The Dark

by Claire Mulligan

  He dug in a small clearing some ten feet from the roots of the oak. Every sound was intensified—the hammering of a woodpecker, the witnessing chatter of squirrels, the bells tolling in a town church. He searched Able’s pockets for money and valuables and found nothing save a cracked-paint miniature of a pretty young woman in an old-timey high-waisted dress. John supposed the miniature was of Able’s dead mother and this filial affection of Able’s was a further annoyance. John couldn’t imagine carrying about a portrait of his mother, even if she had ever been young or pretty.

  John was sweating and breathing noisily from the digging. Soon enough, I’ll be fuck-all sotted and asleep, he thought. He fixed Able’s hat on Able’s head, then rolled Able into the grey horsehair blanket. John could have made use of that blanket, but even he didn’t fancy shovelling dirt into the open eyes of the dead.

  He tamped down the final patch of earth. Covered the grave with brambles and limp winter leaves. At the last moment he lugged over a grey-white rock and dropped it at the grave’s head. The rock could be considered a slab, a marker of a sort. He did not say a prayer. He did not even bow his head.

  By the time John walked back to the boat the field was silvered by a full, high moon. Moonshine! John thought. Hah. Give me a fuck-all sky full. Give me whisky, grog, corn liquor, black-strap. For though exhausted and filthy and sorry for it all, John felt triumphant. None would ever attempt to convert him again. If nothing else, Able’s sad death was surely an inoculation against piety, bibles, preachers.

  John climbed down into the chilled hold of the Morning Star, his fortress. First a drink and then he would attend to the fire. He balled his hands into fists. Could barely comprehend what he was seeing. The second jug had been stoppered. And he’d left it upright. He was not careless about such things.

  “Son-of-whore-mongering bastard …” The jug lolled on its side. The whisky had soaked the patch of rag carpet and seeped through the floorboard cracks. Not a drop was left.

  John fell to his knees. Licked the boards until his tongue was raw and bleeding. Squeezed the rag rug into a tumbler. The whisky, swirling with filth and hair, rose inch by inch. Was just enough to slake his thirst. He collapsed into his niche-bed. Hauled the blanket to his chin. The night turned cold. Why had he given that second blanket to Able? It wasn’t as if he’d need it.

  “Damn your rotting eyes,” John said. Blood from his tongue splattered his beard. He calmed himself with assurances. Come first light he’d go in search of liquor. Since he was penniless he supposed he’d have to turn to crime, but that hardly signified.

  He woke up, with bile in his throat and a tongue so swollen it barely fit between his teeth. He tried to rise, only to collapse shivering on the floor. He hauled himself back to the bunk in a fevered agony. All that day he thrashed and groaned. He pushed his swollen tongue into the tumbler, then hurled the tumbler against the wall. The hold reeked from the spilled whisky. A reek, however, could not sustain a man.

  The shakes came first and then the spasms. The horrors would be next. He’d seen men in the screaming grips of a rum fit, but never had he let himself go so far.

  Let the fucking giant rats and spiders come, thought John-Before. How real can they seem?

  But it was not giant rats and spiders who came in the end, it was Brother Able, and he was mighty real indeed.

  The rank-sweet stench of rotting flesh was what told John-Before he was no longer alone. He half sat up in the bed and pressed himself against the wall. He hup-hupped in terror. Clutched the blanket as if it might be a shield.

  Able sat cross-legged on a barrel. There was moist dirt clumped on his clothes and John-Before’s grey blanket at his feet. Able had only been buried a day, yet already he was the very picture of decay. His face was half skull, half raw flesh. One eye hung limply on a flayed cheekbone; the other looked calmly at John. A worm curled past his rotting gums. Death must have sobered him, because he was stuttering as he berated John for giving him the whisky, for the sorry burial. He did thank him, however, for the blanket. “I-I s-suppose that w-were the b-best you c-could do.”

  John worked his mouth. No scream. Just a silent rush of air.

  Able continued. Told John about his mother again. Her fine house and the loss of it to drink. “My f-father b-beat her. D-did I m-mention that?”

  John twisted his head to one side. Did Able realize he was dead? The thought of telling him he was made John even more terrified, if that were possible.

