The Queen of the Night

by Alexander Chee

  And then it was done.

  I went back to my seat next to my family, as the pastor’s wife made her unsteady way through the introit. I turned to see my mother, her head bent low but her eyes on me, and my father smiling. But my brothers, they stared at me as if my troubles might come for them.

  I took the hymnal, flipped it open, and began to sing. I hadn’t sung in so long, the noise of my voice startled me, but it was there, not only undiminished, but perhaps even changed into something more powerful than before. I wanted more than anything to use it, but instead I held it back, tightening my throat slightly. I made a deliberately thin, weak noise that blended quietly, like the noise of another girl.

  I could tell, for all I was trying to blend my voice, that my mother heard my every effort. I stood out even now. But as the second chorus began, she looked over at me and nodded her head, pleased at last again.

  A few days later, I took one of our horses and rode to the farthest edge of our property, past the long fields of new rye and hay, until I reached a long hill that sloped down sharply and hid everything below. I tied the horse carefully to a tree and walked down until I was sure I was out of sight.

  This was my favorite place.

  I wanted to hear my new voice. I was angry at being punished for what I was sure was God’s only gift to me, and yet I was ashamed still to sing in front of my mother, afraid the pleasure I took would be seen as pride. And as I often sang when I was sad as well, I could not even console myself as I once had, not in the house.

  So here I was.

  The song I chose for my test was a song my father sang often, a sea chantey. I later learned there was more to it than this, but this was the fragment he sang over and over.

  What will you do, love,

  when I am going,

  with white sails blowing,

  the seas beyond?

  I liked to imagine my young father, pacing the deck at night on his crossing, singing this song. I sang it to myself there and then sang it again, falling into it, wandering into the woods as I did so. I imagined leaving my family, leaving the town, leaving it all and never returning. I saw their sad, empty days without me. When they missed me, they’d be sorry for how they’d treated me. My mother would cry for having made me wear that gag.

  When I came out of the woods, I began to head back to the horse when I heard it whicker and looked to see my mother at the top of the hill.

  Is it to make a fool of me, then? she said.

  No, mother, I said, as unhappy to have been caught as I was to have made her sad. For she looked as though I’d insulted her.

  I can’t have you running off like this, she said. You’re not a child anymore. You have responsibilities. We’re to be making your trousseau, in case you forgot.

  I protested, but she would have none of it.

  After that, as punishment, I was to wear the gag for another week.

  All the time? my father asked of my mother that night back at the house. We were eating dinner.

  All the time, she said, except at meals. Her voice has gone to her head, and that will be trouble.

  Ah.

  The other children say she’s possessed, my little brother said; Frank was his name. That if we hear her sing we’ll all be possessed as well.

  Is it true, then? Thomas, the older one, asked.

  It’s just foolishness and gossip, my mother said. Don’t repeat it. Or I’ll make a gag for you as well.

  My parents left then to speak with each other out of our hearing.

  Is it true? Thomas repeated to me.

  I glared. And then nodded. The boys leapt up and cleared the table.

  Now, if I wanted to scare them, I had only to make as if I were going to pull down the gag and look at them meaningfully. And while I hated not being able to speak, I enjoyed their fear. I liked how at church the other families stared at me, liked that the boys who once chased me now stayed back, afraid. But this was also pride. My mother noted it, and then said, One more week.

  I don’t like it, my father said to me the following week as we washed our hands for dinner. It’s not right. I’m working on your mother. But she has it in her head that this will cure you, though I’m not sure how we’re to know you’re cured.

  I started to cry when he said this.

  Can you take it off at night? he asked me.

  I nodded.

  Well, then, I suppose that’s a blessing at least.

  That night I heard him argue with her. I sat hidden on the stairs and listened. It’s you ought to wear it, he said. She’s a girl, not a freak, but now she’s being said to be possessed. Is that what you want for her? How are we to get her a husband if the men think she’s cursed?

  You haven’t seen the wicked pride in her, my mother said.

  You haven’t seen the wicked pride in you.

  My mother began to cry, which startled me.

  It’s not right, what you’re doing, he said. It’s not right at all. Nothing good will come of it.

  Despite my fantasies of running away, I loved them too much to do it. I made another plan.

  That night as they slept I went to where my mother kept a kettle on the stove. The water in it was still warm. I walked with it to my bed and soaked my sheets, careful not to wake my brothers asleep together in the bed across from me.

  Careful not to wake them until my nightgown was wet and my hair as well, I lay down in the bed and then, with great purpose, rolled onto the floor, landing heavily with a crash. My brother Frank woke, sat up, and then got down from the bed to investigate me where I lay, very still, my eyes closed. He touched my forehead, rubbing my wet hair with his little fingers.

  Thomas, he said. Wake up. Wake up and get Mom and Dad. Tell them she’s got the fever.

  Soon I heard my parents come in. Get her downstairs, my mother ordered my father. Good Lord, her bed is soaked. I’ll have to hang the bedding out to dry. I’ll wash it in the morning.

