The Grave Dowser

When the cowbell mounted on the door rang and a stranger entered, the clatter of the checkers against the board painted on the cover of the pickle barrel in the back room of Holmyard’s General Store ceased. Two polished brass rods, each shaped like a capital L, nestled against the stranger’s back like Satan’s folded wings when at rest. Strangers in Vermont’s Thebesford County were only as good as the money they spent and this stranger looked the type who kept his wallet buttoned deep in his back pocket. He smelled of cologne like a flatlander who shaved with hot water, not cold.  Louis Figuier, Holmyard’s owner, looked up from the wheel of Towhee cheese he was cutting into wedges to shrink-wrap for flatlanders who bought anything with Vermont or Green Mountain in the name.

“Anyone know the way to Melville Brewster’s place?” the stranger asked, glancing from face to face. He squinted at Darwin Deering like a hunter lining up a 15-point buck in his gunsight.

Relighting his cigar, Deering met the stranger’s gaze, then blew a smoke ring at him. “No Brewsters I know ever lived in the valley.”

He wore Country Club clothes, this stranger, outdoor gear decorated with logos of wildlife sold to people who thought the knowledge of how to live, hunt, and fish in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom was weaved into their wardrobe. Contradictions and the tension they created were recurring themes in Deering’s poetry and this stranger appealed to his poetic sense. Worth one poem, Deering thought, maybe two, for the literati who presumed to teach his poetry at university to chew over. Critics lacking wit compared him to Robert Frost, but Deering considered himself to be the T.S. Eliot of cowboy poetry, though he was more at home in the saddle of his ATV than on a horse. He blew another smoke ring at the stranger.

With a draftsman’s compass, Figuier measured another wedge of cheese. “Who’s asking?”

“Laurence Godfrey Winchell.” The stranger’s voice rattled as if he had a mouth full of pebbles. “Brewster sent me.”

“A Winchell,” Figuier said, “passed through here while back. Not a fancy name like yours. 1799 or so.” Figuier stroked his beard. Dirty gray, the color of water-logged slush after a late April snow, it was long, thick, as unruly as underbrush, yet a frequent blue-ribbon winner in beard growing contests at county fairs throughout Vermont.

“1810,” Deering corrected him. “Lawes Winchell his name.” Balancing his cigar on the edge of the pickle barrel, Deering leaned back on his stool, nesting his hands flat against his chest inside the top of his bib overalls. Hunting guide, horse trader, horse logger, ice fisherman, pump log borer, he scraped enough of a living out of the mountains to pay for his poetry, not the rhyming verse of summer bluebells, autumn leaves, hunter moons, or newly fallen snow, but post-modern neo-mimetic cowboy poetry rife with coeval proto-symbolism, the poetry  T.S. Eliot would have written if Eliot had been born a century after he was to Vermont Thebesford County folk instead of Boston Brahmins.

Most editors did not understand Deering’s poetry, but they apprehended that a certain exoticism enhanced their publications and accepted every poem he submitted. Over the years he had published enough to comprise several collections, something he had been invited to do many times, but always declined because he feared his muse would wither if imprisoned between the covers of books and his poetry would degenerate into drivel. Cowboy poets didn’t lust after Pulitzers or admission to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Winchell unfolded a piece of notebook paper roadmapped with squiggly lines and flattened it on the counter opposite the cheese wheel. “Brewster told me it’s off the Old Grunts logging trail.”

“Dowsed for gold, Lawes Winchell claimed,” Deering continued. “Seeded a nugget or two and connived a lot of good folks into buying what was worthless. Disappeared. How and where talked about to this day.”

Figuier offered Winchell a thin slice of cheese on the flat of his knife. “Made local from raw sheep milk. Black Barn Farm. Aged 120 days in a cave dug out of Mt. Neistan. Not a day more. Not a day less.” Mt. Neistan was one of the seven mountains that marked the boundaries of Thebesford County.

