Moriah

by Daniel Mills

  I join Thaddeus on the stage.

  The boards here are darker in colour than elsewhere in the room, varnished and black but with scratches in the woodgrain, scuff marks near the front of the stage where the spirits dance. Thaddeus tugs back the curtains to the Cabinet, revealing a narrow, corridor-like space, some three feet by nine with a chair positioned at its end. The smell of varnish is stronger here, the boards black, and a crude sash window has been hacked into the north wall near the chair.

  The window is situated some three feet off the ground and open to admit the light, a cooling draught of air. Looking closer I see a kind of mesh netting hangs beyond the sash, nailed into place along its edges as to seal off the window entirely.

  Thaddeus explains. “The heat,” he says. “Last summer was nigh unbearable.”

  “The spirits would not come?”

  “They came. But when the sitting was over, Sally found me slumped over in here. Half-dead of the heat.”

  “So you cut out a window?”

  Thaddeus shrugs and steps forward into the Cabinet, the curtains falling shut behind him. There are two long panels, each cut from black muslin and of such a width that the interior of the Cabinet is hidden from view.

  I follow him inside and halt where he does before the chair with his back to me, the window to his left. His shadow splays and shivers on the opposite wall, his outline made featureless there, arms and shoulders netted in folds of mesh.

  I say: “It’s here that you speak to the dead.”

  “As you say.”

  “What does it feel like? To call them up?”

  “Doesn’t feel like much,” he says. “Is what it is.”

  “But, surely, to command such power—”

  “Power’s got nothing to do with it. I’m just a tool to them is all. Same as a gun to a soldier or a wife to her husband. An ox yoked to a plow.”

  “And Ambrose?”

  “It’s worse for him, I reckon.”

  “Why is that?”

  “He doesn’t know what he is. What we are.”

  “But you do.”

  “I do, Mr. Flood. Same as any beast spends its life in harness.”

  He folds together his fists, looks down at his feet. He steps back from the window, pressing himself to his shadow so there is just room for me to sidle past him. I wrestle the chair from the back corner and inspect the space behind it, finding nothing. I sound the walls and the floor, drop to my knees to incline my ear. I rap with my knuckles, listening.

  “We are over the kitchen?” I ask.

  “Just about.”

  “And beneath the stage?”

  “Floorboards. Same as the rest of the room.”

  “Is there anything between the stage and the floorboards?”

  “Dust.”

  “Nonetheless I think I’d like to have a look. Have you a pry bar I can use?”

  “A pry bar.”

  “We can use it to remove the boards from the front of the stage. Beneath the railing, that is. It should be easy enough to hammer them back into place.”

  “There’s one out in the barn. I’ll fetch it.”

  “And a lamp as well?”

  He sets off. I hear him descend the stairs, speaking with Sally. He says something to her, and she responds in kind, two or three short sentences I cannot discern. The door slams to.

  From the window I watch Thaddeus proceed past the smokehouse toward the sagging barn, hands in pockets and head hung low. The light glimmers on his thinning scalp.

  Sally’s voice again. She is singing at her work and I imagine her hands in the dishwater, the melody rising from her lips, a clean line. I recognize the tune, of course, for it is the same we sang when first we marched through New York in ’63, our boots beating rhythm on the paving, keeping time, those words like fire in our heads:

  His soul is marching on.

  Now the voice is different. Not Sally’s but Kitty’s, high and mocking and sharp with her hatred. The realization strikes through me, freezing bone and blood like the cry of a coyote on a summer’s night or the rebels howling as they swarmed out of the trees.

  I stumble backward. Collapse against the chair with the taste of sulphur in my throat, and it’s only then, as I steady myself with my hands outthrust, that I realize the house is quite silent, with no sound audible but the din of Thaddeus’s boots mounting the stage.

  He draws back the curtains. In one hand he carries a long pry bar of wrought iron such as a railroad worker might use to tamp down blasting powder and he holds a kerosene lamp in the other. He evinces no surprise upon seeing me sitting, or upon my state of obvious distress, but merely hefts the bar as for my inspection and nods so I know I’m meant to follow.

