The Dark

by Claire Mulligan

  “I know how it goes. Who doesn’t? And anywise, the spirits are real. As real and true as you or I. I have felt them course through me, speak through me even. An astounding thing. Many have witnessed it.”

  John waves this off. “I prayed to the Almighty all morning in the field so that I could see things clear.”

  “That must have been quite damp.”

  “You can’t keep on.” He stammers out his intent. He meant to be calm, convincing, meant to explain how he only wants his family together again under one roof, meant to employ phrases of sentiment: one true heart, the joy of family, the duties of women, and so forth. Says instead, “Order your spirits to leave. Order them.” He laughs dryly. “I’ve got no doubt they’ll obey you.” He picks up a hammer and attends to the boards laid out on his sawhorse.

  “Leave, Father? But I do not wish the spirits to leave, even if they did listen to ‘orders’ from me. I have grown quite accustomed to them—and must you hammer on like that? The board cannot go anywhere.”

  He pauses, the hammer in mid-strike.

  “As I was saying, I have grown quite accustomed to them. They quell the loneliness I have always endured as a woman abandoned with a child, struggling to pay the rent, alone against the trials of the world and—”

  “Sure, sure, I can understand all that, I can; but you’re risking the damnation of your eternal soul, anyone can see that.”

  “Anyone? Perhaps we should leave the judgement of my soul to God. I have no doubt He will find it honourable.”

  John drops the hammer, and on his thumb. He clenches his teeth to cut off the oath. Abjuring foul, blasphemous words is no easy task; they had once constituted a good third of his vocabulary, after all. Yet an oath is the only thing to utter when you have bashed your thumb with a hammer, or when you must live on the charity of your son, or when your daughters are set on the road to damnation and ruin.

  “Are you in pain, Father? Whatever is that sound?”

  “Damnit, girl. Then what of your mortal flesh? Take your lesson from Jezebel. The woman was hurled out a tower for worshipping heathen gods. Got herself torn apart by dogs, nothing left of her but—”

  “I know how it goes, Pa, but that was such a long time past.”

  “Then what of Joe Smith? Him and his false religion and false gods. Got jailed for his sins, but he weren’t safe even behind bars. The mob shot him up and chucked him out the window, just like Jezebel. They finished him off with a firing squad and then tried to saw off his blaspheming head. That was naught five years ago.”

  Leah backs away. Eyes his hammer—as if he would ever strike her in wrath, or in any other fashion. “That Smith was a man. Honestly, none would treat a woman so.”

  John sighs and clenches his thumb to stay the blood leaking from the nail. At this Leah rubs her forearms as if recalling her own wounds. Have the scars have faded over the years since she was a girl? John wonders. Decides it unlikely. There were so many wounds at the time, he knew she would be marked for life.

  “Besides, I have no fear of such things,” Leah continues. “Crowds. Mobs. You of all people must know that. How could I fear any such thing after the birds lifted me in their multitudes?”

  John doesn’t waste his breath arguing this memory of hers. He takes off his spectacles again, wipes at his eyes. Leah is a blur, pink-red with blood. Last card, he thinks. He speaks of newspaper men. How eager they are to listen. He thrice mentions reputation.

  John has seen Leah quake with fury, but never stilled with it, as she is now. “Newspaper men, Father? I am on intimate terms with many, not just the famed Mr. Greeley. And indeed they love to listen. They pick up on any innuendo and turn it into such tales. Already they have spoken of their suspicions that you devised levers, pulleys and such to make the noise of—”

  “I’ll take on the blame. I’ll do that. I haven’t steered you right.”

  He should have known that Leah would not retreat. Has he ever known her to do so?

  “Many things are hidden in this world,” she says softly. “Occurrences in the dark. I have heard of fathers so blinded with drink they attempt to treat their daughters as their wives, when alone with them, in a barn, say, and these daughters of such tender years. The daughters always run off, horrified, before the unspeakable happens. Still. They cannot ever forget it.”

  When he finally speaks it is with the voice of John-Before and with the rage of John-Before. “You, you dare suggest … how can you even brew-up such things? How? Damn you, you were a mean ‘un as a girl. You’re meaner than an old sow now.”

