The Dark (72 page)

David, as if following her thoughts, calls over to the children, “Finish up, now. The wood needs splitting.” His tone is kindly, as if they might have a choice. The boys say, “Yes, sir.” David nods and then tests the edge of a spade. Tubby-Girl looks forlorn, her playmates stolen.

David turns back to his pedalling. Pedalling. Pedalling. Yes, that damned peddler, that damned Pettifew, Leah thinks. He died just before Maggie’s Music Hall rant. Leah received the news via the NOS. It was said his trusted maid found him alone amid his wares,
bottles ranged around him like sentinels. He had taken to ranting, she said, and saw enemies everywhere.

“Davey!” Leah calls. She shadows her tragic eyes. From a distance there is no doubt she would be taken for a much younger woman, what with her ringlets, her tea-gown of floral brocade, her immense straw hat that shields her against the country elements. She calls her brother again. Counts a compound metre of ten as she awaits his response. None comes. Likely because he hasn’t heard her over the noise of his lathe.

Has David read Maggie’s ridiculous memoir? Surely not. Such damned poppycock and not even written by Maggie, but concocted by one Reuben Davenport. All is “revealed” in the
The Death-Blow to Spiritualism
. Not just the toe trick, but the snapping fingers, the rapping knuckles. And the apples. Ah, yes, the apples. Pounding on the floor in their string cages to mimic ghostly footsteps way back when at the Hydesville house. The book is a diatribe, nothing more. Maggie has revealed only her pettiness, her bitterness, her crazed thoughts, has revealed only her unfathomable hatred for Leah. In
The Death-Blow
Maggie even derides Leah’s memoir. She calls
The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism
“false from title page to finis” and “a book of the flimsiest and most absurd narrative.” She then slanders Leah in such variant ways it is risible. Leah is her “damnable” “jealous” sister. Leah is an “evil genius” with “a calculating brain.” A “sinister influence” who kept her family “in bondage” and ruled over them with an “iron rod” and with a “mixture or cajolery and terror.” She claims Leah is a “blasphemer” with “unholy purposes.” She claims that Leah’s own daughter, Lizzie, called her “wicked” and that she took Leah to task for “pretending such things.” And this brave stand apparently saw poor Lizzie banished. Towards Dr. Kane Leah had nothing but “malignant opposition.” Towards Katie she was a “secret persecutor” who sent her to prison and attempted to steal away her beloved children, as if Leah were some hobgoblin alike the ones their mother ever cautioned them about.

Leah paces the veranda. Hah, Maggie failed to mention the way money ran through her and Katie’s fingers, the endless shopping for
clothes and fripperies. Failed to mention the parties and grand people they met. The attention from the public and print. How both she and Katie’s enjoyed all that celebrity just dandy. God and the Spirits, is Maggie’s misery her fault? Is her and Katie’s drinking her fault? Is the fickleness of that prat Dr. Kane her fault?

No. No. No, Leah decides. Maggie’s life has been governed by Maggie’s choices. Certainly women are more subject to fortune’s wind, but still, Maggie could have charted a different course. Instead she has opted to destroy her entire family along with her own pitiful self. The lying, traitorous slut. Leah will have her shut away, that’s what. In a madhouse. The one she took Maggie to visit in Rochester years ago as a warning, for her own good.

Leah presses her hands to her chest. Hums a favourite tune to calm herself. At least she is not all-abandoned. Staunch Spiritualists have rallied to her defense. Have declared that Maggie’s feeble raps in the Music Hall denunciation could in no way compare to the power of the knocks at those first séances years ago. Maggie is an erratic, a dipsomaniac, they have insisted, and is being puppeted by evil, greedy managers who have promised her a river of drink in return for the ruination of her family, of Leah.

