The Dark (21 page)

Dusk is coming on. John quickens his pace. He has not brought a carry lamp and does not wish to stumble about in the full-dark until
he breaks a leg, or becomes lost, or encounters the malevolent night dwellers of which his wife ever warns.

Finally he reaches the rambled length of his son’s farmstead. There is the welcome smell of fried lard and manured fields, the clear song of the vesper sparrows. He nears the oak where little Ella loved to sit and talk with her Miss Nettie doll, the doll Katie passed on to her, the one he made.

He glimpses a flit of braid. Overhears a little girl’s make-believe prattle. He halts, his gut dropping. No, Ella had been much smaller. He comes closer. Sees only Katie, talking to herself alike a child of Ella’s age. She looks up at his approach.

“You all packed for the morrow?” John asks.

“I am, but I don’t want to go. Do I got to? Really? Truly?”

“I know Ruth can be sour, but she’s got no children and space aplenty. You can’t share the same bed with Maggie till her sickness is over. You know that.”

“It’s not the cholera, is it?” Katie clutches her old pinafore. She turned thirteen last week, but her voice is still reedy high, and her eyes have not settled on their colour, are showing a heather-grey in the fall of sun. A few nights past she woke up caterwauling. John hovered as his wife soothed her. Katie told them about the tender’s hound. How she and Maggie were thieving apples and how the tender’s hound chased them, and how she fell and how they would have been surely killed if the hound hadn’t been whistled off. In her nightmare, however, the hound did catch them, then tore them to pieces. The bloody pieces struggled to return to some whole, but Katie’s pieces and Maggie’s were mangled together in the orchard grass and they couldn’t sort themselves out. At that point Katie woke up screaming.

“I doubt it’s cholera,” John says now. “Maggie’s got a belly-ache, is all. We can’t take a chance, mind. David’s boys are at Maria’s and … well, leastaways, you won’t have no more nightmares about that hound. I shot him dead. Don’t tell no one.”

“I won’t, Pa. I won’t. Cross my heart and hope to die. And thanks and all. Really.”

John nods and spits tobacco. As usual he can think of nothing
more to say, but then Katie and Maggie have ever stumped him for talk, even more than most people do.

That night John listens to his wife’s soft snores. Pale moon at the window beyond him. Pale mound of Margaret before. He traces his fingers on her arm. In this matronly woman he still sees ghostings of the sixteen-year-old Margaret Rutan he met at the county fair. She was pink-cheeked, golden-haired, her fluttery eyes a drown-a-man blue. Her endowments? An almighty wonder. She giggled at something he said, which no one had ever done. Love had been scarce in his life and so love was, and is, a surprising and perplexing thing, complicated these days by his love of God, under which his worldly love has been subjugated. Of course Margaret appreciates his piety, what woman wouldn’t? Yet things have been different between them ever since he returned from his ten years gone. To this day they argue blandly, without their former heat, as lawyers might. And they make love dutifully only once a month, as if they hadn’t chosen each other completely.

John whispers her name. Dares a ribald endearment. Margaret mutters back what sounds like a charm. She has no hand in this spirit business. Of that John is certain. She considers doubt some exhausting task. John-Before had never needed to invent original or elaborate excuses as to where the tin-can money had gone, or where he himself had gone on an afternoon, a week. He counted himself lucky for this, though it vexed him also—gullibility in grown people has always vexed him. That was why he never felt guilty for cheating at the cards: the gullibility of the duped seemed more perverse than the cheating itself. Was that why he taught Leah the truth of things? Things a child should not have known? He can’t recall. He supposes he must have been drunk: “You got to have an accomplice somewhere in the room. A child is best. Like you. No one suspects a child, Leah-Lou. You get a system of signals, see, like scratches or blinkings or a sniff or a head tip. Best make that accomplice guilty as you are. That way he won’t betray you, not unless he wants to fall alongside.” He told her such things, and more. And Leah, it’s apparent, listened too well.

