The Dark (50 page)

His wife pokes at the spindles on the work table between them. He is making rockers so that when she returns for good they can sit out here on a warm night and contemplate the stars in God’s sky. She
has become less fearful of night, perhaps from living in an illuminated city where night and day differ little.

“I suppose it was that way with us, John. Yes, it was. Did I say how pale our Maggie was? And how her smile was set as if she were a waxen figure of her own self? And our Leah simply gushed tears, didn’t she? And she kept claiming that life went on. And I kept asking if it were official then, and Katie kept asking where was that champagne because a toast was needed. And everyone was congratulatory, weren’t they? But I was in a perplexity, wasn’t I, John, because, really, shouldn’t engagements and funerals be kept to their separate occasions? Doesn’t this somehow bode ill?”

John says it would be superstition to think so. That his wife should pray for some answers. It all comes out more abruptly than he intends, and his wife frowns in exasperation. “I suppose I must fetch up some food. Join us, won’t you? The night air is coming on, it’s bad for your lumbago. And, gracious evers, why are your fingers stained? Is that ink? Whatever are you using ink for?”

John curls his fingers into his palm. “I was attempting it as preservative for … wood stuff.”

“Humph, you’re always experimenting and concocting, aren’t you? That’s the man in you. Now, do come. You might lead us in prayer. Leah is up to singing again now—though only a hymn, of course.”

“I’ll join at a later hour.”

“Laws, John, you’re like a child.” She leaves him to his work, skirts swishing at the sawdust.

A child?
he thinks. Children, his children, are the ones who sawed up this family, who have created these blasphemous ideas that are reaching to all corners of the world. And it is John Fox, a man long grown, who has been left to right it all.

He waits until his wife has crossed the yard, then sweeps aside the woodblocks and shavings on his desk. He takes out the ink pot that he keeps hidden from sight, the feeling much like when he stashed bottles of whisky, flasks of rum. He had ended his last letter with the story of the day when only he and Ambrose were left unconverted. Telling further is a difficulty, and he dips his pen several times before he starts at last.

John and Ambrose warmed themselves over the hatch-stove. Above them was the stink of the tanneries, the pall of coal smoke, the low din of the high falls. They listlessly debated going to town and decided against it. Work was near impossible to find for men who had not forsworn the bottle and embraced God’s grace. And neither of them could stomach the sights that greeted them in Rochester. Seeing both men and women on their knees was commonplace now. They clustered like pigeons around fountains and in squares, their prayers heard by all who passed. The theatres were closed clam tight, as were the ninepin alleys, the dramshops the billiard halls. The dry-wagon rattling through town was a common sight, the preacher aboard bull-horning for all to jump on. The pledge-seekers were declaring mere temperance was not enough. Called on men to mark a “T” beside their name to show a total abstinence. Erastus Bearcup had become one of these teetotallers. Proudly
T
’d his name, and in public view at that. All talk was of Reverend Grandison Finney. The churches couldn’t hold all the faithful and many knotted outside the doors, straining to hear, oblivious to the cold. Revivals lasted for days. All over the country the pattern was repeating.

Years later it would be called the “Great Awakening,” but to John it was the Great Sleep, a time of interminable boredom. He had only Ambrose for company now and had no choice but to listen to his nostalgic jabber, mostly about the Indians whom he had warred
against and for whom Ambrose was becoming strangely sentimental. “I was their captive, see.”

John poured out a ration of whisky for himself and then Ambrose. Finding any liquor at all took an ironclad determination and John and Ambrose were subsisting on the lone stash of whisky that Erastus had not found and fouled with salt. “I know it,” John said. “You tell of it damn near constant. Them and their torturing, tearing out your tooth and poisoning you, hot somethings on your prick, the old hag wanting your baby and how you clocked her and escaped. Got it fucking covered, haven’t I?”