  Leah flinches, brushes at her eyes, then points to the joists of this house he is building for them all. “Cobwebs, Pa. They’re settling in. They do that in empty places.” She walks off, her dress of bronze-green rustling the fallen boards.

  John calls to her, but she does not turn back. He can’t help but notice, however, that she neglects to lift her skirt hem out of the dirt.

  CHAPTER 13.

  “Whatever are you doing?” I demanded. (My patient had flung off the bedclothes.) “You’ll catch your death!”

  “Catch my death? Oh, the good grief, I’d say I’ve caught that already.” She yanked off her stockings then.

  I was not amazed by the sad bloating of her legs—a prime symptom of her dipsomania—but her feet were another story. They were, to be frank, ghastly: all knobbed and muscled and the toes dreadfully overlarge.

  She indicated the soles of her feet, then showed her palms. “Such was all that was left of Jezebel after she fell, after the dogs tore her apart as punishment for blasphemy. This: the palms of her hands, the soles of her feet.”

  “It was a harsh judgement on Jezebel,” I allowed. “And peculiar how the dogs left only that. I objected, quite strongly.”

  “Objected? When?”

  “When I heard the story, oh, so long ago it seems another age. Would a man be treated the same? No, he would not.”

  “And yet it made no difference,” she said, and studied me for a moment, as if she had mistaken me for someone else.

  “YOU’RE AS QUIET AS A church mouse, aren’t you poppet? Are you feeling poorly? Do you need more brandied tonic?”

  “I have had sufficient, Mother,” Leah says. They are in David’s keeping room. Leah sets the kettle over the smoldering hearth. Mother diligently polishes the table-tops. Above stairs her sisters play at games. It is the day after Leah’s father refused to help her with the spirits and so, yes, Leah is quiet, and filled with that same distasteful sensation as when she hears a song played off-key. Just then John enters and drops a bundle of kindling into the wood bin. He leaves without a word or nod. Mother casts Leah a bewildered glance. Leah pretends nothing is amiss. “This fire is not drawing. Not at all,” she proclaims and jabs at the fire with a poker.

  Leah’s sisters now tumble into the keeping room, all-agiggle. Maggie’s belly-ache has passed and she has sworn off slip-gut pudding for life. Katie has recently returned from the Culvers’ and she and Maggie are delighting in making sport of Ruth Culver once again.

  “Old Ruthie wanted the spirits talking constant, Mag,” Leah hears Katie say. “She reckons she’s got medium qualities too. And she really tried. She even invited her wall-eyed cousin Orville over to hear her ghosts rapping away, but the dead can’t abide her, not at all. No wonder, she’s such an old nasty. She wanted to drown her poor old cat because it wasn’t catching mice enough. She said it was to teach it a lesson, but if you’re dead you can’t learn much, can you?”

  “Well, no. Not usually,” Maggie replies, and adds that Ruth is so sour she could curdle milk with her eyeballs.

  “She said she’d teach me a lesson, too,” Katie continues. “Said I was a lazy skeezick and ungrateful, and just ‘cus I didn’t want to do her nasty old scullery work.”

  “A lesson?” Leah puts in. “What sort of lesson?”

  “I dunno. You know how old Ruth gripes on.”

  “Come, lamb, that’s unkind, isn’t it?” M
other says.

  “Gripes on? How, Katherina?” Leah insists.

  “I dunno. I guess about it not being fair that she can’t get the ghosts talking. Oh, but I hate, hate, hate her. I thought I’d just suffocate if I had to stay there any longer. The only thing that helped was this refreshment that Norman makes out of juniper berries. Mag, you got to try it.”

  Leah looks at her two young sisters. She sets down the poker, having forgotten she was even holding it, then turns to leave the room. My Lord and the spirits! she thinks. These two.

  “Leah? Poppet? Where are you off to?”

  “The veranda, Mother. The smoke in here. Honestly, how can you bear it?” She ignores her mother’s warnings of the night air’s noxious qualities, her brother David’s offer for company, her sisters’ questioning eyes.

