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  PRAISE FOR

  The Death of Annie the Water Witcher By Lightning

  “Majestic is depicted with poetic complexity. Annie’s friends have a salt-of-theearth goodness, and Annie herself is a faceted, compelling woman who emerges from personal darkness to find her own peace.”

  MEG NOLA Foreword Reviews

  “Despite the lemon squares and the familiar agri-business headlines, this is not a domestic novel. Rather, The Death of Annie the Water Witcher by Lightning reads as if it has come out of translation, out of a language created and shared within a community formed by geography, memory, and its own expedient, indefinable spirituality. It’s a funeral story told in forks of lightning, dozen of voices, flashing in and out of transfiguration. Like a good translation, it’s unafraid to leave in shadows what it can assume everyone already knows, rushing instead to throw light on what—until now—has been unknowable.”

  JENNIFER QUIST author of The Apocalypse of Morgan Turner

  “With humour and heart, Whitson peels back the small-town preoccupations of a winning cast of characters, laying bare the mysterious undercurrents of their world and beyond. Annie the water diviner is a force to be reckoned with, even after her death. This book is lyrical and lovely, a stunning achievement.”

  FRAN KIMMEL author of No Good Asking and The Shore Girl

  COPYRIGHT © AUDREY J. WHITSON 2019

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication — reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system — without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Whitson, Audrey J. (Audrey Joan), 1957–, author

  The death of Annie the Water Witcher by lightning / Audrey J. Whitson.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-988732-47-3 (softcover).

  ISBN 978-1-988732-48-0 (epub).

  ISBN 978-1-988732-49-7 (Kindle)

  I. Title.

  PS8645.H5688D43 2019 C813’.6 C2018-904512-4 C2018-904513-2

  Board editor: Douglas Barbour

  Book design: Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design

  Cover flowers © lisima/shutterstock.com

  Author photo: Alana Whitson

  NeWest Press acknowledges the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council for support of our publishing program. This project is funded in part by the Government of Canada. NeWest Press acknowledges that the land on which we operate is Treaty 6 territory and a traditional meeting ground and home for many Indigenous Peoples, including Cree, Saulteaux, Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Métis, and Nakota Sioux.

  # 201, 8540 – 109 Street Edmonton, Alberta T6G 1E6

  780.432.9427

  www.newestpress.com

  No bison were harmed in the making of this book.

  Printed and bound in Canada 1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19

  For Theresa,

  my mother, and first reader

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PERMISSIONS

  1

  ANNIE GALLAGHER

  You can smell the rain on the wind, a right smell for witching. The aspen that survived have taken on a tawny-yellow cast, the way they colour just before the limbs awaken. The willow seem the stronger, most seem to have resisted the drought. Deeper roots maybe. The black poplar, nothing but grey weathered sticks punctuating the pale green understory. You can see it in the shelter belts, the thinning this year, the trees that just didn’t make it.

  There is no water to witch anymore. Unworkable, the cost of digging, the pumping, all that electricity when I have to tell them two hundred, three hundred, five hundred feet deep. They shake their heads. It isn’t magic what I do; I can’t conjure it. I can only find it.

  And now this news of the bishop. He’s coming to close the church. But more than that, he’s coming.

  This Thursday morning, I have Bob stop the truck just short of his yard. For a new well, I almost always choose a branch from a living tree. A green willow is best, a bit of water still in its body. It has to be green and it has to have give. That’s how it finds the stream. And I always start before sunrise.

  We set up in the pasture behind the old corral. The slope is better than in front. Higher ground. Less likelihood of groundwater contamination at spring run-off. I begin to pace, like a monk walking his cloister, straight lines back and forth, head bent, arms outstretched, ears open. A choir monk listening for the cantor. My breviary, the divining rod. Nana called it a goddess branch after the Cornish. Palms down, both forks of the wand gripped, one in each hand, I try to feel the water drawing down from the branch, the crook in my hands speaking to the crook in my legs, to the tingling in my feet. The power in me, the power in the wand: intermittent. The feeling of the current is faint in me. Even at my fullest powers, I have to strain to hear it.

