The Dark

by Claire Mulligan

  “YOU WISHED TO SEE ME, FATHER?” Leah has found him in the oat field out back of David’s house. He is praying on his knees, his broad hat in hand, his round glasses steamed white, a small man in a large field. He holds up his hand. Continues praying.

  Leah counts out in compound meter—One lee la Two lee la—as this helps control her impatience when forced to wait. She is not the only one waiting. Margaretta and Katherina are sitting eager-eyed in the wagon for the ride to the canal dock in Newark. Mother is in complete agreement with Leah. The girls must return to Rochester with Leah. They cannot remain in Arcadia, with its superstitious louts, its threat of lynching by country mobs. If the ghost follows the girls then it will be proved: they are being signaled out, haunted in some novel fashion. This was decided two nights ago, when those twenty-odd men hurled rocks and dirt clods at David’s house, then ranged menacingly in the foreyard, carrying torches, as if in a medieval pantomime. Leah’s father oiled up his flintlock. “Why, that’s scarcely necessary, Pa,” David said, peering out the door. “I can’t think they mean to harm us.”

  Leah caught her father’s eye. She knew his thoughts. They were the same as her own. David was acting the fool. What else could these men mean but harm? She watched from the kitchen with the other women, the children, as David went outside, arms wide in a gesture of peace. Her father followed close behind him with his flintlock. Just then a woman, bleary-eyed and dishevelled, popped through the kitchen window. “Is this the house of the blasphemers?” she hollered.

  Leah grabbed a poker. “No, nor is it the house of drunken sluts!” Her fury approached the operatic, but she did not skewer the woman. No. She stayed quite calm. Katherina and Margaretta looked at her with admiration. Her mother merely looked horrified. The woman yelped and crammed herself back out the window. Outside, the riff-raff was also leaving, their leader apologizing. He had recognized David as an upstanding member of the community. They would all come again, he promised, but in the daytime, like respectable folk.

  “Father? Pa?” Leah asks now, his praying having lasted to the compound count of ten.

  He stands. “I got something for you.”

  “You do?” She is oddly pleased, expectant. He made such ingenious toys for her once—a dog-cart, a string of fluttering birds, a mechanical tiger with teeth of iron nails. She recalls chasing David and Maria with that tiger; how they shrieked.

  He leads her to his makeshift work-shed. It is chock with tools and barrels and planks. A house plan is unfurled on the sawbuck table. Leah notes the smudged lines where he has changed the drawings to allow for gingerbread scrollwork, a veranda, gables.

  John follows her gaze. He taps the plans. “Don’t trouble your head. It won’t be any slipshod, balloon-framed house. Any mortal idiot can raise one of them.” He tells her about mortise-and-tenon, his home-forged nails. He goes on, as he sometimes does, about his planned contrivances. Explains how his house will bring them all together again, shelter generations of the Fox family, hold against any vicissitude. “This house here, it’ll have no history but our own.”

  “My word, how very interesting and—”

  “And it’ll be well-progressed by the time you and the girls get on back from Rochester. I know you’ll want to decorate it up.”

  “Indeed, and what of this?” Leah says, and indicates a drawing that shows a system of levers and pulleys leading to a door.

  “That’s so if any dare enter they’ll get their mortal daylights knocked out, though only by God’s grace, ’course.”

  “Of course.”

  “You reckon your ma would favour a washing shed? Particular for washing clothes, I mean?”

  “What woman wouldn’t covet such a thing?”

  He snorts in reply.

  Leah gestures to his old flintlock. “I hope you are not expecting another mob.”

  “I saw a gawker at the field’s edge.” His shrug is a small movement of his boney shoulders. “A single man, if he’s determined, can wreak as much mortal havoc as any mob.”

  “I suppose you would know.” She studies the saws, the chisels. “By the by, what … that is, what do you make of the knocks?”

  John considers before saying, “Ignore them. You’ll get used to them in time. I told your ma that. Consider Job, him and his trials.”

  “But what of other folk? Those not our kin?”

  “What of them? It’s Our Lord above that matters. Him and his judgements.”

