by Daniel Mills
So dark. Where am I? How did I come here?
Sweat on my hands and face. Heat like damp cloths pressing down.
“Please,” a man says. “Tell us what you remember.”
A light. There was a light. White and shimmery so I couldn’t see.
“Can you describe it for us?”
Not seen so much as felt. A burning in my head.
A woman’s voice now as from a great distance.
“Where are you? What can you see?”
Just this blackness. The wind rippling it.
“Wind?” the man asks.
The trees. Their branches. Leaves all black and flapping like wings.
“There is a fire?”
Drawing closer. I can hear it.
“A summer storm,” a woman says, but I’m not listening. I smell it, the fire. Hear it raging, branches snapping as it comes for me.
The man says: “You must get up. You must try to leave that place.”
Can’t move. The pain. Too much.
“Pain?”
In my gut. A burning. Like another fire.
“Please, you must listen to me. You are not alone.”
And I know he’s close. Hear him breathing beside me for all the noise of the fire. Feel his hand over mine, firm but gentle.
He says: “Death makes an end of things, it’s true. But it is not the only ending.”
The trees swaying, parting. The fire pouring through.
The man continues: “This place. The trees on fire. The wind driving the heat before it. Believe me when I say I know it well. I was there.”
The light come nearer, the pain getting worse. Skin charring, flaking away. Joining the ash where it whirls upon the storm.
“I haven’t forgotten you.”
Then the same brilliant light, shimmering as it burns the spirit from my body, the voice from my mouth. Falling forward. Strike the table with my forehead before he catches me, Mr. Flood, eyes like wet silver in the lightning’s afterglow.
The thunder moves on, taking the rain with its clamour. Mrs. Bauer’s crying ’cross the table, her husband beside her muttering. Mrs. Ambler sighing, sorrow and relief.
A guitar falls to strumming. An ugly sound, the strings abuzz. Someone’s knuckles rapping the wooden body, the base of the table, and the voice inside me rising up in answer, though it’s got no farther than my throat when it bursts over me, filling the room to its corners.
Spring Willow. Singing sweetly as she always did and I’m shaking to hear her voice on my lips or sounding out of the dark, joining itself to the guitar’s strum and climbing, cresting the roof and swooping down like the spirit in Pentecost.
Rock of Ages, cleft for me—
Her voice rebounding from the walls, making echoes which circle the table. Folding on me like wings so there’s nothing to see. No light now, the storm withdrawing, but I remember how she danced for us as children. How she ran.
Sunlight green through summer leaves, blurring the ground beneath us. Hiding me inside that split rock, her cave, though I didn’t know it then. The blackness pounding in my head, turning the day sour, and twilight coming on when at last she returned. She carried me back to the house. Placed me in the bed I shared with Thaddeus and where I woke up—alone.
The circle’s broken. Thaddeus leans forward, relights the lamp. Spring Willow’s gone, the room empty but for the sitters. Mr. Flood stands, makes his excuses and goes. Thaddeus, next, rising to usher the others to the door and following them out.
I don’t move. Sit listening with my face in my hands. Remembering her nearness, her warmth. Her arms wrapped round, the rock-walls sheltering me. The smell of her like wet soil.
Then the thump of boots behind me, the beating of a beast’s tail on the floor-boards. His belt cracks in his hands, the leather snapping back on itself.
Father. Hear him breathing. Loud behind me, getting closer. Blowing through my hair, the heat of it. A taste in my mouth like old blood and then I turn around.
January 7th, 1855—
My great grandfather Isaiah came from Connecticut & settled here when he was young. He built this house & cleared the fields of trees & stumps ’til all the land was bare but for a strip of forest north of the house. The ground there is uneven, choked with stones. The trees are ancient, mossy. They groan where they root within the shallow earth.
If you walk back far enough you’ll come upon a gully where a creek ran in the springtime before our neighbours dammed the lake above the woods. The old streambed turns to ice in the winter but with rocks to walk on if you know where to step.
Follow it for half a mile & you’ll reach a cave of sorts, where a boulder lies wedged at an angle between the rock walls. You can pass beneath it without bending your head. With a few paces you might go from light to darkness into light.
But stay & sit in that dark. Breathe in the smell of limestone & moss, the musk & damp of that pulsing womb. Call out & your voice it will surround you, pouring from the rock as from your own opened body when you too are sixteen & the spirit comes to sing through you.
Those summer evenings. Our conversations.
We were married less than a year and talk was plentiful between us. That night, I recall, we retired to the porch after dinner and spoke of this and that, as we often did, drifting from one subject to another, undiscriminating. The evening was pleasant, scented with lilacs and the wind coming soft from the neighbours’ pasture wherein cattle slept, humped shapes in the moonlight.
This was June of ’61, before Bull Run. The War was a dim prospect to us then, half-real, like mountains glimpsed at fall of dusk, and the whole of the future, I thought, lay open to us: children and grandchildren and a place of rest beneath the cedar trees.
In this security we talked of the afterlife as of a coming journey, a trip we were both to undertake but separately, as in the song she sang, unaccompanied, unfurling the melody over us as the breeze parted the high grass, rustling, whistling through.
