The Dowser
by Liz Wyckoff
Mr. Chartrand lives in Harrisville, New York—a village forty miles south of my hometown, with a population of six-hundred and fifty-three. He’s eighty-seven years old, wears his shirts tucked in, and has deep creases stretching from either side of his nose to the corners of his mouth.
Since he was twelve, Mr. Chartrand has been a dowser. He uses a stick to detect water far below the earth’s
surface. Some people call this water witching or divining or doodlebugging. Others call it bunk. Rubbish. Hooey. Mr. Chartrand calls it “a gift from the good Lord.”
“There’s quite a lot to it,” he says. The stick must come from a fruit tree. It must be large and freshly cut and shaped like a Y. He pulls the branch apart with both hands and walks off in the direction of hidden water veins. Once he’s found them, he paces off the precise location for a well and provides instructions on where to dig and how deep.
Some dowsers have been known to locate other things, like gemstones or gravesites, but not Mr. Chartrand. He can’t explain why—he’s just good at finding water.
Still, I can’t help but wish he’d help me find other things. I wish Mr. Chartrand could pay me a visit, clip a crotched branch from a cherry tree down the street, and extend his arms to find me a job, for instance. I’d follow him and his tucked-in shirt on a jagged path across town to an office building with some open position waiting to be filled.
Or, even better, what if Mr. Chartrand could find love? He’d collect an apple bough from behind my apartment and allow its invisible pull to lead him to another human—some man that he could mark for me like an X in the dirt.
Maybe each of us has a gift for finding something. Lucky pennies on the sidewalk, arrowheads in the weeds, used clothing that doesn’t smell, funny friends with infectious laughs. And maybe those things are just as important as water.
If I told that to Mr. Chartrand, I’m not sure he’d agree. But I bet he’d smile, stretching those creases on his face just like a divining rod, and that might tell me all I need to know.
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of things, and the wind rattling his metal grating is like the prelude to a sigh that never gets released: a long, sharp intake of breath that leaves him slightly shaky, all puffed up with no place to go.
never any school buses, never any kids coming and going, that the giant area of scratched-away paint on the front door that sometimes looked to me like a hunched-over alien and sometimes like a baby with a balloon never grew more chipped. That the same brown-and-tan tweed couch cushion that someone had, at some point in time, tossed over the fence was always sitting there moldering in the same corner of the schoolyard, surrounded by weeds growing completely undisturbed between cracks in the pavement.)
mustache I’d lent you the last time I was home and sleeping while the rest of us moved.
looked up from my book as the train emerged from the tunnel, creaking with care onto the great steel bridge. Even though we had all had made this trip countless times, at this moment everyone in the car lifted our heads to greet the island city, brilliant in the slanting light that warmed our faces.
was surprised to see his enormous feet dangling toes-down over the arm of the couch, like two miniature sides of beef. He had a habit of rising early and letting himself out after a bender. I considered pulling the sleeping bag away from his close-cropped hair and waking him violently, but then I noticed the rivulet of drool, the only proof that he was still for now among the living, and thought better of it.
plop. I told him to knock it off, and he shuffled over to the picnic table, swung one leg over the bench, and immediately started scratching at the peeling paint.