by Daniel Mills
“So it was me who was punished, Father swinging his belt, and Ambrose howling while Rebecca stood by, silently, eaten up by guilt. Afterward, Father made me to drink from that foul mixture and pronounced our house to be a House of the Lord. His Name, he said, won’t be profaned with talk of spirits that the Enemy sends to test the Faithful. Those were his words. Then Mama come in, weeping, and Father sent us off to bed.”
Flood’s eyes on my face. His voice as soft as snow, falling.
“But that wasn’t the end of it.”
“No. Life would’ve been unbearable for us without them. The spirits, their dancing. Then Ambrose began to speak with voices and Father was forced to apply the whip even on those days the child’s head hurt him and he could scarcely stir for pain. Rebecca, too. Though she was born a girl she was always the strongest among us and didn’t cry out though he tugged at her long hair or struck her ’cross the face with an open hand. Nor did she speak when he came to her later and begged her to turn away from Sin, to cast herself upon the Lord’s mercy, have no more congress with the spirits of the air.
“One night he stripped her to the shift and dragged her outside then fastened the doors against her despite the blowing rain. Hours passed. Mama pleaded with him. Go find her, she said, but he wouldn’t, and our sister’s pride was such she wouldn’t come to the door. When morning came she appeared at the kitchen door, soaked to the skin and shivering, but otherwise unhurt. We learned, later, she’d spent the night in the cave down the gully, but that morning she wouldn’t speak to us. Just climbed the stairs to her room and closed the door.”
Flood says: “And the spirits? They continued to come?”
“They did—but only because we kept on calling them. We couldn’t have stopped even if we’d wanted to and we didn’t. For Ambrose, I think, they were all he had. Strange noises in our room, the bed we shared. Rappings at night like someone wanting to be let in. And those voices . . . well, you’ve heard them yourself. Father pleaded with us but he was helpless to stop it, and what’s more, he knew it. So he wrote to him, the boy-preacher who brought him to faith and who showed him that morning the face of God. Two weeks or more Father waited for a response, walking to Pittsfield to collect the mail each morning, same as Mrs. Ambler does.
“When the letter came it urged him to take certain measures. For the good of our souls, it said, and that night, he forced us to drink from such medicines as might induce vomiting and cleanse the flesh of its corruption, and then afterward, he made us to fast ’til we were near starved—and still the spirits came when we called.”
Flood asks: “And then?”
“This preacher, he paid us a visit. He’d been little more than a child when Father came to him to be baptized. Now he was well past thirty and thin as a corpse with the hair clinging in tufts to his peeling scalp. His clothing was filthy and torn and he smelled like a summer privy. Father summoned us again to this room and lined us up before the hearth so the preacher might inspect us. The man might have been handsome once, but his flesh had sunken in and his skull was plainly visible where it sat within the hood of his skin. He turned his eyes on us, each in turn, laughing a little in his throat when Ambrose took fright. His voice, though, hadn’t changed, not since that morning in Falmouth, for it boomed over us like a clap of thunder.
“The first step in such matters, he said, is to verify the truth of these phenomena. So looming over us with the Bible in hand, he called out Satan and his devils and urged them to reveal their presence. Placed his hand upon Ambrose’s head and asked the demon inside to speak its name. But the spirits were quiet. That night alone they wouldn’t come.
“Nothing happened, and the preacher got angry. Lashed out at Father and cursed him for a simpleton. Reminded him of the troubles he’d taken to travel here. For his part, Father just cowered before him. It was pathetic. He apologized and begged the thin man to stay the night and kept on apologizing right up ’til the moment our visitor passed beyond the doorway and vanished into the night.
“Father watched him go. The tears were standing in his eyes and he didn’t think to hide them. Then he went into the kitchen, was a long time returning. Came back into the room carrying a cook pot wrapped in an old shirt. He’d melted down all of the candles and filled the pot with hot tallow which he used to stop our mouths so as we couldn’t cry out. Then he slipped the belt from round his waist. He looked at us and I expect we thought to see hatred there or desperation. But there was nothing at all, not even anger. He snapped the belt in his hands, I remember, cracking the leather ’gainst itself, and we all knew what was coming.”