  She holds vigil on the verandah, watching as the last brindled light fades into the drumlins and the dusk overtakes the world. There is the smell of spring roses, the fairy blink of lightning bugs, the mutter of the Ganargua River.

  She hums the Moonlight Sonata. Delights in the nacreous blue and green lines it evokes. Music rarely reveals its colours to her nowadays, thus the appearance of the colours is a sign of renewed prospects, surely.

  She ceases humming. Gasps. Strains to comprehend what she is witnessing: a black tower rising out the woodlands some rods distant. The tower builds itself higher and higher yet as if to reach the sash of stars, the gibbous moon.

  Leah is about to call her family to come bear witness, then decides, no, if this is her sign—and not the coloured music—then its agent might be questioned.

  The tower begins to break apart into fragments, fragments that wing hither and yon across the ashen skies. Bats, Leah realizes with some relief. The tower is composed of thousands upon thousands of bats, creatures who have no need of light. Some consider them malignant—harbingers of misfortune and misrule. Leah has her doubts. Perhaps bats are merely fortunate to see in the darkling hours. Perhaps to them night is a transparency.

  She hears her sisters’ giddy laughter. Hears Mother scold them for their mollyhawking of all and sundry. Mother has her power, Leah knows, and likely more than all the Fox women parcelled up. She wonders now if some portion of Mother’s frettings and questionings are a pretense. Not that Leah would judge her for that. Has there ever been a woman who has not fretted or trembled or uttered inanities at times, as befits her sex? Has there ever been a woman who has not once worn a cloak made of modesty and manners and piety? Soon the cloak hardens into a shell, which is quite useful, as it keeps one from screaming.

  A hammer’s staccato tat-tat. Leah looks over to her father’s house. The windows are slabs of yellow light. Outside the house, the sawhorse stands like some skeletal creature at sentry. Inside the house, her father’s shadow passes the open door. She cannot see the man himself.

  Where-ever have you gone, Pa? Leah wonders. She recollects an evening back when she was seven or eight and they lived still in Rockport. She had hidden in the barn to watch her father with his sporting friends. The men wore their Coke hats tipped back. They rattled dice on tins. Drank whisky straight from bottles that glinted in the lamplight. She was hiding because her father had already sent her back to bed twice, and she always wanted to be near him in those days.

  The men spoke of quims and snatches. Of where in Gotham to find the cherry whores. They spoke of cock-chafers and sodomites. Of men who went at their own daughters. At that, John, who had been silent through it all, said, “That’s enough of that damn talk.” His eyes never rose from the cards, but his words held pure menace. The other men fell quiet.

  Young Leah had never heard such talk, and yet she knew it was vile. She felt something splinter inside. Her innocence, she supposes now. Of course Pa … her father never touched her. Not that way. But then why, yesterday, did she suggest he had? Perhaps as a small retaliation, she decides, for being given the unwanted knowledge of such depravities. Anywise, both of them understood she would never accuse him to the newspaper men, nor to anyone. Both of them knew she was bluffing. Had he not taught her that very term?

  From within David’s house comes singing and then the sounds of a mouth harp as Leah’s family makes a celebration out of the cholera’s swift passing. Presently, she will go in and take her place at the organ. In a few days she and her sisters will return to Rochester and begin preparations for their tour.

  She looks over the yard once again. Nothing forms out of the gloaming. No torches wielded by men featureless as paper cut-outs. No preachers shouting “blasphemy.” Leah and her family have been warned that some are blaming the Foxes for the pestilence. Medieval dolts, Leah thinks. She knows, however, that as long as she is watchful no harm will come to those she loves. And love them she does. No matter if they ever think otherwise.

  The hammer tat-tatting on the new house ceases. Her father will cross the foreyard soon. Leah tenses and waits. Best to make amends now, she thinks. As like he will call her a Jezebel again, but she can hold herself above such discourtesies.

  She waits and waits on the veranda, counting out to a compound meter of twenty, then twenty-five, but still her father, stubborn man, does not appear.

  “Leah,” Mother calls from the doorway. “You’ll get the catarrh, won’t you? Come in this instance.”

  David looms behind Mother, puts in, “Why, our music cannot succeed without your voice, sister.”

