“Uncle David would never ever do that to his boys,” Katie says.
Leah shakes her head. “My heavens, no. But then most adults are cruel, I suppose you two have noticed that.” She offers her sisters stories of suffering children. How they are banished to the countryside. Forced to toil. Left defenseless against the winter cold. Though sometimes, Leah reminds them, sometimes the resourceful ones, the clever ones, enact a small revenge.
“I’d really, really rather not be an adult,” Katie says, as if she could forestall it.
At last: Leah’s rented row-home on Mechanics Square Park. It is a narrow, cramped place, beset with draughts, the smell of the neighbours’ cabbage stews and the dissonant symphony of other people’s lives. There are only two upper rooms, a keeping room, and a kitchen in which Leah cannot swing a cat. Both the outside-scullery and the outhouse are shared with four other families. The park is large, at least, though it belongs to all of Rochester.
Lizzie clatters down the steep stairs, then hurls herself at the three of them. “Mama! You’re here,” she exclaims, and kisses Leah on both cheeks, as a foreigner might. “Je suis si heureuse.”
“I am here. Yes … Ah, Lizzie is taking French lessons,” Leah explains to her sisters’ puzzled faces. “I do so scrimp for them. And yet is it not astonishing what one can learn and so very quickly?”
“Well, yes,” Maggie says with her little smile.
Lizzie shows her nieces her latest fancy-work sampler. “It’s a milk, maid with a cow and a pail,” she explains. This habit of Lizzie’s—of explaining the obvious—does irk Leah, but she never chides her daughter for it, or at least, not often.
“You could stitch in a griffin, say, instead of a dull ole cow,” Katie suggests.
“You can’t milk a griffin,” Lizzie replies tartly.
Leah claps her hands. “Go on, you three, take yourselves out to the park. Do not speak to any men. And Lizzie, I am sure your dear little aunts will tell you all that has happened.”
Leah’s sisters nod happily, then the three rush off, already whispering in each other’s ears, and in that age-old way of children telling secrets.
Upstairs, Leah busies herself with unpacking. Her hand falls on her father’s gift. She absently traces the lilies carved on the lid, then peers close. A wasp, hidden in the leaves. Clever Pa, she thinks, to tuck in a reminder that adversaries ever lurk.
The box is too large for the bible she has somewhere. Perhaps she will use it for letters. Her father always had a fondness for boxes, she recalls. There was a most delightful one he made for his cards. He showed it to her when she was a girl, just before his desertion. Within a secret compartment was the King. The Queen. The Jester with his pronged hat. Her father fanned the cards out, then plucked an ace from her hair, another from her sleeve. “Magic,” he said, and waited for Leah’s eyes to widen. “Don’t never be fool enough to believe that, Leah-Lou.”
Pointless advice, Leah thinks as she puts the box on her dressing table, then settles for her nap. “Don’t marry Bowman Fish, the odious clod”—now, that would have been of use.
She takes a draft of sleeping remedy, closes her eyes. But she cannot find sleep, not with the girls so uncouth and noisy below. Yes, much about her younger sisters needs improvement: their manners, their grammar, their reveal-all countenances. And their voices! Maggie’s has a country twang, like a banjo being plucked. Katie’s is a tremulous falsetto. At least both girls look much younger than they are, being sweet of aspect and small for their ages. Maggie could take the part of a back-woods innocent, what with her plump cheeks and candid brown eyes. That little held-back smile is a worry, however. It is as if she is too ready to be amused. As for Katie, turn her sideways and she might vanish. Otherwise, Katie favours Father, has his narrow, arched nose and thin lips. Such features should render her homely. They do not. Instead they lend her a distinct, unsettling prettiness, as if a grown woman has been packaged up as a child. More unsettling is that vacancy that sometimes comes upon Katie, as if she is looking at some knowledge beyond the ken of others. And her eyes. Violet in some lights, grey in others. Who has such rare-coloured eyes but shape-shifters, witches? Such, Leah fears, is what some cretinous fools might say.
A bird smacks against the window. Another. Then a scrabbling. Leah starts up. Now the strangest sound: as if a pail of bonnyclabber is spilling on the floor below. She rushes outside. Sees the three girls hopscotching on the flagstones that lead to the foredoor.
“How pale you look, Leah. What’s the matter?” the girls chorus.
