The Dark

by Claire Mulligan

  She fans herself. Searches for her reticule under the pillows and oyster wrappers. Counts out the coins. The tally is enough for a small supply of brandy or a large supply of wine. Tomorrow she might tidy, even though Katie is her only visitor these days and Katie hardly cares.

  In the street Maggie stands baffled. Two people rush by in their usual New York haste, but there are few horses, fewer carriages, and no hawkers at all. She notes then the distant, muted noise. A newly operating factory, she supposes. She presses her handkerchief to her face, steps over an open sewer, then round a heap of waist-high rubbish. Christ-in-all, but we need rain, she thinks. It would arrest the summer stenches, batten the dust, drown the flies, rub clean the distant sky.

  She passes a man who is cursing his broken crate of duck eggs, two scabby dogs who are rutting and howling, and a lone begging child to whom she gives a half-dime. She comes onto 43rd. Only now does Maggie realize that something is awry. That muted noise? It is no factory, new or otherwise. It has become a roaring fronted by the shatter-sounds of glass, the crack-thud of gunshots. Maggie shrieks and hikes her skirts and tears down the street, the mob surging just behind, but she cannot outrun it, not ever. Her scream is buried alive. The mob will see her tarred and feathered. Will see her burn atop a pyre.

  But I swore off rapping, she thinks bewildered, terrified. Yells out, “But I’m done!”

  The mob engulfs her … then carries her along. It has not come for her. Not her. She stumbles along in the press of it. A high reek of alcohol and sweat. A confusion of limbs. Hide in plain sight, she thinks desperately, and makes no attempt to detach. Then, after a time, she doesn’t think at all. She is swept up into a vast and savage joy. She is destruction and power and is now looking up at the Tribune building in Printing House Square. Her mob has joined another and the singing is at least a thousand strong: “So, hang Horace Greeley from a sour apple tree. We’ll hang him high! We’ll flail his hide!”

  A howitzer angles from an upper window. An oily liquid hurtles down from another. Ink, Maggie realizes as a crying woman staggers past, her hair dripping black. Musket shots plume. The shots are joined. Just then she sees the militia outside the building. The soldiers are all grizzled antiques except for a few boys. Some are poised with rifles. The old soldiers are frantically barricading the lobby doors with desks and newspapers. To no avail. The mob overwhelms the barricades. The lobby is breached.

  Maggie weeps and wails, then rushes from Printing House Square, paying no mind to her direction. Horace! Poor Horace! God-of-all! The mob is after him, she realizes, because he supported Lincoln and therefore the draft. It’s after him, too, because of Bull Run. But that debacle wasn’t his fault. He only encouraged through his paper that the Union should meet the Rebels there, a bad decision, yes, but not his. He is no general. No politician.

  Her eyes sting hot from the smoke. Smoke? She has come onto 44th near to the Colored Orphan Asylum. Flames lick out a window. Mattresses, clocks, furniture and dry goods are being hurled to the mob below.

  “Stop this! Stop!” Maggie calls out. “Children aren’t to blame, not for this.” She tugs at a man’s arm. He thrusts her off. Near on the asylum’s matrons—white women all—are trying to shepherd the more than two hundred children away from the jeers and taunts of a splinter mob.

  Maggie is about to offer her help when a man steps out from the mob’s edges and does just that. Cries, “If there’s a man among you, with a heart within him, come and help these poor children.” He is a handsome man with an Irish lilt and a jaunty cap on his pale hair.

  The mob pauses as if realizing the truth of his words. Ceases taunting the children. Turns away from them. The Irish man smiles in triumph and relief. Maggie does also. Then watches in horror as the mob seizes the one person who dared speak reason. Maggie witnesses an instant of pale skin as his shirt is torn away. Sees his arms reach out, and then the mob takes him.

  A paint-red sunset and Maggie is now lost. At least this region of Manhattan is calm. At a looted apothecary she steps round the slugs from a shattered urn. The slugs are sliming their way to certain death past scattered bottles of cocainated teething syrup and brandied elixir.

  Maggie is leaning against a lamppost, drinking away, when the cab hies up. The horses snort and dance. “Smelling nasty old evil, are you?” she hollers.