  I make a widening circle. Not a vibration. A small meadow vole is watching too, worried for its place in the grass. I am careful to watch for and walk around its nest. A hundred paces on I stop and sit. Sometimes that works best for a while. Cross my legs on the earth and empty my mind, just listen for the pace, the rush of water, a faint layer beneath, muffled there, from so high above the surface.

  Bob taps me on the shoulder, interrupts my reverie. “Are you sure about that sky?”

  I rise again and twenty feet across the pasture, the willow branch jumps in my hands. I mark the spot, have flags ready for the purpose fashioned from old nails and strips of cloth.

  I murmur sometimes when I witch. The farmers say I chant. I often close my eyes. There are usually no words, but an intention and a chord that focuses the mind, then a straining to hear the steady hum of the unseen water, the songs calling from beneath. I sway; I hang on and follow where the current takes me.

  Yet today, I summon all my powers of concentration, all the spirits I can muster: the dead, the living, saint and animal. I call on them all. “Nana. Papa. Maman.” Their names anchoring me; finding an echo in my bones; the electricity in my hands.

  The wand wavers. I hold it close to my pelvis, try to stop the shaking in my hands. Then the dream I’ve had for days breaks in, a harsh dissonance: my young self wakes reaching for breath. Arms crossed over chest, the straitjacket pulled tight behind me. So tight, I cannot move. A young Bishop Leo, a priest then, standing over me; his words stripping me, harsher than any indignity he might have performed. Inside the straitjacket in my dream, my hands won’t stop shaking. The rod pulls down hard, starts to shiver; my hands sweat.

  “I thirst,” I say to no one in particular.

  KRISTIAN MUELLER

  The white-haired lady is circling the fields like a squirrel, head bent, fast up and down, down and back, around and around. We are waiting for the usual Thursday morning drop-off.

  A couple months back, I told the dealer over at the Locke place, “I wanna start a superlab.”

  “But you’re a user.”

  He’s a man in black with intense red at the centre. I focus on the red and ignore the black. Red is strong, cool. The black wigs me out.
r />   “It affects me different than other people.”

  “Yeah, right.” He shook his head.

  “Hey, I’m the calmest I ever am when I’m using.”

  “If the baker eats all the buns, there’s none left for the customers.”

  “I’ve got a partner. My best friend, Andy, eh. One of us will always be on duty.”

  He laughed, stepped right into my face. “The more you use it, friend, the more you need it.”

  I didn’t back away. “I can get the ammonia,” I said, nodding behind me. “Anhydrous ammonia, for nothing.” Liquid fertilizer. Tanks of it everywhere you look around here. My old man’s, our neighbours’.

  His eyes lit up at the Latin. “Okay,” he said slowly, eyeing me with new respect. “You’ve done your research. I’ll talk to the boss.”

  A week later, we had a deal.

  Mr. Lechenko, my Chem 20 teacher, would be proud.

  I salvaged a nice double sink, a few tables. Bought a couple of coolers and plastic gas cans. Stole the tubing from the science lab at school. The tank, oversized beakers, three-necked flasks. Lots of extras in the cupboards.

  Equipment along the wall: goggles, heavy rubber gloves, needle-nosed pliers, three Class D fire extinguishers. Shelving to hold the supplies: cold tablets for the pseudoephedrine — twenty-four-hour Sudafed is the best — Energizer Lithium AA batteries, naphtha, distilled water, rock salt. Ice in the freezer — I found an old fifteen cubic foot in the dump. Still works.

  I put down a mattress under one of the tables and crash there if I need to.

  I told the Man in Black, the best drop-off is half a mile north, the ditch across the road from Bob Taylor’s. He lives alone. No animals. A hobby farmer, city guy. He won’t notice. Every Thursday we bring the product and the dealers leave behind all the inputs, except the fertilizer. We make contact the day before on the cell. What’s on your shopping list? We have a code for everything. Cold tablets: candy. Batteries: juice. Naphtha: nappies. They pay me a cut of the product plus rights to sell locally. Where else can I make $2,000 plus benefits, cooking for three hours a week? All of it in cold hard cash.

