Water Witches

  Page 49

  The plumber, standing in perhaps a half inch of water, was hammering clips around the electrical wiring that would attach the pump to an outlet high up on the wall. The power was off in the house, and so the plumber was working by the light from two lanterns.

  As the plumber slammed the clips into the thick wooden beams in the basement, Patience felt the Y rod twitch in her hands, and begin to suggest that one of the underground streams was moving. She began following the vein with her divining rod, walking slowly away from the plumber, watching it react as she moved further and further away from the man. It was as if the reverberations from the hammer were pressing the vein inch by inch in the opposite direction.

  "It's all about sonic forces at work," Patience says today when she explains the process of diversion. "Just as sonic booms will smash glass, a good bang on a crowbar in the right spot will divert an underground vein." Consequently, Patience is now one of perhaps two dozen members of the American Society of Dowsers across the country who believe they can marry two veins together (often doubling the water flow), or divert an "offensive'' vein away from a building or house.

  "And unlike most of the plumbers I know," Patience boasts proudly, "I don't get mud all over the kitchen floor when I'm done."

  The fact that there are indeed more male dowsers in the country than there are females means nothing to Patience. She remains wary. Nor do the facts that there are almost twice as many men as there are women on the Board of Trustees of the American Society of Dowsers and among the group's sixteen officers carry much weight. Patience says these are merely additional examples of how men have unfairly coopted power from women, how they have invidiously usurped control of yet one more God-given female talent.

  "Rectal womb implants for men. It's only a matter of time,"

  Page 50

  she has said to my father and brother on at least a half-dozen Easters, shaking her head in frustration.

  Both Laura and the two sisters' mother, Anna Avery, fear that one day Patience is going to open her mouth at a dowsing conference, and utter the worst sort of blasphemy. Whether she would begin with her belief that only women can dowse (and that all men should be heaved from the temple), or her belief that only select peoplepeople like herhave the true calling is hard to say. But it is entirely possible that one day, Patience Avery is going to stand up at the annual meeting of the American Society of Dowsers, and preach to the thousand-plus dowsers who descend each year upon such small Vermont villages as Danville or Lyndonville that men can no sooner dowse than menstruate.

  What has kept her in line so far? Laura contends it is not so much a what as a who. And that who is Elias Gray: the oldest practicing dowser in Vermont, a tall, thin farmer now in his nineties. Elias has lived all of his life in Landaff, and Patience believes that if God gave the power to dowse to any one man, it was to Elias.

  "Look at his hands," she explains. "They're long and sleek like a woman's."

  Elias is also a vegetarian, and in the fun house mirror through which Patience Avery interprets the world, this is a further indication that the man is sufficiently sensitive to dowse. He has never even been deer hunting.

  Like Patience, Elias is a dues-paying member of the American Society of Dowsers who looks upon the organization itself with some skepticism. After all, with the exception of Patience, no one in the group has anywhere near his ability or his accomplishments, and it is possible that he views many of his fellow members as mere dilettantes.

  Elias, however, has never kept a log of his work the way that Patience has, and he has never dowsed outside of New England. But most people believe that it is impossible to drive down almost any Vermont or New Hampshire road north of

  Page 51

  Concord without passing at least one well that Elias has dowsed. If Patience has found eighteen hundred wells, then Elias has probably found eighteen thousand.

  Moreover, although Elias charges a fee for his services, he has never earned a dime in his life from dowsing. "If you don't charge 'em something, they won't think you're worth a damn," he told me once. "So I charge 'em whatever they want to pay, and then donate the money wherever in Landaff I damn well please." Consequently, from 1936, when Elias began to dowse seriously, through 1977, when Elias began to slow down, the Landaff Volunteer Fire Company never asked the town for a penny, and the Rescue Squad held not a single fund-raising picnic.

  "The Lord gave me a talent," he says, "and I share it the way I'm supposed to. If I were meant to be rich, the Lord wouldn't have made me a farmer."

  After Patience and Laura's father died, Elias looked out for the Averys. He would help repair the clapboards on the house after a particularly bitter winter, he would make sure the family always had plenty of wood come fall, and he would fix the screens on the windows each spring. His wife visited the Averys much less often than old Elias, but she too would do what she could, sending the Averys' way her Christmas pickles, and tremendous baskets of vegetables from her garden.

