Water Witches Read online

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  title : Water Witches Hardscrabble Books

  author : Bohjalian, Christopher A.

  publisher : University Press of New England

  isbn10 | asin : 0874516870

  print isbn13 : 9780874516876

  ebook isbn13 : 9780585255231

  language : English

  subject New England--Fiction.

  publication date : 1995

  lcc : PS3552.O495W38 1995eb

  ddc : 813/.54

  subject : New England--Fiction.

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  Water Witches

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  Also by Chris Bohjalian

  PAST THE BLEACHERS

  HANGMAN

  A KILLING IN THE REAL WORLD

  Page iv

  HARDSCRABBLE BOOKS Fiction of New England

  Chris Bohjalian, Water Witches

  Ernest Hebert, The Dogs of March

  Ernest Hebert, Live Free or Die

  W. D. Wetherell, The Wisest Man in America

  Edith Wharton (Barbara White, ed.), Wharton's New England: Seven Stories and Ethan Frome

  Thomas Williams, The Hair of Harold Roux

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  Water Witches

  Chris Bohjalian

  UNIVERSITY PRESS OF NEW ENGLAND

  Hanover and London

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  UNIVERSITY PRESS OF NEW ENGLAND publishes books under its own imprint and is the publisher for Brandeis University Press, Brown University Press, Dartmouth College, Middlebury College Press, University of New Hampshire, University of Rhode Island, Tufts University, University of Vermont, Wesleyan University Press, and Salzburg Seminar.

  Published by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755

  © 1995 by Christopher A. Bohjalian

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America 5 4 3 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bohjalian, Christopher A.

  Water witches / Chris Bohjalian.

  p. cm. (Hardscrabble books)

  ISBN 0-87451-687-0

  I. Title.

  PS3552.0495W38 1994

  813'.54dc20 94-9816

  Acknowledgment for the quotation from Ernest Hemingway, which appears on page ix: Reprinted with permission of Charles Scribner's Sons, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Company, from THE SHORT STORIES OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY. Copyright 1936 by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright renewed © 1964 by Mary Hemingway.

  Page vii

  For

  Anne Dubuisson

  and

  Howard Frank Mosher

  Page ix

  And Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock with his rod twice; and water came forth abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their cattle.

  NUMBERS 20:11

  Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and it is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai "Ngaje Ngai," the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I could not have written this book if a great many lawyers, lobbyists, legislators, journalists, meteorologists, naturalists, and (of course) dowsers had not been enormously kind with their knowledge and their timeespecially James E. Bressor, environmental policy analyst for Governor Howard Dean of Vermont. I thank you all.

  I am also grateful to everyone in the ski industry who explained to me (slowly, patiently, carefully) what it takes to manage a mountain. I thank you too.

  Finally, I want to thank Mike Lowenthal, an editor whose ideas are thoughtful and his suggestions precise.

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  PART ONE

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  1

  Some people say that my wife's sister is a witch. My father, for one. My brother, for another. And while I will not dispute their use of the term when they are merely alluding to her somewhat contrary nature, I do take issue with them when they use the word to malign what she believes is her calling.

  After all, it is a calling that to a lesser extent my wife hears as well.

  No, my sister-in-law is no witch, at least not literally. She, along with my wife and my mother-in-law, is simply a dowser. She is capable of finding underground water with a stick. She is capable of divining underground water with a stick. And unlike my wife and my mother-in-law, she is an active dowser. She does not merely have the power, she uses it.

  And she uses it profitably. Patience is a well-paid dowser.

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  On a regular basis Patience finds for people the underground springs that for generations will feed their wells. She finds water. She finds the water for drinking that will flow cold from kitchen taps, and the water for bathing and shaving and splashing that will gush (or trickle) warm from bathroom faucets. She finds the water that will rain down from hoses and sprinkler systems onto a state that is full of back door gardens, and rich in cornfields and dairy farms. And while water has rarely been the precious commodity here in Vermont that it is in other parts of the world, the difference between finding it twenty yards below ground and two hundred yards below ground is often a matter of feet. Sometimes inches. Drill sixteen feet east of that maple, and you'll find a spring at forty feet; drill a dozen feet south of that same tree, and you'll have to pound your way through eight hundred feet of granite. Vermont granite.