Oh, you’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low
And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye—
She yearned for it, I think, her place in heaven, and spoke of it often where she did not speak of children, though I longed for them in the same way. But she was five years younger than me, just nineteen when we wed, a girl in the flush of youth. Her days she passed with her books or at the spinet, and three years would elapse before she bore our son, and burned her music, and with it, all the letters I had written from Virginia.
For me and my true love will ne’er meet again
On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.
The song was finished and she was quiet. The cows rumbled in their sleep while the fireflies massed over the neighbours’ pond.
I said: “But surely I will see the Kingdom before you.”
Her eyes upon me. Her usual seriousness. “And you would leave me here alone?”
“I hardly think I would have much choice.”
“And if I went first? If I should reach heaven before you?”
“You’d wait for me, wouldn’t you?”
“For you to join me there.”
“Yes. And I would wait to die.”
“And if you grew tired of it? The waiting.”
“I made a vow,” I said. “Or have you forgotten?”
She would not look at me. Her gaze wandered out over the pasture, where the cattle began to kick and stir, roused by the howling of a coyote in the nearby wood. The cows moaned as they awoke and turned toward the house the points of their eyes, the moon behind them.
“You will tire of it,” she said. “You’ll find someone else, some young harlot to marry.”
Her words surprised me, the bitterness of them. She leaned back against the chair with her shoulders turned away from me and the moon’s shadow draped across her so I could not see her face, only her white fingers wound fast within the fabric of her skirts, chipped nails shining.
“Kitty,” I said, taking her hand i
n mine.
“I couldn’t wait for you,” she said. “I would come back for you.”
I squeezed her hand.
“Then come back for me,” I said. “And I will go with you.”
She laughed then—a hollow sound, unfamiliar—and I knew in that moment that I did not understand her, who she was, or what had transpired in the house where she had been raised.
Then from the woods came a wild cry, as though in answer, cold and piercing as starlight. The cattle took fright and began to trot, their hoofs beating out a forced march.
I helped her to her feet and led her back into the house and then upstairs to bed, where we stayed through the night while the coyote bayed and screeched and chased the cattle through the fields ’til shots rang out like the break of dawn and the coyote, wounded, skulked away to die.
Morning.
The light drops in lines from the windowsill, webbing my face where I lie upon my side with the bedclothes kicked to the floor. I remember my dreams, her words, the shape of Kitty’s body where it curved into mine. Her face returns with perfect clarity, clearer than it has been in years, and I think of the promise she made, if it was a promise, recalling the lines of her face in Sally’s, her voice upon the young girl’s lips.
Last night, after the circle, I hastened downstairs and passed through the kitchen, where I heard the clank of glass from the pantry. This was Sally, no doubt, seeing to the last of her chores, and I quickened my step, not wishing to face her, and slipped out through the side door.
The night was hot and damp and smelled of rain. I passed the Lynches’ trash heap then the smokehouse and the barn, skirting the forest with its branches waving to head west along its margin. The dying man’s voice was inside me: the memory throbbed at my temples, doubling my heartbeat. I smelled singed hair, charred flesh. Heard the crack of split limbs falling.
I reached the orchard, started to run. The apple branches closed over me, heady with the odours of ripening fruit. Breathless, aching, I flew from the trees into the family graveyard where at last my aging body failed me. I stumbled and struck the ground near the first slate, Rebecca’s, and rolled onto my back as I gasped for breath—and always those words close by, invisible, hovering over me in the darkness.
Not dead but sleeping.
The spell passed. I walked back to the house.
By then it was quite late. I had no wish to wake my fellow guests and so made my way round the new addition to the side door, where a figure waited for me, a woman, silhouetted against the doorway. Sally. I halted while still some feet away, squinting to discern her lines and features by the dim light of the kitchen behind.
“It’s after midnight,” she said.
“I needed some air, I’m afraid.”
“Mrs. Ambler saw you leave. She thought you looked—unwell.”
“Yes,” I said, recalling the stench of blood and smoke and cooking flesh. Heat poured from the trees, drying the urine from my trousers, and the wind brought with it the shrieks of the abandoned, the dying, words all swallowed in the whoosh of rising flame.
Sally said: “You aren’t the first to take ill after Ambrose’s circle.”
“That’s scarcely comforting.”
I sensed her gaze upon me but could not make out her features where she stood within the doorway. I crossed the span of yard that separated us until the lamplight enveloped me as well and I saw the glow inside her eyes like the reflection of a night in summer, my vanished faith, and Kitty saying she couldn’t wait, that she would come back for me.
“Your clothes are filthy,” she said.
“I fell.”
“Didn’t we all? You should know as much, being a minister.”
“Mrs. Ambler told you that?”
“She did.”
“Well, I’m not. I was, once, but that was long ago.”
“Maybe so,” she said, “but you still dress like one, with your black pants and coat and all turned out neat as you like. Look at yourself now.”
