The Dark

by Claire Mulligan

  “Come, Leah-Lou,” her father said when Leah was a child of nine. “We’ll get us some pigeons.” They took the flat-wagon to the edge of the forest. She recalls how she gaped at the sight before her, how the vast cylinder rolled over the forest and reached to the horizon’s bounds. “A fifty-miler,” her father said with satisfaction. He spat tobacco, poured powder into his flintlock.

  First, young Leah smelled the reek that obliterated all other odours. Then heard the tumult of coos that was like the ringing of every bell in God’s heaven, then witnessed the massive branches of the oaks and elms breaking under the weight of the nesting birds. Five hundred, even a thousand to each tree and their droppings were a fantastical white quilt. The forest would be devastated in their wake.

  Her father caught a pigeon and sewed shut its eyes, the rivulets of blood like copious tears. He tied a small stool to its legs, then tossed the bird into the field where the farmers stood at the ready with nets and with pots that spewed out poisonous sulphur. The stool pigeon flew low and erratic with the weight, crying piteously. Leah ran from her father’s side to the forest’s edge and held fast to a stump. Her father was talking with the farmers and did not see her until she was too distant.

  “Come back, you damned idjit!” he yelled. Too late. The guns had fired to startle the birds and make them notice their companion and so follow him low in his distress. And then it was as if the soul of the forest had lifted out. Leah was immersed, not in darkness, but in a dazzle of copper, green and white as the sunlight struck the feathers. Wings beat at her with the power and swiftness of angels’ wings and she screamed out in horror and wonder as the birds lifted her in flight. She woke earthbound and in the same spot. She was badly bruised and her forearms were cross-hatched with deep wounds, the scars of which she bears even yet.

  Her father wrapped her in his greatcoat and carried her back to the flat-wagon. She remembers how he shook, how his coat smelled of tobacco and ale. They came home with enough for a year of smoked-pigeon pies. Leah was sent to bed. She slept until Maria appeared, her black, button eyes staring. “Here, Pa told me to bring you supper … Oh, and now why are you crying on?”

  “How could he have betrayed them all? That bird. Even if I had my eyes sewn shut I wouldn’t betray mine own.”

  “Sakes alive, Leah, if your eyes were sewn shut you, you wouldn’t know what you were doing, would you?”

  Now Leah sips her tea. The gunfire on the deck has slowed, either from boredom or from lack of ammunition. Though the farmers and village dwellers will continue to fire as long as the flock is in sight. The majority of the carcasses will be sold to the Southern plantations for slave food. The birds captured alive will be sold to the firing ranges.

  “Maria, do you recall when I was caught up in the pigeon’s flight?”

  Maria looks at her. Her eyes still remind Leah of black buttons. “Surely. I recall you convalescing like a princess and I had to do your chores for a good week.”

  Leah sniffs and calls Charlie over for an embrace. Thinks: No wonder I was not afraid of the mob at Troy like Maggie was. No wonder I am not terrified of human mobs at all. Who would be after such an experience? Who wouldn’t feel protected by the multitude by some uncanny luck?

  MULTITUDES, I THOUGHT, as my patient spoke of Leah and the passenger pigeons; it is a handy word to employ when numbering loses meaning. Consider the “multitudes” lost in the abolition war. Oh, there was some attempt at tallying the dead. Thus one can read that approximately twenty-three thousand fell at Shiloh. Twenty-six thousand at Antietam; fifty thousand at Gettysburg. Approximations. Souls rounded up or down. Where was their luck, uncanny or otherwise? Their guarding angels? Their watching gods?

  I considered the scarf in my lap. Why had I not knitted the lines tighter? Even a paltry rain would come through. “Rot and nonsense. It won’t be any kind of useful.”

  “What do you mean? Mrs. Mellon. Ah, your scarf. Well, let it become something else, then.”

  I didn’t answer straightaway. They were looking askance, I thought, the gods, the angels, the lucky this and that. They were tending oblivion. Worse, they were, and are, imagined only. We, the dominion of souls, are unguided. A multitude alike the passenger pigeons, winging hither and yon and without true understanding or intent.

  “A cover-all,” I said at last. “Or blanket. That is what it will be. They are ever needed.”

  My patient agreed.