  Andy’s let me drive his black Trans Am. The morning sky is dark as ink, puffed high with clouds, the thunder coming in quick, every five seconds, then every three, then every two. I am counting — a split second later the storm is on top of us. Wind, lightning, but hardly any rain.

  She is lit up white like a bulb, rigid at first, then floating. She comes like a ghost across the fields, she comes straight for us. I tell you I saw it straight; I wasn’t using.

  The old woman keeps coming, through the barbed wire fence, not over but through, like her molecules had come apart and reconstituted themselves as mist, as mirage. As if she were a cloud floating, yet everything about her is a body.

  Next thing I know she’s standing right out in front of the car. “Kristian,” she calls out.

  I don’t know how she knows my name.

  Andy is there with me. That’s how I know it wasn’t some weird after-effect of the drugs. He sees her too, but he can’t hear her. “Holy Shit!” He’s bug-eyed at first.

  “Kristian,” she keeps calling, inching closer and closer to the windshield, over the hood. “You have killed a living creature in anger.”

  “No!” I try to plug my ears, put my head down.

  Then she shows me not with words but with a picture in my mind: the nosy magpie, when I was building the crack shed, that would hang out on top of the stack, bring his friends, make a racket, beak off at me. Yesterday I had the idea. “Heh, skedaddle, you crazy magpie,” I yelled up the skylight at him. “Scram. Beat it. Get lost.” Then I opened the valve and let him have it. A shot of ammonia out the vent. He screamed, wheeled screaming, farther and farther away. “Serves you right,” I shouted after him.

  “Let’s go,” says Andy.

  “What about the deal?”

  “Fuck the pickup. They’re probably not coming with this storm. Anyways, we can check the ditch later.”

  Then Andy leans over, lays on the horn. The old lady is standing in front of us again. He’s yelling out the window. “Get off the road! Get outta here!”

  But she won’t budge.

  “You’re going to have a son, Kristian. Take care of him.”

  “A son?” How the hell does she know? I’m thinking in my private heart.

  “Gun it,” says Andy.

  “I can’t.”

  “Do it,” he shouts at me and shoves my foot down on the gas pedal, the weight of his shoulder against my right side.

  And she is under the wheels, her legs, her torso, her raised hands, her head. No thump, no resistance, no weight, just gone.

  “There’s nothing there!” Andy is yelling. “Who is she?”

  I glance in the rear-view mirror. My dad used to say she was an Old Country witch. But back on the road, she looks deader than a doornail. No more light, just a body. I’ve killed her. I’ve killed her!

  “Dear God.” I haven’t prayed since I was a little kid. “I’ll stay clean. I’ll get a job. I’ll go back to school.” I’m not sure who I’m talking to or what I’m talking about.

  Andy punches me in the shoulder then, getting hold of himself, getting the cool back. “Hey, bro. She’s gone.”

  Then I shut up, but I don’t stop praying.

  JACK RAMSAY

  I wake having felt her close, the weight of her hand ruffling my hair, her lips on my earlobe, the way she likes to play after we make love, to keep me awake. But wrenched from me, not unlike the force I’ve seen when the witcher wand marks a change in energies: water or mineral. Violently. She pulls me up by the hand.

  I rub my eyes, glance at the twin curtains sucked out the window, the leaves of the trees showing their backs, trees and shrubs bent low, leaning east. I am alone in my bed. The sun should be rising I tell myself, but the firmament at 6:05 is pitch black. A few seconds later and the foundation seems to explode under and around me. Thunder. And that’s when I realize something is wrong.

  “Annie!”