Flood clears his throat.
“Enough,” he says. “You needn’t continue.”
His face is pale and haggard and in this moment he looks at least as tired as I am. He kneels down on the floor and gathers the leaves of his book, checking the numbers of each page before sliding them back to the broken spine.
I say: “You said I was afraid. After all that, what could possibly frighten me?”
Flood exhales. Speaks without looking up. “And John Turner?”
“What about him?”
“You didn’t mention him.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
And because I don’t want to speak of it, I leave him by the hearth where he kneels with his head bowed, looking like a penitent as he sorts through them, those torn pages marked with their disordered verses, a narrative all in pieces.
Outside. I cross the lawn quick, not quite running. Pass through the orchard where the stench of mould’s heavy all round where some fruit’s shaken loose from the branches, lies mashed up and rotten. Heat steams out of the grass, whirling about like smoke. Into the cemetery now where five are buried, one beside the other, and just four stones to mark them.
Mama. Joanna. Jeremiah. Rebecca.
I see the cuttings Sally left: sprigs of aster and sage, the heads of two sunflowers. See those words scratched in the stone. Not dead but sleeping. Recall John Turner’s sobbing as we laid her down and the snow which blew out of the fields to cover us. All that came later, though. It was spring of ’54 when the boy-preacher came and early summer, June, when Abijah, our uncle, returned to Moriah, a widower.
Fifteen years before he’d married a woman from Brandon, a girl he’d been chasing after since they were children in the schoolhouse together. She didn’t want him, though, and refused him long as she’d the right of refusing anyone. Then she fell pregnant (a hired man, it was said, a Canadian) and in her shame cast herself into the river—and though she survived the fall Abijah married her anyway and moved north up to Brandon where he raised the boy John as though he were his own. But relations with the family were strained. The girl, she died young, and her father bought back the lease on the rooms they rented, so Abijah was dispossessed with nothing to his name but his clothes and the child sprung from another man’s seed.
Mama took them in. Father objected, of course, but this was her brother and she could scarce have done otherwise, though she must have known what it might lead to. Rebecca was sixteen, then, of much an age with the boy John. In the evenings, he joined us at the supper table and afterwards settled himself on a bench by the fire in the parlour. Rebecca sat beside him, always, and he had with him the guitar his dead mother gave him. One night, I remember, he started strumming it, and we all gathered round, even Father, not to join in but just to listen: those holy words in their mouths, their voices moving one within the other. Pure like the whiteness of the sky in winter that folds the landscape into it, blurring all together.
Mornings in the fields she brought him his bread and milk, and afterward, she walked beside him, hand in hand, when she thought no one was watching. She didn’t see us, not at first, but we were there, always, Ambrose and me. We trailed them at a distance through the orchard and ’cross the lawn, stalking them like barn cats—and it was the barn where they went at first.
We heard them inside, their voices. Ambrose thought they were sin
ging, but I knew better. They lingered there an hour or more, and when Rebecca stepped outside with the dusk descending all round, she carried in her person all the fire and triumph of an avenging angel. Her eyes met mine, and there was nothing of shame there, nor did she chastise me as I expected, but she merely smiled, gently, then passed upon her way.
We didn’t speak of it, not then or ever, but she knew what I knew and was more careful after that, taking pains to avoid the barn and the orchard, meaning it was early September before we heard them again. This time it was in the ice house. Ambrose and I hid among the weeds and pressed up close against the siding, listening for their quickened breathing, those few soft moans rising and falling in a kind of song. Then Father appeared out of the dusk, giving no warning of his approach, like as though he were summoned from the very air. He advanced on the door to the ice house, walking with such cold purpose as we knew at once what would follow from it, the heat of that summer and its dying light and the song they sang between them.
