The Diviner's Tale (28 page)

I
WAS UP EARLY,
the liquid melodies of the first thrushes my alarm clock. A heavy mackerel sky stretched overhead, the sun obscured behind it as the moon had been the night before. But my resolve was not dimmed. If anything it had sharpened while I slept. Today was Morgan's homecoming, and even though he'd only been gone overnight, I wanted to make it special. Special in an ordinary, commonplace way. I mixed buttermilk pancakes and fried some sausage and eggs for Jonah when he came down. In a small copper pan I heated some of Cleve Miller's local maple syrup, which filled the kitchen with a childhood incense. I cut a big white bouquet of fresh peonies from the garden and arranged them as a centerpiece for the kitchen table. Filled the bird feeder, which soon was crowded with goldfinches.

From the moment I woke up, I had been singing in my head a nursery rhyme that Rosalie, who was a great aficionado of such ditties when I was growing up, used to recite to me. It went,

The cuckoo comes in April,
She sings her song in May;
In the middle of June
She changes her tune,
And then she flies away.

Which made me wonder, as the rhyme surfaced from nowhere, the way old memories can do, whether the cuckoo represented my unhappy visions come and gone, or whether I myself was the cuckoo. Maybe neither, probably both, but it took me by surprise, this lullaby I hadn't heard for over three decades.

There was no getting around Jonah, no fooling him, so I didn't try. When he asked, halfway through breakfast, "What's with you this morning?" I knew there was nothing to be gained by hedging.

"I've made a couple of decisions."

"Sounds scary. You want some juice?" pushing back his chair and walking to the fridge as nonchalantly as he could manage.

"No, not scary. Tomato, if there's any left."

"So what decisions? There's only orange here."

"Orange is fine. Well, for one I'm going to lay off divining for a while. I don't have any jobs scheduled right now, anyway."

He brought our juice to the table and sat, saying, "If anyone calls, I can do it for you, if you want."

"Well, Jonah, that's really sweet of you to offer. But I think it's best to cool it for a while," reaching over to squeeze his hand which rested on the table. He didn't squeeze back. Not that he was angry with me, just lost in contemplation and disappointment.

"So what else?" he said.

"I'm going to talk to Mr. Newburg about getting my teaching job back."

"The great Newburg who gets a couple of whiny calls from some dickweed parents and what's he do? Stand up for you? No, folds like a broken chair."

"He did what he thought was best for his students," I said, marveling at Jonah's vehemence.

"Did what he thought was best for his own ass."

"Don't use that language. You're too smart for words like
dickweed
and
ass
."

"If I was smart, you'd listen to me."

"I do listen to you. You're my compass. But I need to make money to pay for the mortgage, the eggs and orange juice, and the best way for me to do it is to get my job back."

"This is because of yesterday. You didn't like the Bryants."

"Actually, I did, Jonah. But this is because I realized I haven't been myself these past couple of months, ever since I was out at Henderson's—"

"And saw that girl."

"—and thought I saw something I didn't really see," I said, wishing I could tell Jonah about the other three instances that continued to plague me, so he might have a better chance of understanding my position. "I'm glad my mistake caused something positive to happen, but it would have happened anyway. Laura's an intelligent girl. She would have climbed back to the road and flagged somebody for help soon, anyway. My being there was total coincidence."

"And you believe that."

"Sure do. You should, too."

He rose from the table with extreme dignity and left the room without a further word. This was not going to be easy, I realized, and empathized with Jonah to my very core. But my course was set, and I had to husband, as they say, my resolve.

That same Saturday morning, before we left to collect Morgan, I telephoned Matt Newburg at school, expecting to leave a message that he might or might not choose to return. Instead, I found him in his office. I explained that during my time away I'd had a chance to think about our conversation and some of the concerns parents and prospective students had conveyed to him earlier. I told him I understood their worries. Appreciated as well his awkward position and his need to view things with the big picture in mind. I asked if it would be possible to meet to discuss my status.

He said, much to my surprise, "Why don't you come in Monday morning."