  “As ever,” Leah mutters, and turns into the house.

  “MY, BUT YOUR LEAH NURSED A GRUDGE,” I said, and sliced at a bread loaf.

  “Yes, she did, and better, I’d wager, than you have nursed the most grevious-ill patient.”

  “Oh, you are a one, but should she not have gone to your father? Made amends before it became too late and … damnation!” I cried, the bread-knife having slipped and gashed my finger.

  My patient sat upright. “Ah … you’re bleeding. Are you in pain?”

  “Pain? Do I seem a spleeny sort? A cosset? The sort to make a brouha out a nick?”

  “Apparently not … How bad is it?”

  “It’s not to the bone, duck, and that is the important matter,” I said, and wrapped my finger up snap-quick in a bandage.

  She indicated the laudanum on the nighttable “Would you care for measure or two?”

  It was a generous offering, I thought then, knowing how possessed she was of her medicine. I eyed the bottle. Thought, too, of gin, and how that perilous drink was surely the “juniper refreshment” that Katie tasted at the Culvers’, and how this did not bode well for her, gin being gin and of such easy imbibing.

  “Go on, Mrs. Mellon, I would not think you are a, what was it … a spleeny, nor a cosset, nor a—”

  “Your father,” I said abruptly. “You must have thought him dead when he vanished for those ten years. You must have given up hope. Waited till doomsday for some letter or note.”

  She settled back, and did not offer the laudanum again, for which I was grateful. “I wasn’t born at the time he abandoned the family, recall? But it was peculiar, my father’s conversion. I wonder, Mrs. Mellon, do you think a grown man can be a changeling?”

  “No, that is a ridiculous superstition,” I said, and gave her a bowl of milk-sopped bread, keeping my bloodied finger off the rim. “People change, certainly, they take on this profession or that. Alter appearances, character even, but they still have a human soul and heart. A true changeling has neither, being, of course, a hobgoblin in disguise.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s true. Yet a changeling returning home would be better than nothing—returning, that is.”

  To this fact I agreed. Or perhaps I kept my counsel. I can’t recall. To explain: The conversation had brought my son to mind and in those days any thought of my son was often accompanied by a harsh white emptiness, a nothing, as it were. I do recall that my patient asked if my finger still hurt, and if the pain had grown worse, and that she ate a small portion of the bread-sopping, then asked for her medicine, and th
en her bible box, and then her father’s letters.

  WHEN JOHN SEES LEAH on the veranda, silhouetted as if on a ship’s unreachable prow, a certainty comes upon him, the sort God grants him on rare occasion. He waits until she returns to David’s house, then rummages out an inkwell, blotter and pen nib, and then hefts out the quire of paper he had intended for expense calculations, for sketches of porticos and gables. He draws the lamp closer and pinches his nose so hard the bone aches. He might reach her yet. His first letter, written just after the knocking began, had made no inroads. Had likely only been tinder firing her plans. He need take a different tack now.

  2 May, 1850

  Dearest Leah,

  I give you here an account of my ten years gone. I never thought I’d see the mortal day I’d tell of it, but I want mightily to save your soul from Hell’s everlasting flames and torments and the like, and this account might bring you reason. Understand, Our Lord can be insistent and peculiar in His demands and He sees all, and has ways to bring round even the most determined and ingenious sinner, which I was—as you are, my girl.

  Thing is, Leah-Lou, you’re made from my own stamp and I’m sorry for that. It must be hard tender for a woman to have a man’s pride and ferocity and a man’s stubborn will. And because of your nature you’ve held an almighty grudge against me for my leaving, which I did, if you recall, on a spring morning of April something of’23. The sky in Rockland County was the shade of good whisky because everything under God’s sky spoke of whisky in those days. I told your ma I was going to town for seed. She muttered and sighed like always, then cast some hair strands in the hearth, and those hairs had the look of mine. I was thinking, ’course, how your Grandmother Rutan followed ghost funerals and of all the stories of your female kin that go back to the Old World. She was working a spell, your ma, and I now know she wanted me gone. I hand her no blame. My drinking had become an all-consuming vice and she had cause for complaints aplenty.