  We stand before the stage: Thaddeus to one side, disinterested, and me with the pry bar in hand. Two rows of fronting boards are nailed into place below the railing, though the carpentry is again poor, leaving sufficient room for me to insert the narrow end of the pry bar. This I do and proceed to loosen the nails that secure the lower board, working the iron up and down in the gap ’til the board drops out and strikes the floor with a dusty thud. I prop up the pry bar against the wall near the stage and motion to Thaddeus.

  “The lamp,” I say.

  He hands it to me, and I drop down to my belly to direct its beam beneath the stage. The light pierces cobwebs, motes of dust, clouds of paint or sawdust whirled into motion by the board when it fell but does not reach as far as the outer wall. I wriggle forward, inclining the lamp as much as I dare to drive its light through the gap in the stage front.

  The wall looms into sight, coarse with the same grey mixture of cobwebs and sawdust. My breath blows gaps in the paint-dust, but there are no props or costumes hidden here and insufficient room in which to conceal an accomplice.

  I straighten and clap my hands together, the dust flying.

  Thaddeus takes the lamp from me. “Finished?”

  “Nearly,” I say, and slip a roll of marked tape from my pocket. “For taking measurements.”

  “As you like,” he says, and slinks away, muttering he will fetch a hammer. He disappears downstairs, taking the lamp with him, and again, I am alone.

  The measurements are taken. An hour passes or more as I measure the inner walls with aid of a pencil and tape and jot the figures in my notebook, moving in a trance and trembling to recall her voice, Kitty’s, how it swam out of the past to fill this room: as tangible and ephemeral as the songs of any so-called spirit. Ten years in the grave and she has never ceased from hating me, never ceased from singing.

  I couldn’t wait for you. I would come back for you.

  The sweat pours out of me, running down my arms and flanks. My shoulder throbs, blood surging through gaps in the mangled clavicle, the bone reknit but badly.

  I retrieve a chair from the wall and place it before the music table. There I sit to make the necessary calculations, matching the dimensions of the room’s interior against its outer walls in order to rule out the existence of hidden rooms or passageways. This I do—and with some definitiveness. I check the numbers again, but there can be no question. If there are props or costumes concealed within the farmhouse, they are hidden elsewhere.

  I close the notebook. The clock downstairs strikes two o’clock and I realize Thaddeus has not returned. The stage front remains unrepaired, the gap in the boards showing like a long slashing wound: a body ripped by a bayonet, the entrails spilling.

  I push back the chair. Stand up then stumble with a sudden hunger, dazed by the night’s broken sleep. Sally will be in the kitchen, I know, the brush in hand, performing the duties of a wife though she is not yet married. She will hear my step when I enter the room and turn with the sun glittering about her, an army with banners—and probably it’s only my exhaustion, but I startle to find myself outside the Circle Room and halfway down the stair.

  Sally’s voice is audible but soft, emptied of all feeling, a jug upended.

  “I don’t care what
he wants. He isn’t my husband.”

  Thaddeus says: “It’s nothing. It means nothing.”

  “And if I won’t do it?”

  “You don’t know what’s at stake. What we’d lose.”

  “And me? What more would you have me give up?”

  “You’re a woman,” he says, snarling. “You’ve nothing worth the keeping.”

  Sally does not respond, but I hear the side door swing shut behind her as she goes outside, followed by the scrape of a chair as Thaddeus collapses into it, moaning, the breath escaping him all at once so I wonder at this show of feeling and all he holds inside himself.

  I linger on the staircase, my head resting ’gainst the plaster. Count twenty beats of the blood in my chest before descending to the hall and entering the kitchen.

  Thaddeus rises from the chair. His hands are clenched into fists at his sides, the tendons fat as ropes beneath the skin. He turns round slowly, eyes flat, the white foam beaded at the corner of his mouth as he looks me up and down.

  He says: “Be wanting your dinner, I expect.”

