Bob the Divine(r)

Steve Adams

Bob
Photo by Ida Adams

          He held the spread ends of two thin peach limbs from the fork he’d just cut in each fist, and they trembled along their length to their common center branch, which suddenly shook and plunged toward the earth. It was an almost absurd display, impossible by any rationale I knew. My Uncle Bob in Arkansas, a man born for overalls. He’d asked us if we wanted to see him do some “water-witching.” “Sure,” we said. We were up for anything besides sitting any longer in his living room. It was the summer after my junior year in high school, and we’d driven up from Dallas for a vacation at my parents’ small hometown in Conway, Arkansas. Bob was my dad’s little brother. I should say younger, actually. Bob was truly big-boned, much larger than his three older siblings, and if you added to that his love for food and disdain for exercise, he was almost twice my dad’s size.
          But somewhere along the way he’d learned how to wave a forked wooden wand he’d freshly cut from a peach tree across his path until he felt a vibration in the wood. Then all he had to do was follow this vibration to the source of the attraction: underground water.
          “Peach limbs make the best divining wands,” he told us.
          He had us give it a try. First my dad, then me, then my sister. We didn’t turn up anything. But when my mom held it over the underground stream we knew ran beneath us, she said, “Bob, I think I’m feeling something.” We stood behind her watching when Bob took two strides toward her and placed his hand on her shoulder. The center limb then dipped to the earth, shook there as if in palsy. I remember thinking at the time, if somebody told me they’d seen this, I wouldn’t believe them. It was insupportable.

          The first time Bob almost died he was a baby. He was a big baby too, the fourth of four. Apparently he was colicky, or at least vociferous. He kicked up a constant fuss, and doctors back then, for a period at least, prescribed phenobarbital to mothers so they might administer it to their infants when they made too much of a racket. My grandmother was a tad high strung and, let’s leave it at that, but also, in her defense, there were the three siblings that preceded Bob, and she was no doubt worn out with the whole affair at this point.
          Anyway, I can’t know the circumstances, but likely she’d “had enough” one day, and gave him a generous dollop of the drug. And he went to sleep. No, I mean, to sleep.
          My father, who was third in line and Bob’s closest sibling, remembers the family carrying the infant’s leaden body to their Chevrolet and ferrying him to the town doctor who managed to, through the wonders of medicine that had sent Bob for a visit to the other side, retrieve him before he became resident.
          The second calamity of note Bob suffered involved his grandmother’s guard dog, a German shepherd named Pat. Pat was a no-nonsense working dog, not a playing dog or a petting dog or a cuddling dog. He lived outside and liked it that way, patrolling the perimeter of grandmother’s two acres near the family home along an unlit road that led to the local small college. At night when the kids walked the two miles in the dark to see a basketball game at the school, Pat would appear and escort them to the gym, then vanish into the woods, and pick them up once the event let out. Anyway, the story goes, Pat was sleeping in the sun one day when five-year-old Uncle Bob decided to leap upon him to “play.” The dog, thinking it was being attacked, reflexively turned and tore Bob’s right cheek open, severing the cheek muscle and leaving a scar for life. Because Pat was shot in the head minutes afterward by a well-meaning hired hand, the dog couldn’t be tested for rabies, and after the doctor stitched up his cheek, Bob had to go through a painful battery of rabies shots in his stomach.
          His next major injury occurred about a year later when Bob was walking downtown. He simply lost his balance, fell, and hit his face on a curb that formed an extremely sharp right angle, which severed his left cheek muscle. So by six he’d had both cheek muscles severed. Remember this as the theme comes up later. I’ll drop a hint—the word “voluble,” the opposite of what you might expect considering these injuries. Nevertheless they dramatically, as well as violently, flagged the physical location of one of his gifts, and one of his needs, and where his future would take him.
          For the record, as a child I never witnessed an abundance of affection in that household. That set of grandparents was the stiffer pair, at least as far as southerners go. Bob, however, was the exact opposite of his parents. He’d grab you and hug you and laugh and ask questions and play practical jokes, much like a huge kid. And even with his scars, his was one of the friendliest faces I’ve seen in my life. It made me happy just to look at him.