  A man in a top hat and black coat leaps down. “Maggie? What the devil? Come with me, dear girl. Quick now. They may return.” The man steers her towards the cab. Maggie struggles and kicks at him. The driver shouts for them to make haste. The mob is returning, apparently. It is not done yet.

  “Get your maggot hands off, you damned—”

  “Maggie Fox. It’s Horace. Horace Greeley!”

  She repeats his name. Peers at his round spectacles, his pale fluff of whiskers. But where is the white linen duster? The floppy hat?

  He smiles ruefully, guessing her thoughts. “The staffers told me I’d be lynched if I walked about in my usual getup. They said I’m as recognizable as Lincoln these days and about as popular.”

  “But I saw your building! The mob. Alas and such, but it was a horrid sight—”

  “The mob was thwarted. Not to worry. No squalling Confederate sympathizers shall stop the Tribune from publishing. We’ve vowed to not miss a day.”

  “I was worried ’bout you, Horace, not your wretched old paper.”

  “That is good to hear.” He hands her into the cab. “Don’t look out the window,” he orders as they move on. It is an order Maggie ignores.

  They cut through Broadway past Barnum’s American Museum. The place is as barricaded and fortified as the Tribune building—Barnum being a Lincoln-lover and an anti-slavery man just like Horace. Three men in shirt sleeves dash towards the cab. The driver cracks the whip. The horses veer. The men fall back. A squealing pig trips over its own entrails. A bloodied figure collapses against a looted storefront. A building roils out smoke.

  Horace scribbles in his notebook. “Taking my impressions,” he explains. The cab clatters sharply round a corner.

  “But this is 19th! It’s not the way to my let.”

  “I’m taking you to my town-home. You should be with your parents at this hour. Not alone.”

  “I don’t want to see them. I want to go to my home.”

  “You’re in no condition, young lady. Your nerves.”

  “Don’t you see,” she babbles. “It took him. The poor man. It hurled him up. Oh, it’s so damn-it-all tragic. I’m sorry for what we did. It’s enough, isn’t it? Being sorry? We’re cursed, though. That’s it! That’s why it don’t matter what I say or do.”

  “Of whom are you speaking? Of what … never mind, hush.”

  “I gotta tell, somehow, find a way. Then Elisha will come back to me. Damn, but he will. Then he’ll say my name. Maggie! Margaret! Margaretta!” She makes to jump out the door. Horace yanks her back. She falls against him, begins to sing: “When I fell off the apple tree. All the apples fell on me. Bake a pudding. Bake a pie. Would you ever tell a … oh, no no, not you, Horace!” She giggles and plucks the looted apothecary bottles out of her waist pocket.

  Horace looks at her, then at the bottles. An understanding crosses his face. “My God, poor child, how could this have happened?”

  She can’t answer. She is too far away.

  At Greeley’s town-home, her parents take her in hand with shopworn patience. Maggie, coming to some semblance of herself, hears them admit to Horace that they have known for years about Maggie’s dipsomania. She hears Horace’s astonished protests and she wonders again how people can believe in the most magical things while the mundane, the predictable stumps them all to hell.

  Night claps fast to morning. Mother’s voice insists, “Come, lamb, Dr. Bayard’s orders now. He delivered a new medicine for you, didn’t he?”

  Maggie opens her eyes a slice. She sees a looming spoon. Smells the tar and alum, the damned peppermint. Visions the peppermint fields of Hydesville, the blossoms a
bsurdly fat, obscenely pink. She thrusts the spoon aside and the medicine spills onto her chemise. Her chemise? Ma must have undressed me, she thinks, as if I were a helpless babe, though not a sweet one, certainly.

  Her mother dabs at Maggie with a handkerchief. The medicine is a dark stain. “Oh, here, here, what have you done? No matter. It will come out, with, with ox-gall or salt, won’t it?”

  “That’s likely … look, I’m sorry. But I don’t want any of that medicine right now. It muddles my head and I need it clear and, and clean. Tell me about the people, in the streets. The mob. What have you learned? Are the riots raging still?”

  “Never mind about that. We don’t want you getting as upset and frightened again.”

  “Oh, the good grief, Ma. How much more frightened and upset can I get?”

