The Dark (20 page)

She wends with Katie, Leah and their mother through the lattice of ash barrels, manure heaps and hawkers’ stalls. Calvin is busy with his militia today, and so they behave as unchaperoned females must and keep their greetings brief, their gait brisk, and their gaze cast down, mostly, to the muck-caked boardwalks. None of which lessens Maggie’s certainty that the four of them are being seen, noted, thought of. Attend! There they are, the spirit-raising females. But where is the father? What have they done with him? Save for this “brother” Calvin who comes and goes they have no guidance from any man. No protection. It is as if they have scant concern for their reputation, for their precarious toe-hold in society, that is to say, the world.

Yes, Maggie can easily guess what the watchers are thinking, whispering, it is evidenced in the secret language of glances and sighs, of tightened brows, crossed arms, of quickened breath and quick-changed topics, of drumming fingers and shifting eyes. It is nothing like the language she and Katie once fashioned up to fool their mother. No, this is the language of the unsaid and unwritten, a language she is comprehending better and better each day. Would Maggie prefer illiteracy of it all? No, she is quite certain not.

“A moment, my dears,” Leah says, and stops, as she always does, at the bookstall on Exchange Street. Prominently displayed is the first tract ever written about their family, the one by E.E. Lewis. Maggie vaguely recalls the man, his fingers blued with ink, his goggly eyes. He had wanted to talk to her and Katie but their mother said no. She’s a good ma, Maggie thinks, and knows by Katie’s fond glance that Katie thinks the same. They hook their arms through their mother’s on one accord.

“I suppose this is still a popular item?” Leah says to the bookseller, as if she has only vague interest in Eliab Capron’s thick pamphlet:
Singular Revelations: Explanation and History of the Mysterious Communion with Spirits: Comprehending the Rise and Progress of the
Mysterious Noises in Western New York, Generally Received as Spirit Communications
.

“Still selling like griddle cakes, ma’am,” the bookseller says. Indeed, upwards of six thousand copies have already sold, Maggie knows. Six thousand. It would take her an age to count that high. Many of the buyers must live beyond Rochester, beyond New York state even. And all are reading of her and her family. The thought unsettles her. It is one thing to be known around Rochester, another to be created in God-knows-whose mind miles and miles away.

Leah turns to Mother, says, “I do hope Eliab considers a shorter title for the next printing. Two lines, no more, lines that are like sharp, clear notes that catch the ear.”

Mother frowns. “But then a body, I mean that is, one person, shouldn’t know what were inside it? Would one?”

“Two might,” Maggie murmurs to Katie. Katie smiles into her glove.

Leah glances at her sisters. “What is inside can be discovered. Well, I have left such details to Eliab. I cannot orchestrate everything. I must recall this. Come. We are almost arrived.”

An ornate sign hangs outside a crown-glass window. Mother peers through. Maggie does likewise, though more discreetly. Sees fine-dressed people sitting at fine-draped tables, an aproned man bearing a domed and lidded platter.

“But we’re not travelling or staying here, are we?” Mother asks, agog.

Katie cries, “Ma, it’s not a tavern or a hotel. It’s a restaurant! You can go any old time.”

Once seated at a window table, Mother hefts the silverware, smooths out the stiff napkin, then grips it in near panic. “Laws, laws. Look! Diamond folds.”

“For pity’s sake,” Maggie says. “That’s not a diamond. It’s a … a skewed triangle.”

Leah and Katie agree, and their mother looks mollified. Maggie tries not to smile. And she doesn’t bother asking what diamond folds portend, because it is surely death—her mother’s own, or someone else’s. Death if a curlew cries. If a dog howls under a window. If an owl is seen in daytime. If it rains on an open grave. If a bird flies into a window. If a picture falls. If one dreams of birth, or of death itself,
certainly. Maggie does not wholly discount such auguries. Death does come for everyone, doesn’t it?

Leah encourages Mother’s attention back to the menu. Mother dithers, then decides on the bullock’s heart with macaroni. “Remarkable, isn’t it?” she sighs, as if in the presence of magic. Mayhap it
is
magic, Maggie thinks. Consider this waiter who bows and asks in a foreign voice what they wish for. And then supper appears, without visible preparation, visible fire. And no washing to be done later.

Now the coffee is being served on silver trays. Maggie inhales the coffee scent; it is rich as gravy, sweet as pie. From the waiter’s trolley she, Leah, Katie and their mother share out fancy creams, eclairs and biscuits glacés. Now they chat and jest, all of them at their most congenial, their most content, that is until the commotion begins in the street.

They hear the newspaper boys calling. The call is taken up and passed on.

“But I knew it, didn’t I?” Mother says, gripping her napkin again.

Maggie holds her fork upright as a spear, says nothing. Leah and Katie are also mute. The other diners murmur in agitation. Rise. Space themselves away from their neighbours.

The world stops. The cholera has come to Rochester.

“I
’VE FORGOTTEN HOW IT ENDS,”
my patient said. “That old rhyme about the fly. The words, I mean.”

I clacked my needles. I recalled the rhyme well and many others, to boot. My son ever felt badly for the foolish fly. Yet how could it end in any other fashion?
“ ‘And I have many pretty things to show when you are there.’ ‘Oh no, no,’ said the little fly, ‘to ask me is in vain, for who goes up your winding stair can never come down again.’ ”

“Yes, that is exactly it.” She mentioned again the cholera. “It kills so many, even yet,” she said, and eyed me as if I might disagree.

I did not. “Cholera. Typhoid. Consumption. They’re like the rain and snow—they fall on all without regard. At least they’re not a nameless visitation. At least the sick can be tended and have the benefit of the good death. That sort of thing.” I sighed then, I allow,
with wishing that my son, if he had to perish, could have done so in a sickbed and not, as I assumed then, as so much cannon fodder.