          The next time he nearly died he was about eight and walking out of the downtown Conway movie theater with his family. It had rained while they were inside, and as the family meandered down the sidewalk that summer afternoon, Bob, of course, was the one to reach out and take hold of a metal light pole that had shorted out from the storm.
          If the current passing through an electrified object you’ve grabbed is high enough, your muscles will contract and you’ll not be able to let go; you will shake and quake and tremble until you’re fully cooked, and if anyone tries to pull you away they’ll stick to you as if glued, and you’ll dance together until you’re smoking.
          Fortunately for young Bob, his father (and my grandfather) was educated as to the perils of touching a child who is being slowly electrocuted, and ran, football style toward him, hitting him full force with his shoulders, dislodging him and falling together with him into a heap in the street.
          Bob’s next brush with death occurred when he was twelve. Kids back then, they wandered a lot, especially in the country. The state of Arkansas at the time was digging out a lake that would become Lake Conway, and Bob, who’d been scratching around in the rubble one afternoon stumbled across a dynamite blasting cap. He stuck it in his pocket and carried it home. In spite of nearly electrocuting himself years earlier outside the downtown Conway movie theater, he and the rest of the kids had continued to attend the Saturday matinees, and on the big screen Bob had recently watched a short “educational program” they’d run before the feature, a time filler, like The Lone Ranger or Zorro. In it a scientist—no doubt wearing a white lab coat—demonstrated how you could connect wires from batteries to a light bulb and damn if that thing didn’t light up. So Bob in his musings figured if wires from a battery would make a lightbulb glow, then it might do something at least as interesting to a blasting cap.
          He pulled it out of his pocket in the big bedroom in back of the house while the family was setting up for dinner. I see him alone, touching the two wires he’d run from the battery posts to the blasting cap reticently, as if to a burning object. I say reticently because when the blasting cap exploded, Bob was turning his head away, leaning back as if expecting trouble, as evidenced by how the right side of his face caught a glancing spray of shrapnel. Unfortunately his hand caught worse. It improved over the years, but never functioned at a hundred percent again.
          However, my imagination roots itself in the living room, the kitchen, where folks are working or rumbling about. There’s the explosion, followed by the call I heard so many times from the family while visiting when he did something either considered stupid, or something legitimately flat-out stupid: “Robert!” I can’t imagine anyone in the house had a doubt as to the source of the blast.
          The truth was, Bob’s siblings were sleek and athletic and smart, and Bob either wasn’t or didn’t appear sleek or athletic or smart. “Robert!” His name sounding over and over, a synonym for the word “idiot.” Bob already was becoming Conway’s version of what small rural towns in the south politely refer to as their “town character.” It’s hardly a term of respect and indicates an individual who, though colorful and entertaining, will never amount to more than comic relief. And of course, everyone else in town gets to feel superior to him.
          His mother bears some responsibility for this. Not long after he blew that portion of his hand away with the blasting cap, two of Bob’s teachers approached her. He’d been a poor student, had never worked for grades. But they’d run some new tests on him and he’d scored much higher than anyone in the school had expected. Apparently, he was not an imbecile, and if the family would allow him to enter a special program then they were sure he would catch up to his grade level. Wasn’t this good news? Would she allow for it? I imagine their excitement at finding this diamond in the rough who, with some “special needs” teaching, could quickly leap to success.
          But my grandmother would have none of it. No child of hers needed special help. Her family can take care of its own! Her shame, for reasons I’ll never fully understand (though it seems endemic to the South) would not sustain it. So Bob never got the special-needs education that would’ve made him a better fit for proper society. In the end, maybe that was a good thing. Though I doubt it made Bob’s life any easier.
          But she knew he was “special,” alright, and no doubt blamed herself. Among the family theories about my grandmother’s behavior toward Bob was she felt so guilty over nearly killing him as an infant and any long-term damage resulting from it, she’d coddled him ever since, telling him he didn’t have to do his homework if it was too hard, he didn’t have to go to school if he wasn’t feeling that well. And so he didn’t. Further, if someone is treated like a fool, they tend to believe it and behave accordingly.