Ambrose’s stroked his unkempt beard. “I reckon I lived three months with them. I saw things you wouldn’t believe. This here Reverend Finney couldn’t work anything finer. I seen those Indians call up spirits by looking into smoke. I seen them walk over fire. Jesus could only manage water, couldn’t he? I seen them turn a dead man to life. That’s what I witnessed, I swear.”

“Thought you were trussed like a hog in one of them fucking wigwams.”

Ambrose stared out the small window at the moon-shining waters of the canal. “My tooth was festering and they yanked it out and buried it so it couldn’t come back to pain me. I got lost, see, when I was hunting away from the farm.”

“You weren’t a soldier?” John asked flatly, his capacity for surprise long diminished.

“I were just a stupid weedy boy, worse than that Brother Able we met, recall? Back in Syracuse? Anywise, I was out hunting and I stumbled and speared myself in the bowels and those Indians found me and took me to their camp and fed me some of their medicine, which was foul as shit, sure, but it healed me up, and there was a woman and she had hair shining like black water and she’d put moss on my wound, and every time I saw her it felt like hot tongs on my prick, just like I said, I swear. And then I healed up and they trusted me and I even learned to talk some like them. And then one day I find that woman alone and I … and I run afterwards, run east to here.”

Where has the loyalty gone? John thought. Ambrose lying; Clement, Jeb, and Erastus fallen to the Church.

Ambrose poked at the failing coals. “You reckon there’s any left?”

John studied the bottle. “Half or so.”

“I meant Indians. You reckon there’s any left hiding in the woods and that? Not just living in them museums?”

“How in Christ’s shithouse should I know?”

The next morning John found a note on a whisky label:
I shud nevr hav left them. They was more famly than my famly and I just got to find them and beg forgivnes from her, thats all, I swer. Good luk to you, Ambrose York
.

John crumpled the note and fed it to the fire. Hoped the Indians would do the same to Ambrose.

Wasn’t there a child’s rhyme? About sparrows or crows and how they fell off the branch one by one until only a solitary one was left? John felt alike that last one. Alone and unrhymed.

Jeb O’Doul had been the first to fall. Returned to the
Morning Star
hefting a bible. “They’re giving them out free of payment.
Gratis
,” he said, astounded.

“That’s right, all theys want is your ever-loving soul in return,” Erastus said.

“That’s not the case, that’s not it at all. Besides, a real man of learning knows his bible as well as his almanac and his Latin.” Jeb explained that he’d been raised a Catholic and the Catholics didn’t hold with the ordinary man reading the holy text. “Not that my kin could read anyhow. And I’d go to church and there’d be the priest reading out bible passages in Latin. You can see how it wouldn’t hold a boy’s interest. But this …” He smoothed his hand over the black cover and settled on his stool by the prow.

“Don’t open it,” John warned, but it was too late. Jeb was already reading, was already muttering and arguing with the book, as if it were any other. John was not surprised when Jeb attended a Reverend Finney sermon later that week.

“Finney, he talks a blue streak, but he has no true poetics in him, not like the King James did,” Jeb reported, his bible tucked under his arm.

Two weeks later John and Erastus spied Jeb in a chophouse with some dark-dressed tradesmen. He was in an ardent discussion over
a point in Leviticus. He didn’t see them and they made no attempt to lure him back to the
Morning Star
. They’d both seen the fanatic’s cast to his eyes. He was done and gone.

Clement fell next. A clucky aunt of his arrived at the boat armed with currant cakes. “Come with me to a sermon, Clemmy, I need your strong hand to guide me. Ah, but we’ve missed you.”

“You have?” Clement asked. Four days later and he was packing up. “I don’t feel lonely when I’m with all those people praying, that’s all. And I felt like God don’t care about this hideous face I got. It was like an invitation to a party, but a party with lemonade and tea only. And butter cookies. And currant cakes.”

“Lonely!” Erastus yelled. “Sweet screwed Mary! Lonely!”

Then Thomas told Erastus and John that plodding all day with a mule for company and then listening to the same drunken rants was, yes, lonely. He was tired of counting stones and multiplying them by the number of boot steps it took to walk a mile. His aunt was going to pay his way to college, he said, so long as he kept to the righteous path. She thought he might be good at algebra, or even the ministry.