Winchell stepped back. “Strict vegan. No meat. No poultry. No dairy. Nothing from God’s creatures. Desecrates their auras.” He talked in a start/stop way, sputtering like a sugarhouse boiling tank with a clogged exhaust pipe. He tripped over some words, sped past others like he was racing his thoughts, falling behind, catching up, falling behind, catching up.

“Plants on Noah’s ark,” Figuier said.

Winchell glanced around.  “Brewster’s place?”

“Not this valley.” Deering picked up his cigar, tapping its ash. “No one been living off Old Grunts since Jonas Warner’s shunning and his twin brother Jabez died in Normandy, sixth of June, ’44. Valley royalty, Jonas and Jabez. Direct descendants of Seth Warner, second in command of the Green Mountain Boys at the Battle of Fort Ticonderoga.”

“Forest took over their place,” Figuier said. “Can’t hardly walk Old Grunts she’s so overgrown.”

“Melville Brewster’s Jonas Warner’s grandson,” Winchell said.

Figuier and Deering side-eyed each other. The same thought darted back and forth between them–this Winchell would make more trouble than old Lawes ever did.

Figuier pointed his knife at the brass rods. “Those?”

“L-rods.” Winchell set his backpack on the counter beside the notebook page. “Not for searching for water. I use them to measure auric fields.”

“Never planted auric,” Figuier said. “That a hybrid from scrambling genes?”

“Aura’s your energy field,” Winchell said. “All God’s creatures have auras. The more complex the creature, the more dynamic its aura. L-rods detect it. Measure it. Size. Strength. Fluctuations.”

“Despise flatlanders who think we’re dumber’n tree stumps,” Deering said.

“With brains the size of acorns,” Figuier added.

Winchell pointed his L-rods from person to person until they settled above Deering’s shoulders, framing Deering’s head the way antlers framed the head of an adult buck.

“Hold still.” Winchell closed his eyes. “I see letters. Jumbled up and scattered like a child’s alphabet blocks. You’re trying to arrange the letters into words except they fight you.”

“So, you read my poetry,” Deering said. “Don’t prove I got an aura.”

“Wait,” Winchell said. “A hole in the ground. Deep. Fresh dug. The letters are falling into it. No, they’re being pushed. Being covered with dirt. An alphabet’s grave.”

Deering pushed Winchell’s hands apart, forcing the L-rods to the side. “My family’s been twig twitchers generations back to when my people came from North Wales to work the slate. I still have the rod passed down. Never used it. Too impatient to learn the way of the dowser. Preferred playing with those letters you so eager to bury.” He paused. “Real rodsmen don’t use factory made.”

“Depends what they’re dowsing for,” Winchell said.

Deering ignored him. “Grandpops said I had his special gift and warned me what happens if I reject it. The spirits of dead dowsers materialize out of thin air, stalk me like an Abenaki hunting party, eat me raw, bones and all. This Brewster, he a dead dowser?”

“Neither dead nor a dowser,” Winchell said.

Deering slammed his hand on the pickle barrel. The checkers jumped in their squares. He crushed his cigar butt in an ash tray. “So, Brewster sent you.  Mind saying why?”

“If you have the gift, ask the rods.”

 

#

 

Four days later, Deering hunkered down behind a fallen red spruce, the victim of the Nor’easter of 1978. He had followed Winchell to Jabez Warner’s old place. Mt. Borraean, another Thebesford County boundary marker, glowed green in the summer sun. Thick foliage obscured the road through the Borraean Pass, two lanes of asphalt pimpled with potholes and frost heaves. A boreal forest of red spruce and balsam fir hearkened to the rumble of the trucks laboring up the steep incline and the squeal of their brakes descending the other side. Flatlanders who flew into Burlington and drove to second homes in the valley agitated for the road to be repaved, regraded, widened, for yellow stripes to delineate the center line and the shoulders, for reflectors to be sunk into the asphalt, for barriers to be erected on the naked curves and switchbacks, but flatlanders were ineligible to vote and the county road commissioners knew better than to waste money against the wishes of their friends and neighbors.