          Still, there was something unsinkable about Bob, as well as that word I mentioned earlier—voluble. My mother told me at sixteen she’d be at the town drive-in, the local hangout, packed into a car with her friends eating fries and sipping Coca-Colas when someone would spot him from a distance headed their way, no doubt grinning. “Oh God, it’s Robert!” one of them would exclaim in alarm. And then he’d be at their window talking about this and that, laughing and telling a joke, and if they didn’t respond he seemed fine with that as he could certainly carry on a conversation on his own. My mother was three years older than him, and she talked to him when no one else would, not just because she had a crush on my dad, but because she truly thought Bob was sweet. And also, she told me, Bob was keenly interested in his subjects. He wanted to know how you were doing. He found you fascinating. Still, she admitted, once he had hold of you it was next to impossible to uncouple yourself.
          Bob took to these rambles as a kid, walking the couple miles from the homestead to the downtown donut shop to see if he could join a conversation, then moving on to the town square, Greeson’s Corner, and talking to anyone who’d give him their time, and after that, wandering over to the drive-in to visit with the high school kids, this boy who’d had both jaw muscles severed and couldn’t seem to stop talking.
          The town accepted him, spoke about him to one another I’m sure (“Poor Robert is just a touch simple” and “God love him” and “God bless him”), and since he was huge, kids his own age didn’t pick on him. So he drifted by like this, being passed on to the next grade at school whether he did his work or not and talking to everyone he came in contact with, spreading local news and gossip and general observations, grinning through that round, scarred face.

          My grandfather was a mason, an independent bricklayer (during the Depression he traveled as far as Texas for work and slept in his car), and he taught all three of his boys his trade. Charlie, the oldest child, was a natural bricklayer. He first won the Arkansas Apprentice Bricklaying Championship, and then went on to win the national competition. My father was a decent bricklayer, but since he wasn’t keen on making a career of it he set his eyes on college via the G.I. Bill after enlisting for a stint in the Korean War. Bob, no fan of the heavy labor the family business demanded, signed up with the army. An issue regarding Bob—and I wonder to the degree his mother kept this “in the family”—was brought to a head and made official when one night the MPs found him wandering around a field during “lights out” without his having a clue as to who he was or where he was or what he was doing.
          Shortly afterward, the U.S. Army gave my Uncle Bob the official diagnosis: Epilepsy. Turned out Mama was right; he was “special” after all. And the army discharged him. Since he’d already discovered being a private in the military was hardly a soft course of employment, I doubt this turn of fortune troubled him a great deal.
          Back home in Conway, Bob set about finding a new way to make a living. Since everyone in town knew him, he could get work. Problem was, his idea of work was different than his bosses’. He’d manage through the first week with no problems. But the second week he’d decide he wanted to go fishing and call in sick for the day. Week after that he’d call in sick for two days. Week after that he got fired. Bob burned through a string of jobs in short order, and in short order no one in town would hire him. The only work he could get was helping his daddy bricklaying. He wasn’t the steadiest worker there either, of course, but it gave him pocket money while living with his folks.
          Yet . . . why should he be steady? He had people to talk to, information to disseminate. Anybody could lay bricks. And so just as he did before joining the army, he hung around the town square and talked to anyone he could corner, and every morning he headed to the donut shop.
          He won people over by wearing them down. He was unavoidable. Local folks knew about his calamities, and if death couldn’t beat him, what chance did you have? Further, wherever he went he got people talking, and this tends to be a good thing for a small town. Looking at this from a distance, it’s clear he provided connective tissue for this community. Even if sometimes people looked down on him as their “town character.” Even if without meaning to he played the part. And maybe that made it easier for conversation, because he would hardly be intimidating, regardless of his size.

          Outside of town across the county line where liquor could be sold lay a strip of hard scrabble honkey-tonks and roadhouse bars, rough joints where a fight could start and gather and roll out the door in a tumble of fists and knees and elbows. It was the only place, though, within many miles to drink in public, and as Bob soon discovered, he liked to drink in public. What a great deal! He could go out there and drink and talk, and a waiting audience would be lubricated and ready for socializing. So what if sometimes a fight broke out and Bob found himself thrown in jail? So what if his daddy had to bail him out?
