload of wood. Patience was with me. She was about nine. Laura, I'm not sure where you were. Brownies or something. It was spring, and he was bringing a couple cords by so it wouldn't be green come September. Anyway, Elias was

  Page 161

  distracted. Very distracted. He said he had just met Robert Frost."

  Patience folds her arms back across her chest, and looks at her mother angrily. She knows well the story her mother is about to tell, as do Laura and I. Only Reedy has never heard it. It is the sort of anecdote that I imagine Patience loves to hear over and over, but because she figures prominently in it, she must feign disgust for our benefit.

  "He said Robert Frost was driving around Vermont, looking for a new place to settle. He was living at the time over in Ripton. Well, as anyone with any sense might, Frost fell in love with Elias's land, his view. He thought it was just the spot, and living there would be just the thing. Just the thing. So he offered to buy the farm. On the spot. He told Elias to name his price, and he'd be more than happy to meet it."

  "Did Elias know who he was talking to?" Reedy asks.

  "Yes, he did. He knew exactly who he was talking to. And he told Frost that his farm wasn't for sale. So Frost repeated the offer: Name your price, he said. And Elias said it wasn't for sale at any price. He said he was happy right where he was."

  "Did Frost get angry?"

  "Oh, no. He told Elias, 'About time I found someone who's actually happy with his lot in this world.' Elias said Robert Frost told him that if he couldn't put a price on the land, then no one should buy it. But by the time Elias got to our house with the wood, he was having second thoughts."

  Patience snorts, and Cocoa looks up at the sound. "Elias would never have sold his land, not for all the money in the world," she says. She glances down at Cocoa, as the dog rests her snout on the edge of the wicker couch.

  Ignoring her older daughter, Anna continues, "Elias said there were a lot of things he could have done with that money. He said there were a lot of people in his familychildren and grandchildren, thenwho could have used it. He said there were a lot of groups in town that could have used a little help.

  Page 162

  The Volunteer Fire Company. The Rescue Squad. But he had said no. He had stood on his porch like a stubborn old fool, he said, and said no.

  "And that's when Patience spoke up. She had been sitting on one of the front steps listening to everything Elias had said, but she hadn't said a word up to that point. So then she spoke up. She said to Elias, 'I bet if you sold that land, you wouldn't be able to dowse anymore.'"

  Reedy chuckles. "You said that to Elias?"

  "She says I did," Patience answers, motioning over her shoulder toward her mother.

  "She sure did," Anna continues. "So Elias asked her, why was that? Why wouldn't he be able to dowse if he sold his land? And Patience here told him, 'If you started selling your land every time someone came to your front door, the ground wouldn't trust you anymore.'"

  Reedy wanders over to Patience and Anna, and gently strokes Patience's hair. "You know something?" he asks her.

  "I thought you were going to get
me some tea," she says, looking away.

  "You know something?" he asks again. "You were one hell of a weird kid."

  Miranda sobs and sobs, her face buried deep in her pillow.

  Just when Laura and I are convinced beyond doubt that no tears remain, that her body will no longer withstand one more onslaught of sadness, she will curl further into her blanket and press her face deeper into her pillow and she will wail.

  When we left Miranda at home this morning with the Scutter twins, she had seemed fine. Otherwise, we would not have left her. She was saddened by Elias's death, but she was accepting it with a maturity that struck both Laura and me as extraordinary, a maturity well beyond her years.

  When we returned early this afternoon, however, Jeanette Scutter told us that midmorning Miranda had begun to rear-

  Page 163

  range the furniture in her bedroom. She had left the garden where she had been playing, and gone inside the house. She had gone upstairs to her bedroom, closed her door, and begun pushing her bed and her bureau and her toy chest all over the room. At least that's what it sounded like to Jeanette. So Jeanette went upstairs to check on our daughter, and she saw that her suspicions were correct: Miranda had indeed rearranged all her furniture.

  And then, when Miranda saw Jeanette in the doorway, she abruptly burst into tears, tears which have flowed almost uninterrupted ever since.

  Laura rubs Miranda's back softly, and occasionally squeezes one of her shoulders. "Shhhh," she whispers, "shhhhh."

  But it is not solely for Elias that my daughter is crying, these are not tears spilled only for a once-ancient dowser. These are, I believe, tears shed also for trees now gone, for land that is scorched, and for rivers and brooks and streams that are dry. They are tears brought on by the drought, tears from a feara fear that I am unable to convince her is unfoundedthat nature somehow is changing. Moreover, my daughter's tears are tears of mistrust, tears that I know are directed at Laura and me.

  "You said it wouldn't matter if we lost some trees!" she has yelled at us twice. "You said it wouldn't matter!"

  After each of these outbursts Laura looked over at me and tried to smile, but the words hung in my daughter's bedroom like smoke. For weeks we have been telling Miranda that she had nothing to fear, that she had no reason to be afraid.