  I kept my eyes closed as my father carried me, not wanting to let on. If he was to look me in the eye, he’d know, I was certain.

  When the doctor came the next day, I pretended my voice was gone, and he determined me to have been rendered mute, at least temporarily, perhaps permanently. There’s nothing wrong with her now, he said.

  Well, my mother said. This was God’s will. She surprised me then for she began to weep.

  I prayed for the Good Lord to take away your pride, she said. I suppose he has taken away mine also.

  Whatever shame I’d felt before was nothing compared to this. As she wept next to my bed, she asked me to forgive her. I could not decide which was worse, to continue to pretend or to reveal the pretense. I decided to take my time, to act as if the voice had returned slowly—having planned this miracle, I would plan another.

  My parents, in the meantime, returned to being loving with each other; the children stopped staring; my brothers no longer feared me and played with me again. Everyone was kind and told me how much they missed my voice at church. All returned to how it had been before except for me.

  Then the real fever came and took them from me, every one.

  My family died the fall of that year, my mother the last to pass. Her death left me alone on our farm, far from the town and the one road that ran to it. I decided it was more trouble for me to find someone to bury her than it was for me to bury her myself, and as I’d helped her bury my father and brothers, I felt I knew what had to be done and began.

  I went to what was now the family graveyard, selected a spot for her to lie in, and when I found the dirt too frozen to move with a spade, paced out a fire the length of her to thaw the ground. I tended that fire for a week, sometimes cooking and reading there through the night, the three graves a short fence against the wind. There wasn’t much wood left for fires, so I pulled boards from the house and the barn. At the end of the week I was able to dig a narrow trench through the warm dirt, but I found the ground three feet down still frozen, so I set my fire again and wai
ted.

  I didn’t want my mother washing out of the ground with the first floods of the next spring, as I had seen once, coffins swept down a river as the current left its course and ate the bank.

  I took more boards from the smooth wood of the doors to her bedroom and the kitchen, and made her coffin as I had seen her do for my father and brothers. I never thought to spare the farmhouse. I knew I could not stay. The farm settlement would return to the animals and the Minnesota storms, which had always appeared better suited to it.

  I could have cremated her, but my mother had been a devout Christian woman and cremation would have disappointed her as pagan, a refutation of the Last Days and the Glory. She’d want to take my hand then and she’d need a hand to do it with, would be her argument. The fires I lit never touched her.

  The second fire was enough to finish the hole. The earth turned easily again under the spade, the ash blew around me as I worked and found its way into my clothes so that when I was done and took a bath dead cinders shook loose from my skirts as I undressed and the water turned as gray as the sky. The work had been cold and hard, but I was glad to have taken my time. I took note of the snow on the ground outside the window, Minnesota’s winter gathering to the north of the farm across the lake, and hurried through my cooling bath. I was not its equal.

  The next morning the pail at the well knocked on ice. I left it out to collect the new-falling snow while I hurried to finish. I knew I had a day before the snow would be too deep to get to town.

  The coffin I made was shabby and uneven, but sealed tight. I ran my hand through it as I imagined my mother at her final rest. It wasn’t right; I hadn’t the skills for more than a rough box. And yet this was all I knew how to do.

  I set it beside her bed and climbed in to get a good hold on her. Under the shroud I’d sewn of her sheets and blankets she lay, arms crossed, dressed in her best dress by me the morning she’d gone. I lit a candle on her bedside table, sang a short blessing above her, and prayed that He welcome her into His arms, and then added, in the silence made deep by the new winter, a request for the strength to get her into her grave.

  And then I began.

  The cold had kept her but she was heavy to the touch as she had never been in life; Death seemed to have left something with her, some new weight to help her keep her place under the earth. It startled me as I pulled against her, and the composure I’d felt since her illness had begun left me. I became frantic to move her and finish. She slid from my grip and fell to the floor. I tipped the coffin on its side, rolled her into it, and nailed it shut.

  Getting her to the grave took the remainder of the day. I would move her, rest, move her, and then rest. Halfway to the hill I fell and the coffin slid back down on the new snow. The old snow’s edges were like glass where my steps broke it, and when I went back to the house for a lunch, I saw I’d cut my shins; my blood had soaked to the edges of my skirt and, when I returned to finish, lay in frozen stripes along the path.

  When we reached the grave’s edge, I saw I’d forgotten the dirt would freeze again and the mound mocked me, shining.

  I sat down on it and hid my head from the sight. I heard from the barn the sound of the horses, forgotten by me until now, complaining, and I remembered how we had used them for the lowering of the other coffins; they were to take me to town when this was done and needed feed and water. I shut my eyes until my breath grew calm, and then I left the hill, took the bucket by the well, melted the snow in it on the stove, and took that to the barn. I returned to the house, took another bath to wash the blood from my legs, and slept that last night on the kitchen floor, my back against the wood stove, my mother by her grave, the night for her mausoleum.

  Whatever you think the sacrifice will be, it is not enough. It isn’t for us to decide. God wants from us what He wants and nothing else.

  I still needed a fire large enough to bury my mother.

