“Some of those gossipers are even saying it’s all an April Fool’s joke, seeing as the ghost started knocking on the 31st of March. Close enough, wouldn’t you bet, ma’am?”
“I do not bet, sir, nor gossip and, oh, my heavens, do mind your horses, if you please.”
The driver obliges with a touch to his slouch hat, a crack to his whip. The two horses, piebald and ancient, do not change their pace, not even when a wolfish dog leaps across the road. Eleventh of April of 1848 and yet the drumlins are scrimmed with snow, the Hyde’s orchard scrawled with bare limbs, the crocuses curled underground. Even the dark has not retreated. The sun seems the same pale smudge as in midwinter, the days just as short. The world is entirely out of tempo, Leah decides, and at this a raw wind snatches at a chestnut curl. She ties her bonnet tighter, her hands made clumsy by thick gloves. They must be cared for, her hands; she teaches piano to the children of Rochester’s tony set. It is her sole means of survival since Bowman Fish, the charlatan, deserted her with a wailing babe and fifteen summers to her name.
A crow walks atop the buggy’s hood. Mimics the rattle of the harness. The driver hacks and coughs as if to bring up a lung. Of a sudden Leah feels very much alone. Her dear friend Addy Granger was to accompany her to Hydesville, but she left off at Newark citing the vapours and the possibility of demons. And Leah’s daughter, Lizzie, though she so wanted to come, would not have been a suitable companion. The girl is still prone to outbursts at age seventeen and Leah cannot have distractions if she is to deal with the strange events at hand. And thus Leah is on her own. As always. Never in all her thirty-two years has she begged help of anyone.
The carriage reaches the saltbox house under a fore-noon sky that is laddered with clouds, hung with birds. Leah half stands in the buggy. Clenches a fist to her heart. The house is abandoned, that much is evident even from this distance. The chimney is dead, the windows shuttered, the yard stilled of chickens and hogs.
“I wager the ghost ran ’em off with some new terror,” the driver suggests.
Leah steps out, not waiting for his hand. The ground bears the impress of boots, patens, clogs. A barrow is upset. A portion of a rock wall is in rubble. There must have been a hasty departure, then, as if the inhabitants feared the coming of the plague and not just the visitation of a ghost.
“Will you attend me?” she asks the driver, keeping her voice low, melodious and warm. “Sure, sure, ma’am,” the driver says, hefting out the feedbags. “Just got to tend the nags, they’re particular. Yup, they are.”
“When you’re done, then,” Leah says graciously, and wills up bravery and heads round the back of the house on her own. Her imagination reaches ahead, shows her mother, father, her two young sisters, mysteriously, horribly dead.
But no. Nothing. No bloodstains even. She hears a squirrel chattering on the roof of the buttery, the wind soughing in the three balm o’ Gileads aside the road. And then a groan. Leah whirls just as the handle of the water pump shifts itself; it makes the same groaning—and yes, of course—mechanical sound. Water drip-drips onto the pebbles below.
From the side of the house she calls, “I cannot wait a moment longer, sir!”
At this the driver gestures helplessly to his horses as if, Leah thinks, they are holding him up in conversation. “My Lord, must I do everything my own self,” she mutters, and hefts her skirts, then pats under her mother’s collection of “curiosity” stones that serve as a border to the herb garden. The stones are of variant shapes and hues. Some bear the imprints of leaves, others of small and fragile bones. Leah tips over a particularly black and heavy stone. The key is there. She works it into the padlock of the buttery. Pokes the door open. Steps within. Claps her mouth to stay a shriek. The shed reeks of death. Ah, only a mouse, only a mouse; there, rotting in that basin. She berates her foolishness, walks in briskly, nearly slips on a trail of clumpy dirt. The dirt is a troubling sign: her mother would never willingly leave such a mess. She passes through the cramped scullery into the kitchen and checks inside the stove. The ash looks several days old.
Into the front room. There is not a lick of furniture. The walls show a few pale squares where the lithographs hung. The shutters are seamed with light, the window latches snagged with grey threads where, perhaps, her parents’ old horsehair settee was dragged off. She turns in the room, once, twice. Without the furnishings the room looks smaller, not larger, as one might expect. She hurries out and up the narrow, creaking stair. The single upper room is empty. Her parents slept in that corner. Margaretta and Katherina there, on a trundle bed.