The spruce Deering hid behind lay inside the tree line, sheltered by a ridge overlooking what was left of the meadow where Jabez Warner once pastured dairy cows, the meadow having been cleared by Warner’s great grandfather when he returned from the Civil War. In the seventy-five or so years since Warner had gone to war, balsam fir and red spruce had encroached on the meadow, shrinking it by half, then half again. The newest generation of trees, barely the height of a man, dotted the remaining open space. The spring where Warner’s cows once watered in the morning sun was now in perpetual shade except at high noon on a few days during the week of the summer solstice. The stream feeding that spring now snaked through the forest rather than dividing the meadow into upper and lower sections. In two or three generations the conquest would be complete, absorbing the meadow where Warner’s children once dodged cow patties.

Deering didn’t have children, at least none he knew of. His poems were his children. His genetic legacy. Even the ones never to be published.

Bunchberry shrubs, one of the few species of ground cover that thrived on the dark acidic floor of a conifer forest, skirted the fallen spruce like a petticoat, their tiny white clusters of blossoms glowing with the occasional light that filtered through the crowns of the trees, illuminating the greenish center the petals surrounded as well as the ribs of the flat green leaves that bracketed them. Bunches of plump red berries, ripe for picking and preserving, hung from stems. Figuier’s wife put up bunchberry preserves that Figuier stocked beneath the counter for sale only to valley folk. Flatlanders lacked the taste to appreciate her preserves.

In the deep woods, a male spruce grouse hissed, answered by the see see suz-ee see of the black-throated green warbler, the least musical of wood warblers, a duet between song birds that had lost their voices. The forest quieted. Deering inhaled its fragrances in deep lung-filling breaths. Nothing written in his poetic old age matched the hypnotic hallucinogenic effect of the aromas of the forests of Thebesford County. In moments like this, Deering wished he had lived when boreal forests reigned and man hunted with spears, razor sharp with tips of antler bone.

Deering pointed his binoculars at signs of motion and adjusted the focus. Winchell plowed through the field grass and wild lupine that held out against the final invasion of red spruce and balsam fir. His L-rods extended outward in front of him, grasped by the short ends. Every few feet he paused, then moved on, crisscrossing like a farmer plowing furrows. At the spring, he dipped his hand in the shade-cooled water and wiped his face and the back of his neck.

Three times Winchell’s L-rods pointed down. Three times he stopped and sprayed a circle of orange marker on the grass, fluorescent graffiti disfiguring a verdant field, then resumed walking at right angles to his original route. Near the southern tree line, he knelt by a stand of jimson weeds, rotating their stems between his thumb and forefinger. He snapped off one of the flowers and held it beneath his nose. Eat it, Deering urged. Eat it. Winchell tossed the flower aside. By mid-afternoon, he had finished. Packing his gear, he disappeared into the forest heading toward Old Grunts.

Deering waited for half an hour, then followed the traces of an ancient footpath through the woods to the field. At the nearest orange marker, he gently swept aside the field grass with the flat of his hands, exposing the ground. There was no sign it had been disturbed. He checked the other locations. At the second, he scooped out a hollow of earth about the size of a cantaloupe. At the third, he built a cairn of small stones.

For the next several days, Deering hid behind the rotting log overlooking Jabez Warner’s pasture thinking Winchell might return to dig where he marked. Deering’s absence from the checker games at Holmyard’s, often for several days running, was as common as spring calving, and didn’t raise suspicions. Figuier attributed them to the itinerant way he earned his living as a hunting guide, horse trader, horse logger, ice fisherman, or pump log borer, the truth often, but not always.