His wife shifts to her back. Her endowments rise up and up. John hefts one breast, then the other. Kisses her brow, her nose. She stirs.
Bolts upright and clutches her nightcap. “What is it? What now? Leave me in peace.”

“Peggy, it’s only me for … for crimmey’s sake. Your husband. Hush.”

“Oh, you. I thought it was a wretched spirit up to no good again, didn’t I?”

John pats her back. He nearly tells her then about the past he hauls with him, about Brother Able and his sorry fate, about those first knocks at the Hydesville house and what they meant. Then he decides no, best she be kept in the dark. Best for us all.

The next morning John is mixing lime plaster in the foreground of his half-built house when Leah announces her presence with a stiff, rustling sound. Her dress of bronze-green is fronted with rigid pleats and agate buttons. Her day-dress of madder red, the one she wore for years, is long gone. She wears a different fit-out near daily now.

“You wished to speak with me, Father? Here I am.”

John pushes up his spectacles and pinches the bridge of his nose. “You’ve got yourself in a perilous situation, Leah-Lou, and I want to be a help to you.”

“Help? My Lord, but we could use another man’s help. Calvin is kept far too busy. You shall come to Rochester, then? When the cholera passes? We shall be so very busy. Eliab is planning a grand tour. He has exhibitions booked for us in Auburn and Troy, and in many other towns besides. And then the city of New York itself! And Mr. Greeley himself has written Eliab and asked to be our champion. He and his dear wife are eager to meet us the moment we arrive in New York. They lost a son to the cholera, though that was in last year’s round. Pickie? Yes, that was his name. Odd, but there it is.”

“Who’s this Greeley?” John says, exasperated, because lately Leah has taken to tossing down names with the same abandon she once tossed knives in mumblety-peg.

“Who? Father! Horace Greeley. The editor of the
New York Tribune
. His name is writ large on every issue of that publication. He is most recognizable.”

“I don’t hold with New York papers. They’ve nothing to do with us.”

“With you, that is true. But what of P.T. Barnum? Surely he rings a note or bell in your head. Horace is keen to introduces us to that celebrated man—they are fast friends, apparently—and Mr. Barnum will surely be keen, in turn, to promote our blessed spirits.” She gives her dimpled smile.

“Don’t talk like they’re real, them spirits of yours, or
quasi
real, or any kind of real.”

Leah frowns, then masters herself in a way she never could when she was a child. “And I have assured Ma that New York is not a pit of snakes, but you know how she worries.”

“Recall the commandment, my girl,
thou shall not bear false—
”

“I know how it goes. Who doesn’t? And anywise, the spirits
are
real. As real and true as you or I. I have felt them course through me, speak through me even. An astounding thing. Many have witnessed it.”

John waves this off. “I prayed to the Almighty all morning in the field so that I could see things clear.”

“That must have been quite damp.”

“You can’t keep on.” He stammers out his intent. He meant to be calm, convincing, meant to explain how he only wants his family together again under one roof, meant to employ phrases of sentiment: one true heart, the joy of family, the duties of women, and so forth. Says instead, “Order your spirits to leave. Order them.” He laughs dryly. “I’ve got no doubt they’ll obey you.” He picks up a hammer and attends to the boards laid out on his sawhorse.

“Leave, Father? But I do not wish the spirits to leave, even if they did listen to ‘orders’ from me. I have grown quite accustomed to them—and must you hammer on like that? The board cannot go anywhere.”

He pauses, the hammer in mid-strike.

“As I was saying, I have grown quite accustomed to them. They quell the loneliness I have always endured as a woman abandoned with a child, struggling to pay the rent, alone against the trials of the world and—”

“Sure, sure, I can understand all that, I can; but you’re risking the damnation of your eternal soul, anyone can see that.”

“Anyone? Perhaps we should leave the judgement of my soul to God. I have no doubt He will find it honourable.”

