Moriah

by Daniel Mills

  Mother’s favourite, I think, as it was Rebecca’s. The song she sang with John when they met up in the barn at first and then in the icehouse, their voices low and breathy and John strumming that guitar which Father smashed.

  Let me hide myself in thee.

  Her words float back toward the house, reaching me where I sit and sip at my coffee. And she’s not humming now but singing, a few phrases audible despite walls and windows dividing us so all the house can hear. Ambrose is awake, though I doubt he’s listening. I hear him pacing overhead, his steps coming near then retreating. Pacing as he does before a headache. The other guests are up too, least I’d guess as much, the widow for her walk down to Pittsfield and the Germans for their prayers—all but Flood, who was up all night like he was still in New York.

  Was after midnight, I remember, the whole house abed and only me awake with worry, for Flood hadn’t returned for the sitting and Ambrose hadn’t, either. There was a sour taste in my mouth, getting stronger each hour until it all boiled out of me, filling the chamber pot and leaving streaks of bile about my lips. Then the clock struck two and I heard the kitchen door open and shut and my brother’s familiar tread.

  I met Sally in the hall (she’d also waited up) and followed her downstairs to the kitchen where we found him dripping mud and damp and with the look about him as of a beaten animal. His face turned away. Whimpering when I tried to touch him.

  “Where’s Flood?” I demanded. “You been talking to him?”

  But he wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t speak. Just buried his face in Sally’s chest and begged for her to take him upstairs, to sing him down to sleep.

  “Tired,” he said, and more than that maybe, but his words were muffled by her dress so I couldn’t hear, and anyway, I didn’t want to listen. I went upstairs. Emptied the pot out the window and slid beneath the covers. Fell asleep quick and didn’t hear Ambrose come in. Woke up later to the din of Flood’s shoes on the stair then going down the hall, vanishing into his room. Heard the doors closing. He missed the very thing he came to write about and sleeps now through the morning, the sun well up, dreaming maybe of the same voice that comes to wake him. Sally singing: Be of sin the double

  cure.

  The coffee’s hot and bitter and stronger than I like. I drain the cup to the dregs and place it empty on the counter. Climb the steps to the room I share with Ambrose and let myself in.

  “Ambrose,” I say, and he turns round slow. Looks at me with those eyes of his like Mama’s but clouded with pain and sightless with the storm that roils and pitches behind them. I step inside. Shut the door. Soft as I can though he moans at the sound and cowers when I approach. Backs up toward the corner where it meets the wall and folds in on himself with knees at his belly and elbows up, hands joined together ’cross the back of his head. Rocking back and forth as though he fears I might strike him for all I’ve never done so, not since we were boys, but the pain, it’s blinded him, broken his mind, and I’ve become like Father dressed as I am in his grey coat and skin and with his voice like grease in my mouth.

  “It’s Thaddeus,” I say.

  He claps his hands over his ears. Burrows a finger into his right ear, the left still deaf where Father struck him that morning when he was three or so, no older, beating him about the head so like as not he would’ve killed him if Rebecca hadn’t come.

  “My head. Hurts.”

  “Last night,” I say. “Where’d you go?”

  I kneel down before him and take hold of his wrists, easing his hands from his ears as he whimpers. He lifts his head. Looks at me. His eyes have the distance of winter days, empty skies, trees all bare and shaking with the wind off the hills. But the terror’s gone from them, the ghost of Father and his shape that was mine where it hung inside them.

  “Spring Willow’s Cave,” he says.

  “And that’s where you met him? Flood.”

  Ambrose shakes his head. His lips tremble, the drool hanging down.

  He says: “There was a fire.”

  “And Flood? You saw him, didn’t you?”

  His jaw snaps shut, a trap sprung. He stares at the floor and sobs when I release his wrists. Covers his face with his hands. Plugs up his good ear and falls to rocking on his heels once more. “My head,” he says. “Please.”

  And so I leave him, plunging downstairs with the thoughts racing round me, rage following and fear so as I don’t know the difference and maybe never did, the same as that evening in March. The weight in my gut as I ran up these stairs, palms slick with sweat so as to leave marks on the gun’s barrel. Then as now the blood drumming in my temples, beating out a one word tattoo: Rebecca (Rebecca). Flood (Flood).