Leah shudders. The room is dark and cold and dim even at this early hour, but there is nothing of note.
The cellar. Leah cannot delay any longer. She must see for herself this peddler’s grave.
She finds a candle stub in the kitchen. Pries the wick out of the stiffened wax and fires it with a pocket lucifer. The cellar door opens at a touch, as if she has been expected, invited.
“Keep on,” she murmurs, and steps down. She trails her hand for purchase—there is no railing—and her gloves are soon dirtied and damp, her skirt flaked with stone. She descends the last stair into a space fit for troglodytes. The earthen walls bulge and curve, have stains the size of bears. The air is dank and loamy, the light a murky stain. Something snatches at her bonnet. She yelps, then swats at the wire hanging from the low, planked ceiling. She breathes heavily, then wills herself calm and sidles over to the hatchaway doors. Hefts them open. The pallid light shows a shelf empty of apples and preserves, a trough empty of brine barrels and lime pots. Shows the crumbling foundation at the cellar’s far wall. And the deep dug holes. Six, no, seven in total. Two are planked over. The others are filled with muddied water. Aside one hole is a pile of animal bones, rabbit by the looks of them. Aside another are fragments of pottery. Leah has heard that if one digs deep enough something will always be found: bones of starved colonists, Indian graves, animals from Noah’s flood. But not a murdered peddler, apparently. They have been reckless, she thinks. Anyone might have fallen in and drowned. Even I might have.
Footsteps sound overhead. Leah stills.
“Ma’am? You there?”
She hurries up. The driver is looking round the kitchen, committing everything to memory for later telling, no doubt. He stuffs a tobacco twist into his gums.
“Sir, you will not spit in here. That is, I surely hope you do not.”
“No, ’course not. Everything tickety-tock? Anything happen? You find anything? That I can help with, I mean.”
“Nothing, though I feared what I would find. Alone as I was. Ah, a moment … There,” she says, and presses a hand to her chest.
The driver mutters an apology. Mentions a bad leg, his skittish horses.
“Never fret. However, I must carry on to the house of my brother, Mr. David Fox. He lives no more than three miles from here. That is where my people must have sought safety. That is, if they still live. Oh … another moment … There. Sir, I must ask. Need the price be more? I am stretched in the purse since all this fearful business began. Surely a man such as yourself …” She pauses and steps to the exact acceptable distance from him. She is not pretty, Leah knows this. Her features are not dainty-cut enough. She is arresting, however, when she smiles just so. When she shows the white teeth she need never hide behind a fan, the dimples like little scimitars. When she gazes at the beheld as if they are the world entire.
“ ’Course, ’course. No more particular payment necessary, ma’am, I’d be honoured to take you to your own kin or anywheres else.”
Leah settles in the wagon. When she first heard tell of the hauntings of, yes, her own kin she had been in the midst of her music lesson to the daughters of a well-to-do printer, one Mr. William Little. She had been listening disenchanted as Mary … or was it Georgina? As one of them, anywise, plunked at the piano and sang “Rouse Thee, Child of Heaven” as if it were a happy song about picnics and maypoles and not a hymn about a child’s lingering death.
Just then Mr. Little rushed in with proofs for this very pamphlet, his face astounded. “Is your mother’s name Margaret? Have you a brother David? And your father? He is Mr. John Fox, is he not?”
Leah can scarcely recall what she replied, what with seeing her family’s name so emblazoned, what with Mr. Little reading aloud in a voice of rising incredulity, and then Mrs. Little joining them and voicing certainty that Leah would collapse in a nervous faint, what with the Littles’ little girls hopping with delight at the drama, at being excused from their lessons, as any girl, rich or poor, might.
Leah now reaches under her cloak and opens her reticule and takes out this same pamphlet: A Report of the Mysterious Noises Heard in the House of Mr. John D. Fox, in Hydesville, Arcadia, Wayne, Authenticated by the Certificates, and Confirmed by the Statements of the Citizens of That Place and Vicinity, by E.E. Lewis. The pamphlet is forty pages long, as the citizens of Arcadia have much to tell. They recall that a murdered peddler has been knocking about for years in that saltbox house, even when it was inhabited by other families, the Bells, the Weekmans. Ghostly footsteps were heard in the buttery. A dog howled like rabid under a window. A child woke in terror night after night. A ghost, likely the peddler’s, appeared before a horrified maid as a shadow-form. But the peddler was also seen alive, just before the hauntings. Mrs. Bell admired his fine thimbles and wares, so stated their day-girl, Lucretia Pulver. Not long after the peddler’s visit Lucretia saw Mr. Bell carting dirt out of the cellar. “The place was infested with rats and moles” was what Mr. Bell said. The Bells moved soon after, their debts suspiciously cleared.