  Her mother relents after further pestering. Tells Maggie that two army regiments arrived from Gettysburg to help quell the violence. The day is Friday and the city, though ransacked and pillaged, has settled at last. And the orphans are safe, yes, but not so the many others. Over the next four days Maggie learns of mutilations, stompings, drownings. Of the beatings meted to street vendors, hack drivers, sailors, to amalgamist women married to black men, to abolitionists of all kinds. Of the uncounted murders by lynching.

  “Terrible, isn’t it?” Mother opines. “How folks simply don’t know when to stop.”

  Three days later, Mother folds the shutters open to the splendid sunshine. “Today you must get up, mustn’t you?” Maggie doesn’t answer. She sees no need to leave her bed.

  Mother talks of Dr. Bayard. It seems he believes that both Maggie and Katie are cursed with the intemperate habits of their father. “And he’s recommended a place alike a fine hotel but with all manners of cures and regimes. A sanitarium? Yes, that is what it’s called.”

  “And who, pray tell, would be funding our respite in this sanitarium?”

  “Laws, why-ever does it matter? Here, have some more tea. Toast? You need toast and drippings, don’t you?”

  Leah. Her meddling hand is ever present. Well, Maggie will not go. Cures? Regimes? Absence from Elisha’s shrine? Leah finding satisfaction in pulling strings? No, Maggie would rather face a mob again. Fine. Perhaps not a mob. But certainly she would rather face the ignominy of a drunken encounter with Horace or with some other person who once thought well of her. “I won’t go, Ma. I’m sorry. There’s no point insisting.”

  Her mother gapes at her, then wrings her hands. “This is all my fault. I knew it. Oh, I knew how your father loved his drink. But I didn’t think a woman could be that way. It’s my fault. I’m a poor mother, aren’t I?”

  “It’s not your fault. Not at all. And you’ve ever been a help. My indulgences are my fault. And so’s all this spirit nonsense. Katie’s not to blame I’m the elder, I should have seen how we were being led astray, and so caused harm, just like all those rioters. They lost themselves, you see, when they became a mob.”

  Her mother wipes her nose with her sleeve. “What do you mean, your fault? What do you mean spirit nonsense? Mobs? Gracious evers, I—”

  “Attend closely, Ma, for once. It was a prank. And then it got away on us and went beyond our control. It couldn’t be stopped. It didn’t want to be stopped neither. That was the trouble, you see.”

  “What are you talking about? A prank? I don’t understand, do I?”

  Mother looks elderly and tired, but full of stubborn love. Does the entire story bear telling? Maggie wonders. Then says firmly, “Call in Pa. He must hear this also. The peddler’s ghost is of no consequence. Indeed, he never existed at all.”

  THE LAUDANUM BOTTLE sat on my patient’s night table. I admit I had helped myself, and now I felt a curious tingling, a warmth, a sense of time being created anew.

  “You were in Printing House Square?” I asked.

  “Well, yes.”

  “And Greeley, he helped you?”

  “Yes. He was a good man and judged himself too harshly. The Bull Run debacle. His disastrous presidency campaign. They were his undoing, I’m sure of it.”

  “Good is as good does.”

  “Were you here for the riots, Alvah?”

  “Here. There. I’m in all places. I grow black wings. I take whom I choose without regard. I am Havoc. I am Vastation.” I chuckled at this. “No, no. Alike your peddler’s ghost, I am of no consequence.”

  “You are consequence incarnate, dear Alvah.”

  I thought then of how, after I failed to find August, I came to New York, this city of nameless throngs and mindless work. When I could no longer hold scullery work, I laid down for whatever pittance or bottle a man cared to offer. This went on for a good while. The only joy I had was in spitting outside the Tribune building where that Horace Greeley worked his poisonous pen. I blamed him for the rout at Bull Run, as I have said. He had meddled. What did he know of warring things?

  I know August would have counselled forgiveness. Not that the boy had any experience with forgiveness, having never held a grudge in his life. And at times I was afflicted with rage at August too. For, indeed, what divided the actions of fools from the actions of the good? Was it Mr. Mellon who said this? It must have been.

  And to answer my patient’s question. Yes, I was in New York during the draft riots. And it was then I had the sea change. I’d been caught up in a mob near Battery Landing when I stumbled. I looked down.