I did as she said, taking in the ripped fabric at the knees, the mud caked in ridges down the legs. Sally covered her mouth with her hand and laughed to see my dismay, her voice warm and resonant and again like church bells overlapping or like Kitty’s when she sang at the spinet, but only then, and never when she laughed.
Sally said: “Bring them to me tomorrow. There’s washing to do. I’ll see to them.”
I thanked her. “Your brothers are most fortunate to have you.”
“Are they? They won’t have me much longer. Not if Thaddeus has his way.”
“Where would you go?”
“John Turner. Our cousin. He would have me for his wife.”
“But you do not wish to marry him?”
She looked away, blocking the lamp on the table behind her. The shadows, blossoming, stripped the lines from her face, leaving a softness in their place so that I was at once ashamed.
I apologized. “That was impertinent.”
She lifted her head, unblocking the light, but still I could not face her. My feet were wet to the ankles. My shoes were grey with mud.
“You may say what you like,” she said. “There will be no wedding.”
There was anger in her voice, perhaps fear, but when I looked at her I found her smiling, the lamplight making sparks of her eyes. Her skin was no longer white but honey-brown in the kerosene lamp and darker where it plunged to her breasts, their curves visible where the linen bunched about them, her nipples showing, the tips of them, where they broke the shadows.
She said: “It’s getting cold. Your clothes are soaked through.”
“Yes.”
“You’d better come in.”
She stepped back from the doorway. “There is no fire in your room, but the coals are hot enough. Would you like a bed warmer? I can bring it up to you. If you like.”
But I refused and watched her go just as now, eyes open, I see the dawn come up grey and dripping beyond the window, appearing as a revenant, the shadow of loss: a drowned man rising with eyes the blue of the breaking day and with breath like the winter.
Cool morning streams through the open window, fans out over the empty bed. I shiver and toss beneath the quilts.
Rising, shaving, dressing.
The breakfast hour is passed, the house so quiet I can hear the pulse in my neck, fluttering when I think of Sally, then Kitty, the part of me that’s withered, sapped of all but want.
Last night, at the circle, the others listened as I pleaded with the voice of a spirit, gut-shot, and tried to give comfort, to convince the dying man that he was not forgotten. Sally, too, saw something of this hunger, my need reflected in her own as she stood in the doorway with the lamplight swimming behind her. Even Mrs. Ambler spied it, yesterday afternoon, when we spoke in the sitting room. I questioned her concerning the girl Evening Star’s ribbon and later betrayed myself in admitting my doubts, stripping myself bare:
Not even that. Especially that.
The widow considered this, her fingertips drumming the end table beside her. They stopped. She heaved herself straight in her chair, and the clock was chiming when she told to me her story.
Her mother, she said, had succumbed to a fever shortly after giving birth and the infant Ethel Carr (as she was christened) was taken to live with her aunts in a neighbouring village. Her father, a minister, was the youngest of his family, with three elderly sisters, all of whom doted so much upon the young Ethel that she sometimes wondered why they had never married. Her own father, by contrast, was mercurial, distant—disposed to drink and to fits of melancholy, which his sisters were quick to dismiss as they would the whims of an unruly child.
Ethel did not understand it, why her aunts spoke of their brother in the patient tones reserved for animals or idiots but addressed his daughter, a mere girl, as though she were already full-grown. They treated her as a woman among women and she soon came to regard herself as an old spinster where in truth she was only seventeen when the last of her aunts
passed away.
For a time she persisted in this fantasy, even after the house was sold off and she was sent away to the rectory. Her father, the minister, kept his distance, as was customary, and she spent her nights alone, engaged in sewing or embroidery or in reading by the fire. It could not last. She was nineteen and soon the young men came to call, bringing flowers and love-words or poems dreamt up in the daze of drink or opium.
But youth, it seems, held little appeal, for the man she married was sixty years older than herself. Mr. Quentin Ambler, a Physician and Doctor of Medicine, had been widowed decades before in the days of the Bloody Pox. Their courtship was brief, a matter of weeks with the wedding soon following, though Mr. Ambler was, by then, too old and infirm to love any but his own lost wife, to whom Ethel bore some resemblance.
There were no children, of course, but when he coughed and expired at the age of eighty-nine, she mourned him as she had not mourned her own mother, whom she had never known, and it was only later (Mrs. Ambler said), when she reached her forties, that she wept for the life she might have had: the ghost of the woman she might have been.
This vision fascinated her, possessed her. At night, she said, she heard her own spirit pass by her doorway and imagined the groaning of the bed in the room opposite, her half-heard sighs and whispers. Once, when she was nearly fifty, she heard a baby—her baby, she said, who never lived—wailing for suck from her breasts, though these were sagging and overripe, heavy with age and dry as petals pressed in books from flowers given to her long ago.
Mrs. Ambler exhaled and settled back against the chair. She said: “My aunts were superstitious women, Mr. Flood. Mary, the youngest, was frightened of storms and the evil eye, while the oldest, Rose, used to tell me ghost stories. She never married, but I gather she was once engaged to a sailor—one of many who went to sea and did not return. The stories she told me were so vivid, so detailed, that I used to wonder if they had truly happened, if she knew . . . I do not wonder anymore.”
