The Dark
Page 54
“Birthday? Whose birthday? What are you—”
“Your son’s.”
“I’ve never spoken to you of a son. Nor to anyone. Never!”
But she was not listening, not to me anywise. No. She had the intent look of one straining to hear a far-off tune. She said, “The loss of August is ever with you.”
“His name! How did you know it? What trick are you playing now?” I was peeved. No. Outraged. We were both sinners and grievously faulted sorts, from the same kettle of fish as it were, and I hated, to be frank, that she was practising her art on me. I stood up from my little stool. I shouted I didn’t believe it. I shouted that she had told me how it was done. It was all a fraud.
I hauled the bedclothes off and pointed to her feet, at which there came a bang so strong the windows shook. It was nothing like the taps she had exhibited for me previously. And she had not moved a joint.
Next came a pat-pattering of raps, alike running steps.
“It’s your August. Speak with him. He cannot stay long.”
The garret fell very quiet, very still. The far-down din of the streets, the shouts of children, the cries of hawkers, the arguing of the other tenement dwellers. All ceased. The room was empty but for us. And yet. And yet.
“August?” I was rubbery with fear. Breath-stilled with hope. The thuds sounded back straightaway.
I told him how I missed him. I told him I was so very sorry that I did not give him my blessing, sorry that I did not hold vigil nor hear his last words, the words of his true self that would set him right afore the Redeemer. At which there came three loud raps on the side table. I remind you that Maggie Fox Kane had not moved the whole time. Not her feet. Not her hands. Nothing.
She said, “Fetch a paper and pen.”
I rummaged frantically in my apron pockets and then my satchel. I couldn’t find my little notebook, however, only bottles.
“Never mind, Alvah. Here,” Maggie Kane said, and ripped out a picture plate from Arctic Explorations. Just like that. As if Elisha’s book mattered nothing to her anymore. I have kept the plate, of course. It shows a barren Arctic place called Sanderson’s Hope (though I have never discovered who Sanderson was and what hope he found in that dread place).
She wrote rapidly on the plate’s blank side. She did not look down as she wrote, but at the garret’s three linked windows. When she was done I saw that the script was unintelligible, like a foreigner’s script and language.
“What is this? Do I look a linguist? A professor of heathen tongues? Am I—”
“Hush. It’s merely backwards. You have a mirror?”
I did. I had my pocket mirror for the gauging of life and breath. I held this mirror to the paper, then nearly dropped them both in astonishment. August’s handwriting was in the reflection. The hand was looping and would have seemed careless if it had not run in a straight and purposed line. His writing. Surely so. I would have known it anywhere.
Dearest mother. I was charging the Rebs at Bull Run when a musket-ball stopped me up. Please don’t blame poor old Horace Greeley for the debacle at Bull Run. He had no cruel intent and he suffered much for encouraging it. The Quakers at the Washington Hospital were kind. Truly, they’re a kind lot. I gave my Last Words to one of them, a lady who looked akin to you. I told her that I was glad to meet my Redeemer. That I was glad to die for the Cause. But glad, too, that I escaped having to kill a fellow man. I told her that I never meant to go off without your blessing.
I know you had some hard years after I vanished. But I don’t judge you a whit for losing your sorrow in the remedies of the living. Nor for what you did to Pa. You didn’t kill him, by the way, though he’s dead just the same. And you should know that we’re not judged Above the same way as in the Mortal Sphere. Our hearts are what matters. And yours is the truest and kindest heart a son could want. Yet I beg you: Don’t drink spirits any longer. Life should be used for good purpose. And whatever time we have on this blessed earth, why it should be cherished.
The Quakers burned my clothes and identifying papers by mistake because the typhoid was raging. And so I was buried as an Unknown Soldier in Washington’s Military Asylum Cemetery. My stone is in the tenth sector, the third from the gate.
With everlasting love.
Your son, August
“Your dream! You dreamed of his resting place. The selfsame cemetery,” I said, but Maggie Kane was asleep, her breathing very shallow, and I feared then what I had accepted from the very start of our acquaintance.
The succour from this letter was such that, as my August asked, I have not drank spirits since. As for Margaret Fox Kane, she passed to the Glory three days later. She rambled a great deal in her last hours: about Katie, about blue skies and gold warmth, about high-up trees. “But I can see the world from here!” she exclaimed at one point, by which I suppose she meant the Other World.
As I reported in that brief statement eleven years ago, my patient could move neither hand nor foot by this time, and there was no wardrobe, no place to hide, no gadgetry at all. And yet the knocks came again as she departed. This time on the wall, on the ceiling and on the floor. It was as if a hundred joyous spirits had come to meet her. You simply wouldn’t believe it.
Alvah June Mellon
December 1904
AUTHOR’S NOTE
To tell the story of the Fox Family and the beginnings of the Spiritualist movement I have followed as closely as possible the events as they are known. However, this is a work of fiction and I have freely invented scenes, dialogue, and motivations, and have filled in the blanks in the historical record: namely, whose remains were those found in the cellar of the Hydesville house in 1904, years after all the protagonists were dead? Did the peddler exist at all or was he a pure fabrication of Maggie and Katie? Where did John Fox disappear to for ten years, and what happened during that time to change him from a hard-drinking “sporting” man into a devout believer? And why was this reverend Chauncey Burr so determined to expose the sisters? Lastly, was Mrs. Mellon telling the truth when she declared in her 1893 statement that she heard spirit knockings at Maggie’s death? These are the provocative mysteries that provided much of the inspiration for The Dark.
For source material I am particularly indebted to the following: Talking to the Dead: Katie and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism by Barbara Weisberg; The Reluctant Spiritualist: The Life of Maggie Fox by Nancy Rubin Stuart; Exploring Other Worlds: Margaret Fox Kane, Elisha Kent Kane and the Antebellum Cult of Curiousity by David Chapman; The Spirit Rappers by Herbert Jackson; Time is Kind: The Story of the Unfortunate Fox Family by Miriam Buckner Pond; The Epic of New York by Edward Robb Ellis; and A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1825-1837 by Paul E. Johnson.
It should be noted that I have worked into my story many direct quotes taken from memoirs and letters of the protagonists, as well as quotes from newspapers and periodicals of the time. These sources include: The Love Life of Doctor Kane by Margaret Fox Kane; The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism by A. Leah Underhill, Revised and Arranged by a Literary Friend; The Death Blow to Spiritualism by Rueben Briggs Davenport; Godfrey’s Narrative of the Last Grinnell Arctic Exploring Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin by William C. Godfrey; and Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin 1853, 54, 55 by Elisha Kent Kane.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted and endlessly grateful to my agent, Sally Harding, for having faith in me and my work, and to my editor Lynn Henry of Doubleday Canada for her hard work, vision, and insight. I am also grateful to the indefatigable Doubleday Canada team. As well, I give my heartfelt thanks to my first readers Catherine Howe, Alix Noble, Susan Mongar, and Mary-Lou Bertucci for their helpful comments and encouragements, and to Gabriella Heald for her inspired portrait shots.