Can it get worse? It can. The Music Hall denunciation was not enough; the publishing of
Death-Blow
was not enough. No. Leah learned just yesterday that Maggie is touring from town to town, waggling her big toe, telling “all” to all, and with Katie looking on. Yes, Katherina. She is a traitor through and through also. Is being continually led on by Maggie’s delusions. Perhaps it had been unwise to have Katie’s children taken. But how could Leah have known that Katie would be sent to the Tombs? Or that the juvenile asylum was a wretched institution little better than a prison? She is not as all-seeing as some think.

Chauncey Burr. The name, the image of the man himself, long buried, floats up from the depths. But then Chauncey Burr, her greatest nemesis, is surely the only one who would understand her feelings at this moment, for they must approximate his when the judge ordered him stripped of ten thousand dollars. When he was revealed as a swindler, a humbug, a fraud. I shall write to him, she
thinks. We can bury the hatchet. It is not too late. I shall ask for his advice. His help even. He will help me, surely, so long as he hasn’t died of apoplexy or been murdered by a fuming compatriot.

Leah gasps. She understands now. Understands wholly. The destruction of Leah’s cherished reputation is but one of Maggie’s goals. Leah’s murder is the other. For
The Death-Blow
in the title of Maggie’s book is meant not for Spiritualism, but for Leah.

She collapses onto the deacon’s bench. Sobs aloud. Across the foreyard David halts the lathe at last. He walks towards the veranda with some tool in his great hands. He is stooped now but still a man of considerable size. He looks down with misgivings at the steps as if they might not support his weight, then risks them. The stairs hold. He does not sit aside Leah on the deacon’s bench; he sits in a rocking chair some paces off.

Leah dabs her eyes. Tries for cheer. Even if David has read Davenport’s lies he would not berate her. He never accuses, never gossips, never speaks ill of anyone. Indeed, conversations with David have ever left her grasping for topics.

“Ah, is that a divining rod, Davey? You are seeking out a well?”

He glances at the pronged stick in his hands, points vaguely west. “Water—why, it’s ever a problem. William Hyde reckons we can hit an undercurrent over that third drumlin. He’s a good man. A fine neighbour. And a far better diviner than I am.”

“Is he still … is the old Hydesville house still in his possession?”

“William’s the son. And, yes, the spook house is his now.” David speaks mildly as always, but he does not look at her. Has not much since she arrived. “I keep an eye on it for him. He trusts me, and I do appreciate that. Of course the house is naught but a blight now, a ruination and such. I reckon I’m the only one who goes there. Who wishes to rent a house so haunted, eh?”

She reaches across the gap to hold his hand. “You believe me, Davey, tell me you do.”

He spits tobacco over the rail. “There’s sure been a hullabaloo since Maggie’s confession. The neighbours are calling us blasphemers, just like when the raps first started. And they’re saying I knew all along my three sisters were lying. I can’t walk about in
town without feeling shame. This here, why, it’s our home, and all this business, Leah, I confess it has ever been a sorrow to me.”

“Surely you cannot doubt me, Davey. Recall when we were children. How we played together. We had such trust then.”

“I recall you stealing my molasses sticks and then telling me you were making them sweeter for me. And I recall you saying the pigeons lifted you clear into the sky. Why, I believed that one for years.”

“But they did! I swear it. I was abed a fortnight because of it. I had my hair torn out. I was scratched to bits. My arms still bear the marks.” She hefts a ruffled sleeve and shows the underside of her forearm, the cross-hatchings there.

He glances down. “They’re near gone. The pigeons, I mean. Why, I saw only five this year. I couldn’t find the heart to shoot them.”

“They shall return and in greater numbers than before. Mark me.”

“No, I don’t believe they will, Leah. The signs are against it.” He stands and trudges down the steps. Looks about his yard. “I’d hate to leave this place, but it might come to that. I’ve planted crops year to year while you three went away. Watched Pa pine and strive and ever build that darned house so that you’d return. You never did.”