Leah tucks the pamphlet back into her reticule. The pamphlet reads, she thinks, like an elaborate game of whisper-down-the-lane. But why did none of Leah’s family give a statement? And why did they not send word for her to come straightaway? Why did she need hear about these events from a public pamphlet? Surely her family knows she is the only one with the wherewithall to sort it all out.
Leah looks up. The wagon is trundling past the red schoolhouse her young sisters attend, though Margaretta, at near to fifteen, must be too old for schooling. She will be married off soon, poor creature. Leah closes her eyes. Never mind ghosts, she must warn Margaretta against the likes of Bowman Fish, who courted Leah with a talking bird and a mouthful of romantic prattle. Leah’s mother muttered some opposition—Fish had a good twenty years on Leah—but hardly roused herself to stop the union. That should have been her father’s task. John Fox, however, was in the middle of his decade-long vanishing act punctuated only with the occasional note to let his family know he was not boxed and planted. When he at last returned he offered Leah no explanation for his abandonment. No apology. He would only say he had been working on the canals and had found God and sobriety through hard aspects. Once, however, Leah had heard him mutter something most peculiar. He had been napping at the time. “I’ll keep my promise to you, Brother Able, by God, I will” was what she heard, though her father refused to explain what this meant when he woke to Leah’s prodding and questions.
Naturally, Leah had applauded her father’s piety, whoever or whatever compelled it—as had her mother and her siblings David and Maria—who wouldn’t? She had been astonished, however, at the arrival of her sisters Margaretta and Katherina. She had thought her parents past all that. Bowman was gone by the time her younger sisters were born, had shown his true colours just after Leah gave birth to Lizzie. He is now married to some woman in Illinois, having forgotten somehow that he is married already.
Leah hears the monotonous thud of a mill. Sees the Ganargua River glinting through a leafless tangle. A drowned little girl haunts that river. She wails and sobs, her face white as river stones. The crossroads of Hydesville are haunted also, as most crossroads are, by a suicide buried there. He makes the horses shy and bolt. And is there not an Indian who appears behind one in a looking glass? He augers misfortune. Or is it death? Well, the two, Leah supposes, are much the same.
The driver begins whistling a cheery tune. And in key. Ah, but then they are passing a graveyard, aside which is a small Methodist church, the one Leah’s own family attends. Leah tips her head. Sees a rivet of amaranthus as the driver hits a high C. Only a few notes conjure colours for her now. B flat is a nacreous blue. D is lampblack. C this lovely amaranthus. F an egg-yolk yellow. When Leah was young, however, every note conjured a unique and dazzling colour, making each a snap to identify. It was her mother’s parents, the Rutans, who recognized Leah’s extraordinary musical talents—her perfect pitch, her gift for improvisation and elaboration, her mastery of timing and tone. “How extraordinary you are, Leah. Why you can sing any tune at all!” they often said (though Leah never told them, nor anyone about the colours). These compliments began when Leah, along with her mother and David and Maria, moved to the home of the Rutans in Consecon, Ontario. They had had no choice but to move—John Fox had left the family destitute—but the move proved advantageous for Leah. Her Rutan grandparents lavished music lessons upon her, after all, and convinced her that she could grace concert halls across North America, even Europe, if only she practised enough. And Leah might have had such an illustrious “career” if not for her wretched marriage, the too-soon arrival of Lizzie, after which the colours of the notes began to fade and become, she has realized, as they are for ordinary people.
On consideration Leah realizes it is hardly surprising this “ghost” has visited her family. Did not Grandma Rutan rise at night and follow premonitory funerals to the graveyard? Come morning, she would describe the procession in detail, often faulting the mourners’ attire. And what of Leah’s Aunt Beth? She dreamed the correct date of her death. Saw it carved on her tombstone and died to the day and year. Do I believe in such things? Leah wonders. Decides she does. After all, there is so much one must believe; another thing scarcely signifies.
