By Maria McLeod                                                               

We didn’t know, at first, if the divining rods would work — only that my younger brother, Tommy, the middle of three boys, might be the one to lead us to water. Not that we needed water. Rather, it was a test of his psychic abilities at the height the 1970s era of ESP. On evening talk shows, people were bending spoons with their minds and making ash trays scoot across coffee tables. Psychics were enlisted to find dead bodies for cops. There was even a television show, “The Sixth Sense,” where a paranormal psychology researcher solved mysteries using his extra-sensory powers of perception.

We had not assigned Tommy his task on whim. We had been testing his powers for days at the picnic table in the backyard. It was midsummer and school was out, which, for us and most of the kids in our tiny Midwestern town, meant living our life outdoors until the end of August, when we were sent back to school. Of the four of us siblings, Tommy was best at guessing which card we were holding, or which hand behind our backs held the marble or the rock. We all tried our best, but when we looked at the results of our study — numbers of successes and failures we had recorded in a spiral school notebook — it was Tommy who was consistently in the lead. So, we gathered up two sticks, both with bent ends he could hold like handles. We cut the sticks to equal lengths and blindfolded him with a kitchen towel. Then we led him around the yard. I can still him, age 10, and little Paddy, 8, Joey, 12, and me, 14 — all of us dressed in cut offs, t-shirts and Keds or flip flops. Joey is leading him, serving as his eyes, and Paddy and I are at either side, watching the sticks work their magic in Tommy’s hands.

Whenever the sticks crossed, Tommy would feel it. He’d come to a dead stop and say, “here,” and one of us would pound a stake in the ground. Where we got all those stakes, I can’t recall, only that once we removed the blindfold from his eyes and took in what we’d accomplished, we noticed he’d made a perfect grid. There was no denying it. The backyard, neatly divided into squares, looked like a giant grass checkerboard. For Tommy it had been effortless. He said it was like there was a hand from beyond guiding him. “Like a ghost,” I asked? “No,” he said, “Not like a ghost. More like somebody in a book. The one who tells the story.” Looking back on it now, I think he meant “narrator,” only he hadn’t yet learned the word for it.

The four of us grabbed digging tools from the gardening shed. We pulled up the stakes at random and dug with shovels, spades and a hoe. We struck water at every spot. If you dug a couple feet or so, just after the earth turned to clay, you’d hit water. Guaranteed. Our brother Tommy, we thought, had a special gift. He was a gangly, skinny kid, quick with wise cracks and irreverence, which were traits we found daring in our family, if not admirable. But he was harassed endlessly at school. He was no good at fighting back, and having a quick wit was of little benefit. Provoked, he just screamed and wailed and became a perfect mark for bullies who liked to prod things that produced an animated response. Animal, insect or human — they didn’t care. They just aimed for a display of emotion or evidence of a wound — fear or pain or gore — something that showed their action equaled a reaction. Achieving their desired outcome was the goal, and Tommy was the volcano that you could be sure would erupt.

It was Joey, the eldest of my three younger brothers, who had come to Tommy’s rescue at the bus stop, cafeteria, and playground. Seeing a skirmish involving Tommy, Joey would simply and intently walk over unrushed, silent, unblinking. Like a stoic comic book hero with super-human strength, he’d pick up the offending kid — Tommy’s nemesis — by the scruff of his neck, carry him a few feet away, and deposit him on the ground. Sometimes he’d utter a single-word directive like “stop” or “don’t.” The kid, and any accomplices, would sit stunned, as if not realizing how they’d been so suddenly and effectively diverted.

I have theories about Tommy’s special abilities. Not only was he victimized at school; he was repeatedly beaten by our father. Our father had a rage problem, a quick trigger leading him to extreme anger, from zero to a hundred in a split second. We were all victims of it, but my brother Tommy, his namesake, was a special recipient of his wrath, a scapegoat, or perhaps an expression of my father’s own self-hatred — my middle brother serving as the object of my father’s subconscious need for self-punishment. Not the rest of us were spared, not entirely, but Tommy came closest to meeting his end at our father’s hands.