Several times a year when a literary magazine had grant money or a university English department sponsored a symposium on 21st century poetry, Deering traveled to distant places to give readings and befuddle his audiences with cryptic answers to well-intentioned questions, his favorite being whether he preferred a thesaurus or the Oxford English dictionary as a source of the oddball words so prominent in his poetry. For these journeys, he left his bib overalls in his hotel room and dressed like an American poet in exile in Paris between the two World Wars, a child playing dress-up in its grandfather’s old clothes.

Days passed and Winchell didn’t return.

“Gone,” Figuier reported when Deering materialized at Holmyard’s. “Quint tailed him to Burlington where he caught a flight to New York.” Sheriff Rejean Alperine V, a fifth generation resident of the valley, was known as Quint because he was the fifth Rejean Alperine to bear his name and the fifth Rejean Alperine to serve as country sheriff. Quint lived on the homestead that the first Rejean Alperine had carved out of the forest on the southern slope of Mt. Proetid, another boundary marker, after returning to Vermont from the Battle of New Orleans. Before the lumber company cut through the dirt road, it was a day’s hike up from the valley floor. During mud season, Quint allowed two hours in his 4-wheel drive.

“Brewster ever show?” Deering asked.

“God bless Monskie.” Theresa Monkshood was the County Clerk and had been for as long as anyone could remember. She registered voters, maintained the census records and property tax lists, recorded births and deaths, marriages and divorces, burials. She remembered names the way school children remembered the alphabet. Figuier retrieved a stack of photocopies from beneath the counter and handed them to Deering. “His name went on the title to Jabez Warner’s place in 1989 when Rosie Brewster of Wareham, Massachusetts deeded it to him for $1.00. According to his birth certificate, he was born in Boston in 1971, the son of Rosie and Nathanial Brewster. According to their marriage certificate, they married in 1969 and her maiden name was Warner. According to her birth certificate, she was born May 1, 1944, daughter of Darlene and Jonas Warner. Never lived in the valley.”

Deering stacked the papers in a pile, tapped them on the counter to square the edges, then handed them to Figuier who slid them under the counter. “Why do you think after all these years?”

Figuier shrugged. The Five Elders had banished Jonas Warner from Thebesford Valley for poaching Deering’s Great Grandpop’s sugar maples and trap lines. Jonas’s defense was Grandpops did it, not him, word against word; but one word of Grandpops was worth a thousand of Jonas’s, especially when Jabez stood mute rather than defend his twin. Out west, Montana, Jonas became one of the richest men in the state by brokering the sale of lumber to the Department of the Army during World War II and the Korean War without owning a single tree himself. Being valley royalty, having all the money in the world, didn’t make up for the shame of being exiled and his twin standing mute.

That night, Deering backed his truck inside the barn and loaded two shovels, a long-handled and a short-handled, a pick-ax, a garden trowel, and a rusted tool box, covering everything with a tarpaulin that he anchored with cinder blocks. He secured his hunting rifle in the gun rack and slid several boxes of ammunition under the driver’s seat. He packed a cooler with enough food for several days and put it on the floor in front of the passenger’s seat. From the top shelf of the closet in his poetry writing room, hidden behind stacks of literary magazines in which his poems had appeared, he retrieved the gabardine carpetbag with the floral pattern and canvas handles in which Grandpops had stored the family dowsing rod. He put the carpetbag on the front seat of his truck and looped the seatbelt through the handles.

Under the cover of night, Deering drove the Pegler By-Pass, an Abenaki footpath that Jabez Warner had widened and graded so he could drive his pick-up to town. He drove slowly so he would not have to use his headlights. Above him, the Milky Way illuminated the sky. When he reached Jabez Warner’s meadow, he parked inside the tree line where the truck wouldn’t be seen. Money was the most obvious explanation as to what Jonas Warner had buried in his brother’s field, but Jonas, unlike Jabez, never did anything obvious. Evidence of war profiteering or political bribes, perhaps, but burning it would be safer than burying it. A body, but Jonas Warner had never been associated with any murders in the valley, solved or unsolved. Deering’s mind raced through the possibilities: an aborted fetus, holy relics of the Abenaki, old Jonas himself. Whatever it was, Jonas’s grandson had dipatched a flatlander to find it.

