When I was at school, I was preoccupied with the contrast I felt between going to school in the city right in the centre of Edinburgh, and coming home to the countryside. The two became kind of bigger categories in my mental landscape. Town was people, doing, growing, consuming. Country was were you went to retreat back into yourself, a haven to just be. Even now I find the fields and the forest powerfully restorative. In my final year I was lucky to have an encouraging headmaster who made us think about what a poem was and taught creative writing. This story was the result.
Divining
Henry’s footsteps crackled and thudded over a field of
broken corn stalks, his mud-encrusted boots slowly becoming obscured by the
early afternoon mist. Even in his distraction he was alert to the bite of a
wind picking up against him, to the rush of a stream half a mile away. Even as
the branches tied to his bag chafed the back of his neck, May’s voice was still
soft and echoing in his ears.
There had been a grey wind whistling over the flat land the
first time it had happened. Just a boy, he had thought it was the wind that was
making the branch he’d picked up for a sling-shot bend upwards in his hands.
But it happened again, the switch of hazel was twitching and twisting as if
charged with energy. Henry’s father looked up from setting his traps under the
hedge, saw him staring down. A superstitious man, raised on vague warnings
linked with the weather and the birds - trappers’ stories. Jim knew when a gale
was blowing and when something even less tangible was at work. “You’ve got the
gift, lad,” he called through the weather, proud and dimly jealous. “My father
had it too. There’s water running under your feet, sure as anything.”
“What?” Henry was enchanted, could barely drag his eyes up.
“Dowsing. Water divining, some folk call it. A man can make
a living off that, lad. Course, I doubt most just happen upon it.” But Henry
wasn’t thinking about earning a living. Jim turned back to the sharp rough
metal of the trap jaws, exasperated at his faraway son.
Henry remembered grasping hold of the new phrase -‘water
divining’- that made so much sense to him, putting a meaning and a name to the
natural awareness he’d always felt. He’d always studied clouds, fox holes,
unripe berries. Now as he grew up,
quiet and wiry with hair like upturned soil, he spent hours and weeks outside
setting traps or labouring, and he began to listen for needle-piercing rain
before it fell, or for trickles under stones. His ability soon set him apart,
and he used it as an excuse for his loneliness. As time passed, the more he
attuned himself with the seasons and elements, the easier it became to find
water under the ground, and the harder it was to find the right words, or
understanding in people’s eyes.
Henry remembered how it had been discovered by the rest of the
village. He’d been at the tavern with his father, a new practice into which
he’d been initiated only recently. Tracks were turning brittle with the start
of winter, and work was drying up, and Jim was chasing away the darkness of the
drawing-in evenings with copious amounts of cider. “My boy can find you water
from five miles away!” he was boasting to a farmhand, his face ruddy with the
drink and the glow of the fire. “He can smell a beck in the air, he can!”
“Jim Traverse, that son of yours couldn’t find the sea if
you set him on the cliffs of Dover, he’s that away with the fairies…” Henry had
broken up a brewing brawl stemming from Jim’s objection to the word ‘fairy’ in
relation to his only son, and led his father home, thankful for his blustering
faith.
As the pearly fog drew close around him, Henry had only the
sound of his steps and snatches of memories for companionship: the rattling,
pervading elation he’d felt on finding a river’s undiscovered tributary, and on
actually being paid for the water it would give the fields, and most
importantly on being recognised. The universal sense of wistfulness and
beginnings when he left home to find new work. After that, the years became a
blur of villages and seasonal jobs with ever-changing farms and the feel of
bark and wood in his hands. As Henry continued striding, he recalled how in
those years the sound of water was always in his ears. The booming of an
unexpected waterfall, quiet lap of a still pool, gush of a hurried brook. Until
that summer – until May. The crunching of the ground underfoot slowed as his
thoughts turned to her.
He’d been working at that farm for just over a week,
bringing in the hay and corn, when he heard the farmer wanted to build a new
well. He saw May first when he went to her father, cap in hand, spoke to him in
the sunny cobbled courtyard. She was carrying a tray out to the fields and
seemed both to perfectly belong to the golden and cornflower-blue scene and to
look right into him. She was there when he went to the edge of the farm with
his hazel branches, distracting him. He tried to concentrate on the arc-shaped
bough, to feel the warmth in the soil, to let the rush of water there in his
head intensify and drown out her laughter. He knew there was water there, he
had found it the week before, but her presence infused him and left no room for
the craft he’d perfected.
“Are you going to tell me where to build my well now, young
man?” her father asked him a few days later, still sceptical despite what he
had heard about the boy. For the first time, Henry had to admit that he
couldn’t. All summer long, the claws of ravens that would perch on him became
replaced by May’s brown fingers curled into his. At night he stopped gazing at
stars and they talked together. Then autumn came; Henry realised he was no
better at finding a pheasant nest than the next man and suddenly the full
extent of what he had lost seemed to leave him like a ghost, characterless. He
left, to blindly search again for the consciousness that had shaped him.
But now the joy of the last months crowded back and her last
words resounded - “You can’t just go on forever, Henry…” He slowed to a halt
and drew over his shoulder the boughs tied to his pack. He was tired of having
only his strides and the beat of wings to fall in rhythm with the drum of his
heart. He couldn’t move seamlessly in concert with the seasons, but now he
could place himself within them. Better to divine water or people?
The branches fell to the ground, and the mists lifted as his
boots turned back the direction they’d come.