One time, when our mother was out with Paddy, then 5, shopping for groceries, I heard my dad in my brothers’ basement bedroom, berating Tommy. I was upstairs in my room, which was in the opposite corner of the house, but my father’s screaming was loud, reaching a fever pitch. I could envision the vein on his forehead popping out, as it often did, when he lost control and flew into one of his rages. Then I heard Tommy, age 7, begging, pleading, his voice strained, “Don’t Daddy. Daddy, don’t.” It was a desperate, terrified child voice — as scared for himself as he was for a father on precipice, teetering on the edge. I don’t know where Joe was. I assume he was frozen in some corner of the house, contending with his own helplessness.

Meanwhile, I was rocking back and forth on my chenille bedspread when up from the depth of me came a sound I hadn’t anticipated, almost a growl, starting low and deep. It was the word “no,” but delivered elongated and loudly, seemingly engulfing our entire house. Then came a thud, and the screaming stopped. My father ran up the stairs to find me hyperventilating in my room. Seeing me like that seemed to snap him out of his fervor and back to his senses. He made me hold my head between my knees and breathe into a paper bag. He had, I later learned, been holding Tommy up by the neck, off the ground with his feet dangling, slamming his back against the bedroom wall, choking him as if hanged by a rope, which is why Tommy’s voice had grown so pinched, thin, and terrified.

I often think of that moment, and the cumulative toll of all those scary episodes when the person Tommy depended on for his very survival became the most likely to end it. I’m certain it was those scary experiences that pushed him into a different realm, one that required more than the typical forms of self-preservation we are armed with as humans — to fight, to scream, to run. Rather, Tommy needed extra powers of perception, especially the predictive ones. He needed to know what terrible threat was coming before it arrived, so he’d be able to provide himself with the best chance of escaping it.

Five years ago, I sat next to him in the hospital where my 82-year-old father was dying, both of us in our 50s by then. We had just visited our dad’s room in ICU when Tommy casually mentioned seeing my grandparents and mother at my father’s bedside, all of whom were dead. He mentioned it almost as an aside, an unsurprising occurrence. I assumed I hadn’t heard right. “Wait, you saw who?” Our grandparents, he explained, were at the head of our father’s bead, and our mother was at his side, holding his hand. Of course, I saw no such thing, and I told him so. So, I asked how it could have been possible that he witnessed the visitation of dead family members. He told me it’s not something one can look for, or want, or will themself to see. Rather, a person would need to be relaxed about it, unopposed to the possibility of it. He said it came to him more in a glimpse rather than a solid, continuous vision, as if a curtain to another dimension had briefly parted before falling closed again. His explanation reminded me of learning to float. That moment when you finally relax and your body rises, and you realize that by some miracle the water can hold you up.

A couple years after our father died, I came across real metal divining rods for sale in a little novelty shop. I couldn’t help but purchase a set for Tommy, who now goes by Thomas. When he unwrapped them at Christmas, he called me up and we talked about that time we staked out the yard, recalling the water table, how close it was to the surface. We didn’t talk about my father’s abuse, a subject that is still difficult to broach. We stuck with smaller subjects instead: what he got his kids for Christmas, how the weather was there, if he expected snow. Thomas now lives on a five-acre plot in a rural area where he and his neighbors are on well water, a constant supply that doesn’t go dry or freeze up. So, again, like when we were kids, he’s not in need of water. But I’m sure, if he did need to search for water, or if anyone else needed water, he’d be able to walk out into a field and feel the rushing beneath his feet as the rods crossed. “Here,” he’d say. “Dig.”

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Maria McLeod‘s poetry and prose have been published by literary journals in the U.S., England, Scotland, and Germany. She’s won the Quarter after Eight Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Prize, the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, and has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes. She’s authored two poetry chapbooks, Mother Want and Skin. Hair. Bones. She works as a professor of journalism for Western Washington University. Find her on Instagram: @mariapoempics