  According to her logbook and diary, Patience has now dowsed 1,812 wells, of which about 1,500 were in Vermont. Most of the others were in New England, although my sister-in-law has indeed used maps to find water for clients in Texas, Colorado, and throughout the southwest.

  Moreover, Patience has dowsed in her life for far more than just water. She has been paid handsomely for finding oil, gold, and natural gas. She has found well over a dozen missing children and injured hikers for the Vermont and New Hampshire state police, and thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of jewelry and money and antiques that had been lost. She has even helped solve crimes as far south as Boston and as far north as Montreal, although to this day the authorities who called her in will deny her involvement (''But it's me who keeps my participation in those sorts of investigations hush-hush," Patience has told me, "not the police. A dowser like me must always fear reprisals").

  Patience has a track record of professional achievement that spans almost two decades now, and it is only a matter of time before the American Society of Dowsersseventy-six dedi-

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  cated chapters and five thousand divining members strong these daysstarts a dowsing hall of fame in her honor, or finds a public relations firm to publicize her success.

  Patience told me two things when Laura, my wife, introduced us almost twenty years ago. She told me that as a dowser she is in touch with the earth. And she told me that as a man I have great potential to become grotesque.

  We were sitting in the farmhouse in Landaff in which Patience and Laura grew up, in the kitchen thatlike in many farmhouses in Vermontwas the soul and center of the structure. The Avery family did not simply cook in that kitchen or eat in that kitchen, they lived in that kitchen, savoring the warmth that came from the woodstove they kept burning eight months of the year. The kitchen table, a pumpkin pine monster longer and wider than a ping-pong table, was the desk on which Laura did her homework every school night for twelve years; it was the cutting board on which the girls' mother chopped vegetables, rolled flour, sliced bacon; and when that table wasn't covered with papers of algebra probl
ems or the remnants of a pie crust, it served also as the conference table around which the Avery family would gather whenever there was a decision of any magnitude that had to be made.

  And so when Laura brought me home to meet her family the spring of our senior year at college, it was only natural that she would sit me down at the pumpkin pine heart of the Avery homestead.

  Laura had warned me about Patience, telling me flat out that Patience would probably try and scare me away for no other reason than the thrill of the hunt, but I was twenty-one and unconvinced (or unaware) of my God-given inability to win this sort of fight. So I asked Patience what she meant about men being grotesque, challenging her, and she asked me in return with a flatness to her voice that in tone alone conveyed oceans of disgust, "Are you stupid or curious?"

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  Patience has since mellowed, becoming in her own way at least a tad more pacific. She has even married twice, although neither marriage was able to survive the spring construction season in Vermont, when Patience's services as a dowser are most in demand.

  As I have gotten to know Patience (as much by necessity as by choice), I have been able to glean from her only small hints as to why some men become grotesque. But I have learned from her a great deal about dowsing. "Dowsing is prelinguistic sensory perception," she has explained to me on occasion, "that's all it is." "Dowsing is an incantation of the mind," she has said at other times, ''it's a means of accessing our spiritual and visceral links with naturenothing fancy." Unlike most dowsers who believe that with proper mental conditioning anyone in the world can dowse, Patience insists that only select people have the power. People like her. And while she will acknowledge that many famous dowsers"master dowsers"do indeed happen to be male, she insists that a male dowser is either a charlatan or a cross-dresser.

  "A man could no sooner find water with a divining rod than he could breastfeed a baby," she has pronounced on occasionusually an occasion like Thanksgiving or Christmas. "Dowsing is all about fluid, and a woman's life revolves around fluid a hell of a lot more significantly than a man's."

  Patience is very fond of great pronouncements, especially if it is Thanksgiving or Christmas, and my family is present.

  "After all, no one talks about earth fathers, do they?" Patience will often add from her spot at the head of the table, raising one of her thick brown eyebrows.

  This belief is, of course, a major philosophical break with the opinion of the American Society of Dowsers: Officially, dowsing is not a gender-specific talent. Consequently, my wife and my mother-in-law, who have attended the annual dowsing convention with Patience many times in the past, say that Patience is uncharacteristically quiet at these annual meetings, and lets her accomplishments speak for her.