I thanked him, hung up, penciled the appointment on the kitchen wall calendar. A good first foray, I thought, wandering into the front room and looking out the window at our horse chestnut for some vision of another ghostly boy or girl that would contradict my mood. But no, only a woodpecker working its way up the bark, pecking for bugs. On an impulse, I opened the phone book and looked to see if Roy Skoler was listed. He wasn't.

At the bus terminal, the glum look on Morgan's face as he threaded his way through the crowd spoke volumes. Jonah and I, models of reserve in light of all the handshaking and hugs, glanced at each other, guessing in the second game he must have made the last out with the bases loaded, or errored on some clutch throw that handed the other team victory. Unceremoniously, Morgan chucked his gear bag in the back of the truck, climbed in, and grumbled, "Let's get out of here."

"What's happening, man?" Jonah asked, as we pulled out.

"Nothing."

"You can't win them all," I said, as trite as a stale fortune cookie.

"What're you freaking talking about?" Morgan challenged.

"I mean, it's clear from your mood the team lost."

"We killed them. They couldn't've sucked worse."

"So what's the problem? No 'hello,' no 'good to see you'?"

"I'm not in the mood, Cassandra, so spare me."

"Easy, dude," said Jonah.

"You can shut up, pipsqueak."

Without a further word being spoken, I realized what was wrong. "You didn't get into a fight, did you?"

"I'm too smart for that. They'd have benched me the rest of the summer."

"Who was it?"

"Who cares? Screw them, anyway."

"We'll talk later," I said.

"Forget it."

The rest of the ride home was tense. And here I had wanted so badly to listen to my twins do their routine, jousting and joking, but neither of them had much patience with me at the moment. Still, this incident—which, predictably, turned out to be a couple of the boys taunting the team's star player about his mother, new kids trash-talking him in an effort to secure a place in the hierarchy and drag him down a notch—further steeled my resolve. Morgan was right. It didn't matter who ridiculed me with another tired accusation. What mattered was we move forward. One of Rosalie's pet clichés was
Consider the source and rise above it.
As clichés went, a decent one.

After lunch, the boys recovered some of their fraternal rhythm. Morgan's spirits revived as if he had shaken off an umpire's bad call and had to go on with the game. Suppressing my urge to tell them to lock the doors while I was out, I drove over to see my parents. Here I told them—sitting on the back porch, looking at the meadow that cupped the pond as if in the palms of its hands, a vista as familiar to me as my own palms—about my decision to take a hiatus from divining, my request to be reinstated at school, my desire to simplify life and get more into the swim of things.

"Like racerats swim," I could swear Nep said under his breath as he swatted at an invisible fly. "Churchrats."

"What was that?" I asked.

"Churchrats."

"Be nice," Rosalie interjected.

He looked out toward the woods and pale horizon beyond.

"Ever since Henderson's," I continued, trying not to reveal my distress at the strength of Nep's disease this afternoon, "I've been flying backwards and upside down and I'm tired of it. Hummingbirds can do that but I'm no hummingbird. An albatross more like. I have to pull myself together for you and the boys, if not for myself."

Rosalie sat as silent as a Trappist nun, clearly caught between a dawning optimism that her daughter had been visited by some archangelic clarion voice of wisdom, after so many years of wandering in darkness, and an apprehensive concern that there was some catch lurking behind this sudden transformation. "I've even been thinking," I continued, "that if it isn't an imposition, I'd like for me and the boys to come to church with you tomorrow."

"Imposition?" she said, breaking her silence with a beaming smile. "It'd be wonderful. How long has it been since Morgan and Jonah saw the inside of a house of worship?"

Nep stared into the distance.

"I can't guarantee they'll go along with it—"

"You're their mother. Tell them and they will."

"That's not quite how it works. They've got heads harder than anvils and I can't force them. Besides, how many times did you tell me to go and I didn't?"

"Your father was the reason you got away with that."

"Either way, I'd like to go to church tomorrow. I want to see if there's something there for me."