  Those few things Ambrose knows or remembers, they are each one a fragment to be coaxed out of him and placed alongside the others ’til Flood can see it, the shape they make. The ghosts in this house. Their graves past the orchard and the hold they have upon us. Father’s hands round mine. His blood in me like the Spirit he imagined, which came on me once in fire when the rifle bucked in my hands and hasn’t left through all these nineteen years so that Ambrose, my own brother, is frightened of me, though not near as much as I am of myself and of the ghost that dwells inside me: weeping as he prays, raging through the night.

  Father wasn’t always so cruel, though. When we were boys he went with the cart to Trois-Rivières to sell the bullock. Judah, as we called him, and we’d weaned him from a bottle when his mother died. The snows fell heavy, though it was just November, and Father was late in returning. I was six or seven, Ambrose no more than a babe in the bed beside me, murmuring to himself as he slept, when Father slipped in, grinning, and roused me with a candle.

  “Thaddeus,” he whispered and leaned in ’cross Ambrose to place into my hands a long box cut from cardboard. He watched me open it. Inside were five toy soldiers, cast from lead and painted, glittering in that light. Soldiers wearing white. Red Indians in war paint.

  “For you and Ambrose,” he said, straightening as he backed toward the door, then wished us goodnight where he paused in the doorway, the light guttering on his lips and nose but keeping the eyes hidden. Next morning, we saw them, the other gifts he’d bought with the money the bullock brought him. For Mama there was a shell and the china which sits now in the cabinet, while to Rebecca he gave a slim chain, silver, and hung with glass beads in every colour. She wore this round her neck for years, whether working the cider press or walking with John Turner, and so we buried her with it.

  For himself he bought a painted figurine of a man standing some six inches high and naked or near enough to it, the ribs like ropes beneath the skin. The lips were the red of oak leaves curling, making a half-smile despite the wounds that covered his body, and there were arrows sticking out of his chest at all angles so he bristled like a porcupine.

  I think maybe we’d have laughed at it, Rebecca and me, save for the blood that streamed from every wound and the expression on the figure’s face. That queer smile. His blue eyes like a woman’s and fixed on nothing. He looked like one who’s seen the angels—as I suppose he must have done, for Mama said later he was one of the Papist saints.

  “It’s blasphemous,” she told Father, “having it in the house. You’ll have it for an idol,” she said, and so he did. Placed the figurine on the dressing table in his bedroom which now is ours and there he’d kneel gazing up at it as he’d once beheld his God, or claimed to have done, but as he’d never looked at his wife. Often it was he shut himself inside with it and latched the door so as we knew not to disturb him, even Mama, who took to avoiding him on such days as the Mood was riding him.

  So she termed it, and I don’t doubt she was right, for he seemed sometimes bent double by Its weight and couldn’t see us for the blinders It placed on him. Eight months passed like this and we were all afraid of him. All of us but for Ambrose, who was just two, then three, and this before that statue broke, when he still came running to hear his Father’s call.

  Nights by the fi
re he perched on Father’s knee and watched the shadows on the wall. They moved like water does with the light inside it, frothing as it runs to wild, catching our reflections and breaking them apart while the wind sang in the chimney.

  “What do you see?” Father used to ask, and Ambrose told him such queer and fantastical things as he claimed to have seen: djinnis and veiled maidens, white horses that whirled and leapt amidst the smoke. A woman in black. A girl dancing, an Indian.

  One time he saw a murder, one man striking down another with a metal club.

  “That’s Cain and Abel,” said Mama, smiling, for she’d told the story the night before. But Father just nodded and looked serious.

  “What else is there?” he asked. “What happens after that?”

  But Ambrose didn’t say a thing. Just dropped off Father’s knee to the floor of the sitting room and tottered over to the fire and sat himself down in front of it with the silence falling over us as in answer to the questions asked—and in that silence now the past resounds.