Hours later, the birds of morning awakened Deering, songs of call and response like a church congregation. He sipped coffee from his thermos and nibbled on red grapes and a wedge of Towhee cheese while he waited for the fog to burn off. He felt shivery like the time he gave his first poetry reading to a university audience. Chilled by air conditioning set too low, he had stood before an auditorium of people whose appearance, the clothes they wore, the way they walked, their diction and vocabulary, the subjects of their small talk, made him feel as dumb as a rock outcropping. He had gripped the sides of the podium that night as if he were trying to squeeze the fake wood into a sheet of paper.

Deering started digging at the marker with the cairn of small stones. Breaking through the thin layer of topsoil that was the curse of everyone who ever tried to farm in the valley, he soon reached the sand and gravel deposited by the Laurentide Ice Sheet when it retreated from New England at the end of the last ice age some 10,000 years earlier. Deeper and deeper he dug, deeper than the depth of a grave, deep enough to reach the water table; but nothing, a dry hole with only dampness at the bottom. Over the next several days, he dug eighteen holes, six at each of Winchell’s three locations. Hillocks of dirt rose above the field grass like giant ant hills.  He stank of body odor from days of sweating and nights of sleeping in his clothes.

Deering knew he wouldn’t be able to restore the field to its original appearance. Winchell would know someone had been there, had taken whatever had been buried, though nothing had been. He would ask around, but Deering had not shared his plans. The spruce grouse would not talk, nor the wood warblers. Neither would the balsam fir or red spruce. Nor the cow vetch, bunchberry shrubs, or jimson weeds. If there were poetry in what he was doing, he would not write it; at least not for publication in his lifetime.

Returning to his truck, Deering gulped a bottle of water and retrieved the family dowsing rod from the carpetbag. He grasped it by the short ends of the Y, his hands outwards, his palms up. He held it parallel to the ground with just enough tension to keep it stable, one of the many contradictions between the theory and practice of dowsing that convinced him dowsing was like astrology, fortune telling, communicating with the dead, something that could never be proven or disproven scientifically, but thrived from generation to generation as a popular delusion because of anecdotal evidence. Held too tightly, the rod did not react to the impulses emanating from the earth; too loose, it bounced up and down like someone riding the bungee cord ride at the county fair. Slowly, he crisscrossed the remains of Jabez Warner’s meadow, the Y-rod leading the way. Inside the triangle created by Winchell’s three orange markers, the rod rose up at a 45º angle, then plunged straight down. He planted it at his feet.

Gauging the distance between himself and the points of Winchell’s triangle, he estimated he was at its center.  As he prepared to measure the distances by walking heel to toe, a noise at the edge of the forest distracted him. A covey of birds fled the woods, too fast for him to identify. A spark of light exploded from the forest. Another spark and he saw the source, sunlight reflecting off mirror sunglasses like those worn by Vermont state troopers, two pair, one worn by Winchell, the other by a stranger. Brewster, he assumed. They did not move with the urgency of men who had found his truck. Deering dropped to a crouch and reached for his shovels.  Slowly, dragging the shovels and pick-ax, he back-crawled toward the tree line. Mounds of dirt shielded him. He remembered his trowel and dowsing rod when it was too late to retrieve them. Inside the tree line behind a balsam fir, he hid the shovels in thick underbrush. He looped the pick-ax through his belt.  Careful to avoid dead branches that would snap loudly under his weight, he climbed into the fir’s crown. If Winchell and Brewster, if that was the stranger’s identity, searched for him, up would be the last place they would look. From his vantage point, Deering could see the entire meadow into the woods beyond.