  “So, who won?” I asked, and sighed, and began again with a cast-up stitch. “You have them set to join each other in Columbus,” I reminded her. “Your Leah. Her Chauncey.

  “BALLS, THAT’S WHAT,” Chauncey tells Heman as they lurch in the Concord towards Columbus, Ohio. “She’s got them the size of a bloodyo mule. Ten thousand dollars! I’ll give her ten thousand thwacks on her fine arse, what ho.”

  Heman says, “I did mention that calling her a woman of notoriously bad character weren’t wise. Not clever neither. There’s a line, Chauncey, and if—”

  “I’ll set fire to everything we own before she sees a damnedo nickel of it. Won’t I? Won’t I?”

  “Everything we own?” Heman echoes. He looks with longing at the Concord door.

  “I’ll see her ruined. I’ll see her reputation strung up in the nearest tree, won’t I, Hemano? She’ll not make a jackass of Chauncey Burr. Not neither a fox-ass, hah.”

  “Jimmeny Jesus,” Heman mutters. “Why’d I leave the dry goods business? Why?”

  “Because it was a fucko bore.”

  At this remark the stout lady across from Chauncey nearly asphyxiates from shock.

  “My apologies, madame,” Chauncey says, all amiable of a sudden. “I’ve been unjustly accused. My dander is up. My ire aroused.”

  The stout lady clutches her carpet bag like a shield. A man in a bang-up coat glowers. Let him call me out for a duel, Chauncey thinks. I’d rather have a fucko hole drilled in my skull than suffer a court dock.

  Heman whispers, “It’s thanks kindly to your mouth that we’re in this rotten pickle. Yup, it is. You’re a reverend, recall that? Start acting the part. You were fair good at it once. And convincing besides.”

  Chauncey agrees with his brother for once. He had made a damn fine reverend. He conjures up the high vaulted tent, the sea of people within, and never has a metaphor been more apt. He visions the revivalists arrayed in storm-greys, their hair straggled as seaweed, their faces are whitecaps; their undulate movements a wave’s movements; their voices like wind roaring, water crashing, and Chauncey high in his makeshift pulpit, more alike to Neptune than a preacher of the Christian world.

  The revivals would tumult into dawn, men and women collapsing and shaking with the spirit. Even yet Chauncey can hear the hallelujahs, the rousing hymns, his own bellowing exhortations. He became an expert at the head-smack that sent a participant into ecstasy. The power of suggestion, that was all. But there’d been no need for such a trick on the baker’s wife. She came to him—splendid woman—fearless and broad-beamed. He left before a scandal broke. Before, in fact, she could follow him with her baker’s dozen worth of children. Chauncey smiles in nostalgia of those glorious days. Still, is it not better to be a scientist? Is it not better to dine with men who are so learned it takes them half an hour to make one damnedo point? Unlikely the learned men would dine with him now, and all because of those Fox females.

  Chauncey sighs and rolls up the window flap and surveys the open countryside. It has been unusually warm for March and the main of the snow is gone. Flowers are thrusting up hither and yon. Birds are making their usual racket. Chauncey squints in disbelief. The entire horizon is heaving and undulating as if to detach from the earth. Ah. The passenger pigeons. He wonders if he should point them out to the others in the Concord. Decides, no. He will take credit for the sighting only if the birds fly overhead. They do not. The line sinks away and Chauncey’s eye falls now on an itinerant knife grinder. The grinder ignores the Concord even as it overtakes him. He walks head-down wi
th poverty’s defeated gait, which is the gait of itinerants and peddlers the world over, no doubt.

  Chauncey swats at a foot dangling from the stage roof. Maggie and Katie Fox said a peddler had been murdered for his money, and that made sense. Who gives a ratter’s ass about peddlers, or for itinerants of any stripe? Who marks where they go, or why? Their names are unknown. They have no set residence. And they might as well have Blame Me scripted on their backs, so often are they scapegoated. Indeed, if Chauncey were a miscreant, he would choose such men as victims, as had the Fox girls, those cunning little demons. No, society does not respect itinerants, not even itinerant preachers.

  Chauncey recalls now a stuttering young circuit rider he’d met—in’32, was it? At the height, anyhow, of all that bullshit and ballyhoo about temperance. The young man, scrawny as a plucked rooster, was just commencing his mission and was yet agog with optimism. Said he was not going to accept donations. “No, s-sir!”

