The Dark (10 page)

“I just want to go on back to Mechanics Square. Ma said she’d bake apple flummery. And lucky Lizzie got to help Calvin make chocolate, for drinking, I mean.”

Maggie sighs. Apple flummery. Chocolate. Childish pleasures.

“I think I miss the dull ole countryside,” Katie adds, puzzled. “How can that be?”

“It was simple,” Maggie replies, and pulls her licorice rope in twain.

Katie looks nervously at the two dangling strings. “Ma would say that’s a bad omen. A really bad one.”

“Don’t be niddy-noddy, don’t be …” Maggie trails off as Amy and Isaac hurry over, Leah close on behind them.

“Sit down, dear girls, sit down,” Isaac says. He leads Maggie and Katie to a window bench, the one that is netted with the show-globe’s green light. “Thy dear sister has told us all you have done.”

Maggie stares at Leah. “She has?”

“Ah, loves,” Amy says. “We have always suspected you art special in some fashion. Perchance the time has come.”

“Special?” Maggie asks. “How?”

“What time?” Katie asks.

“The time for the arrival of the Universal Spirit, my dears,” Amy says. “When the world is made whole and in Christ’s design. The hungry fed. The naked clothed. Compassion reigning. Oh, I have told ye of it.”

“Ah, that,” Maggie says.

“I recollect it now,” Katie says.

Amy kneels before Maggie, a strange look on her face, and says, “If it is … if it is a truth, and not, say, a phenomenon of the air or wind or some such, then we might speak with them again.”

“With who? Or … whom?” Maggie asks, even though she knows.

“Why, with our children who have passed on. With darling Henry. And sweet Matilda.”

“Henry. Matilda,” Maggie says flatly. Yes, Kat had the names correct. Maggie comprehends Amy’s expression now: hope run rampant. Isaac’s expression is the exact same. He puts his hand on Amy’s shoulder. “We pray for them, always, but that cannot compare to their dear presence.”

Leah looks at Maggie, then Katie. “I was explaining, my dear girls, how we have spoken with not only the peddler, but also now with other spirits, and how it is the innocence of you girls that beckons them, and that if you two call on this spirit or that, they come, often as not, particularly if their beloved living are also present.”

“Yes, them spirits like us a lot,” Katie says.

“It is ‘those’ spirits, my sweeting,” Leah reminds her.

Maggie works her mouth, but the words she wants to say are impossible to purge. She tries again, but just as the words take form, the apothecary door flies open.

Calvin. He is grave-faced and soaked from the rain. Lizzie, weeping, clutches his elbow.

Calvin gives the dire news. Their little niece Ella is racked with fever. It is doubtful she will live. Mother has already left for Arcadia. They all must follow on.

Maggie is hardly aware of Leah guiding them out the apothecary door, though she does hear Katie babbling, “It was all a real bad omen when Mag broke her licorice. I knew it.”

“Get that out of your head, Katherina,” Leah orders. “Causations are plenty in this world.”

“D
ID
I
SAY THEY WERE HONEST?
The Posts?” my patient asked.

“Yes, duck, champions of the truth, no less.”

“Let me recant. They were not
entirely
honest.”

“One is or isn’t,” I muttered (in those days I had little patience for straddle-acts of conscience).

“You see, one night when we were staying with the Posts in Rochester—this was before we moved to Hydesville, before the peddler came—anywise, one night I was awoken by the sound of scuffling and knocks and garbled voices. They came from above me, from the attic. I was terrified, and convinced that the ghosts of Matilda and Henry Post were up there playing Jacob’s ladder or knuckle-bones or some such game. I was convinced they would creep down and throttle me with their cold little hands. None of the other children woke up, nor Katie, but I was owl-eyed the night through. Come morning I discovered the true source of the sounds.”

She fell into a study.

“And?”

“Ah, they were escaped slaves, hidden in the attic. The Posts’ house was part of the underground railroad. It was the first time I’d heard the phrase and ever after I imagined the underground rail as just that, as tunnelled beneath the regular streets and byways, existing as might a fairy world: the depots all tilted and coloured bright, the people so beautiful, and getting on and off the whispery trains with an joyous intent. I imagined glowing stones inset in the walls. Down there, the dark had no power, you see. And down there, a secret was sometimes good. Necessary. Righteous.”

“Such a fanciful imagination you have, duck. You might have been a poetess. An advocate of good causes. A Samaritan sort.”

She gave a bone-dry laugh as if she saw, just then, all the unplucked chances of her life. I cursed my wayward tongue. I am a straightforward person. I do not dissemble, nor varnish the truth of things, by which I mean I am often blunt, even tactless.

“Oh, but you’re spot-on about the laws of men,” I said. “They’re not always good, nor just. And they’re often at cross-hatch with the Higher Laws. Shameful.” I spoke of how slavery was an evil of unchartable depths. I spoke of moral conscience and so forth. My patient, however, seemed to scarcely attend my philosophical chit-chat.

“Damn, but it’s hot in here,” she said, though the garret was cool that day. She shifted the bedclothes, then returned to the Posts, and without the least encouragement from me.

Still, I listened.

“C
HRIST-IN-ALL, ARE WE DONE?
Can we ever be done?” Maggie thinks. Luncheon at the Posts’ is lasting an eternity this sweltering day in mid-July. Maggie, hot-pressed between Leah and Mother, visions herself melting into a sawdusted slab of ice, the ice-wagon drawing her off. She almost envies the Posts’ four children for being sent back to school.

Think ice
, she mouths to Katie, who is likewise in a cast-iron sweat. Katie shrugs and dabs at her eyes, which are ash-grey today and red-rimmed from crying.