  He was a man of middle years. Likely a shopkeep, given his apron and arm bands. His eyes were very blue, I recall, and they looked at me in hopes of a remedy for his condition, which, to be frank, was dire. He had been trampled. Or beaten. I could not tell. I did my best to save him. I could not. My healing skills were scarce, and there was such a lot of blood, poor man. After the riots I ceased imbibing and presented myself at the Medico Society for training, and in this care and comfort of the dying (of which we all number) I found the strength to keep myself sober. Until now.

  My throat was dry. I took up my patient’s laudanum bottle. It was empty. Surely I did not drink it all. “I’m sorry I’ve been so quiet, duck. You must think me a mute. A tongue-tied.”

  “What do you mean ‘quiet’?” she asked, her voice sleepy.

  “What do I mean? Quiet, as in silent, as in … Was I talking, just now? Was I? Damn, this medicine of yours. I won’t touch another drop.” I looked at the garret windows. “The gloaming!” I cried, amazed. Hours had passed and I had not noticed.

  “The gloaming,” my patient murmured. “I’ve not heard that for a time.”

  My patient slept then. When she woke she was keen to chat, and about her father and his final hours.

  THE BED ROPES CREAK as John’s wife wakens from her first sleep. She ever does about the midnight hour. She will potter about or mend for an hour or two, then take her lighter, second sleep until dawn. John, however, prefers to sleep through, as is the modern custom. Their daughters are sleep-throughers as well, as are most city people. In the city noone shuts themselves in after the supper-hour. No one fears the gloaming. Owl-let. Grosping. Cock-shut. Candle-lighting house. Indeed, there had once been many words for twilight and its gradations. People once attended the sky and feared the coming of the dark. No longer. Why should they, John thinks, with the abundance of gas lights and lamps, with new illuminations being invented by the week.

  He feigns the breath of deep slumber and watches his wife through half-closed eyes. She strikes a lucifer. The match glimmers blue and eerie before it winks out. She lights another, studies the effect, sighs. She fires the candle wick and the light puddles about her hand. She slides on her house-shoes and night robe. John shuttles back his disappointment. She will not be demanding his attentions, then. A mortal pity. They have been regaining a measure of their old passions in these New York nights, though they are both in their seventieth decade, and both afflicted with ailments and aches. And in the New York days they take the air together, even shop arm in arm for trinkets and crockery, linens and lampshades. His wife is ever asto
nished at his patience for such excursions, his considered taste in gimcracks and baubles. She is ever astonished, too, on how he attends her every worry, he who has always been scornful of her fears. “Only rats. Only neighbours dancing” was what he told her that first night of the hauntings back in Hydesville. And now that the girls have confessed to contriving the knocks, she seems to have forgotten the rank smell that pervaded the corners of the Hydesville house, the little clumps of moist earth, the grey threads twisting round latches and buttons.

  Nearly three months have passed since Maggie, and then Katie, confessed. For the first week his wife had been distraught. “But what of my mother and her phantom funerals?” she asked John. “Were they only night carriages? Only tinkers fleeing mischief?” This thought of explainable phenomena distressed her more, John noticed, than the thought of ghosts ever did.

  John consoled her as best he could. Reminded her how the girls were at least no longer indulging in liquor. Katie has been improving mightily, thanks to her stay at the sanitarium. As for Maggie, she has sworn to abstain and seems to be making good that vow. Certainly she seems much more like the wry and watchful girl she once was. Is no longer addled. No longer prone to outbursts. Her court suit against the Kanes is proceeding much better because of this. She might get her money yet. John and Margaret, Dr. Bayard, Horace Greeley, the Taylors, Leah, they are all in agreement that Elisha Kent Kane is to blame for Maggie’s dyspepsia and melancholy.

  Damned Dr. Kane, John thinks, would that I had got off my knees and thrashed the shot-eyed prick. Would that I had thrashed the whole damned Kane clan. He says a hasty prayer for his blaspheming. He hears his wife, padding down the hall, and recalls her querying Maggie on her confession. “But what of the footsteps I heard?” she asked. “Before the raps began that night? They weren’t your apples on strings. They weren’t any bodily crack, were they?”