“He came to us, in time. He was a help to us—”

“And I’ve dug more graves than I can count. For neighbours. For kin. You bury enough dead of a place, Leah, and it binds you more than a hundred years’ worth of crops. Leaving here, why …” He shakes his head, swallows.

She puts her hand on his arm. “You shan’t have to leave here, Davey. No. Do not do so.”

David proclaims then that he must wash before dinner, that his wife is calling to him, and he must away and help her.

“You are too good.”

“We don’t see peddlers anymore either,” he says by way of reply. “Which is as well. I ever felt pity for the wandering souls.”

David takes his leave. Leah watches him cross the foreyard where Tubby girl is closing up her tin box that resembles, yes, a peddler’s box. Leah’s chest tightens as she thinks of Pettifew, of the awful proposition he made when she visited him those years ago, the proposition to place a body in the cellar of the Hydesville house, and thus
give the old story of the peddler credibility. It is an awful plan, yes, but not impossible.

Tubby still loiters in the foreyard. She clutches her tin box now as if it were life and soul, though surely, Leah thinks, she can be convinced to part from it for the right price.

Did not David just say he was the only one who goes to the Hydesville house? And did not her father say he was determined to help his daughters, his Leah, and in any fashion? Did not he inform her that poor Brother Able was buried under a giant oak in a copse of trees near Wayne? That is close to here, Leah realizes, and less of a risk than digging up a cemetery or a church graveyard. And Able’s bones would be aged enough. Pettifew gave Leah the address of a resurrection man. Leah has it still, because, Leah must admit, the idea of providing proof for all those naysayers has remained planted in her mind.

Leah recalls her father writing, and surely hinting that Able’s resting spot is exactly marked with a slab of whitish stone.

I
NEARLY DROPPED MY GIN FLASK
. “And was this accomplished? Did the resurrection man dig up the poor boy? Is he now there in the cellar wall? With the tin box?”

“As like he’ll be found by bored children one day. Bored children are worse than hobgoblins at causing mischief,” Maggie Kane said by way of answer, and as if she knew this better than anyone (which she most certainly did). “You may tell-all, Alvah, once he’s found. It would make a sterling story.”

“Do I look a scuttle-butt? A back-fence talker? Have I ever babbled out my patient’s secrets? No. I carry more secrets, to be frank, than you can imagine. I’m stuffed with them. Drunk with them. Lead-weighted with them.”

“Then perhaps the divulging of secrets will be a help to you. It has surely been a help to me, as have you, dear Alvah.”

“I may well be in the bone-yard myself by time poor Able is found,” I grumbled.

“Now that I very much doubt.”

O
n this day, Maggie Kane woke and looked at the ceiling with delight. I could not make out what she was saying (her voice was hoarse by then and she slept a great deal), and so set aside my knitting and sat on her bed and leaned close.

“I had a dream, Alvah, a real one.” As I have mentioned my patient insisted her dreams were no more than tableaux, by which I mean she claimed they did not hold any narrative sense, nor meaning; nor did they give out prophecy.

I took a nip of my flask. I had another in my coat pocket. My brief attempt at controlling my imbibing had failed. To explain: the blue devils were swarming more than ever. They were clawing at me with their horrid little hands, crossing the rivers of absinthe and gin with ease, and I had decided that an ocean was needed to keep them a bay.

“Pity for you, duck. Dreams can be worse than a plague of locusts. Some are scared to sleep because of them.”

She fixed on me her depthless brown eyes, at which I might have blathered recklessly at last. But I did not. I will be clear on this once more. I did not speak of August, nor tell her that I, too, had been dreaming, and it was ever the same dream. It was of me searching and searching the field of Bull Run among skeletons that were whitened by the years, animated by wind, speared through with Aaron’s rod, their eye sockets sighted with daises and life-everlastings. In the
dream I never found my August. That seemed scarcely fair. A dream should give some consolation.

“What of yours, then, Maggie? Your dream?”

“It is of a cemetery,” she said in wonderment.