Nep shook his head. An unpleasant cast settled over his face. He wasn't in pain, so far as I could tell, but neither was he comfortable. He appeared pinched, as if some errant facial muscle had seized up. I glanced at Rosalie. To her, it seemed, nothing was unusually amiss. When she walked me to the truck, I asked about him. He seemed to have taken a sharp downturn since returning from Covey.

"Bad days, better days," she told me. The dementia flowed under the influence of its own unseen tides.

Dementia.
Such an ugly word, like
death, decay, despair.
But his mind was losing itself, his words sculpting themselves into curious shapes. While I'd avoided thinking of his illness as dementia, strictly speaking this was precisely what was chasing him away from himself. Driving along an empty road to Mendes, I tried to imagine our lives without him striding around competently, modestly, in it. What a weatherless world it was going to be.

My proposal after dinner that the boys accompany me to church was met with a resounding hush at first, followed by a storm of raucous, disbelieving laughter.

After asking, "You're kidding, right?" and seeing I was quite sincere, Morgan shifted into one of his mock characters, the Minister of Sinister. "My deareth brethren," he lisped with sham melodrama. "Blessed be heeth that passeth through the eyeth of the needleth."

"Amen," his brother intoned.

As ever, the routine descended into playful sacrilege.

"Oh, Joneth, my childeth."

"Yea now, Minister Sinister."

"Thou hath sinneth and now must payeth for thy sineths."

"Boys, come on," I said.

Morgan grabbed a broom that was leaning in the corner behind the kitchen door. With grinning solemnity he raised it like a crosier in both hands, saying, "Prepareth to meet thy maker, you sinful scummeth."

"God save me." Jonah laughed and fled the room, perhaps a touch worried that Morgan, still moody, might take the joke too far. "Save me from the fire and brimstone—"

Running after him, Morgan shouted, "Minister Sinister's coming to punish you."

The screen door slammed. They horsed around outside, yelling and yapping. One of those moments when I was grateful our nearest neighbors were hundreds of yards farther down the road, unable to hear us.

And yet next morning, after all the hijinks, without another word exchanged about the matter, they donned their blazers and ties and accompanied me to the service. We sat toward the back of the nave on one of the long mahogany pews, beside Rosalie who was in shock over our actually being there. Flanking me, the twins shifted some and stifled yawns but were otherwise on good behavior. The pastor gave a sermon on the healing power of soul-cleansing. Like most such sermons, or so I guessed, his was generic enough to feel tailor-made for my personal predicament. That was the genius of good preaching. The imagery got a bit out of hand—I couldn't picture running my soul in the Laundromat of the Lord's love, or drying it on the clothesline of contrition—but many of his points made sense. Whose spirit couldn't use a good scrubbing once in a while?

After a haphazard but earnest rendering of "Arise, All Souls, Arise," much of the congregation departed, but my mother insisted we join her in the annex, where they served coffee, juice, and doughnuts. I knew this meant getting in over my head, and the boys urged me with strident whispers to skip the reception. But I was drawn along by the stream of talking worshipers and the unvarnished enthusiasm of my mother who, it was plain to see, reveled in all this. The congregants were upbeat. That is, until a few of them noticed me and gave me some of the looks I'd anticipated. What-is-she-possibly-doing-here looks. Even Hodge Gilchrist, once a bosom buddy but now grown up and married to convention, and his wife, Jane, gave me a condescending nod.

Many of these people would have heard the rumors of my fantasized discovery of a hanged girl in the woods. More than a few may have preserved a low opinion of my morals based on my having given birth to a couple of illegitimate children. Others disapproved of or were amused by my heretical divining. Part of this was surely paranoia. But part of what I was seeing—the turned heads, the mild grimaces, the shallow smirks—was as old as the hills surrounding this village church.

As I began to search out more friendly familiar faces, ones that might offer an encouraging smile, I realized—despite my teaching and Morgan's games—just how much an outsider I had become. Amazing how if you seldom attended the volunteer fire company's annual pan-cake breakfasts, or never went to the big June tractor parade in Callicoon, and if you avoided the various roast beef dinners at St. Joseph's and religiously skipped church, you really could live in a community and know almost no one at all.