“Like me,” my patient said.

“What is that? Yes, like you. You have time aplenty to ready yourself for the Glory, a thing for which you should be grateful.”

“I’m grateful in bucket-loads, Mrs. Mellon. But at the time of the cholera announcement I was not interested in dying, in a good fashion or otherwise. The epidemic the year before took, what, four thousand in the Southern states? And mayhap ten thousand in England. No surprise, then, that we wished to be far from its reach, that we all fled to brother David’s farmstead in Arcadia. Of course our father, John Fox, was there too. He was still building a house for our benefit and believed that now the family would stay together for good. He truly did believe that. It was as if he had no knowledge nor interest in his daughters’ burgeoning fame, as if he cared not a whit about the ghosts we’d set loose upon the world.

N
OTHING MOVES ON THE PUBLIC ROAD
except John. He walks with a resolute pace, cradling his old flintlock. A few figures work cautiously in the fields. A meagre commerce stirs the crossroads a half-league off. Wagons and carriages crowd the quiet yards of the farmsteads. The visitors hunker within. Droves of such visitors have come to Arcadia from Rochester and New York. Cities are where the cholera somehow breeds and thrives. Perhaps in the miasma. Perhaps in the breath. The countryside offers sanctuary, that much is known.

He attains the Hyde’s orchard and clambers over the split-rail fence. The apple trees are in full spring leaf, the afternoon warm and the breeze a balm, though it brings only pestilence. Or punishment? It might well be. Punishment for his daughters’ sins, or mayhap for the general, unceasing sins of the world; his daughters are scarcely the only wrongdoers about. And of course, he’s followed his daughters’ “career.” How could he not? What with folks talking behind their hands when he passes by, and children playing at ghost-talking
on the dry goods stoop; what with his son, David, ever bringing home newspapers and pamphlets, ever shaking his head in aghast wonderment, as if the ghosts are the animalcule of some infecting plague, worse than any cholera.

John whistles loud, sharp. A hare trembles in the grass. A cloud crosses the sun. John calls out, “Here! Here!” then turns at the rumbled growl. He hefts the flintlock. Fires. The air plumes with gun-smoke, echoes with the crack. The tender’s massive hound flips back. Yelps once in agony, then dies. John nudges him with his boot. Spits tobacco into the grass. He doubts anyone will come questioning. Shots are heard often. Raccoons are hunted. Squirrels. And the fear of the cholera is keeping everyone occupied. If anyone does ask, John will tell the truth: that he sought the hound out. As a Godly man he must only tell the truth, a rule he finds vexing still.

He walks homeward. Leah, Katie, Maggie and his wife are cloistered with David’s family at the farmstead. Maggie felt poorly this morning. “Just ate too much slip-gut pudding,” she said, “that’s all, that’s all.” But the decision was quickly made to send Katie to Ruth Culver’s on the morrow.

He passes their old saltbox house. Quack grass grows high in the foreyard, ivy runnels over the walls and a shutter hangs listless over a shattered window lite. No surprise the house cannot be rented, not to anyone, much to Carlos Hyde’s annoyance. But who would rent a house in which a body is buried somewhere? In which a murdered man knocks about at all hours?

John’s pace slows when he passes Hydesville’s small white church. He stops and rests his musket against the church gate, then cuts off a twist of tobacco with a hunting knife. Just inside the gate the Reverend York bends wearily among the gravestones. He is wielding a yardstick, measuring for space. John supposes the plague-struck will need to be buried one atop the other, as in the old countries of Europe, where the dead are said to be stacked a mile deep.

The reverend looks up. He is a tall, bull-shouldered man and yet he casts the slight-framed John Fox a fearful look before he hurries towards his church, the church from which he has banned John and his family for blasphemy. And yet perhaps even this expulsion is in God’s
plan. For when reverends expound on the evils of liquor, John ever wishes for the whisky burn on his tongue, and for the hard pews to become the hard benches of a grog house, the shuffle of the prayer books the shuffle of the playing cards, and the church windows those of a tavern through which a whore might be spied, skirts riding high. Indeed, the Reverend York gave an entire sermon about the sins of the drunkard on that March 31st of’48, and the longing for liquor thus lodged in John’s brain in a way it had not in years, and then he found the flask of whiskey in the snow outside the church where another churchgoer had tossed it in righteous determination.

Hamartia
, is that the word? It’s akin to
Hubris
, John recalls and is Latinate or Greek mayhap, and anywise has to do with how small unthinking actions—alike his idiotic lapse in sobriety—can spawn titanic consequences.

The Reverend York vanishes through the church’s banded door. John tips his hat. Just then, Brother Able comes to the fore of John’s mind, as he often does. You, Reverend, could sure take some lessons from that stripling preacher, John thinks, there was some mortal keen tenacity, some courage. And best recall, all you high-handed reverends, that God gives his true will to the oddest figures, the oddest voices. Best recall that in the beginning of God’s revelations there were no churches nor reverends, only the domed sky and bushes afire, only the expanse of desert and God in all things. John would have been more at home in those times; he is certain of it. He’d enjoy letting his beard grow apace with the wisdom of his years, or have his women mind him at least. He is the patriarch, is he not? Is father to five living children and one in the grave. It should signify. He imagines palm trees and camels and Margaret and the girls in old-timey dresses. They are bearing platters of dates and casting him looks of respect—gratitude even. They are listening to him say once again, “Ignore those raps. It just makes them worse. You’ll get used to them. In good time you’ll scarce hear them at all.” Just then John recalls Abraham’s Sarah and wonders if women have ever been as respectful as men would wish.