That rage. No predicting its arrival. Leah’s clenched hands grow hot. She breathes deep. “This ghost. He has been about for a time now. And I wonder. Truly. How does he intend to earn his keep?”
The girls laugh at this, though Leah is not jesting. She treads back upstairs, leaving the girls to their skipping rhyme.
“As I went up the apple tree
All the apples fell on me.
Bake a pudding. Bake a pie.
Would you ever tell a lie?”
A lie? No. The dead are not a lie. Leah hears them each time her fingers touch the organ keys. She hears them in the half-notes, which is, of course, where tragedy dwells. Indeed, when Leah sets aside her sheet music, when she plays without plan or intent, then the air near throbs with ghosts, their longings and regrets, their desire to speak. She wonders if, with some encouragement, the dead would do so, would actually speak aloud. At least the dead, unlike so many of the living, would surely know how to keep a tune.
That night cold fingers press Leah’s cheeks. The raps sound all around her bed. She calls to the girls: “Are you safe?”
“We are. Are you? What’s happening?”
“I cannot say. I …” Leah reaches for the matchbox to light the candle. The box tips away. The lucifer matches skitter off.
“Quelle horreur!” Lizzie shouts.
Thuds and bangs and more callings back and forth. Leah joins in until she wearies. The girls seem to have no need of early-night sleep. Did she at their age? Indeed she did. Sleep was an escape from household drudgery, from Bowman Fish and his grunting demands.
Leah wakes to a gauzy light. The girls are all heaped in Lizzie’s bed, are sleeping as soundly on the worn horsehair mattress as if on a Queen’s featherbed. Yes, it is for the best that I brought my sisters here, she assures herself. How, in truth, could I have left them so long with our aging parents? It is a wonder things have only now gone awry.
Leah fastens on her stays, then her underpetticoat, then five more petticoats over that. The stiff-cording on her petticoats is frayed. The seams on her stays so threadbare that the very boning prods her skin. The money from her music lessons is never enough, not for new clothes or new intimates, not for the smallest of nest eggs. Her future yaws before her. As does Lizzie’s. And her sisters’. Those three cannot expect decent marriages without dowries. For that matter, just how will Leah manage into old age if she doesn’t marry again? Marriage. The thought of it fills Leah’s head with a hot, white noise. She rubs at the faint cross-hatch of scars on her forearms. The rubbing is mere habit now, a calming reflex of sorts, though as a child and filled with the usual superstitions, she had rubbed the scars for luck.
She is grinding the coffee, when the post boy comes with a letter from Arcadia. She searches out enough coins to pay him, then breaks the seal, unfolds the letter. The writing is upright and cramped—her father’s. When has he ever written to her? Never, that is when. She reads, at first fearful of bad news, then in puzzlement.
15 June, 1848
Dear Leah-Lou,
I reckon you and the girls are settled in Rochester by now, and I have been pondering over our conversation in the field out back here of David’s house. And I’ve been praying, too, for God’s guidance, but He has been quietude itself of late, and so I am taking it upon my own self to steer you to a safe and knowing course.
I need confess straightaways that I’d been indulging in whiskey that nig
ht of the hauntings, the first occasion in near to fifteen years. And that I was awoken by uncanny sounds before your mother and your sisters were, even though I’d been sleeping soundly, as the soused are like to do. And when the knocks started I knew straightaways unholy trouble was drawing nigh, though how much trouble I surely miscalculated. I knew it weren’t the ghost of some peddler who’d gone and had his throat slashed, and that no mouldering corpse would be staggering out of that cellar, not even come the Last Trump, not even if we dug down to Hell’s watchtower. Not to say the saltbox weren’t a dour place. Straightaways on moving there your mother complained about the frowsy smell, and about those grey threads, thin as hairs, snagged round the spigots and latches. Straightaways she demanded I scrape my boots so as not to traipse in those rank clots of dirt she was ever finding on her new-cleaned floors. I scraped my boots. I surely did. Not that it mattered a holy whit. Your mother was determined to find that house haunted, just like all the places we’d lived in since I got back after those ten years gone. She had the Sense, she ever claimed. All the females in her family claimed the Sense. Your grandmother Rutan followed phantom funerals and the like, but there was, too, a great-aunt who could find any lost thing, and a midwife cousin who could make babies live just by scalding her hands in a cauldron. It were all blaspheming hogwash and I prayed constant for your mother’s soul, and for mine, too, ’course. But our voices must be a clamouring riot to God’s holy ears, and all a sinning man can do is hope the Lord attends one solitary word.