  A forest fire wouldn't be a big deal, we have told her, nothing's going to happen to the trees. It's all part of nature, I remember telling her one morning over breakfast, Vermont has plenty of trees.

  Now, however, the trees among which she dowsed the spot for Anson Gray's holding tanks are gone. All gone. Where there once was a beautiful new sugar house is instead a wide, long ashtray, bordered by neon orange tape.

  Page 164

  Wells continue to dry up as the springs that feed them disappear. There will be but one sickly cutting of hay this entire summer, the corn crop will be sorry, and the back door gardens that cover the state will yield little bounty.

  And, of course, Elias Gray is dead.

  All of this frightens our daughter, it frightens her more than it would most little girls.

  "You said everything would be all right!" she cries again, indicting her mother and me for misleading her. "You said everything would be all right!"

  "Shhhh," Laura coos. "It will. Everything will be all right."

  There are clouds to the west, there is rain in Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis. I can't believe this system too will break up before it reaches us here in Vermont.

  "Miranda," I begin, my voice little more than a whisper, "Would you like to go for a ride on a chair lift? I don't think we can go tonight, but Monday maybe?"

  One of Miranda's favorite summer treats is an after-dinner ride on one of the Powder Peak chair lifts. Technically, only the tramway is open for rides for summer tourists, and the tram only runs until five in the afternoon. But Ian Rawls occasionally has a repair crew working at the resort as late as five thirty to eight thirty at night, testing the chair lifts and tuning up the machinery. Consequently, if I call Ian ahead of time I can usually commandeer a ride for the Winston family at dusk.

  "Wouldn't that be nice, sweetie?" Laura asks Miranda. "A ride on the chair lift?"

  Miranda continues to cry into her pillow, but the sobs may be softer.

  "I want it to rain," she says to us through her sniffles. "That's all I want. I just want it to rain."

  Page 165

  18

  There are generations of Grays in the Landaff cemetery.

  Lying flat amidst the hydrangea in that part of the cemetery are a full half-acre of Elias's cousins and siblings and grandparents. He will be buried beside his older brother and sister-in-law, in a plot reserved for him andsomedayGiannine. He will be buried about ten yards from the boy who would someday have grown into his uncle Willis.

  Willis has, perhaps, the longest epitaph of any of the Grays in Landaff. This may be because he had the shortest life. But his epitaph is long, and the light Barre granite of his headstone is illustrated with a carved horse's hoof and a pair of angel's wings:

  Page 166

  Here rest the dashed hopes

  Of Willis Thetford Gray's loving parents.

  A youngest son,

  Born September 25, 1869,

  He died July 19, 1877,

  Aged seven years, ten months.

  It was a horse's kick

  Which smashed his skull and brain.

  He lived 18 days, sick,

  In agony and pain,

  Until finally he left us.

  We think not of the seventy years

  Willis lost,

  But we thank the Lord instead

  For the seven precious years

  That he had.

  Elias's epitaph has far fewer words, and will include simply his name and age. But before he died, the American Society of Dowsers, the Landaff Fire Company, and our town's Rescue Squad purchased for Elias a tombstone with a small rendering of a pair of hands grasping the ends of a dowser's Y rod.

  There are a lot of words to the conditions that come with Powder Peak's expansion permits, enough toas Liza Eastwick saidfill the pages of the Landaff Church directory. But as I examine the conditions carefully Saturday afternoon, sitting in the dry brown grass of our backyard, they really can be distilled to three key issues.

  Essentially, the resort can tap the Chittenden River to make snow, as long as the river's water flow does not fall below three-quarters of one cubic foot per second. Powder Peak had requested approval to use the river even if the water flow fell below that speed. Nevertheless, this condition shouldn't prevent the resort from expanding its snowmaking capabilities,

  Page 167

  and guaranteeing snow throughout the season on virtually every trail on Mount Republic.

  Assuming, of course, that Vermont gets some rain in the next year. Right now, the Chittenden River's water flow is just about three-quarters of a cubic foot per second, and slowing fast.

  Although the permit for the new trail network on the westernmost edge of Moosehead was denied because it would skirt too close to a wildlife habitat, the wide top-to-bottom trail and high-speed gondola that the resort had designed for the center of Moosehead were approvedas were all of the new trails and connecting paths on Mount Republic. The Commission also approved the additional parking spaces.

  Probably the most complex issue for Power Peak is the issue of the holding pond for the snowmaking system. The Commission not only denied the resort's request to build the storage pond near the base of Mount Chittenden, it insisted as well that the twelve hundred acres surrounding the proposed site remain a pristine, untouched forest area. While Powder Peak can certainly find another location for the pondand, I'm sure, willthe engineers told Ian yesterday that building the pond anywhere else could increase the cost of the new snow-making system by close to four hundred thousand dollars.