  “He d-did. D-Darn him. I c-could hear him y-yelling and her c-crying.” That was another reason Able had become a preacher, John learned; he wanted to have some purpose. He wanted to change the hearts of people, but through kindness and persuasion.

  He stood and walked agitated about the cramped hold, dirt and skin dropping from him. “B-But now I w-won’t b-be able to ch-change anyone. I’m d-dead.” He sobbed. It was a dry, rattling sound. No tears. His eyes were too decomposed for that. At least he knows he’s dead, John thought.

  Hours passed. Able-the-dead spoke on and on. Lamented the failure of his ambitions and hopes. Relayed the minutia of his ordinary upbringing, his quotidian sufferings. Told constant of his poor mother, how she longed to be with him in his endeavours. “B-But I told her, n-no, that I wanted to be a-alone.” And that was a lie. It was the burden of her love that Able didn’t want. And now? Now she was dead. Now he longed for such mortal love. For human company.

  Able-the-dead pushed his rotting face close to John’s aghast one. John gagged from the stench. Twisted his head aside. Able squelched his hanging eye back into its socket; pus dripped onto John’s hands as he did so. Now Able could stare properly at John. Stuttered out that love between mortals was as necessary for salvation as a love for God. “It’s an ex-extension of D-Divine love, is all.” One cannot exist without the other. And this was where Able had failed. He had not loved his brother, Willing. Nor his mother, not in the way he should have. “W-We should have b-been together. S-She needed me. L-Love is hollow unless y-you show it.”

  By this time the swelling in John’s tongue had abated enough for him to croak out, “Go away, please. I’m begging you.”

  Able’s rotting lips curled up in a smile. He promised that he would leave. But John had to promise something in return. John had to cease drinking spirits. John had to become a man of God. And John had to return to his family and provide them with his love and unceasing protection. If not, Able would walk with him wherever he went. He would never cease talking, and he would never cease rotting, and the stench would follow John, and John would be a pariah among even the most wretched of the living.

  “Fucking dandy, then. I’ll do it. Just leave me be, damn you.”

  “Sh-Shake on it?” Able stretched out a rotting hand and John took it. Felt Able’s exposed knuckle bones, the veins looping out of his palm. John-Before squeezed shut his eyes.

  When he opened them, Able was gone but for a lingering stench, but for some dank clots of earth from his grave. Some mouldy grey threads from his blanket shroud.

  … And he haunts me still, Leah-Lou, though I’ve not seen him manifest again in a rotted state or otherwise. I know he’s about, mind, because he’s ever leaving those threads from his blanket shroud and those dank clots of his grave dirt, though I’m doing my mortal best to fulfill my sworn promise to take care of my family, and love my family, and serve my family, and at the selfsame time as I love and serve God. Take what you will from what I tell you, but know that it’s my fault, this haunting business. That was Able’s ghost tromping about the Hydesville house that first night, before those “raps” of your sisters started up. He came back that night because I gave in to the temptation of whisky, and for the first time since I made that promise to him to not ever drink again. Let’s hope and pray, for your sake and mine, that Able will atain peace in due time, and that he’ll stay quiet in his grave under that great oak near Wayne.

  John sets aside the pen, stretches his stiffened legs. Takes his spectacles o
ff and pinches the arched bridge of his nose. He cleans the lenses with a rag, breathing on them first, the round mist showing like a second eye. He folds up his narrative—for that, he supposes, is what it has become.

  A clatter. Then a shattering.

  He whirls. The peg lamp has fallen. He stuffs his narrative in his pocket. He yells. Flails his rag. Too late. Flames tear along the spilled burning liquid. Ignite the newspapers, the wood curls. In a blink the flames are shooting up to the ceiling and hurtling out sparks. The Currier and Ives prints vanish into a fiery maw. The wallpaper blackens and disintegrates. John stamps and swats. Curses as he has not done in years. Coughs and gasps, his lungs hot as forge-irons.

  David pounds at the smoke-whirled window. “Pa! Get out. Leave that.”

  John staggers out, the flames grasping at his legs, David grasping at his arms. A small explosion tosses them both down the fresh-painted stairs. John hears glass breaking. A ferocious crackling. He lies stunned on the cool grass, his limbs flung wide as if he were afloat in a pond. Above him stars tunnel the sky, their multitude a humbling thing.