Anywise, recall, Leah-Lou, that this “peddler’s” ghost arrived at the tail-end of the winter of’47-48, the most God-forsaken winter the almanac’s got on record. I blame my lapse in sobriety on that endless and frigid spell of darkness that seemed so deep you’d reckon it didn’t stop at Heaven’s gates, but went on infinitum, to use that Latinate word. Your mother saw portents falling thick on the world. Woodland creatures were watching the house, she said, and were plotting, as if mayhap the cold had honed up their wits. Breath took on shapes, dragons and the like. Metals snapped like twigs. Then one forenoon your mother shrieked and pointed at the kitchen window. Sure enough, written out in hoarfrost were the words Get gone.
Get gone was surely what your sisters wanted for themselves. They were stir-crazed bored that winter and griped no end about having to go to bed so soon after supper as if they reckoned lantern oil and pine logs were God’s free bounty. And how they did gab on about Rochester, the lit-up byways, the canals with their carnival show of boats, the ice-cream parlours, and all those stores crammed with whatnots we had no money to buy anywise. They surely gabbed about you and Lizzie both, my girl, and how they missed your singing and piano playing, and how you didn’t come to visit near often enough, and that, ’course, was true as preaching. They teased your mother, too, and worked up some garbled language to confuse her thoughts.
Now, don’t hold for an instance by the way I write of her that I don’t love your mother. I surely do, but it’s alike an old cat, one that keeps slinking off and then coming back, just when you thought it flat-dead. I know we make an odd pair to most eyes, her a vasty woman, all afret and ajostle and talking constant, me rake-thin and a good head shorter than my chosen wife, and skint with words besides. But Solomon’s Song keeps a lively tune with us, as it should in any marriage. And don’t hold that I don’t love your sisters, for I surely do, but I had little time to attend their growing. I had peace to make with Our Lord, as I do even yet, and such peacemaking is a time-stealing occupation. I surely regret my neglect of those two now. They needed attending. Your mother reckoned herself old as the blessed Sarah when she bore them, and this has surely added to her superstitious bent regarding those two. But then they were queer babes, watchful as owls, even in their swaddling, and easy to mistake for those creatures of the old stories, those what choose a family for convenience but are only biding their time to wreak havoc. No, I scratch that. It’s a blaspheming thought and uncharitable besides. I allowed your mother to be their only guiding rod. Their waywardness is my fault in toto, to use another Latinate phrase.
Leah-Lou, I was the one who heard those footsteps first. Not your sisters. First the footsteps, then a swish-drag. The night was dark as Egypt with not a fillet of moon, and the sounds were hard to situate. The keeping room? The hall? Outside our bedroom door? Anywise, those sounds surely made sleep a difficulty, and then they got loud enough to wake your mother, and so began it all. She shook me though I was already wide awake and silently cursing, too, the taste of whiskey in my mouth, the empty flask propped under our marriage bed.
“You hear that John?” your mother gasped. “Laws, where’s the tinder? Where’s the candle?” she said, and so on. I grumbled about it all, but I lit the candle stump obligingly enough and went to investigate. I found nothing, of course. The damp-reek had gotten worse over that long winter and it pervaded the house. I pushed aside a clump of dirt near the threshold and then stoked up the kitchen embers.
Your sisters were huddled up in bed with your mother when I got back. They’d lit all the candles and night shadows paraded on the walls.
“Rats,” I said.
“Rats? Rats?” your mother near shouted. “Do rats wear boots? Do they?” She clutched your sisters into her well-endowments, one to either side.
“Boards,” I tried. “In the wind.”
“Is there a wind without? Is there? I hear none. John?”
I suggested next the neighbours were having a revel—a foolish grasp, I concede now.
“Are our neighbours giants? Are they?”
Those thump-knocks came again, and they were surely in the room with us. I noted the smell of apples then. Apples! What follows next? I thought. Just then your mother and the girls shrieked in unison. You never heard such a godawful sound. Next the bedstead shook and the floor shuddered.