  Luncheon is hard cheese and salt-pork with a bottle of cider, the latter produced from a crawlspace under the pantry and smelling faintly of moss and damp. I take this meal in the orchard, slouched up against the largest of the trees with its leaves spreading over me, filtering light, apples red and waxen and gleaming like jewels where they hang amidst the foliage.

  The cheese is dry and flavourless, as is the pork, but I choke it all down with mouthfuls of bitter cider. From the adjoining fields drifts the groaning of oxen, men’s laughter, the cries of young boys at play. Sleepy now, the cider flooding my brain, I think of Kitty again and of something she once told me.

  This was shortly after we were married, the spring before the war. We were living in Rhinebeck in that house we made our own where we felled the trees and rolled the lawn and spent the whole of a summer’s morning planting apple saplings, sinking them deep in two rows behind the house. Afterward, when the work was done, we walked together, side-by-side, like Man with God in the garden, and Kitty was likewise conscious of the comparison for she spoke aloud and said how she had often played among her father’s apple trees.

  “When I was a girl,” she said. “And it was summer. In those days I never felt so close to Eden.”

  “And now?” I teased.

  “I am like Eve returned home at last.”

  But if Eden is a place, a real place, then it exists in time and once left can never be reclaimed. I went out into the world like Cain and survived those months in hell, preserved by my faith and later by the loss of it sure as the brand which marked Cain’s forehead.

  And where I had left, Kitty remained, held captive in the place that was her Eden. There the gates were closed fast, always, the angel’s sword poised above her, falling slowly and in time with the beating of our son’s heart within her as she played the piano or walked the empty rooms and corridors. But that place too she left, just as I had done, and in this moment, with the scent of apples all round, the thought of her causes no pain, no regret, only a sense of sorrow at last for the things we could not know.

  And that is why you have travelled all this way? To escape your ghosts?

  There are cicadas in the fields, wind in the branches above. Bees drone among the trees, flitting from fruit to fruit then swinging themselves toward the fields where grows the clover, the chicory, those few rare blossoms of rose and honeysuckle at which the hummingbirds feed. And in that way I imagine them, with bodies light as the dew itself, wings beating, beaks out-thrust to drink the milk of paradise—

  Sleep, then, and the shadows lengthen. Moving over me, a dream of summer’s evening.

  I come awake slowly, eyes fluttering as they open and the light slants low with the sun’s descent, coming green through the leaves overhead. My head aches and I squint to see a man’s shape at five yards’ distance, his long shadow lying across me. John Turner.

  “So this is working to a New York man,” he says, coming closer. “Would like to see you hay the fields or rise in the dark for a morning’s milking.”

  I force a smile despite my discomfort.

  “You have found me out,” I say.

  “Thought that was your job. Finding out things. Least when you’re not sleeping away the daylight.”

  He laughs—a harsh, jangling sound. His clothes are soaked through with sweat, as is his hair, and it’s plain he has come from the hayfields without halting to change his clothing.

  “You’re here for the séance?” I ask, standing. I brush the grass from my shirtfront along with breadcrumbs and leaves. “Surely it is not yet so late—”

  “Not even suppertime,” he says. “No, I’m here to see my cousin.”

  “Thaddeus is inside,” I say, gesturing toward the house.

  “It’s Sally I want, not Thaddeus. Can’t a man call on his betrothed without having to explain himself to a stranger?”

  His betrothed.

  I say: “I haven’t seen her today.”

  “What? Haven’t you been paying her your regular attentions?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  But of course I know exactly what he means and can only hope the leaf-shadows suffice to hide my discomfort, obscuring the warmth which rushes to my face and fingertips, causing the flesh to tingle.

  “That so? Thought you were a priest or something. A minister, right. A Wesleyan. That’s what the old widow said.”

  “Not anymore,” I say.

  Somehow this answer seems to satisfy him, for his tone is suddenly jocular, sickly sweet, ripe with a false bonhomie.

  “Well, then. You just think on it now. You’ll be at the sitting?”

  “I will.”