  “Yes … I see.” He puts her at a loss for words, this man. When he first returned from his ten years gone Leah had called him an impostor. Naturally, she doesn’t think of him as such any longer. Still, he is hardly the same man who made puppets out of chicken heads, who took her to see the fairs with their magicians and freaks and fortune tellers, who revealed to her the traveller birds in their glorious multitudes.

  Leah rubs her forearms at this remembrance, feels the faint hatch-work of scars beneath the sleeve, the clawing of the birds themselves.

  “Them wounds, they hurt you still?”

  “My Lord, no, not at all.”

  “Don’t say it like that.”

  “Say what?”

  “My Lord. My heavens. My word. Mine and mine, like it all belongs to you, and not the vice versa, like them Latins say.”

  Leah sniffs at this. “Anywise, here I am. You said you have something for me?”

  The box is perhaps a foot and a half wide and nearly as deep. It is made of plum mahogany and black walnut and smells of new varnish. The lid is carved with entwined lilies. “See them, Leah-Lou. Them are the lilies of the field, from the scriptures: Consider the lilies of the field they neither spin nor toil—”

  “I know how it goes.” Leah looks under the box. Opens the lid. Peers inside. “What does it do?”

  “Do? It’s a bible box. It holds your bible. I made it up large. For a family-sized bible, see. You got a bible, don’t you?”

  “Certainly. Perhaps I was thinking of the toys you contrived for me once. Remember that tiger? With the snapping jaws?”

  “A dog, that was, not a tiger.”

  “A dog? My … word, perhaps it was. Anywise, you hurled it into the fire. Recall? When I chased Davey and Maria with it? It was deserved. They called me a liar, I believe, and said I was fit only for tending Hell’s kitchen.”

  “You’re the one who chucked that dog in the fire, not me. And it was because you broke it on David’s head. You begged me to make it whole again. I couldn’t. You sure did wail on about that.”

  “I did? Well, I do not wish to argue about it.”

  “Were we arguing?” John asks, and with no particular intonation.

  Honestly, Leah thinks, did the Good Lord need take all his character away, along with the liquor and sin? Says, “I should haste. Will you come to Newark to see us off on the canal?”

  He grimaces at the mention of the canal. Leah is not surprised. Her father avoids canal travel completely. Odd, she has ever thought, seeing as he had been a cannaller himself.

  “No, no, I got work here. You go on. Just … like I said, don’t you get anything in your head about them raps.”

  “Whyever would I?”

  “Why? Confound you, girl,” John says, and lists the grand schemes Leah had when she was young: the neighbour’s privy she tore down to make a castle. The boy whose ear she near hacked off when playing Indians. The games of mumblety-peg that involved skinning knives and rules that only she could master. “Thing is, I was always fixing up behind you, placating the neighbours and the like. It got to be a real … modus operandi of mine. King Solomon didn’t have a harder task, I tell you that.”

  Leah feels that faint throb in her temple, the one that heralds an ungovernable anger. “I suppose you wished I were more like Davey or Maria. I suppose you wished me placid and dull-witted as a cow.”

  “I wished nothing of the kind, Leah-Lou.” He takes off his spectacles, then pinches the bridge of his nose, as he does when he is perplexed.

&nb
sp; Her anger settles. “I often wished it,” she murmurs. “I often wished to be someone else entirely.”

  In the foreyard her young sisters wait impatiently in David’s wagon. John lashes down Leah’s valise. At the last instance Leah kisses him on his cheek. “But the fault is not yours, Pa. Honestly, why ever would you think that?”

  At this John falls back in astonishment, as if she’d slapped him, and not merely guessed his coursing thoughts.

  CHAPTER 4.

  “Thus it was Leah’s?” I asked, and indicated my patient’s bible box. “Then how did it come to be in your possession? And its contents, to boot? Your Leah, did she bequeath it to you? She is dead, is she not?”

  “Last time I noticed, yes,” she said, then glanced at the yarn skeins on my lap (I had brought my fancy work as I had said I would). “Do you plan to stay a while today?” She seemed desirous of my presence for the first time. Thus I did not press my questions.

  “I need to keep my hands busy while you talk on, duck,” I said, “by which I mean you seem set to linger a great deal longer than I had calculated.”

  “What will it become?”