Erastus grumbled over that for days, then suggested that, to rouse their spirits, they visit a grocer that sold liquor on the sly. Erastus, Ambrose and John had their boots up on the back table, a dram before each heel, when the two women walked in. The one woman was overtall, with a pinched look. The other wore a fur-trimmed cloak, a velvety plum gown with a matching bonnet. Underneath the bonnet were curls so perfectly spiralled they might have been carved from gold. Erastus gaped and stood. John and Ambrose followed suit. Plum-Girl fiddled shyly with her gloves. Her pinch-faced companion said that they were going door to door to spread the Gospel and would have a word with the lady of the establishment.

Erastus pressed back a greasy strand of hair. “Door to door? Now there’s a da—a real catchy phrase.”

The grocer reported that the “lady” of the establishment was at market. To which the pinch-faced lady said, “Then we shall return on the morrow. Good day, gentlemen.”

“Hold up there, please,” Erastus said. “We can listen well as anyone, can’t we, boys?” He turned to John and Ambrose with what was likely a fool’s grin under his mass of beard.

“We’re not allowed, obviously, to preach to canal men,” said the pinched-faced lady.

“But I can pray for you if you tell me your name,” Plum-Girl put in shyly.

“Pray for me? You? You’d use my name? I’d like that, I surely would,” Erastus said, and gave her his name, though he might as well have torn his heart out and handed it over.

The next morning Ambrose and John walked a funereal pace behind Erastus back to the grocer. Erastus had gone to the barber directly after the encounter and got far more than his ear hairs trimmed. The beard that had spanned his chest and crawled up his cheekbones was entirely gone, as was the long hair and its wrappings of twine. Revealed was a jaw that a level couldn’t have made as square. He’d traded his sack coat for a frocked one and his straw hat for a top hat of beaver. His hair was pompadoured out of his eyes, and these eyes shone like emeralds. He was a damned handsome man, even John could see that. The owner of the grocery stared at this transformation.

Erastus opened the door for the women when he saw them approach. Gave a clumsy bow. Plum-Girl stared in puzzlement, then blushed when Erastus said her praying must have worked its wonders.

“Ah, I would not have recognized you,” she said. “Not for all the world.”

February of 1831. John was balled up in the niche-bed below the decks of the
Morning Star
with only a banked fire and horsehair blanket for warmth. He couldn’t tell if it was morning or afternoon, not from that muzzy light at the top of the hatchway stairs. His teeth
were loosening in his aching gums, his hair littered his pillow, and his eyes were often so itchy he wanted to claw them out of his head. Likewise his skin so itched he longed to shrug it off entirely, as if he were some grimey moth inside a tattered chrysalid.

He scrabbled for the bottle. Only two finger-measures of medicinal brandy left. This he promptly and despairingly swallowed. It was the last of his stash. John would have to forage in Rochester. But how? His legs shook when he stood. He cursed Erastus and his children to be. Shivered. Prodded at the coal fire. Only a few coals were left in the box. He supposed heat might be as important to his survival over the winter as liquor. He’d have to forage for both.

Boot steps above his head.

“Thank shivering Jesus,” John muttered, thinking it was Ambrose come back from a failed mission to find the Indians. John lurched out of the hold and onto the tilted deck.

Brother Able staggered back with a cry. He wore the same overlarge homespun coat along now with mittens the size of paddles. Wore the same too-small black hat, the same pop-eyed look of astonishment. He had a scribble of beard and matted hair and red-rimmed eyes. Looked, in all, as if he were faring even worse than John.

“Son of a poxed whore! What the hell you doing here?”

“I—I, that was, M-Mr. Bearcup, he s-said, y-you were s-still here. Th-that y-you are s-still r-renouncing G-God.”

“Not ‘renouncing’ any fucking thing. Want nothing to goddamned do with it.”

Brother Able’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “I—I h-have a p-proposition, M-Mr. F-Fox.”