  “Good. The spirits are restless tonight. Least that’s what I hear. Thaddeus says they reckon on a bit of dancing.”

  “Dancing?”

  “That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

  “Evening Star, you mean. The Indian girl.”

  “Not just her,” he says, grinning.

  “No?”

  “Oh, there’ll be others, too. Should be a sight to see.”

  And saying this he leaves, whistling to himself as he strolls up to the house. He disappears inside and with him goes the stillness of the day, whatever sense of rest or contentment that came to me as I slept beneath the apple trees. I carry my plate up to the house and leave it in the parlour beside the empty cider bottle, remaining long enough to note the time, five o’clock, before withdrawing from the house once more and into the retreating light.

  North and then west. This time I skirt the orchard’s edge, avoiding the family’s cemetery and plunging myself into the trees and underbrush. The quiet is bracing, unearthly. Maples send layered shadows creeping across the path while mosquitoes swoop out of the gloom, settling in my hair to sting me through my scalp. Spider webs hang from the low branches, green and dusted with pollen. I bat them away and continue northward, taking my bearings by the light through the canopy, making for the ravine, the cave.

  But the woods continue to all sides, deepening to brush and shadow. The sun comes from the wrong direction, and I realize I have turned myself around. I am lost, or nearly so, and the weather is growing cold, the wind stronger now. The maples creak and moan, an insistent chorus, filling the wood with whispers: bird’s wings, a crackling fire. The sound, the smell of it. Spanning the gulf of years between Virginia and Vermont and drawing me toward it, compelling me forward with all of the inexorable force of a nightmare.

  Our campfires at Cold Harbor. We huddled round the pit with our hands clasped together, bringing our fists to our mouths to breathe between them so it must have looked as though we were praying, all of us, with the fire as our altar, as though its heat might serve to ward off the dawn. That the sun might never rise, the order to attack never come.

  There was a young man, I remember. Little more than a boy, really, raised in Albany. He was an avowed Baptist with a missionar
y’s zeal, having come to faith at a revival meeting when he was ten. As such he thought little of my Methodism but the other chaplain had fallen at Spotsylvania Courthouse and so he came to me. He stepped from the fog and crouched down beside me with his hands at the fire and asked what he should do, how he might make peace with the God who made him. I heard him out, listening closely, all the while knowing there was little I could offer him: not comfort, not relief.

  “Only this,” I said and pushed back my coat to show where I had pinned a leaf from my Bible (taken from the back, the Revelation of John where it would not be missed). On this I had penned my own name, and then Kitty’s, so they might know where to send me after they had carried me from the field in pieces.

  This young man—Matthew, yes, that was the name—slunk away, dissatisfied, but I spied him again in an hour’s time, once the orders had come, and we stood in our ranks in the gathering fog. He had fastened a similar note to his breast but did not meet my gaze or otherwise acknowledge me and I never saw him again.

  Then the drums were beating back the fog, echoed by the thud of cannon, the whistle of canister, rending of clothes and flesh. Still we advanced, near-blind in that fog, marching toward the unseen guns, running when the breastworks opened up on us, pouring down fire, and the cannon continued to boom, louder now, raking the field with shrapnel and shot.

  The sergeant was in front of me, Edgar Heap the Englishman. He was a big man, tall and thin and graceful despite the rifle in his hands, the long legs pumping beneath him. The canister struck him and he burst, evaporating into a red cloud, a seething tempest out of which the shell fragments ricocheted and flew. They struck me through shoulder and collarbone and across the skull, snuffing out my vision so I fell forward with his blood in my mouth. Then there was the darkness, moving so quickly there was only itself and nothing more. A dying that was not death for all the long silence that followed.

  The memory is gone, the blackness scattered by a light in the wood. The fire is sheltered, hidden from view, though it casts a dim glowering on the trees, their leaves and undersides. The shadows move toward me as I approach, folding themselves around me and opening onto a narrow, rock-bound ravine with the fire stoked and burning at its centre, banked over twigs and cedars and roofed with a fallen stone. Spring Willow’s Cave.