  I inspected the yarn, peeved by the colours. I have ever disliked aniline dyes, what with their false and lurid brightness (much like the electric bright of the night streets). The brown wool looked near to red, the red near to orange, and the yellow flat-out sulphurous. Years past I dyed my own wool with ox-gall and fustic. My son often helped me, as was his wont, and without a solitary complaint. When he was six I promised I would knit an article for his birthday (which fell on March the 5th), and that I would do so no matter his age or location. Mittens. Socks. Sweater-alls. He liked clay reds, earth browns, the blues of sea or sky. I should add that he was my only child.

  “Mrs. Mellon? Mrs. Mellon!”

  “Yes, I have ears. Do I look a statue?”

  “Somewhat. And you didn’t answer my question: what will it become?”

  “I don’t know. I merely follow its shape. Womanly arts require simple thoughts. Ruminations … ponderings … they only beget tangles and messes and … rat’s nests.”

  “Well, yes.”

  I began with a cast-up stitch. The needles clacked in the garret’s silence. “Shall we just get on with Rochester, duck,” I said, and with my kindest manner to atone for my abruptness.

  “Surely,” she said, and described how Leah packed her new bible box in her battered old valise, then packed her young sisters off to Rochester. My patient owned that she did not know it at the time, but neither Hydesville nor Arcadia would ever be her home again.

  IN ROCHESTER, Leah disembarks at Canal Street, her young sisters one step behind her. She tells a boat porter her address on Mechanics Square, raising her voice above the racket of tin horns, the calls of peanut vendors, the clatter of horses and commerce. The porter loads their luggage on a handcart, doffs his cap. No one else pays the three sisters much attention. Nor had they been noticed on the canal boat. A fine day for the glide, the mule and his hoggee plodding along the towpath, the sun aglint. “Astonishing,” Leah said to her sisters. “How a lone mule can pull along a boatful of oblivious mortals.”

  Her sisters agreed and smiled and then pasted themselves on either side of her. The ghostly rappings began then, but were mistaken for the general workings of the boat. “And so the ghost does follow you, but for what reason?” Leah mused. “Surely he has a purpose. Everyone requires purpose.”

  “Come, lambs,” Leah says now. “Lizzie will be awaiting us at home.”

  “Can we call on Amy and Isaac? At their apothecary?” Katie asks. “They’re sure to give me a horehound, mayhap two of ’em.”

  “Of them, dear, and the Posts are still in Seneca at some women’s suffrage conference.”

  “Well, I miss them. I really, really do,” Katie says.

  “Of that I have no doubt,” Leah replies. Amy and Isaac Post are fast friends to the Foxes and have given shelter to the family during various financial crises. But then such is the way of Hicksite Quakers. They partonize good causes and treat all and sundry as equals, even children, hence Maggie’s and Katie’s affection.

  “Thee. Thouest. Thine,” Katie chants now, in mimicry of the Posts’ antiquated Quaker speech. “It’s such a cozy way to talk. Why can’t we talk like that?”

  “Because it would draw unwarranted attention, Katherina, and sound ridiculous.”

  Maggie asks, “Do you reckon Amy and Isaac will, I dunno, fancy our ghost, believe in him, that is?”

  “They believe that women can achieve suffrage and that, Margaretta, is an equally fantastical notion.”

  “I recollect you saying women suffer all the time,” Katie says, then scratches her nose, puzzled, when Leah laughs so hard she must cover her mouth with her gloved hands.

  “Ah, but you are an amusing little thing. A moment … there. Well, come now, girls, do not lollygag,” Leah says. She briskly steers her sisters through the thickening crowd, round ash barrels, carriage stoops, mounds of horse droppings. The girls cannot cease gawking. Rochester has changed since the girls were last here only nine months ago. Has grown presto-quick. Become even more the hub of commerce, thanks to the glorious canal. The wonders of American invention shall never cease, Leah decides.

  “Honestly, if you walk any slower you will be going backwards,” Leah says, but relents and slows her pace at Maggie’s and Katie’s beseechments. Everything is a marvel to her sisters: the gutted geese hanging in the butcher’s window, the veiled bonnets at the milliner’s, the fruit and vegetables heaped in stalls, even the proprietors themselves, who call out prices in pennies, shillings and reales. The girls now make a game of find-the-symbol. They count the helixed barber poles of the barbers, the trio of golden balls that mark the pawnshops, the show-globes of the apothecaries, the black lettered signs of the mourning supply shops. Six. Eight. Three. Four. What the girls like best, however, are the carved Indian figures of the tobacconists. They find five in all. “They are only facsimiles,” Leah warns. “A true Indian may look nothing alike. They may, indeed, look much like anyone.”