Once the graveyard is behind them, the driver ceases whistling. He is a charming whistler, though Leah thinks it a pathetic superstition that a cheery tune would be enough to keep the dead at bay.
At last David’s farmstead comes into view. It is a whitewashed, rambling place with three outbuildings and what looks to be stakings for a fourth. A giant oak is the only tree on the property. The foreyard is crowded with wagons and buckalls, even a brougham, a landau. The buggy draws up. The ancient piebalds drop their heads. Leah sees three strangers, all men, tromp into the house. At a short distance, David’s two boys and some others play at mumblety-peg. They laugh and yelp as the knife, balanced on a boy’s fingertip, falls and nearly skewers their feet. Such is what passes for entertainment in the countryside, Leah thinks, this nearly losing a thumb or a toe, nearly gashing a thigh, the horrified delight of it all. They will take up gander-pulling next. As a child Leah played mumblety-peg too, of course, though she had always insisted on a few simple rules before she did so.
She alights from the buggy.
“I guess I could stay on, ma’am,” the driver suggests. “Wouldn’t mind staying on, in fact, out of naught but a practical curiosity, ’course.”
“Why? To gawk? As if my family were an organ-grinder’s dancing monkey?” She is more abrupt than she intends, and so she adds with her dimpled smile, “Forgive me, I am close to fainting in exhaustion. Many thanks for your assistance. I shall send for you if you are needed.”
She lets herself into the back hall. Hangs her cloak and bonnet on the peg-rail. Doesn’t halloo. There is nothing wrong with a quiet entrance. Anywise, with the low din emanating from the keeping room she would not be heard. She pauses in the shadows aside the entry. The keeping room is crammed with perhaps twenty souls, all speaking with contained excitement. For this occasion of uncertain etiquette some folk are sombrely dressed, as if for a wake; others are in their going-out clothes. At least Leah will not be out of place in her one good day-dress with its subdued stripes of butternut and madder red. The sleeves are slashed to show a clean white. Her collar starched and spotless.
The men clumped about the trestl
e-table with its jugs of cider and platters of food are concerned, as ever, Leah thinks, about their manly appetites. The women form a gaggle around Leah’s mother, Margaret, who sits on the hearth stool and worries at the flaps of her old-style lappet cap. Mother is ashen-haired and pigeon-chested, that is to say, the very picture of a settled matron. She is voicing, at the moment, her sentiments on the ghostly horrors, and the alarming effect of it all on her health. “And I haven’t slept a jot, have I? And, oh, how my old eyes ache and tear, as if filled with sand granules. I’ve used my eyestone thrice, haven’t I, but still they ache so.” She dabs her eyes with her handkerchief. Leah has ever been slightly disconcerted by her mother’s eyes, they being of such a pale aqueous blue one can practically see her thoughts swimming by. Not that one need look for them; Mother will readily proclaim her thoughts to all who care to hear, and to many who do not.
Just behind Mother stands Leah’s grown sister, Maria, nicknamed “the wall” by Leah’s younger sisters, Margaretta and Katherina. It is a fitting nickname, Leah thinks, given Maria’s brick-red complexion, her square figure and rigid posture. Maria’s husband, Stephan, is also in attendance, as is their youngest child, Ella—a sweet-faced creature, all eyes and all of four. She is a favourite of Margaretta and Katherina, Leah recalls.
Leah now searches out her brother, David. Easily done. He towers over everyone. Looks alike a benevolent giant in a fairy book with his flaxen hair and heavy limbs, his genial face. His wife, Beth, bustles up to him with a mug. She is a bustler through and through, is plump and short with coppery curls and a cheery face. And why should she not be cheery? Her home is a fine one, even for the country. The chairs are upholstered, the floors laid with rugs, the walls papered, the candles all of beeswax. Davey must be profiting well from peppermint, Leah thinks, not for the first time. She adjusts her stance. Sees David conferring with the same three men she saw entering. They wear their coats still, their hats. The men look around, appraising, angered, then leave by the foredoor. The hazel nailed over the lintel trembles. Hazel, Leah recalls, is protection against evil spirits and must be her mother’s idea. It is surely not her father’s. And where is her father? She peers here and there, but he is nowhere in sight. Not that he ever has much to say to her or to anyone.
The Dark Page 3