  “Pa?” David’s broad face wanes into his view. John stands with David’s help. David’s sons and two farmhands rush by with buckets of water.

  “That’s a waste of decent water,” John says. “Attend to the other buildings. Forget this one. There’s no saving it.”

  A farmhand tosses his bucket of water at the porch. It might as well be a thimble-full. The porch collapses in flames.

  David’s wife, Beth, runs up, skirts clenched in her hands. “Lord, how’d it happen?”

  The flames tower up and up. The smoke thickens to a pall. John could say it was his carelessness with the peg-lamp, the burning liquid, but that is a falsity. He puts his hand in his pocket; his fingers rustle against the pages of his narrative, then touch something else—a thread that has the unmistakably coarse feel of horsehair.

  “Don’t claim to know, Beth,” he says at last, “but I’m guessing the Good Lord has his reasons. I’m gonna pray now. We all should.”

  Dear Wife,

  … And so there’s naught left excepting some burned slabs. I’ll come assist you women then since you’re needing it. I’ll attain New York Wednesday or so and then I’ll hire one of those cabs to the Greeleys’ town-home, so as you don’t have to trouble yourself.

  Your husband,

  John

  CHAPTER 32.

  The walk-up was hard going this day, and I so stopped on the tenth-floor landing to catch my breath. I steadied myself against the wall, felt the cracks, the peeling plaster, the grave-damp of poverty. The tenement reeked, as always, of sewage pipes, onions, cabbages, piss. I heard a child crying, a dog yapping, and a muted argument cycling through accusations of betrayal and want.

  I sat down on the step and set the gin bottle aside me. It was near empty.

  To explain: I had not uttered my son’s name—August—for many years. And uttering it—that is, reading the same name aloud from Kane’s book, well, it had brought him back utterly.

  “We’re on the side of justice,” was what my August said before he left to join the Union Army. By that time my August owned eighteen years. He was strung-tall and rackety-limbed and homely in parts (I admit) and he blinked too often, as if in constant aghastment at the cruelties in the world. Still, he had an arresting grace.

  I had a hundred discouragements to him joining. They made no difference. He was stone-wall stubborn, as the truly good often are. I refused him my blessing. I was that mad. I just watched, arms akimbo, as the green horizon folded him up. When I came to my senses and ran after him he was gone, gone, gone.

  Mr. Mellon rolled his mean, piggy eyes. “Ah, let the weepy fool go save them darkies,” he said. He would have said more but something in my glance stopped him, murder to be frank.

  I waited and waited for a letter to tell me where he was. And one arrived, yes, but that Mr. Mellon kept it from me until it was too late. When I found the letter I was so enraged I thwacked Mr. Mellon with a hot pan (I was cooking eel stifle at the time). He dropped and did not move, not even when I shook him. I left that very hour for Bull Run. No sign of Mr. Mellon dead or alive when I returned to the cottage some weeks later, nor have I seen him since.

  The letter Mr. Mellon hid from me, out of jealousy and spite, is tucked into a side pocket of my satchel. I keep it with me always, like a talisman. And like any talisman I hold it often, though I surely know it off of heart.

  “Gather yourself, Alvah June. Look presentable. Look brisk,” I said, and stood and then huffed up the last storeys.

  My patient began her narrative straightaway upon my entering, as if I had not even left.

  MAGGIE LATCHES THE DOOR softly behind her. When the Greeleys lived here the room had been the nursery for their five (or was it six?) dead babes. It has been shut up for years. No one enters anymore except Maggie. Not even the maid, a sturdy Nantucket girl. She wouldn’t, even if Maggie allowed it.

  “That thing in there!” this maid exclaims. Excessive, is the general opinion; shudders and perplexity, the general reaction. A closet shrine to the dead is one thing; a whole room quite another. Leah would nag constantly about this, which is another reason Maggie has chosen not to stay at her sister’s brownstone. Leah has no sympathy for Maggie’s determined grieving, unlike their father, who has been nothing but helpful since he moved here to the Greeleys’ town-home. No one could fault his attention to the gas lights and candle-trimming; and when Thomas Kane came to bribe Maggie out of Elisha’s love letters, and with a puny insult of a sum, what did Maggie’s father do? He shoved Thomas out the door as if Thomas were a petty bill collector, a sight that almost made Maggie laugh again.