  Leah leads her sisters on through the Four Corners with its banks and fine stores. Advertising banners hang hither and yon. A boy herds two cows past a bright-painted buggy. And on the centre rotunda a four-piece band plays, torching the air above with colours. Leah is the only one who sees these colours, of course. She thrills at their wondrous display, sighs in disappointment when the colours swiftly fade then vanish. Talents of perception are for the young, she thinks, and I am no longer.

  Maggie is also watching the band. “And Calvin? Will we get to see Calvin? Please?”

  “Why do you ask? Ah … the band.” Calvin, their ersatz brother, plays the fife in a military band. “Perhaps I shall write him. But first let us see how loud this ghost plays, shall we? And … Katherina!” Leah cries, and slaps at Katie’s hand. “Do not point, dear. Honestly, there is nothing more rude, nor more noticeable than pointing.”

  “But look-it, Leah,” Katie says. The coloured man plays a limber-jack, the wooden man’s clackety limbs making the very music to which he dances. “Miss Nettie could never ever do that,” Katie declares. She gave the doll to their niece Ella before they left. “I’m too old for dollies now” was what Katie said. “So you take care of our Ella, Miss Nettie, and don’t go on with your rambly ole talk.”

  “Leah,” Katie whispers now. “They do talk. See?”

  Sure enough, the limber-jack is commenting on the fine June day. Next he sings, clear as a bell, his wooden mouth working open and shut. The coloured man’s mouth, however, is set firm, and he looks at the limber-jack, there on his knee, with as much astonishment as anyone.

  “How very clever,” Leah says, and drops a coin in the pot at the man’s feet. “Now where is your sister? Margaretta!”

  Ah, there she is, standing agog afore a stall that is chock with almanacs and periodicals, books and newsprint. “Margaretta, you cannot leave my side without asking. You migh
t be snatched off. Men, my dear, are not to be trusted.”

  The newspaper proprietor, as if in agreement, spits tobacco within an inch of Leah’s hem, “Just the once, Leah?” Maggie implores. “Please?” She points to a dime novel, to the image of its whey-faced, hand-wringing heroine. “We’ll share it, won’t we, Kat?”

  Katie shrugs, twists at her hair. Leah agrees after some calculation of her money. “But, once again, do not point, my dears, nor twist your hair. It is bad form. Walk briskly, double-time now, else you shall not get anywhere in this life.”

  Behind them the vendor calls out, “Sir Franklin Lost in the Arctic Wastelands! Read now!”

  “Where’s that?” Maggie asks.

  “The Arctic? A place you shall never see. It is at the top of the world, apparently, or perhaps the bottom. Anywise, it is black as pitch and frozen over and has not a whit of life. Men like to to seek it out and tend, not surprisingly, to get lost forever there. This way, girls.”

  Leah hurries them over the long reach of the aqueduct. A funeral coterie plods by. The hearse wagon is drawn by a horse with a soot-blackened hide. The mourners look lightning-struck, the pine coffin ordinary and small. Leah and her sisters bow their heads, but only briefly before Leah indicates they must keep on. It would take a dog’s age to get anywhere, Leah thinks, if one stopped stock for every funeral procession.

  Beyond the aqueduct is the Third Ward, the finest neighbourhood in all of Rochester. This is where most of Leah’s young pupils dwell. Cats being boiled alive. Idiots banging on barrels. Such is what comes to Leah’s mind when her students play, although she is ever kind, ever encouraging.

  They step off the aqueduct path. This ward of Rochester boasts a plethora of tanneries, factories, mills. Leah’s eyes tear up from the smoke and reeking fumes. Katie coughs, cries, “That’s awful, awful. The ole nasty!”

  “Grievous,” Maggie adds.

  Leah follows their gaze. Outside a livery, a boy is being whipped. He refuses to cry out, though the man wielding the belt shows no inclination to mercy.