  A sound of shattering, smack of flesh on flesh. Ambrose crying as his nose caves in and Rebecca comes running in her nightgown. Their singing, Rebecca and John, their voices braided. The soft plucking of his guitar. The strings snapping, buzzing as Father’s boot goes through. A single gunshot. The screech of a babe born early.

  Voices in the hall. Audible where I stand half-dreaming on the staircase.

  It’s the Bauers, and they’re talking in German, arguing as they were last night after the sitting when their children came to them again and the wife claimed not to know them. She wouldn’t even acknowledge them for all they moaned and wailed after their mother.

  The husband, he threw himself at the stage and tried to scale the railing before John Turner caught him by his coattails and dragged him to the floor. Mrs. Bauer stood watching with her handkerchief at her mouth and shaking in place with the spasms which rocked her though she wouldn’t come any closer. She moaned, a low, trembling kind of sound, but she wouldn’t go to her husband, and John Turner had to carry him out like a wounded soldier with the weeping man’s arms draped about him.

  A door opens. Flood’s voice floats toward me down the hall, calling my name, but I don’t want to speak to him, not yet. Moving quick, I go down to the kitchen where Sally’s seeing to the breakfast, still humming to herself but a different tune and this one I don’t recognize.

  Breakfast, then, and they’re all assembled: Flood, the Bauers, the widow Mrs. Ambler. Their conversation’s fitful, flickering. Strained but polite.

  Sally excuses herself. She leaves the pots all filthy on the counter and slips through the side door with her basket and shears. I follow her out. ’Cross the glittering lawn to the rubbish heap where lies the old plough (Aaron’s Plough, we called it, though I forget why) with the weeds and wildflowers growing up all round and no one to see as I pull back the tin sheeting that covered the old chicken coop. Gaze into the darkened space beyond, making sure it’s all there, secreted away in that hollow under the plough where we used to hide while Father stalked the woods and the lawn in his heavy black boots and the Thing riding him with Its rage, Its lust.

  Someone behind me. John Turner, leaning on the rake handle which serves him as a walking stick. His hands folded together, the fingers drumming, and for once he’s looking serious. The sneer gone from his features and the mockery from his voice.

  He says: “Been looking for you, Cousin.”

  “That so,” I say.

  “I saw Sally. Waved to her. Called out, too, though she pretended not to hear me.”

  “Maybe she didn’t.”

  “Oh, she heard all right. Admitted as much when I cornered her.”

  “You spoke to her?”

  “I tried. Don’t think she wanted to talk to me.”

  “It’s nothing to do with me,” I say.

  “It’s everything to do with you, Cousin. And you know it.”

  “Tomorrow. The dancing. Evening Star and Chogan. It’ll happen tomorrow.”

  John shakes his head. “She burned everything,” he says. “The dress and the hair and that old woman’s ribbon. All so as she wouldn’t have to dance with me. It’s a hard thing, knowing she hates me that much.”

  “Maybe she’s got good reason,” I say.

  A blur of motion and the rake handle flies up to strike me ’cross the cheek. I throw up my hands but I’m not quick enough, and the second blow lands ’cross the bridge of my nose so that I fall backward, gasping, and hit the ground hard, choking as the warm blood fills my mouth. I open my eyes, see him looming over me. He offers his hand.

  He says: “Shouldn’t talk like that, Cousin. Isn’t me they’re going to hang, is it?”

  “No,” I say, despising myself as I take the hand that’s offered me.

  “Good,” he says. “Would hate to have to go to Sheriff Benson. Tell him what I know.”

  “There’s no need of that.”

  “And that journalist,” he says. “Keep him away from Sally.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “He’s persistent is all. Been talking to Ambrose.”

  “What’d your brother say to him?”

  “Nothing, he—”

  “What’s he remember?”

  “Just pieces. He was so young when it happened.”

  “You better hope that’s true.”

  “He doesn’t remember,” I say. “I can promise that.”

  John shakes his head. Somber. A mocking gravity.

  “What good’s that?” he asks. “The promise of a weak man.”

  Then walks away, swinging the stick before him as he makes for the fields, splitting the dry grass, whipping the heads off dandelions.

