Dowsing

This essay is part of Scent Access Memory, our editorial series with Dirt.

The same name used to bless you can be used to curse you. I am named for two aunts, one an arsonist. I miss her sometimes, or the version of me represented by my time with her. She was honest enough to be unkind when necessary, which I still consider a virtue. I don't love her anymore, for various reasons; during the election, and again during my grandmother's illness(es), I took a chainsaw to my family tree, and I left her behind without mercy. I used to play in an empty grain silo behind her house with my cousin, who is gone now. My old house is gone now, too: it was condemned, and the well was torn down. My aunt warmed her house by leaving her oven door cracked, like most people in my area did, because she did not have central heating or a good fireplace. A stove was probably how she started the fire in the trailer she burned down.

What I remember of our oven is sleeping in front of it the night we found out my baby sister had cancer, in a ruthless iceblink February, my sisters crying and asking me to reassure them that the doctor made a mistake, because I am the oldest and I knew the most, or so it seemed. But I went to sleep that night with dry eyes, because I knew the least.

What I remember of our well is either the orange memory or the silver one. The orange memory is of pressing my weeping face to a hot window and begging god for rain. The silver memory is of a midnight rain, the kind you can smell, waking me up, and seeing the moon reflected in the well's glutted black pupil from the same window.

I sometimes behave, irrationally, as if limitless abstractions were scarce; for example, I am jealous when someone is a successful writer, because I feel like success is finite. So if they have it, it was taken from me. But there is a kind of infinity in finitude, regardless. If there were four sandwiches available for the free lunch program and I was the fifth person in line, a new sandwich would not manifest itself: someone would either pass on their own, or share it. I was a child of scarcity, for better and worse. I gave things away just as often as I was given them; sometimes another person's warmth burns longer than your own. Other times, I pushed my sisters out of the way to be the first to press my mouth to the cunt of a spring, long past the point of knowing better. Mine is the hard kiss of a chipped Mason jar. I am gentler now because I lived past the need to be ungentle. It remains to be seen if this is a blessing or a curse.

I look like my great-great grandmother, Salome, who immigrated here from Germany. When my mom's parents were not arguing with her for becoming Pentecostal, I walked through the woods to their house, searching for snakes and finding blackberries instead. Salome looked like my grandmother, who also looked like me. My grandmother was extraordinarily hard to get to know; we mostly looked in the mirror together. You have my nose! she would say. Give it back! And then her heart would close again, and I would find something else to do. I walked around looking for water and never found a drop. I read The Odyssey and sifted through my grandpa's maps and atlases, because he was a pilot and believed navigation was a dying art. I still know how to make a compass and navigate by the stars; I have never needed to, I am rarely lost. In a way I think that was what he really wanted. He was also a polyglot and a deep, deep lover of language in general and Latin in particular. Language is a map too, he believed, because a map is anything that gets you where you're going. Maps tell the truth.

My favorite mondegreen: arsonists in the well. We would throw rocks at the arsonists in my grandparent's well one day, bread crusts the next, trying and failing to provoke them into answering our questions. What we really meant, and didn't know we meant, was arsenic: we had misheard the adults. One day there was a lid over the well, and it remains there, our gifts and curses and questions having long since disappeared under it, unless they too formed a body: a handful of chemicals, waiting to be touched.

Look at us, she would say, sometimes. I could never deny you. When she was first diagnosed with Alzheimer's that was her favorite phrase. She called my son John, which is not his name, but she called him that consistently; he was always John to her, like the saint, the baptist. You can't deny him, she said. You look just alike. And then she died, and my aunts and I stopped talking for good, our peace treaty revealed as the sleight of hand it always was; the lady disappearing beneath a hand, into a sleeve, with a puff of smoke. There are greater tragedies, some of them mine, or so it seems to me. And there are greater joys, some of them mine too: my sister taking out her prosthetic eye for my son's amusement, reading about Penelope's shroud trick for the first time, unexpected rain, kissing my son's nose on his sonogram and then on his face.

If I define myself by the face shaped from a beloved and unknown forebear, I must also define myself by the blood of a known and unloved arsonist. I cannot accept one and deny the other; we flow from the same source, she nearer to it. Perhaps the body is not an infallible divination tool, but a mutable starting point. There are things it can tell you and things it cannot. There is truth that can be reduced to yes or no and truth that cannot. A cliché, still true: there are scars you can't see, running deeper and stiller than groundwater. There are truths that contradict each other, urges that do, too. Another cliché: there are ugly truths. There are falsehoods so lovely and so ardently wished for you will load them like bullets into the gun of your imagination and blow them through the back of your mouth, so as not to miss their taste before they kill you. And they will kill you, and you will survive, forever perfumed with grave dirt. You will wander the aisles of your new city's grocery store with a peach in your hand like some sort of unsought Georgian Persephone, dazed and hungry for the face of everyone you've never met: are they real? Did I make it? And it will hit you like a battering ram, firm and inevitable; you're a person, you're real and you made it, and it will hurt so bad you have to sit down, and your Mama will say Honey, is everything all right? And her thumbs will cross like divining rods, wiping the tears from your face. You are what you make of yourself, using the clay you have been given, the fires you have stoked in others, nothing more, nothing less.

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