The Dark (74 page)

Maggie smiles, puts Chauncey aside.

Discover what you will
, Daniel had said. Maggie inspects under the strangely thick lid. She taps the inset rectangle that is of a fainter shade. It was obviously added later. Maggie recalls Leah’s phosphorous test and runs her hands over the lilies atop the lid. The secret under-compartment reveals itself after some attempts. Inside are a wad of papers. The familiar writing covers both sides, is dense and crabbed but of easy decipherment. Well, Pa, Maggie thinks. Here you are.

She reads of John Fox abandoning his family in Rockland County because of his wife’s magic spell. Of him labouring on “Clinton’s Big Ditch.” Now he is meeting Erastus Bearcup and the crew of the
Morning Star
. Now the pitched battle with the crew of the
Sweet Eleanor G
that left the
Morning Star
men victorious and famed. Now the twin onslaught of Temperance and the Great Awakening and the canallers’ temporary victories against it.

Maggie reads even more intently. Brother Able arrives at the weigh-lock in Syracuse and makes a sorry attempt at converting the crew. One by one, John’s crewmates fall to the Evangelicals. John stands firm. Ambrose leaves to be again with the Indians. Brother
Able finds John aboard the mud-larked
Morning Star
. Now comes the young man’s unfortunate, accidental death by alcohol, and then his return, worm-infested from the grave, his demand that John abstain, that John convert, that John embrace love both mortal and divine and return to his family and be their protector.

Maggie chuckles. Only when she finishes reading her father’s account does she notice Leah’s bequeathment letter to her and Katie.

Maggie chuckles. She spends the rest of the afternoon searching for Katie. They will laugh like they haven’t in years. The dead, why they return after all. Maggie is not thinking of Able—sitting in the
Morning Star
, worm infested and wrapped in a horsehair blanket shroud. He was formed, as like, out of her father’s delirium tremens. No, it is the peddler—Pettifew—that she is thinking on now. He died just before the Music Hall exposé, Leah wrote. But surely she and Katie saw his apparition outside the music hall when they made their way through the heckling crowd. The apparition had that selfsame twisted mouth. He was small and had a limping gait, steadied by a cane that was topped with a hound’s head of gold. And he demanded that they apologize, and in the selfsame voice of outrage as he used when Maggie and Katie encountered him by the Hydesville orchard when they were foolish girls. And they did apologize. Better late than never, as they say, and now the wandering soul is all at rest.

Evening draws on, the streets are aglow from the gas lights and electric lamps, and Maggie still hasn’t found Katie, not in any of her cocktail taverns. Maggie even ducks into a Turkish smoke parlour or two. She is not worried. Katie always surfaces eventually. She still has her boys to consider, even if they are grown. She still has Maggie. “You’ll always find me” was what Katie said.

But now it is two days later, and still no Katie.

“Ma came home last night, then left again this morning,” Ferdie says.

Henry adds, “She seemed swell. She said that if we saw you we should tell you not to be a worry-all.”

“But I have such news. It’s about our pa. And Pettifew. And Leah. Oh, the good grief, I dearly miss Leah.”

“Who’s Pettifew?” Ferdie asks.

“And what news could matter so much?” Henry asks, but Maggie is already on her way out to search once again.

Katie has been gone now for over a week. Ferdie reports first that she is in Rochester again, then that she is staying with some wealthy Manhattan benefactor.

“I didn’t get the details,” Ferdie says. “But she’ll find her way back. She always does.”

A day on and Maggie opens the door to find, not her final client of the day but Ferdie, twisting his hat in his hands as if to strangle it. She does not ask him. She dares not ask him. Asks instead, “How’s your brother? How’s the weather? Damn, I’m expecting a client. No time to chat. I need all the clients I can get these days. They only pay half of what they once did. Half the price for half the belief in it all. Alas and such, it serves me right after all that silly recanting and the recanting of the recanting.”

Ferdie cuts in bluntly. Gives the news: His mother, her Katie, is dead. “I found her in a rented garret. It was nearly empty of furniture. But it was clean,” he adds, as if this might ease the telling.

Ah, the wild freedom of being staggering drunk. How Maggie welcomes it after the river-calm of poppy tea. For days she wanders through Katie’s haunts, as if to inhabit her last weeks. The few clients she sees soon leave in disgust at her rambling, senseless prophecies. Her limbs have a puffed aspect. Her skin aches at any pressure. Her eyes when she dares the looking glass are tinged with yellow.