  I grab my trousers off the chair beside the bed, pull on last night’s shirt, my suspenders. Fumble for my cane. Tell myself to calm down. Find the phone on my night table. I’ll call Bob; they’ll be having coffee. But the answer comes from another direction. Even before I have hobbled over to the window, I have narrowed the location of the siren to the north road. My knees give out. Go to the hotel. The hotel? And wait for me. The voice comes from somewhere, and I obey. I drag myself to the front door, grab my windbreaker, and the spare set of keys. Right myself, stretch once high over my head. Stumble through the door.

  I do not hurry. I know there is no hurrying now. I know as sure as the day. The clouds are apocryphal overhead; the heavens still cracking. One magpie balances on top of the back stop on the ball diamond, fighting to hold her own against the wind. She barks at me softly, lowering her beak and her brow, shifting weight from foot to foot, in time with the wind gusts. I recognize her from the night before. For a few moments, I bow and shuffle into the wind too, thinking this is bereavement: not knowing where to stand or how to walk.

  Finally, I let myself in the back door of the hotel. Retire my stick to the boot rack. Follow the hall into the kitchen. Flip to today’s date on the at-a-glance wall calendar, by the phone: Thursday, June 8th.

  See the note for me by the percolator: “Help yourself. Should be back about nine.”

  And that is exactly what I do. Pour a cup of coffee and wait.

  ALEX MACIVER

  I am looking out my living room window, my worrying window I call it. Thinking about the secret meeting at the hotel last night to save the Catholic Church from closure. The History Project we’re calling it, to buy up the property, or steal what we can if all else fails, out from under the bishop. I’m looking and taking the measure of the sky, the light, a chalky yellow. Thinking about Mike’s phone call afterwards, the magpie funeral he witnessed at the schoolyard. Whoever heard of such a thin
g?

  I watch the black SUV skid by on the gravel, givin ’er. Wonder what spooked them this morning? Oh, I know who they are. I have their licence plate. I’m saving it for an opportune time. I see the lightning, see the thunderheads piled high, hear the thunder clap close. The burning smell like cordite through the open window, and beside it, a faint smell like sour gas, something I’ve been noticing more and more these past weeks when the wind comes up.

  That field used to flood every spring. My brothers and I used to take makeshift rafts out on it, old stoneboats. That was before all the sloughs and the creeks were drained. The days before the advice of the district agriculturalist and the farm credit corporation. All those brochures they’d put out: How to Maximize Your Yields and How to Increase Your Arable Land. Late spring, when the air was rank with spearmint and peppermint, the creek edges lined with it, heading out along the ditches. Those days before progress was king.

  I turn back to my breakfast, start opening cupboards, shuffling dishes, find a mug, flip on the kettle switch, dig out a tea bag. Pour dried oats into a bowl, turn on the tap, stir in water, grab an old plate for a cover, open the microwave door, and place the mixture inside. Hit the soup button.

  Yes, I am a product of the age too, no matter how much I resist it. Everything’s got to be instant these days or the public won’t buy it. There’s no time for anything else. Still, some things I won’t compromise. Eat what you sow, my father used to say. Don’t feed your animals anything you wouldn’t eat yourself. Oats, same as the cows for breakfast.

  That’s why I’m here on this earth, so people everywhere can put cereal of some kind in their mouths in the morning and beef on their plates at night. Simple as that. No ground-up pieces of your own kind, organic or not. Protein supplements they call them: a euphemism for cannibalism. The BS in BSE.

  I wait for the beep of the microwave, grab a canister, open the lid, and take out a pinch of brown sugar, just the way my mother used to do every morning. The action, like saying Good Morning to her, her canister set. Homemade riveted brass, small designs of a rooster, a hen and chicks etched on each one. There used to be six in the set, now down to three. I miss a feminine presence around here. Bob Taylor’s still got his wife’s voice on the message machine. Spooks some people, but I understand it. My own wife has been gone for eight years now. Ex-wife, I guess. Not what I signed up for, she said. But is it ever? Set me back a pile, had to re-mortgage the place, then this bloody BSE hit. Our son is graduating high school this year but wants nothing to do with the farm. That pains me.