  That’ll bloodyo change, Chauncey had thought. His advice? “Be God’s bulldog. Never accept a reluctant convert. Sinners must be brought to the fold! Or else you fail in God’s design.” Such blather, but it had seemed the fitting thing to say.

  “Th-thank you, s-sir. I’ll t-treasure your a-a-advice,” he replied, clasping his hands as if he were holding actual words and not just vacant air.

  “Oh, and hey-ho there, boyo, get yourself a horse if you aspire to be a circuit rider. Hard to seem above it all when you’re squelching in the mud with the downtrodden.”

  The young man stuttered that he didn’t know how to ride. That he couldn’t afford a horse anyway. “It’s j-just my m-ma and m-me now. And we’re a p-poor family, p-poor as Job’s t-turkey,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  Chauncey heard rumours later that the young man was having an exceedingly trying time as a preacher. Well, indeedo. Listening to him stutter out a sermon must have required more patience than Job ever had, never mind his turkey. And then Chauncey heard no more about him. Likely he became a bookbinder or a tailor. Likely he realized, as Chauncey did, that a wanderer had no respect.

  Recalling all this Chauncey decides that whether he wins or loses this court battle, he will settle down and marry a good woman of ample charms. Become a professor of something or other. Botany, he decides as the Concord rolls on past an endless wood of what might be chestnut trees or elms. Chauncey sees polecats and deer and bears, now a field of horned cows, now a marsh crammed with ducks. At the edge of this marsh a horse, shod with clogs, balks at crossing while a child beats him with a stick. Chauncey sympathizes with the horse and the boy in equal measure. But then he has a knack for holding contradictory emotions. Particularly for Leah Fox Fish, whom he’d like to ruin and ravish and at the same instance.

  “Great damn it!” shouts Heman. A woman screams. The Concord has rounded a curve too fast and now lists precariously on two wheels.

  “Now, people!” Chauncey orders. In one practised go, the passengers heap to the high side of the Concord, forcing it back down to four wheels. The passengers then pop back to their own seats, as neatly as corks in a toy gun. The Concord has only tipped over once this trip, the driver seeming more sober than most.

  The excitement past, Chauncey stretches out his legs and taps his feet, to the annoyance of the other passengers. He thinks on the brothel in New York, the one recommended by the maid at Barnum’s Hotel, the one that specialized in feet. The madame, the maid’s aunt, showed him a collection of footwear that made Chauncey appreciate man’s ingenuity anew. Research, he told himself. And indeedo, those ladies had some tricks with their toes the Fox females could never imagine. But truly, how did the Fox women manage the constant cracking and snapping? Chauncey’s feet were always swollen after his exposes, became so sore and knobbed that at times they barely made a sound. He’d kept the sorry state of his feet secret, of course. But then that Leah had found him out. She or a confederate must have visited his hotel in Cleveland last spring and paid off a porter or waiter. How else could the Cleveland Plain Dealer have known of the wretched state of his feet after every demonstration? Why else would the writer have compared his grimaces and scowls when toe-cracking to the Fox ladies’—ah, yes—placid, blameless countenances when attended by what are indisputably spirit noises given how effortlessly they emit from any room in which the Ladies are sitting.

  Blameless. Blamed. Blasted. Bullshit.

  “We shan’t lose. Righto, Hemano!”

  “ ’Course,” Heman mutters.

  Chauncey sighs. It had all been going so well. Mrs. Ruth Culver had been his coup de grace. For her name he had to thank that animate clockwork Alfie Kincaid. Chauncey arrived at Ruthie’s door on a day of spitting rain. He was accompanied by reputable men—a doctor, a lawyer, a possible minister. The face of Ruth Culver was a map of disappointments, her house the dwelling place of bitterness. It had a smell, bitterness did: vinegar, lye, rapeseed-oil lamps, musty carpets, burned biscuits, rancid butter. She sat bolt upright by a hissing fire. No need to coax a story out of her, no need to offer money, either, though Chauncey gave her three silver dollars. Maggie and Katie, she said, were experts at mimicry. They’d imitate their old mother most cruelly, and their schoolmaster, and their saintly old father. They were far better at repartee than farm girls should have been. And they had a strange language between them.