By January of’93, Maggie knows what she needs to do. She looks through her cherished possessions—Elisha’s white gifts, her books. She reads through Leah’s memoir. She kept the copy Leah sent her years ago, but she has never read it—out of stubbornness, she supposes. She reads it now. She laughs and laughs. The events are so enlarged, the forces against the Fox sisters three so easily swatted down, like flies on a sill. It is amusing and sly, not infuriating at all.

She does not consider taking her own books—
The Death-Blow to Spiritualism
and
The Love Life of Dr. Kane
. They are too much her own voice. Katie published nothing, nothing. She cannot be found in books. Still.
You’ll always find me
was what she said, and so Maggie must go to her, that much is clear.

Elisha’s
Arctic Explorations
, then, is the sole book she takes, because love cannot be shed as easily as mortal flesh. She searches out a garret that is in accordance with Ferdie’s description of Katie’s
last retreat, excepting Maggie’s is even higher up, even farther from it all, bare but for a bed and table and that ladderback chair. She pays for two months’ rent with her last dollars. She intends to be alone when she dies, just as Katie was.

“B
UT THE VERY NEXT DAY YOU ARRIVED
, Alvah,” my patient said, “and stood there so mysteriously, so insistently in the vestibule, and all haloed by the waning, crackling light of the Edison bulb.”

T
o finish: I did not cry in front of my patients. It was a professional rule. And I wasn’t crying. I was merely sniffling hard between swigs from my flask. I had finally finished the cover-all, and it sat bunched in my lap.

“It’s his birthday today. It is March fifth,” Maggie Kane declared, the way one does a simple truth. Her hands were folded atop the bedclothes. As I have said, she was incapable of cracking a toe joint or anything else by that time.

“Birthday? Whose birthday? What are you—”

“Your son’s.”

“I’ve never spoken to you of a son. Nor to anyone. Never!”

But she was not listening, not to me anywise. No. She had the intent look of one straining to hear a far-off tune. She said, “The loss of August is ever with you.”

“His name! How did you know it? What trick are you playing now?” I was peeved. No. Outraged. We were both sinners and grievously faulted sorts, from the same kettle of fish as it were, and I hated, to be frank, that she was practising her art on me. I stood up from my little stool. I shouted I didn’t believe it. I shouted that she had told me how it was done. It was all a fraud.

I hauled the bedclothes off and pointed to her feet, at which there came a bang so strong the windows shook. It was nothing like the taps she had exhibited for me previously. And she had not moved a joint.

Next came a pat-pattering of raps, alike running steps.

“It’s your August. Speak with him. He cannot stay long.”

The garret fell very quiet, very still. The far-down din of the streets, the shouts of children, the cries of hawkers, the arguing of the other tenement dwellers. All ceased. The room was empty but for us. And yet. And yet.

“August?” I was rubbery with fear. Breath-stilled with hope. The thuds sounded back straightaway.

I told him how I missed him. I told him I was so very sorry that I did not give him my blessing, sorry that I did not hold vigil nor hear his last words, the words of his true self that would set him right afore the Redeemer. At which there came three loud raps on the side table. I remind you that Maggie Fox Kane had not moved the whole time. Not her feet. Not her hands. Nothing.

She said, “Fetch a paper and pen.”

I rummaged frantically in my apron pockets and then my satchel. I couldn’t find my little notebook, however, only bottles.

“Never mind, Alvah. Here,” Maggie Kane said, and ripped out a picture plate from
Arctic Explorations
. Just like that. As if Elisha’s book mattered nothing to her anymore. I have kept the plate, of course. It shows a barren Arctic place called Sanderson’s Hope (though I have never discovered who Sanderson was and what hope he found in that dread place).

She wrote rapidly on the plate’s blank side. She did not look down as she wrote, but at the garret’s three linked windows. When she was done I saw that the script was unintelligible, like a foreigner’s script and language.

“What is this? Do I look a linguist? A professor of heathen tongues? Am I—”

“Hush. It’s merely backwards. You have a mirror?”

I did. I had my pocket mirror for the gauging of life and breath. I held this mirror to the paper, then nearly dropped them both in astonishment. August’s handwriting was in the reflection. The hand was looping and would have seemed careless if it had not run in a straight and purposed line. His writing. Surely so. I would have known it anywhere.

“Your dream! You dreamed of his resting place. The selfsame cemetery,” I said, but Maggie Kane was asleep, her breathing very shallow, and I feared then what I had accepted from the very start of our acquaintance.

The succour from this letter was such that, as my August asked, I have not drank spirits since. As for Margaret Fox Kane, she passed to the Glory three days later. She rambled a great deal in her last
hours: about Katie, about blue skies and gold warmth, about high-up trees. “But I can see the world from here!” she exclaimed at one point, by which I suppose she meant the Other World.