Chapter Two
The dirt road drifting down Spanish Valley toward the highway was rippled and hard like a washboard. Hiram gritted his teeth and smiled to avoid telling Michael how to drive, but the pie swung around in his stomach like a baseball in a sock. The constant rattle of the Model AA nearly made him throw up.
“How old were you when Grandma Hettie first taught you to dowse?” Michael asked.
“I don’t remember a first time.” Hiram was grateful for the distraction. “I suppose that means I must have seen her do it when I was very young. She taught me…well, I was a little younger than you are now.”
“What about your mother and father?” Michael asked. “Did you ever watch either of them dowse a well? Or, you know, open a locked door, or heal cowpox, or do anything else with…with lore like Grandma Hettie’s?”
Michael didn’t say “magic.”
“No.” Hiram had rarely seen his father doing anything at all; Abner Woolley was a polygamist, and he had neglected Hiram and his mother in favor of his other families, even before he had finally lit out for Mexico. The closest he’d ever come to performing an act of craft in Hiram’s presence was a blessing of comfort he had once offered Hiram, at the end of a brief visit. Hands heavy on his son’s head, Abner had sternly enjoined Hiram to obedience and patience, promising that all suffering would be repaid in the fullness of time. Hiram’s neck had hurt for an hour after his father had left. “My mother…sang the Psalms. She knew Grandma Hettie’s melodies, but she didn’t use them to do anything. She just liked to sing.”
Michael cleared his throat. “And after she, uh, disappeared…did you ever dowse to find out where she went? What happened to her? The Mosaical Rod can answer yes and no questions, can’t it?”
The light reflecting off the white and orange rock was intense. Hiram rubbed both his eyes with his knuckles. His mother had vanished one night after his father had abandoned them. Hiram had tried various divination techniques to discover her fate, and had yet to learn anything. The mystery made him feel ill at ease.
“It’s like twenty questions, right?” Michael pressed. “Is my mother alive? Is she in the United States? Is she in Utah? If the rod works, you ought to get answers.”
“You know the rod works.” Hiram’s voice was suddenly hoarse. “You saw it work today.”
“I know you miss your mom, Pap. You must have asked these questions. And if you didn’t get answers…maybe the rod doesn’t work, after all. Maybe I was fooling myself, back there on Whittle’s farm. Or did you get answers you don’t want to share with me?”
“I asked.” Hiram’s eyes stung, and he squeezed them shut. “I never got any real answers. Never could figure it out.”
“Damn,” Michael said.
Hiram nodded. He had skirted a lie. He had divined after his mother’s fate more than once, and never been able to make any sense of the answers. Is my mother alive? No. Is my mother dead? No.
The dirt road poured down onto the highway at a steep angle, cutting through a knotted grove of juniper trees. As Michael shifted down and the Double-A groaned into compliance, Hiram saw a flash of blue-green metal through the foliage.
“Cars!” he snapped.
Michael brought the truck careening over to the side of the road faster than Hiram would have done. His son also braked more abruptly than Hiram liked, but he put the Model AA right behind a blue-green Buick Series 40 that sat at the mouth of the gravel road: Bishop Gudmundson’s car. Beyond the Buick, a Model AA Ford truck sat parked on the highway; it was an older version of Hiram’s own vehicle, dark blue and dusty. Gray men in overalls stood around it, slapping their hats on their knees. The ranch hand Clem stood with them. Beyond that, on the highway’s shoulder, sat Lloyd Preece’s much newer truck.
“Maybe get a bottle of water from the back,” Hiram suggested.
Michael turned off the truck and climbed into the back to get water. Hiram descended to join the other men. As he got closer, he could see that the hood of the truck was raised, and both Lloyd Preece and Bishop Gudmundson were poking around beneath it.
“Woolley!” Gudmundson called. “Perfect, I was hoping you hadn’t taken that turn south back there. Do you have a crescent wrench? Stupid me, I was in the middle of fixing a sink before I had to get up to Rex’s place, and I left all my tools back in town!”
Lloyd raised a hand. “Glad you stopped, Hiram.”
Hiram put a finger to the brim of his hat.
“I’ll get the wrench, Pap!” Michael called from the back of Hiram’s truck.
Hiram joined the men around the Model AA, looking both ways up the highway. “Five men and a truck. You fellows work for one of the ranchers around here?”
As he asked the question, he thought he knew the answer. Battered trunks and suitcases sat in the back of the vehicle, and the men’s clothing was frayed at every edge, sweater elbows unraveling and soiled collars flapping loose.
“We would,” one of the men answered. He was deeply tanned, short, and unshaven, and he smelled like cigarette smoke. “You know anyone who’s got work?”
“You aren’t from Grand County, are you, brother?” Bishop Gudmundson asked.
The short man shook his head. “I’ve come from Colorado looking for work. Some of these boys have come a lot farther than that.”