For frightened girls your sisters surely had some wherewithal. Katie called out, “Mr. Split-Foot, do as I do.” She clapped her hands, and, lo, the knocks repeated the same. Now your mother has numerous names for the Devil. Mr. Split-Foot, the Horned Gentleman, Old Nick, Old Scratch, and the like. You’d think by her manner there were more than one devil, but there’s only one, just as there’s only one God, and he is a God of demanding nature. Anywise, Katie invoking the Devil only got your mother more lathered up. And then Maggie got the knocks to repeat her hand-claps, as well, and then Katie said it was April Fool’s Day on the morrow, and that someone was playing a trick.
Your mother said, “But there’s no one else in the house. Is there? John?”
I thought on that and said no, but I heard it again. That swish-drag. It was underneath the knocks, underneath all the foolishness. Your mother started asking questions of the “ghost” and so learned the ages of her children, even the age of the one who died in her swaddling. The Red Sea might have parted the way she carried on then, as if she didn’t know the ages of her offspring already.
“Are you that peddler?” she asked. “Are you? That poor man who was murdered hereabouts for his five hundred dollars?”
I put in that no peddler carries five hundred dollars, and that it was only a gab-about tale, and that every village has its murdered peddler, or its self-murderer stalking the crossroads, or its ghostie children wailing like all-forsaken.
The ghost wasn’t too sure of himself at that point, but your mother can be fixed as God’s Heaven on occasion and the ghost wasn’t going to get away with being anything but a murdered peddler who’d got his throat slashed and, lo, was buried there in our cellar. The girls acted mortal confused and skittish-scared when this was determined, but soon enough they settled into their routine of knock-and-answer as like this were something they were born to do.
It should have ended there, Leah-Lou. I should have stopped it all, but I kept my counsel for reasons of mine own. Quick as God’s lightning the neighbours were flocking to the saltbox, and others rode in from near and far, and the cellar was dug up until it was pitted with holes, and some folk got
riled and said our family was blaspheming to say the dead could speak.
Your mother was the one who insisted we go to David’s house. She was thinking the ghost would stay behind and that, lo, we’d get safe away from the crowds and hullaballoo. I kept telling her that it was foolishness and that she should ignore the raps. “You’ll get used to them in time,” I said. “In time you’ll scarce hear them at all.” But on we went anywise to David’s house, your mother having got that look against which a quarrel is useless prattle.
Your mother wanted to write and beg your presence. I said no to that, and she relented. My fear was that you’d make more of the raps than you should, that’d you court trouble somehow, or disaster mayhap, and when I gave you the bible box in the oat field just before your leaving that fear got even stronger and I could no longer ignore it. Hence this letter.
Ignore those raps, Leah-Lou. I say it again. They have naught to do with you or the girls. Causations are plenty in this world.
Yours truly, your father,
John D. Fox
P.S. The house is coming along a pace. I plan to paint the hall vermillion as I recall you liking that shade. And don’t trouble yourself about my imbibing of liquor. It won’t happen again, not ever. That night of the first “raps” was a mere foolish lapse. Nor will I abandon you again, I swear it, Leah-Lou.
Leah folds her father’s letter back into its little rectangle. Considers, then pops it into the bible box. She takes a small bag of grain and goes out into the limpid spring morning, into Mechanics Square Park, and settles on the narrow bench far from the other park-goers. Sparrows, just returned from their winter vanishing, flick jewel-drops of water from a pedestal bath. The sparrows slumber underground some learned men say. Others speak more fantastically of the birds flying to Africa, which might as well be the moon, and that is a theory also.
Leah tosses some grain and more birds swoop to the flagstones. Oriole and warbler. Vesper sparrow and kingbird. Humility bird. Finch. She can identify many. Is happy as a treasure hunter when she spies a new variety. Oddly, she does not wish them stuffed and put in a curiosity cupboard to be viewed at her leisure, not even though the cross-hatch scars on her forearms were dealt her by birds, by, indeed, a multitudinous flock of the passenger pigeons. This incident—witnessed by her father only—is hazed by years, and engenders no terror or resentment, only a certainty she has been marked somehow, a certainty that grows when she hears, as now, the birds give voice to what must be God’s music for God’s enjoyment; for why else would He bid them sing? A pity that Leah lacks the daring to write music that warbles and trills, music that is an improvisation without clear pattern or end. Music bursting with colour. God would enjoy such music. And Leah surely would. But it would perplex all others.
The Dark Page 6