Lizzie, seated at the table’s end, prods the remains of her luncheon with her fork tines. Leah taps the table, slow and deliberate, as if hearing a dirge. Mother sniffs and worries at her sleeve. She wears mourning black, as does Maggie, as do Katie and Lizzie and Leah. Three weeks have passed since little Ella died.

“Dost thou think the spirits will grace us with their presence?” Amy asks Leah.

“They do prefer our home, but if we carry on as normal, then perhaps they shall grace us plenty.”

So carry on they do, finishing their plates, making their conversations. Maggie attends all the chit-chat without seeming to, a fresh-honed habit of hers. It has become a habit of Katie’s, too. At last the luncheon guests, fourteen in all, move to the keeping room, avoiding the squares of sunlight as if they are trap doors.

Maggie surveys the room. There are no tassells or fripperies, no wallpaper. No lamberquin on the windows. All is simple. Functional. Unadorned. The walls are linen-white. The rugs patterned only with lines. And yet the room has peculiar beauty, a soothing aspect. So why am I not soothed? she wonders. The heat, she decides, this damned perpetual heat. Yet it doesn’t seem to trouble Abigail Bush. Abigail, plump and heavy-chinned, sits over her needlepoint, serene as a roosting hen. Her husband, Henry, round-headed and liverish, nonchalantly brushes crumbs from his whiskers. The Bushes are close friends of the Posts. Like the Posts they are Hicksite Quakers. Mr. Bush is in the stove business, Maggie recalls. And Abigail is a
suffragette leader. She even presided over that women’s convention in Seneca recently. Such a ruckus that caused, because who ever heard of a woman being chosen to preside over anything?

Maggie sits next to Katie on the settee. Katie sips her cider. She has been church-mouse quiet since Ella died, and has been all-worried, she admitted, about saying the wrong thing at the right time and the right thing at the wrong.

“… and the buzzing wouldn’t stop,” Ruth Culver says to no one in particular. “It drove me near mad. It wanted to say something. Something of grand importance, in my opinion. You can ask my Norman here. Norman?”

“No Man? Noman?” Maggie undertones to Katie, using her cranky Ruth voice. Katie pokes her finger in her cider, doesn’t smile.

Meanwhile “Noman” slides his thin self over to the melodeon, where Calvin is talking with George Willets. George is a cousin of the Posts. He has spindle limbs, carrot hair, freckles. He is about the same age as Calvin but not a jot as handsome. Maggie and Katie were quick to agree on this.

“No, no, Cal,” George says loudly. “It wasn’t Horace Greeley who advised ‘Go West, young man,’ but Soule of the
Terre Haute Express
.”

“It seems a swell strategy, whoever said it,” Calvin responds. “That’d be an adventure, wouldn’t it? Marching off so far.”

Norman Culver, eyeing his wife, Ruth, wholeheartedly agrees.

“And what of young women?” Maggie undertones to Katie again. “Why in tunket can’t we run far off too?”

“We ain’t—I mean
aren’t
allowed,” Katie says, as if Maggie had been serious.

Leah’s voice rises over the general conversation. “The vote, Lemira? Do you truly believe we women shall have it soon? My Good Lord, I cannot believe that women have the fortitude for politics and other manly occupations.” Leah is speaking to Mrs. Lemira Kedzie. Lemira is yet another Hicksite Quaker, and looks, Maggie thinks, like a wood-pecking bird what with her outdated topknot, her long thin nose and small black eyes, her manner of determined nodding.

“Whatever is Lemira doing here?” Maggie whispers to Katie, lips barely moving. “Or George. Or the Bushes even.”

Katie’s shrug is so faint it could be shudder.

Maggie continues, “I mean, spirit talking was to be just for kin and dear friends, that’s what Leah said. Ah, the good grief, our elders are worse than six-year-olds the way they keep on telling and telling. If they don’t heed caution, all of Rochester is going to know that the dead are tromping on back.” She takes a long drink from Katie’s cider. The cider is barely fermented, and tastes flat, almost sour.

Nearby, Leah, released from Lemira, tells Isaac, “We shall hear Ella in time. It was too soon, you see. Spirits need time to cross over, particularly spirit children, who tend to dawdle. Yes, I am only now discovering how it all works. Truly, it is like hearing the works of a daring new chamber ensemble.” Leah is not trying to command attention, but her voice carries and all attend her.

Why always her? Maggie thinks, surprised at her own faint jealousy.

“Yes! Yes,” Isaac cries. “That explains why our Matilda and Henry have not yet made their presence known. They were … are … of such tender years and might have lost their way back. Perhaps thou could guide them? Provide some signpost?”

“A signpost?” Leah says to Isaac, as if trying out the timbre of the word. “Mayhap.”

Isaac gives his beatific smile.

“I’m all-empty,” Katie tells Maggie. She indicates her mug, then rustles without another word over to the cider bowl on the sideboard. She looks, Maggie notes, like a wayward shadow in her overlarge mourning clothes. Maggie wishes her mourning clothes were overlarge, too. Her sleeves chafe her underarms, her stays cramp her breath. She yanks at her cuffs, sees her wrists black-ringed from the dye, sees Ella’s small coffin being lowered into the ground.

“Your Ella is with us still,” Leah told their sister Maria at the after-gathering. “She is happy now and forever. Who of us can say the same?” Leah tried to raise Ella’s spirit then, but got only silence.

“Do you sense our dear Ella, Margaretta?” Leah asked.

“Nope,” Maggie said. It was true. Among all these folk with their well-worn mourning clothes, Maggie sensed nothing but staggering grief.

Now something brushes against Maggie’s skirts. She catches her breath, then chances a look down. No enormous-eyed face under the settee. No Miss Nettie doll clutched in Ella’s arms. No, because Katie put Miss Nettie in the coffin with Ella. Nothing here. Only the feet of the living jostling for space.