“We’ll get this started, no problem.” Preece pointed along the highway. “Moab is that way. It’s the only town of any size within fifty miles. Go to the Maxwell House Hotel, tell them you’re looking for work, and that you’re friends with Lloyd Preece and Gudmund Gudmundson. Leon should be able to set you up.”
“I don’t know about hotel work,” the short man said. “But I’m handy enough, and I’m up for any kind of manual labor.”
Clem spat. “There’s work. You come to the right place.”
Preece scratched his head. “Maybe Don Pout has something for them.”
Gudmundson shrugged. “Maybe. You know what I’d do, Lloyd?”
Preece grinned. “I expect you’ll tell me.”
“All the town’s ranchers meet at the Maxwell House for drinks,” Gudmundson said. “The hotel staff know who’s hiring. They should try there.”
Preece laughed long and hard. “That’s a great idea, Bishop. I’m so glad you thought of it.”
Gudmundson smiled. “And if Gudmundson is too strange a name to remember, these fellows can tell Leon the bishop sent them.”
The short man chuckled. “What’s that? A nickname?”
Gudmundson laughed, too. “You could say that.”
Hiram found himself smiling.
Michael arrived with the crescent wrench and two bottles of water. He handed the wrench to Bishop Gudmundson and one bottle to the short man. He handed the second bottle to another of the migrants. They were glass bottles, with cork stoppers wired to their mouths, full of well water pumped in Lehi. “Sorry it isn’t cold,” he told them. “We’ve been out in the desert all day.”
“Sorry it isn’t a woman,” a tall migrant with a sharp nose shot back, “but I’ll take what I can get!”
A raucous round of laughter petered out quickly as the men passed the bottles around. Gudmundson emerged from the engine and closed the truck’s hood. He was covered in grease up to his elbows and had a big smear of grease on one cheek, but he was smiling. “Should start now.”
The hawk-nosed migrant climbed into the truck and started it. The engine rumbled smoothly into life and Gudmundson patted the hood. “You shouldn’t need a replacement part,” he called to the men as they climbed into the back of the Model AA. “I guess you’ll get ten thousand more miles out of it.”
“I can’t pay you gentlemen,” the short migrant said. “Maybe if I get a job in town I can find you.”
Lloyd waved a hand. “Not at all. When I’m down on my luck, someday, you’ll be the one helping me.” He reached into his working coat and pulled out a calf-skin wallet. He peeled off a hundred dollars in twenties, right there. “Or someone else will.”
Michael gasped.
Lloyd pressed a twenty-dollar bill into each vagrant’s hand.
The tall man with the sharp nose stood blinking. “Why, I’d fight you not to take charity, but I reckon you’d fight me back. You sure?”
“We’re sure.” Gudmundson marched forward and slapped the tall man on the back. “Lloyd’s set for money,” the bishop said. “Me, I work for other reasons than money. And this fellow here,” he jerked a thumb at Hiram, “he’s even worse than I am. Don’t be like him. He turns money down left and right.”
Hiram smiled. “I have what I need.”
“Can’t argue with that. I reckon with this depression going, God is busier than a one-armed paper hanger giving folks what they need. Like he brought you here for us today. And we appreciate it.” The short man collected the two glass bottles and handed them to Michael. He bowed before Preece. “Mister, we needed this windfall bad. But we won’t just drink it away. We’re gonna go on to that hotel and find work. We have families. We’ll send the money.” He climbed into the back of the truck with his fellows, and they drove up the road toward Moab.
“Well done, Woolley,” the bishop said.
“I didn’t do anything.” Hiram clapped Michael on the shoulder. “Well done, Michael, getting two bottles out when I suggested one.”
“I just thought they looked thirsty,” Michael said, “and I asked myself how much water I would want someone to offer me, if I was that thirsty.”
“That is the most profound sermon I am going to hear today,” Bishop Gudmundson said. “Now if you brethren will excuse me, I better get back to that sink, or Ida Mae Stokes will never let me hear the end of it.”
Preece nodded at Hiram. “You and your boy take care, now.”
The rancher drove off first. The bishop and Clem climbed into the Buick and Hiram and Michael returned to the Double-A. “Are we really going to go help this ghost?” Michael asked.
“At least we’ll go look for it,” Hiram said. “If we can help it, we will.”
Michael shut his eyes and sighed. “Helping men in need makes perfect sense to me. Helping ghosts forces me to question your sanity, Pap.” His eyes popped open, and he grinned at Hiram to show he was kidding.
Hiram laughed. “Sometimes, I question it myself.”
They got into the truck and pulled back onto the road.
He didn’t say what he was thinking—he could barely admit it to himself. Not entirely consciously, Hiram believed that if he worked hard enough, if he was good enough, if he helped enough people, then maybe…just maybe…Hiram might be able to reconnect with some of what he’d lost in his life.
Maybe he’d be able to find his mother.
Someday.