At the meadow’s edge, the stranger became agitated like a quail flushed from its cover by a hunting dog. He plowed through the field grass toward the nearest mound of dirt, curses trailing behind him.

“Relax,” Winchell shouted. “Decoys.” Extending his L-rods, he walked toward the center of the triangle formed by his orange markings. “Over here,” he said when they pointed downward where Deering’s Y-rod was planted. Winchell knelt, then quickly stood. He removed a handgun from a side pocket of his backpack and released the safety. Slowly, he pivoted, scanning the edge of the tree line, examining each tree from its roots to its crown, minimizing his motion so he would not startle any birds or animals that might be lurking. He didn’t see Deering.

Deering glanced at his watch. Maybe an hour before sunset, another before dark. A moonless night. If he couldn’t outwit two flatlanders in the dark, he deserved whatever befell him. He calmed himself by trying to write a poem in his head. He sifted through words and ideas, impatient, rejecting one after another at an increasing rate of speed. He needed a title. From titles came focus; from focus, poems. Black Bear in Softwood. Too easily deconstructed. The Ways of the Dowser.  Too intellectual. He hated intellectual poetry. The Grave Dowser. The ambiguity appealed to him. ‘Grave,’ an adjective, a noun, a verb. Choosing one would not limit the poem’s meaning as each, in turn, had several definitions, some similar, others not, from the Latin, the French, the German, the Anglo-Saxon, one, the musical definition, from the Italian. He would embed ambiguities between the words and lines in the deepest recesses of the poem and challenge readers to resolve them. He wished he had pen and paper. Memory, at his age, stretched with time.

Wrapped inside his poem, Deering didn’t notice Winchell and Brewster digging furiously where he had planted his Y-rod. They stood knee-deep in a hole, side by side but far enough apart so the swings of their shovels did not strike each other. Hogbacks of dirt rose at either end. Deering cursed himself for leaving his binoculars in the truck. As dusk deepened, Winchell left, returning minutes later with a hand-held spotlight. Winchell aimed it at Brewster, now thigh-deep in the hole, then joined him.

When only their upper torsos were visible, they stopped. Winchell planted Deering’s Y-rod on the peak of the dirt mound nearest the spotlight, a stele whose shadow, elongated and distorted, spread across the meadow and disappeared into the forest. From a cooler, Brewster handed Winchell a can of beer. Its red and white colors glowed in the spotlight’s beam. The droplets of sweat on its outside sparkled like diamonds. Swarms of flies created the illusion of a beam of lights emanating bridging the meadow, connecting the hole to the forest.

Winchell and Brewster drank their beers, silently, men exhausted from their labor, then tossed the empties into the hole and departed. Typical flatlanders, Deering thought. Thirty minutes later, he descended the tree, branch by branch, testing each before putting his weight on it. On the ground, he crouch-walked to the hole Winchell and Brewster had dug. No treasure at the bottom. As empty as a grave awaiting its occupant.

A horn blared and Deering jumped. The headlights of his truck cleaved the night in two. In the light’s penumbra, Winchell and Brewster stood side by side, Winchell with his hand gun, Brewster with Deering’s rifle. In that instant, Deering understood Winchell was that rarest of dowsers, a grave dowser, not one who searched for buried bodies, but one who searched for the perfect place to bury a body.

Deering shielded his eyes. The glare of the headlights blinded him. No epic poem would celebrate him. His poetry, like the paper on which it was printed, would crumble into dust. His unpublished and unwritten poems would evanesce. Only the family Y-rod planted atop his grave would memorialize him. One day, like Jabez Warner’s pasture, it, too, would be consumed by the encroaching boreal forest of balsam fir and red spruce.

Liss, a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, finalist for Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Prize, St. Lawrence Book Award, and Bakeless Prize, has published 61 short stories in inter alia, The South Dakota Review, The South Carolina Review, Two Bridges Review, Hunger Mountain, and The Florida Review.