  From the barn, beside the horses blindfolded against the fire, I watched my home burn.

  The fire went slowly and then all at once rose up around the house, the house unchanged until the very last moment when it charred to a shadow and fell in on itself. The windows shattered, pinging out over the frozen fields.

  I raked the dirt for coals and took them in the wheelbarrow to her grave.

  I had packed a small bag for myself that morning and dressed in my mother’s raccoon coat made for her by my father, his pistols belted at my waist. Her grave I staked with a cross made from pieces of the barn door.

  I saddled the one horse and led the other and rode the miles into town to sell them and be on my way. I rode and did not look back except to check my direction against what I could see of the sun. None of them had thought the farm was to be mine, my brothers having gotten good with even the sewing. I was to find a man who didn’t mind my cooking and loved a song, and this was the way my mother and I lived right to the end, as if in the spring I would marry and he would come to do what the men had done before.

  I hummed to my horse the whole way as I rode. When I dismounted, a patch of ice from my breath striped his brown neck.

  §

  In town at the general store I walked in and set the pistol and the reins on the counter. The store owner picked them up and looked outside to where the horses stood. He began to open his mouth to ask about my mother, as he had the last time I’d been in when she was healthy.

  Whatever is the fair price, I said, is all I’d ask of you. Mine was not the first family lost to this fever. He went out to look at the horses then came back in. I counted what he gave to me.

  Where to? he asked me.

  Of my father’s family I knew little; of my mother’s, a little more. She was from a well-to-do family in Lucerne—she’d received mail sometimes from her sister there, and some money, which she always took regretfully. On the day she died, I found one of her sister’s letters in her hand, and I’d kept it. It seemed to me she had meant to speak to me of it next, as if she were pointing me there.

  On my girl’s map of the world, it seemed like I could get to Switzerland as easily as anywhere else, and I knew there was only one place to start.

  New York, I said, thinking of the oceans that began there and the cities beyond them.

  He told me the fare, and I paid and sat near the stove to wait.

  §

  On that first trip to New York I didn’t speak. I watched snowflakes blow in and melt against my clothes, how they shone like tears in the soft winter light. I thought I must have smelled of death, the air around me like match smoke. But no fellow passenger let on.

  As we’d buried my brothers and father, my mother had said, This is God’s will for us; pray, pray for mercy. Pray. She said this even as she lay dying; she had kept her faith to the end that this was the work of the Lord. When I did not fall sick, she saw that as a prayer answered. But I had prayed not to be left behind, and I was.

  The other passengers smiled and chatted with one another as we rode and smiled at me from time to time. I wanted the relief of conversation also, and a few times I nearly joined in, but instead I could only think of how they would ask me where I was traveling to and why. But to speak would have been to burst, to let out all the anger and grief—anger that I was left behind to roam this world without them.

  Here, I knew from my parents, this world, here was where we were tested. The next world was Paradise. To live when they had all died told me I’d failed.

  I could have sold the farm that day, could have ridden for help, could have asked my mother, before she died, more questions about her kin, of whom she rarely spoke. If I’d been better at all of what I was to have done in the years before then—but I was not; I did as I did instead. I always knew somehow that I would live apart from them and the farm, and then I was, and I had not prepared.

  I was that terrible girl, too stupid to get help, who made a bonfire of her house to undo a patch of winter and filled her mother’s grave with her own hands.

  Why is it so l
oud when you cry from grief? Because it must be loud enough for the missing one to hear, though it never can be. Loud enough to scale the sky and the backs of angels, or to fall through the earth to where they rest. And so it is sometimes when I sing that the notes come from me as if I believed I could reach them where they rest, they sure of a reunion I still cannot imagine or believe in except, sometimes, in song.

  Four

  I ARRIVED IN NEW YORK’S Union Square in a coach that was little more than a wood drum dragged by horses through the winter dark. As I stepped down, I found a city as strange to me as if I’d been brought all the way to Mars, like in a novel from Jules Verne.

  There were at least a hundred girls like me arriving on just that day. The fever had taken more than my family, and the survivors had fled. New beggars angered the old ones, and while I wished there was more to my purse than there was, I did not want to beg, and so I left quickly, as if I knew where I was going, though I did not. The mute doors I passed, their purposes unknown to me, mocked me. The men and women in the street walked, confident and dour, and I was little noticed by them except in occasional stares.

  What I had thought was a fine way to dress for leaving looked to the citizens of New York that day, I’m sure, like a farmer fantasy. I was clean, at the least, and my hair braided, coiled under a rabbit-fur bonnet made by my father.

  I could see there was water to either side. Water meant boats; boats meant leaving. I put my head into my collar and walked against the wind until I found one of the rivers. The Hudson.

  I was directed to the ship lines, where a ticket clerk confirmed I had nothing like the money required to purchase a passage to Europe, by sail or steam. As I walked away from the counter, my life fit in my hand, only as big as the coins in my purse, and it was not large enough. I could pay for a meal or a room, but not both. If I ate, I would have nowhere to sleep. If I chose a place to sleep, I would have nothing to eat.