Father was a brute, but he was right about some things. Predestination, he called it, a game where everything’s fixed. The whole of the world remade in the image of one moment, then forced to circle round it, never free. For us, it was that instant when he passed beyond the threshold and saw them at it. We heard their cries of surprise, then fear. A crash of wood that was the guitar breaking. Then Ambrose yowling beside me, panting and screeching without cease so I can hear it now among the stones with the birds gone quiet and the wind withdrawing. That old terror fills the silence, inhabiting the land as sure as the soul dwells in a body.
“You hear that, Mr. Flood?” I say, talking to no one. “Spirits are real. There’s one, at least, which haunts us.”
But the orchard’s quiet, still as the morning which follows a slow passing. A draught horse comes into view, crossing the fields to the west, and the Carter boy riding it bareback, urging him on, striking the beast with a stick about the flanks.
The horse tosses its head, baring the teeth in its fright, and still the boy thrashes it, laughing, ’til he breaks the stick across its nose. I shout at him. Cast out the past with my voice and advance on him, descending the hill where it slopes to the fence-line.
“Leave that horse alone,” I say.
The boy reels round to face me, grinning.
“Ain’t your horse,” he says, and whips the broken stick ’cross the beast’s neck.
The horse stamps the ground feebly but makes no other protest, and before I know myself, I’m halfway over the fence yelling and the boy’s turned the horse about and slashed it into motion. He turns his head and calls back over his shoulder.
“I’ll tell my dad about this. This here ain’t your land anymore and you know it.”
The horse clomps up over the rise and down the opposite slope ’til the hoofbeats are too far off for hearing. Turning, I start back toward the house, thinking of my grandfather, who was also Abijah, and who worked these fields when he was young. And of his father, my great-grandfather Isaiah, who cleared the pastures of brush and stump and planted the apple trees. The orchard now at the peak of summer with the trees all gorged and laden, branches hanging down to brush at my face. The blood drying in my nose, sweat stinging in the open cheek. The parlour silent when I reach the house and make my way to the kitchen, where the basin’s full of the morning’s dishes and flies beginning to gather.
Half past two. Dinner’s late. I call up the steps for Sally, then Ambrose, but none come in answer, so it falls to me again to set the table and serve up dinner.
Mrs. Ambler comes down, garbed in black as is customary. She sniffs at what she terms “the tardiness of the luncheon” then takes her seat at the table’s head and piles high her plate. The Bauers enter and sit down across from each other, unspeaking since yesterday, and Friedrich glares at his wife who won’t look at him, doesn’t eat.
Flood’s late to the table. He sits himself down beside Friedrich Bauer, opposite Mrs. Ambler, and makes his apologies. “You needn’t have waited for me,” he says.
Mrs. Ambler says: “It is fortunate, then, that we did not.”
Her needles click together and I can see she’s knitting a cap such as you might wear in winter though it’s much too small for herself or for any full-grown man.
The Bauers rise and excuse themselves. They go out together but part in the corridor with the husband climbing the stair while his wife retreats into the sitting room with a light step like the rain. Mrs. Ambler’s needles click and rattle, the way glass does when the wind’s up behind it.
Flood speaks. The same softness is there as before, the same gentleness. So quiet I can’t make out the question he puts to Mrs. Ambler.
The needles stop. The widow says: “Actually, she did not come last night.”
“No?”
“I admit I thought it queer. Always she has come to Thaddeus’s sitting.”
“Perhaps he did not call her up?”
“Perhaps not.”
A pause, then. A moment of silence in which I hold the cook pot and rag and close my eyes listening.
Flood asks: “Will she come tonight?”
“I do not think it likely. Ambrose does not possess his brother’s gifts for materialization. Nonetheless, I am sure she will be present tomorrow. You may depend on it.”
Flood exhales heavily. He pushes back his chair.
“Unfortunately, Mrs. Ambler, I rather fear that I cannot.”
With that, he goes, and Mrs. Ambler turns her attention back to her knitting. The needles click and pop like the sound of her old joints and the cook pot slides from my hands as a realization takes hold.