John drops the hammer, and on his thumb. He clenches his teeth to cut off the oath. Abjuring foul, blasphemous words is no easy task; they had once constituted a good third of his vocabulary, after all. Yet an oath is the only thing to utter when you have bashed your thumb with a hammer, or when you must live on the charity of your son, or when your daughters are set on the road to damnation and ruin.

“Are you in pain, Father? Whatever is that sound?”

“Damnit, girl. Then what of your mortal flesh? Take your lesson from Jezebel. The woman was hurled out a tower for worshipping heathen gods. Got herself torn apart by dogs, nothing left of her but—”

“I know how it goes, Pa, but that was such a long time past.”

“Then what of Joe Smith? Him and his false religion and false gods. Got jailed for his sins, but he weren’t safe even behind bars. The mob shot him up and chucked him out the window, just like Jezebel. They finished him off with a firing squad and then tried to saw off his blaspheming head. That was naught five years ago.”

Leah backs away. Eyes his hammer—as if he would ever strike her in wrath, or in any other fashion. “That Smith was a man. Honestly, none would treat a woman so.”

John sighs and clenches his thumb to stay the blood leaking from the nail. At this Leah rubs her forearms as if recalling her own wounds. Have the scars have faded over the years since she was a girl? John wonders. Decides it unlikely. There were so many wounds at the time, he knew she would be marked for life.

“Besides, I have no fear of such things,” Leah continues. “Crowds. Mobs. You of all people must know that. How could I fear any such thing after the birds lifted me in their multitudes?”

John doesn’t waste his breath arguing this memory of hers. He takes off his spectacles again, wipes at his eyes. Leah is a blur, pink-red with blood. Last card, he thinks. He speaks of newspaper men. How eager they are to listen. He thrice mentions reputation.

John has seen Leah quake with fury, but never stilled with it, as she is now. “Newspaper men, Father? I am on intimate terms with
many, not just the famed Mr. Greeley. And indeed they love to listen. They pick up on any innuendo and turn it into such tales. Already they have spoken of their suspicions that you devised levers, pulleys and such to make the noise of—”

“I’ll take on the blame. I’ll do that. I haven’t steered you right.”

He should have known that Leah would not retreat. Has he ever known her to do so?

“Many things are hidden in this world,” she says softly. “Occurrences in the dark. I have heard of fathers so blinded with drink they attempt to treat their daughters as their wives, when alone with them, in a barn, say, and these daughters of such tender years. The daughters always run off, horrified, before the unspeakable happens. Still. They cannot ever forget it.”

When he finally speaks it is with the voice of John-Before and with the rage of John-Before. “You, you dare suggest … how can you even brew-up such things? How? Damn you, you were a mean ‘un as a girl. You’re meaner than an old sow now.”

Leah flinches, brushes at her eyes, then points to the joists of this house he is building for them all. “Cobwebs, Pa. They’re settling in. They do that in empty places.” She walks off, her dress of bronze-green rustling the fallen boards.

John calls to her, but she does not turn back. He can’t help but notice, however, that she neglects to lift her skirt hem out of the dirt.

“W
hatever are you doing?” I demanded. (My patient had flung off the bedclothes.) “You’ll catch your death!”

“Catch my death? Oh, the good grief, I’d say I’ve caught that already.” She yanked off her stockings then.

I was not amazed by the sad bloating of her legs—a prime symptom of her dipsomania—but her feet were another story. They were, to be frank, ghastly: all knobbed and muscled and the toes dreadfully overlarge.

She indicated the soles of her feet, then showed her palms. “Such was all that was left of Jezebel after she fell, after the dogs tore her apart as punishment for blasphemy. This: the palms of her hands, the soles of her feet.”

“It was a harsh judgement on Jezebel,” I allowed. “And peculiar how the dogs left only that. I objected, quite strongly.”

“Objected? When?”

“When I heard the story, oh, so long ago it seems another age. Would a man be treated the same? No, he would not.”

“And yet it made no difference,” she said, and studied me for a moment, as if she had mistaken me for someone else.