  Maggie shuts the black bombast drapes against a slip of light. She has sold the more frivolous of her jewellry to buy not only these drapes, but also the black candelabra that sits on the black-draped table. Displayed on this table are Elisha’s “white gifts”—the lace handkerchiefs, the Honiton-lace undersleeves, the fox stole, the silk cape, and the white diamond bracelet from Tiffany’s coiled there in a velvet-lined box. Also displayed are newspaper clippings detailing his exploits, maps of his journeys, copies of elegies, and two black-framed daguerreotypes of Elisha-when-alive. One shows him in his explorer’s furs, rifle in hand; another as a beardless man of twenty. But, alas and such, no daguerreotype of the Elisha-when-dead, not one of him in his coffin nor propped in an armchair. Maggie does not even have a death mask of her beloved. No memento mori at all. But at least Father Quinn, her confessor, has helped her to purchase something close.

  She strikes a lucifer and lights the candles. Blinks to stop the flames from dancing so oddly. She drank perhaps more of good Dr. Bayard’s laudanum medicine than she should have. She often does.

  I will cease it all soon, she vows, and kneels on her black stool, her widow’s weeds stiff and heavy in the spring warmth. She feels alike a black bauble suspended on a heavy chain, unable to swing this way or that. Is she a true widow or not? She and Elisha had indeed vowed themselves to each other. But no minister blessed their marriage ceremony. No papers recorded it. And what to make of their peculiar, bloodless consummation? For love to be consummated there had to be blood. Didn’t there? Consummated? Or is the word “consumed”? She conjures Elisha. He stands over her, his torso candle pale, his trousers buttoned fast. He presses her hands there. From behind Elisha, the peddler leers. He is as ugly as Elisha is handsome. He shows his member. He curses her again: “You’ll die alone and ranting for your lies, you hoyden bitch.”

  Maggie presses her fists to her forehead. The image thankfully recedes.

  Does Elisha wander Purgatory? she wonders now. That grey place between Heaven’s light and Perdition’s dark? Such is the place for questioning souls. And if Elisha should attain Heaven, will he be happy there? He joked he wouldn’t be. All that stasis, all that dull perfection. He said he would prefer that his soul seep into her skin.

  Maggie wills her breat
h quiet. Elisha will speak to her if she is quiet. Patient. Still. He will send her a message from the beyond or wherever, and in one of his clever little codes. She must simply attend. And then he will utter her name. Then he will make a clear declaration to his family, the world. Come soon, she thinks, else I’ll vanish inside these weeds, leave only a black puddle of crepe and tears for the maid to scrub off the damned floor.

  Maggie looks to the side wall, up and up, the dreadful image there giving her comfort and a sense of substance, as always. Now she rearranges the objects on the table, polishes a frame with her sleeve, polishes harder and harder in her frustration. She has again been denied a way out, again her inentions have been thwarted and denied. She was set to leave behind the spirit sittings, the ghost talkings. Become a wife and mother. She would have been happy with an honest life. Katie would have come to live with her and Elisha, would have found a husband and another life as well.

  She approaches the far wall. The tortured Christ looks down at her from his cross. The rendering is macabre even by papist standards. Blood sheets his face and body; thick nails split his palms and feet; heavy thorns gouge his head and brow. And such an expression on his gaunt handsome face: of agony and resignation. The wood carving is twice the height of Elisha, but the resemblance, well, it is undeniable.

  “Do forgive me,” she pleads. “I will find a way to make it all right. I promise.”

  CHAPTER 33.

  “Was it not terribly remarkable, Alvah? That we invented this religion, if you could call it that, and in such an accidental fashion withal. The séances, the spirit boards, the spirit writing and spirit cabinets, the hundreds of Spiritualist Societies, the uncounted mediums and charlatans, the endless hope and yearning, and all invented out of that little lonesome house after a long dull winter, and by children, playing as they oughtn’t, the hobgoblins.”