She burned everything, said John Turner.
Ambrose said: There was a fire.
Flood must have found it, the fire pit, with the charred dress and the ribbon she was to wear, and this he’ll call the proof of our imposture. He’ll label us charlatans and thieves and publish it in his paper so all the world knows of it. There’ll be no more guests, no more sittings, and though I sell the house from under us even this will not suffice nor serve.
John blames us for it, Rebecca’s death, and he isn’t wrong to do so. He would see us undone, unhoused, and Ambrose and me, our father’s children, thrown on the mercy of a God that cares but little. For though I sold off the fields and gave him the price of them, he was yet unsatisfied. The sittings, too, and all they’ve brought us, all of it taken and squandered where there’s but one thing he wants from us—and she herself has risked it all.
“Sally,” I shout.
Mrs. Ambler’s needles stop. Click, begin again.
Through the door and upstairs to her room. Empty, the curtains whispering where the breeze makes ripples on them. The north window’s open and with space enough for me to thrust out my head and look toward the woods, the road. Vacant as this room or the noose which awaits me. The absence she left, Rebecca, and always the shadows gathering round us, closing over me and hastening the dusk.
I slam down the window, dash the vials of scent to the floor and stomp down on them. Punch at the wall, bruising fist and forearm. Then drop back against the footboard of the bed, groaning like a felled tree. I strike it hard, slide to the floor, and I’m facing the dressing table which is Sally’s now, though it was once Rebecca’s. The mirror wherein she gasped and thrashed in her labouring and could not be stilled nor comforted. The stand where she kept her diary, writing in it by night like the fine lady she thought herself.
There’s water in the basin, cool and clear. I submerge my face. Blinking, feel the cold slip down my cheeks. Slide open one drawer of the bureau with its pins and beads and tortoiseshell combs then try the other with its nibs and ink, a penknife I don’t recognize. Not Rebecca’s. Not the blade she held out before her that night in March, the point wobbling when the doorjamb broke and Father reared over her, looking like a mountain in that light.
The memory rides me hard. Fastens itself to my back, the limbs hooked round and holding. The breath leave
s me as the quiet lingers, stagnant as a dream of death, where my hands are not my hands, those legs not mine for all they float me through the doorway toward the steps, their voices.
Mama’s room. They’re inside. I hear them together, Ambrose and Sally. My brother sobbing as she asks him something, the same question over and over. I come closer and bending down push my ear to the wood grain.
“He was on top of her,” Ambrose says. “They were wrestling.”
Sally’s voice, low and breathless. She asks him another question.
“Couldn’t move,” he says. “I was scared.”
Then step back of a sudden, all thoughts scattered now to think what he remembers. You better hope that’s true, said John, and I’m thinking on the icehouse and what happened there, what Ambrose might have told to Sally. The way we hid among the weeds and listened to their breathing fast and full and Rebecca crying out.
There was a crack between the pine slats, a seam without light. We pressed ourselves to it, our faces, and there we saw them at it, naked, the two of them like dogs and our sister gazing back at me and through me, looking like a saint in the throes of martyrdom who’s heard the angels singing and seen, as Father did, the face of God.
Ambrose says: “She saw me. She looked at me.”
“Hush now,” says Sally and begins to hum, soft as wind in the pine trees and just the way he likes when the sickness overtakes him, but this time, it seems, he won’t be comforted.
“Didn’t do aught,” he says.
John Turner whimpering and turning to take flight with his trousers round his ankles. Father’s fists battering him about the face and throat and the boy too afraid to do aught but fly toward the woods. Rebecca, then, with her dress bundled to her breasts, trying to hide them though it proved no use. Father grasped her by the hair and dragged her back toward the house with all the hell and fury of Jehovah on his lips. Her scalp tore and the hair came out in tufts, black but tinged with blood at the roots where they’d ripped free and all while we watched, Ambrose screeching, the two of us too young to go and help her, too scared to run.