  “What manner of language?” the lawyer asked sharply.

  “Couldn’t say, but it were strange in my opinion,” Ruth Culver replied. “A jumble. It were like something you thought you could recognize but couldn’t. Or like to some language you’d forgotten. Not foreign, so much is what I mean. But old.”

  The possible minister frowned. The doctor looked uneasy. The lawyer scribbled something down. Chauncey steered the conversation away from weird languages and mimicry. What next? Talk of spells? The riding of brooms?

  Ruth Culver’s every word was scribed down. Was only altered a small bit here, added to there.

  “Katie disappointed me, I’ll say it again,” Ruth said. “Never could get the spirits to locate my ivory comb nor Norman’s boot jack. Oh, she helped some with the milking, but she wouldn’t raise a tiny hand to help with the cooking. She had the worst case of blanket fever you ever saw.”

  “Blanket fever?” asked the doctor with a professional air.

  “Like none you’ve ever seen! She’d laze in bed past dawn unless you hollered at her five times. A good whipping would have cured her, in my opinion, but I don’t reckon her pa ever whipped that little skeezick once. And those barn cats. She wouldn’t let me drown them. Threw an unholy fit. After that, those cats followed her around near everyplace.”

  “Cats?” echoed the lawyer, the doctor, the possible minister.

  “Fortunate I’m not superstitious or I’d nail juniper over my door,” the lawyer said as they left the Culvers’ yard.

  “Horseshoes work just as well,” said the possible minister, then quickly added that he was jesting, of course.

  The Concord arrives at last in Columbus. Chauncey and Heman search out the courthouse on foot. Get lost twice before finding it on the outskirts. A small crowd specks the steps.

  “They’ve come to see a ‘scientist’ and a sorceress before a judge of the land!” Chauncey says to Heman. “An honour, isn’t it, brother mineo?”

  “I suppose,” Heman mutters. “Not really, though.”

  “You hungry? Damn, but I am.” And Chauncey’s gut is indeed light and hollow. He buys some early-ripe apples from a stall. Nearby, a wainwright kicks at a mangy dog. The dog yelps then slinks off.

  “We wait until the last chiming second, righto?” Chauncey continues. “The females aren’t the only ones who can make a damnedo entrance, eh?”

  The beaten dog has returned. He slinks up to his master, all acringe. The wainwright tosses the dog some gristle, then bootkicks him again.

  Heman watches this, shakes his head. “I’m just hoping we can make an exit.”

  CHAPTER 22. />
  “And what of the helpless dog? You mentioned him yesterday.

  The one outside the courthouse?”

  My patient smiled. “What would you like to know?” Her tone, I should add, was all-inviting, alike an open door to a some sun-struck garden.

  I understood her tack then, clear as glass. She was luring me to question, as was her lifelong habit. She was fishing for truths beneath. Questions reveal as much as answers, she had said that herself. Or perhaps this Chauncey had. “Nothing. Forget I asked.” I said.

  She made no reply. She was fast asleep.

  I had only asked about the dog because my son had so hated to see dogs beaten or even chained. Consider this: when he was six he padlocked himself to the dog post and let Queenie, our yellow hunter, roam free. My son was weed-thin and tall for his age. He was no great scholar. Not one who promised fine looks. But he was fierce in his idealism even then. He wanted to know, he told me, how it felt for poor Queenie. He’d tossed the key, he confessed, into the shell road aside our cottage. Dark clouds boiled while I searched through those whitened fragments. It began to rain and thunder.

  I begged help of Mr. Mellon, but he only laughed and said the larky fool could get lightning struck and wouldn’t that teach him a lesson.

  “He’s not a fool. He’s full of good!” I yelled.

  “Hah, hah. Much the same,” Mr. Mellon said. I could have killed him then, but my hand had alighted on the key, there among the crushed shells and bones of sea-creatures, and I was intent on rushing back to the post and padlock.

  I took the half-worked cover-all out of my satchel and studied my patient. Her eyes were fast shut, but I knew she was awake. I could tell by the cadence of her breath, the tension in her hands, the sense withal. Maggie Kane was not the only one who could read a sign or two.

  “Are you sleeping, duck?”