          A friend of the family was so respected as a psychic that businessmen from across the country flew into Conway to seek her counsel, and she had a premonition one night that Bob was in great danger and phoned the family to warn them. But Bob was already unreachable, out at the county line quaffing brews with a friend. Soon his buddy was driving them back, no doubt fully loaded. Still, I doubt even a sober driver would’ve seen the flatbed truck backing up at the bottom of the dark hill as they headed down from the top that night since it had no backup lights. Anyway, by the time the driver saw the truck it was too late, and the car hit the back of the flatbed and slid under it, crushed.
          For all the disasters and physical calamities Bob had suffered, this was the only time he’d ever been pronounced dead. When the cops arrived they didn’t even bother to tend to him, since his side of the car took the worst of it and by the looks of things he’d done met Jesus, while this other still-living-fellow needed to be pulled out of the metal. But about the time they worked the driver free and the ambulance showed up, they realized Bob was conscious. The cops couldn’t believe it. They had to use the “jaws of life” to extract him.
          It was a miracle he survived, the doctors said, an absolute miracle. But of course, this was hardly uncharted territory for Bob. Cheating death just seemed part of his lifestyle. The damage to his body was pretty extreme though. It took a full month in the hospital before he healed up enough to be wheeled out the door, and his face picked up a number of new and prominent scars. One created a jigsaw effect where it ran down from his nose and met the childhood scar Pat the dog had gifted him on his right cheek. The overall look of his face was a bit fractured, but his spirits never flagged. The main thing that aggravated him was being stuck in the hospital when the social life in town was going on without him.

          There are a number of other less dynamic accidents that befell him. My dad told me laughing that Bob once got his pants caught on a clutch while trying to step off a tractor and he fell and broke his leg. I told him compared to the other events that didn’t rate high on the story-meter. But my favorite near-miss with death is this one.
          The oil crisis of the 1970s produced a desperate time, as far as getting gas. Across the nation people lined up around the block just to fill up their tank. Bob owned a pickup truck and bought a fifty-gallon auxiliary gas tank designed to fit snug to his cab. It even had a spigot that stuck out the side of the truck so he could fill it when he filled his regular tank. Well, the story goes, Bob was headed back to Conway on a two-lane highway at night (probably after filling up a different tank out at the county line with a different kind of fuel), and fell asleep at the wheel. So picture this dark two-lane road with deep ditches on either side, and Bob’s pickup angling off the road into the ditch on his right until the passenger side of his truck hit the far bank. Which, of course, woke him. But by then the damage was done, because the ditch knocked off the spigot to his special backup gas tank, and gas had spewed all down the side of his truck and to the ground. At the same time the contact had created a spark that set the side of his truck ablaze, as well as trailing fire after it.
          Picture Bob, well awake now, barreling down this ditch, his truck in flames and a path of fire in his wake, trying to wrangle his truck back onto the road’s surface without wrecking and before the thing blew up, which he finally managed to do, parking it, jumping out, and running away from the vehicle as flames took it.

          That pretty much sums up the highlights of Bob’s more dramatic close encounters. He got a forty-acre plot from his parents and built a house on it. Later he would marry a woman who was both an ordained minister as well as a spiritual channeler (her business card read: “Psychic Messenger—Messages of Love from the Other Side”), and her son and his family set up and lived in a trailer home parked on their property. Meanwhile, Bob grew so fat he could only sleep in his La-Z-Boy recliner because his fat pressed down on his lungs when he was prone. After he got his stomach stapled he lost enough weight to move back into bed.