  At both of Patience's previous weddings, it was Elias the dowser who gave her away. And while I have always thought it rather odd that Patience of all people insisted on having a man "give" her away at her weddings, Laura wasn't surprised.

  "Sexism is one thing," she told me about her sister. "Ritual is another. Patience loves ritual."

  If Patience should decide to marry Reedy McClure, Laura and I have every faith that she will ask the old man to escort her down the aisle once again. She probably loves Elias Gray as much as she loves my wife and my daughter, and views him on some level as kina man not related to her by blood but by water, a bond that may in fact be much stronger in the eyes of a dowser like Patience.

  Page 52

  Consequently, Laura and I tend to think that as long as Elias Gray is alive, Patience Avery will keep her dowsing beliefs to herself.

  "I got these charts and graphs from a meteorologist up in Burlington," the overweight editor of the Montpelier Sentinel tells me on a Monday evening in the middle of June. "John Dexter with the tv stationWCAX."

  I hang my tie and jacket on the hook behind the door in my office, and pull on a red and neon yellow shirt with the words Quarry Men sewn across the chest, and the seams from a softball sewn through the "Q".

  "Dexter took the information he gets every day from the National Weather Service, and combined it with their long-range forecasts," Noonan continues. "Then he plugged it all into a computer, and the computer generated these graphics for television."

  Some of the charts are maps of the United States, and some are maps of Vermont. All of them are rich in blues and greens and yellows.

  "They must have looked very impressive," I tell him, trying to reflect his enthusiasm, but it's difficult. I've never been especially enamored with graphs and maps and charts.

  "They will look very impressive. They won't be on television until the six o'clock news broadcast tonight. Almost another hour."

  "Guess I'm going to miss them, in that case. We should be well into the second inning by then."

  Warren Birch, the more senior of my two partners in the firm, leans into my office, his sports jacket draped over his shoulder.

  "I'm out of here," he says to me. "You'll lock up?"

  I nod, and a moment later the front door to our office falls shut.

  "They'll be on again at eleven," Roger continues, referring

  Page 53

  to the maps as if we were never interrupted. "But you can really take your time with them tomorrow morning. I have permission from the television station to run them in tomorrow morning's edition."

  I throw my cleats and glove and antique Hillerich & Bradsby into a gym bag, allowing the bat handle to protrude through the top.

  "Well, I'll look forward to it."

  He rests his arms atop the throw pillow that passes for his stomach. "Damn it, Scottie, you didn't even glance at these for five lousy seconds!"

  "Was I supposed to?"

  He looks hurt. "Might
have been nice, yes."

  "I'm sorry, Roger. I just don't get excited about maps."

  "Do you have any idea how serious this drought could be?"

  I sigh, and put down the gym bag. Roger Noonan would not be standing in my office at five in the afternoon unless he had something important to discuss. "Aren't you supposed to be in an editorial meeting or something? Shouldn't you be in your newsroom?"

  "Of course I should!"

  I wander back to my desk, and together we stare down once again at the maps spread out on the blotter. He points at the first map with his index finger, as small and pudgy as most people's thumbs.

  "Precipitation is almost sixty percent below normal for the first five months of the year in Vermont," he begins. "New Hampshire is about forty-five percent below normal, and upstate New York is about twenty percent behind where it should be by Memorial Day. They'll both feel a little pressure this summer, but nothing like Vermont."

  "Any special reason why Vermont is so bad off!"

  "According to Dexter, northern Vermont gets a fair amount of rain because we're lodged between the White Mountains to the east and the Adirondacks to the west. Clouds sit between the ridges, and give the state a good dousing. This year, the

  Page 54

  mountains on either side of us are keeping the clouds away, instead of keeping them here." He pauses for air, a fat man's breather. Talking can tire Roger Noonan out. "Burlington is the cloudiest city in New England, you know. The city averages one hundred and ninety-nine cloudy days a year," he tells me after a moment.

  "I'm not surprised," I mumble, trying to concentrate on the chart showing the long-range weather forecasts. "Am I reading this correctly?" I ask nervously.

  "It depends on what you're getting out of it. But judging by the altogether pathetic way your voice just cracked, I have a feeling you are."

  "According to this chart, we're only going to get two or three inches of raintwo or three inches, topsover the next ninety days ..."