  I watch him go. Retrieve my kerchief from my pocket and staunch the flow of blood from my nose. Then, turning, see a face at the window of the sitting room. Flood. He’s watching closely but looks away. I spit blood, taste its sour tang and bound ’cross the lawn to the kitchen.

  Ten o’clock. The last bell hangs over me and all the house like the past we share, sounding its one note over and over and none but me to hear it, and with the blood smeared on my lips and pounding in my ears, I make for the sitting room. There I find Flood with his back to the window, a book open in his hands.

  It’s a slim volume, one I haven’t seen before, the leather soft and brittle at my fingertips when I tear it from his grasp and cast it to the floor. The spine splits on impact, flinging pages ’cross the hearth rug.

  “You said you’d be fair,” I say. “You gave me your word.”

  Flood exhales. His breath is hot and damp.

  “You’re quite right,” he says. “I gave you my word. And I have kept it.”

  His words he chooses carefully. Speaks them soft so as the moment stretches and neither one of us blinks or looks away and I realize I believe him. Then the anger goes, bringing shame, and I look down to see the book where it lays upon the floor, broken, some pages visible with poems or songs written on them.

  “You been sneaking round behind my back. Talking to Ambrose.”

  “I have not spoken to him since Tuesday.”

  “He said he saw you. Last night.”

  “Perhaps he did—I don’t know. But I did not see him.”

  “He saw you,” I say. “In the cave.”

  A flickering about his features: a twitch of his lip like a shadow passing over. His mouth drops open, the tongue just visible so as I think he means to speak. But the teeth come down again, closing over his tongue, and he simply nods.

  “You don’t deny it, then?”

  “There is nothing to deny,” he says.

  His voice is hoarse. “We did nothing wrong.”

  “Isn’t about right or wrong. Just stay away from him is all. Sally, too.”

  “Sally,” he says, dully.

  “What I said isn’t it?”

  “She is betrothed to your cousin. John Turner.”

  “Wh
at do you know about it?”

  “He struck you down just now. You’re bleeding.”

  I dab at my nose with my kerchief. Wince with the heat, the pain of it. Sweat runs down off my forehead to fill the rip in my cheek, salting the wound.

  Flood says: “You’re frightened of him.”

  “Not him.”

  “Then of what are you so afraid?”

  His voice a whisper or little more. Light as feathers, cutting deep. I kick at the book where it lies and send it skating ’cross the floor, strewing loose pages behind it. Some words half-glimpsed: the lady I had found alone . . . “Hold me, hold me.”

  I stuff the kerchief into my jacket, smearing blood about the pocket, and for all my guilt and weakness, I lift my eyes to meet his, find at last the voice to speak.

  “I told you about our father,” I say. “Weren’t you listening?”

  “I was.”

  “Then listen again,” I say. “He was a drinker when he was young. Worse things, besides. But he came to faith at twenty-nine and after that he wouldn’t touch liquor. Went down to a revival in Falmouth where he heard a boy-preacher speak. Got himself baptized right there. He thought he was forgiven, you see, washed clean. He saw the Lord, he said, and maybe this was true, but his terror was such as he spent the rest of his life running from Him. I can’t say as I blame him. His God, He was the butcher of Canaan, and Father feared Him more than death itself such he’d deny the presence of the angels though they came and lighted on the house.”

  Flood says: “The spirits, you mean.”

  “For months, Rebecca and I, we called them up and danced with them in secret ’til one night after supper, Ambrose told Father everything, and he called me downstairs to this room. The fire was going and Rebecca was stood to one side of it with her jaw set and hands balled up. Father was sitting in that chair there with Ambrose to one side of him. My brother looked at me, said to tell him about the spirits. About Spring Willow, he said.

  “I denied it, of course, the same as Rebecca had done, and we thought we were safe enough. But Father was clever. He mixed black ash into a cup with water and added a burning coal so the mixture steamed and smoked. The liar’s punishment, he called it. The water that causeth the curse. He threatened Ambrose with it, raising the cup to his lips and forcing him to drink of it ’til Rebecca dropped to her knees at last and made full her confession. Father nodded, satisfied, and in the throes of his own holiness said as he’d show her mercy.