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  Why does my sister-in-law believe that men have great potential to become grotesque? Patience has consistently refused to elaborate. But Laura thinks the opinion grew from the same seed that spawned her sister's dogmatic bias that only women can dowse. Laura and Patience come from a family of women.

  Or, as my brother says, a coven.

  As far as we know, there are no other fathers, sons, uncles, brothers, male cousins, or male pets with the Avery name. At least in this area. The Avery clan today is a clan wholly of women.

  I imagine an extended family of women is rare anywhere, but it has always seemed to me especially unlikely in a small Vermont village such as Landaff. Landaff sits on a ridge off the Green Mountains, in a no man's land (I use that term figuratively) between the Vermont state capital of Montpelier, and the maple syrup capital of St. Johnsbury. It is the sort of town where everyone is indeed related to everyone, and the town meeting that occurs on the first Tuesday of every March is as much a family reunion as it is an exercise in legislative self-determination.

  Laura and Patience's father, at least in photographs a lion of a man, lasted the longest of any male who has come in contact with the group in recent memory (except for me). He came to Vermont to marry my mother-in-law forty-plus years ago, and stayed long enough to father Patience one year and Laura three years later. He then died all alone in a hunting accident.

  It was a tragedy. He fell on his gun the first day of deer season, when he slipped on wet leaves at the start of a snowstorm. Patience, four years old at the time, used a hickory stick to find the body, buried by then by a good three feet of snow in the gore.

  My mother-in-law is the oldest of three sisters, all of whom still live in Landaff. She never remarried, simplyshe says

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  because she never found the right man. And just as Patience gave marriage a shot (two, actually), each of her aunts experimented with what one aunt refers to around me as the ritualized subjugation of women. Between Patience's two ex-husbands, and the three ex-husbands that the aunts have collected, there are five men who at one point married into Landaff's family of women, and have now moved far south, far west, and far north.

  It is worth noting that none of these men came from Vermont, including me. They all came from big cities like Philadelphia and Boston and New York, and then, after the marriages went bad, they returned to cities like Atlanta, Vancouver, and San Francisco. Cities chosen because they are far, far from Vermont. Cities chosen, perhaps as well, because to get to them one need never traverse what Steinbeck referred to as "the mother road," Route 66.

  No, of all the men who have come in contact with the current crop of Averys, only I have stayed, because only I was fortunate enough to find amidst the human maelstrom of Averys a soft and gentle tide pool named Laura. And only weLaura and Iwere fortunate enough to be blessed with a child, a little girl whom we named Miranda.

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  PART TWO

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  2

  I sit on the front steps of the courthouse one Tuesday afternoon, my tie loosened and the top button of my shirt undone, and I stare up through closed eyes at the afternoon sun. Even in Montpelier the sun is warm by the end of May, but I have never before felt it this strong this early. It is almost warm enough that if I breathe slowly and deeply and think only about the heat that pours through my eyelids, I know I will soon feel the sun in Key West: the hot tropical sun that burns thousands of miles south of here, a sun of enervation, relaxation, andfor Laura and me, as often as we can get therea sun of dehydrated slow-motion lust.

  "I never trust anybody with a tan," a voice behind me warns. "Especially a lawyer."

  I turn away from the sun and look back over my shoulder into the belly of Roger Noonan, a gelatinous awning that

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  blocks the man's chest and face from this angle, andwere Roger standing before me instead of behind memight block out the sun.

  "Rather prejudiced of you, don't you think?" I ask.

  Roger sits beside me on the steps, spreading his legs to allow his stomach room to droop, and loosens his own tie as well.

  "Yup. But that's me: Prejudiced. Prejudiced, provincial, and completely uninformed. And goddamn proud of it."

  "What brings you by the courthouse, Roger? Contesting a speeding ticket? Trying to cut your alimony payments once again?"

  Roger smiles. "Clara does okay by me. She has no beef that I know of. No, I'm just here to see you."

  Across the street from us, two professors from the Green Mountain School of Earth Science sit by the curb eating ice cream. I know they are professors from the Green Mountain School of Earth Science because they are blonde women in saris and sandals, and they are licking carob-coated ice cream bars called Peacesicles. This is a prejudice of my own: Anyone in Montpelier wearing a sari or eating a Peacesicle is affiliated with the Green Mountain School of Earth Science.