  "Bingo."

  "... when we should be getting ten or eleven."

  I have lived in Vermont almost twenty years now, and I have seen at least two droughts that I can recall, summers that seemed to last forever without any rain. I try not to let this particular drought alarm me, but for some reason it does. Perhaps it's the expected severity.

  "Look at the projected temperatures," Noonan adds, motioning toward a line of two-digit numbers across July and August, all of which begin with an eight or a nine. "It's going to be one hell of a hot summer. The temperature is going to be a good five or six degrees higher than usual this year."

  "And all of this is going to be on the weather report on tonight's news?

  "Weather report, my ass! This is their lead story, Scottie! Don't you get it? This is the number one, lead fucking story in Vermont!"

  Fifteen miles to the north, two magnificent white clouds of cotton rest for a moment on the long, flat summit of Mount

  Page 55

  Republic. Then they move on, one lone pair, flying into the clear night skies to the east.

  "Tag up on any fly ball to right or center," Clinton Willey is saying to me from the coaching box, as I stand on third base. I turn from the mountain to him. He continues, "It's going to have to be hit deep if it's hit to left. That guy out there has a cannon for an arm."

  Gulping in great swallows of air, I mumble, "I'm too old for this, Clinton. Never again am I stretching a double into a triple."

  Clinton, an elementary school teacher perhaps twenty-five, shakes his head. "That was a single with a two-base error, Scottie. Sorry."

  In the bleachers behind Clinton, Reedy McClure wanders down from his perch in the top row of seats, and starts to hover beside the Quarry Men bench.

  Our next batter is Ian Rawls, the managing director of Powder Peak.

  "Let's go, Ian, little bingo, little bingo!" Clinton says, clapping.

  Ian lets two pitches fly past him for balls, then strokes a ground ball through the infield for a base hit. With Clinton screaming his lungs out behind me, I jog home with the run, touch the plate, and then veer toward Reedy McClure.

  "I believe some congratulations are in order," I begin, taking his hand and shaking it.

  "Well, I thank you. There are many today who offered me their condolences instead."

  "You know what you're doing. You know Patience as well as I do. Probably better."

  "I know I love her," Reedy says, handing me a paper cup full of water.

  I nod my head apprehensively. But I am able to remain silent.

  "I do, you know. You only see one part of Patience. You only see her when she has her guard up. With me, that guard comes down."

  Page 56

  "Sounds like a reason for marriage to me."

  "You don't see her when it's just the two of us, Scottie. Or the two of us and her dogs. She can be very sweet. Very giving. Very kind."

  I swallow the water he has offered me. I smile. "You sound like a man trying to convince himself he hasn't struck a bad bargain."

  "Not at all. I was only nervous when I thought she might say no."

  "Oh, there was never a chance of that. I knew Patience would say yes the moment she told me you asked her. I think she only took the weekend to think about it because her first two marriages failed."

  He nods, then motions out toward the diamond. "You guys are embarrassing them," he says, referring to the team now in the field.

  Clark Rawls, Ian's younger brother, hits a fly ball over the left fielder's head. While the fellow chases the ball into the high grass behind him, Ian races all the way home from first base, and Clark doesn't stop until he is standing where I was only a few moments ago on third.

  "Let's face it," Reedy continues, "nobody stands a prayer against you boys from Powder Peak. You guys are animals."

  "Now, Reedy, only a few of us have anything at all to do with the resort. As far as I can tell, it's just me and the two Rawls brothers."

  "And Hugo Scutter."

  "Scutter is an engineer."

  "He's working with you on the expansion."

  "Have you and Patience set a date?" I ask, grinning as I change the subject.

  "No. But we'll figure that out this week. Patience thinks she wants a summer wedding."

  "Patience has always liked the summer."

  Reedy shakes his head. "It's not the season. It's Elias. She

  Page 57

  wants him there, and doesn't figure she should press her luck and wait too long."

  "No, probably not."

  "Of course, she also said she may want to wait until the second week of Septemberwhich really isn't all that far awaybut only if she's pretty sure Elias will hang in there."

  "The annual dowsing convention?"

  "Yup. She thinks it would be great to get married with a bunch of dowsers."

  "What do you think?"

  He shrugs. "Wouldn't make any difference to me."