          But I’m veering into the “town character” aspect of Bob, and I believe he deserves better than that. A happy ending even. Still, it was always one thing after the next with him, which didn’t help him shake the title. And even if he’d lived a normal adult life, folks don’t tend to give you second chances to define yourself once you’ve set yourself up below them on the social ladder. Especially in small towns. It’s just not in their best interests. Which is all to say that Bob’s self esteem, for all his jovial garrulousness, took blows every day. His brother Charlie ran a successful lumber business, his sister had kids and a solid marriage to a claims adjuster for an insurance company, and my dad was working his way up the corporate ladder at Sears back when Sears mattered.
          But something shifted in Bob. He’d always been good at growing plants. This is not surprising, I suppose, for a fellow who would in a few years discover he could find underground water with a peach limb. And he realized that because of his short stint in the military he could tap the G.I. Bill for funds for college. He was, of course, intimidated by the idea of school. I doubt he told many people he was going to apply to the local college and study horticulture, which is hardly a soft course of study. But regardless of his failings in public schools, he managed to get himself admitted, and once in the classroom he discovered to his amazement that, not only could he hold his own with his younger classmates, but that he excelled. For the first time in his life Bob made good grades.
          He also discovered, however, after a further period of study, that the business of horticulture involved hard work. The outside-in-the-Arkansas-summer-heat sort of work, the lifting and hauling of bags of fertilizer and seed and digging in the earth for hours every day sort of work. And of course, such long working hours would keep him away from the donut shop and the Very Important News people would be sharing. So as the reality of the demands of this new potential occupation kicked in, Bob followed his inclinations as he was prone to do, and they took him elsewhere. Back to Greeson’s Corner. Back to the donut shop where he’d hold court. But his inclinations now took him to books as well, to studying, since he’d discovered late in life, that even if he couldn’t convince his family and friends of it, he was actually smart. Very smart. And he began a self-study program, devouring history books, geography books, books about politics, books about anything and everything. Reading became his new job, and the fact that he could do it indoors and from the couch no doubt made it even more appealing.
          So now when Bob walked into the donut shop, he would not only be able to share local news and town gossip, he would also be a source of broader knowledge, of legitimate information from outside the boundaries of Arkansas, or even the U.S. And once again, his aw-shucks persona and limited standing in the community reduced the intimidation factor to the degree where he could very effectively disseminate it.
          His personal downside, however, was even this wouldn’t change his social status. In order to do that he had to find a way to leave his one lifelong platform and define himself on another. I’m not sure if this move came about entirely by accident, but another shift occurred. What he told my father was this: he had become conscious to the fact that he was now carrying a bottle of whiskey with him wherever he went, and that indicated he might “have a problem with alcohol.” So, and rather suddenly, he joined AA.
          Turned out he didn’t have that big of a problem putting the bottle down. Instead of drinking he took the lectern at AA meetings and told how he nearly died one night because he’d developed a too intimate relationship with Jim Beam. But now thanks to AA he was a changed man, his life was better, he no longer needed late nights at the county line and the precarious drive back to Conway on those winding narrow roads. In fact, he had all he needed right here, with his friends and family.
          Turned out, what Bob needed more than liquor was a forum, and he’d found it. Again and again he spouted his stories from the stage and shared his woes concerning the evils of alcohol. And when a newcomer drifted in through the doors and had a fleeting urge to talk to a member, Bob would be there. And when that person took the next step and needed a sponsor, Bob would be there. “Call me anytime,” he’d tell them, “day or night. Believe me, no matter what you’ve done, I’ve done worse.”
          And there he’d stand, this big hulking mass of Arkansas hillbilly with a smiling patchwork face that somehow came off as friendly looking, comforting even, and he’d put them at ease, and listen if they needed to talk, and if not, then he had plenty of stories to fill the time. He would talk from the stage, or one-on-one, or on the phone from his bedside in the middle of the night. After all, he was born to talk, and in this community talk is currency. That currency made Bob rich, for the first time in his life respected and admired.
          Sometime later after all this talking, all this working with AA and addicted folks, he discovered his ability to track underground water with a stick. He told my parents he’d watched a working douser as a boy and never forgot it. Later as an adult he read about it somewhere and decided to give it a try. He felt a little something in the wood, he said, so he focused on that and it grew until he felt it a lot. So there we were that summer afternoon, me seventeen years old with my family out back of his house, watching him track underground streams with a peach limb. After he was done he handed us business cards he was obviously proud of that read “Robert Adams—Douser.” Proud, as if a business card legitimized him. Folks in the area had already started hiring him to come in and water-witch the best locations on their property to dig a well. Some years later the local paper, Log Cabin Democrat, would do a full-page feature on him and his water-locating powers, their theme being a sort of tribute to the way people did things in the old days.¹ Log Cabin Democrat, Conway Ark, Sunday Oct 3 1982; page 3; microfiche; UCA Archives; accessed March 14, 2016 And don’t you figure that back then, someone who could find underground water with a stick, since water was, and is, life and death, someone who could tell you where to dig your well, would be a valued member of your community?
          As if that wasn’t enough, Bob also developed “healing hands,” and according to multiple family sources, when he held his hands a couple of inches above your skin and focused, you could feel the heat radiating dramatically out of them. Then he would place them on you, hold them there for a few moments, and when he pulled them away the ache or pain or whatever it was troubling you had either greatly diminished or exited the body entirely. (Unfortunately for Bob, once word got out, aging family members had him driving all over town to minister to their various afflictions.)
          I wonder how many of these skills of healing and survival, whether they seem rational or not, lie buried in our DNA, or in the DNA of ones who aren’t so cleanly accepted from a paint-by-the-numbers, fit-in, rational perspective, and the degree to which in older times such people would’ve been respected leaders of their tribe, their community, instead of oddities, or folks who have to travel afield to find homes worthy of them.

          My last chance to see Bob was some years later. I’d started writing novels and had an idea for one set in Arkansas in the fifties, so I took a long tour driving through the state, corner to corner. But I felt I had to stop in Conway, even if it had radically grown due to its proximity to Little Rock, and visit Hank, one of my favorite uncles. I was planning on seeing only him, but of course once he drove me to the old downtown cafe for lunch there were a dozen relatives waiting for me inside. They embraced me like the prodigal son, but Bob was not among them. I later heard some years before my trip he’d gotten into a misunderstanding with one of the diners, a cousin, who also happened to be a local bank president. Bob, regardless of his newfound status elsewhere, was still Bob, especially when family was in play, and he’d wanted a sizable loan and expected that relative/cousin/bank president to grease the skids. Instead he’d asked Bob, “What do you have for collateral?” And Bob was nonplussed (as well as short on collateral). This guy was the bank president and a relative. Why couldn’t the deal go through? He took it personally.
          I’m projecting now, but still, I can’t imagine that the decades of “town character” status wouldn’t come wheeling in here with the rejection, even if his request was bone headed. Especially if his request was bone headed. You never survive your family. If you’re the idiot child you’ll still be that child even if you become President. I figure Bob wasn’t keen on feeling like comic relief at one more family gathering, coming off as the fool in front of that cousin who’d stiffed him. And so, instead of showing up to be humiliated in front of me, he left a message on my Uncle Hank’s answering machine saying he was feeling under the weather and would be staying home.
          After the big family-reunion-lost-relative-lunch I went back to Hank’s house and he told me maybe we should call up Bob so I could leave him a message—he was sure Bob wouldn’t pick up—and say I was sorry I missed him and maybe I’d catch him next time, just to settle any troubled waters, family-wise. And so I did, relieved when Hank proved right—Bob didn’t pick up. After all, I was on a schedule and already behind, and if I got talking to Bob there was no telling how long it’d take to get off the phone. After I hung up I told Hank goodbye and drove on.
          And that was so many years ago. And Bob’s gone. And Hank’s gone. And so many of the rest are gone. But what I’d like to do, if I could, if I had it to do over, would be to have decided to spend an extra day in Conway, and call Bob up and leave a message asking if I might visit him since he was feeling under the weather, and maybe we could catch up. I’m sure I would’ve heard back within the hour. And then I’d drive over. After I paid my respects to his wife, she’d no doubt leave us to ourselves. Then he’d lean back in his La-Z-Boy recliner, and I’d sit on his couch. And I’d let him talk my ear off. I’d ask him to tell me everything he knew.