Moriah

by Daniel Mills

The boys nod again, as though they understand, and they tug at the nurse’s skirts ’til at last she shuffles them toward the railing in their flowing gowns, always following close. Friedrich’s arm slips through the slats. He buries his fingers in the folds of Johannes’ nightshirt, but the child does not retreat from him but merely lowers his mouth to Friedrich’s ear, the lips red and round and scarcely moving.

  Friedrich nods. “I will tell her,” he says.

  Johannes steps back toward the nurse, the gown slipping free of Friedrich’s grasp, even as his brother, Martin, leans forward to whisper into his father’s other ear.

  Again Friedrich nods. “So will it be.”

  The moment is past. The boys glide back toward the spirit cabinet, and the nurse draws the curtain shut behind them. Friedrich straightens and returns to his seat, looking like one who has taken the Lord’s Supper and knows himself forgiven. He sits.

  From out of the dark there comes a new sound, a hand drum’s steady thumping, accented by a crack like a snare drum, much like the noise I heard this morning. I look to the music table, but the lighting is too dim to make out anything, and when I return my attention to the stage I see that she is there, Evening Star, just as Mrs. Ambler promised me.

  She darts from the cabinet with the grace of a fawn then leaps ’cross the stage at a bound, spinning so her bare legs show, the braid bouncing on her back, tied off with a ribbon. It is a different ribbon, I’m sure, purchased this afternoon in town, but so much like the other in length and colour that I can only watch, transfixed, as Evening Star—Sally—swings her lithe body between the shadows, blowing the candle-flames horizontal.

  The light shifts, revealing Ambrose where he sits in the front row with fists clenched at his forehead, hiding a face full of pain and fear. Behind me there comes a ragged exhalation, nearly a sob, and Mrs. Ambler blows into her handkerchief.

  The drumming continues, low and constant, accentuated by that same cracking sound, which now seems to emanate from inside the Spirit Cabinet, and all this while Sally dances to stop time in its turning, young and fair as Isaac and soon to be offered up in the same way.

  She retreats toward the Spirit Cabinet. The drumming quickens in time with her dancing and the black curtains whirl round, hiding her from view, even as the drum goes silent, replaced by three sharp cracks as of a revolver and the thump of heavy boots on the stage floor.

  Ambrose shouts. He leaps to his feet yelling incoherently as a man comes charging from the Cabinet. It’s Thaddeus but dressed as he was this morning in the same mouldy green-black clothes with the old belt looped round his hands. He snarls, cracking the belt, and approaches the railing where his brother stands quaking, red-faced and wild.

  Ambrose springs forward, moving more quickly than I imagined possible. He grasps hold of something long and thin, which glints dully as he brings it round, using both hands for the weight of it. The iron pry bar—left in the corner after Wednesday’s examination of the room.

  Thaddeus does not move, makes no attempt to avoid the blow. The pry bar strikes him across the jaw, shattering the bone and dropping him to the ground. Dark fluid pours from his mouth: broken teeth, the snapped remnants of a tongue. He twitches, chokes, sputters. Kicks out and upends the nearest candle, covering himself with the dark.

  By now Friedrich Bauer is on his feet, as am I, and Mrs. Ambler is crying out for light. Footsteps come rushing out of the dark, John Turner’s, but Ambrose is already over the railing with the rod in hand, visible in silhouette as he brings it up, drives in the point.

  We run toward the stage. Friedrich vaults the rail even as the curtains part and a figure darts from the Spirit Cabinet, a woman running. Sally.

  John Turner is first to reach Ambrose. He catches hold of the other man’s arms and wrestles free the pry bar. Casts it to the boards, where it bounces once and rolls toward the Cabinet before coming to a halt against it.

  Sally slows and steps over the pry bar then picks her way round Thaddeus where he lies, the blood spreading out beneath him. She is dressed as Evening Star, her dark hair knotted into a braid and the new ribbon tied through. She reaches Ambrose where he kneels, slumped forward and shaking in his cousin’s grip. Takes his face into her two hands and speaks to him softly, soothingly, her words inaudible for Mrs. Ambler’s screaming.

  “Bring up the lamps,” the old woman cries. “The light—”

  Friedrich walks to the end of the stage and bends to retrieve the last remaining candle. He stands over Thaddeus and casts its glow across the broken skull, the savaged face.

  “Coming for me,” Ambrose says. “Thaddeus said.”

  We see the splintered teeth and lips, the nose split where the pry bar went through into the right eye, pulping it in the socket. Friedrich waves the candle over the cracked forehead. The left eye is open but unseeing, the pupil black, dilated.

  March 28th. Dawn.

  Too early. The blankets are wet. I think

  January ’64, Brandy Station.

  My boots were mired in mud and filth and the rain was sheeting down when Stephen Van Parks came for me at a run. He was nineteen, a Rhinebeck boy, and churchgoing, though not so much from devotion as fear. That night, I remember, he flew in from the rain panting with exertion, terrified and breathless. He stammered something about devils and sin and immediately I assumed there were women in the camp. “You must come,” he said, and with that, he led me to the campsite adjacent ours, which belonged to a regiment from Albany.

  He stopped outside the mess tent and motioned for me to enter though he would go no further himself. The tent was as dark and silent as any church I had encountered, though it reeked of mud and smoke and unwashed men. A space had been cleared inside near the front where a portion of the canvas was left exposed. Benches were jammed together near the back and the men were seated on every surface available with their eyes turned toward the front, toward that patch of empty canvas where a series of images took shape, swimming into focus.

  A road by moonlight. A lone traveller, glimpsed in silhouette. The man’s movements were queer and jerking, the canvas fluttering behind him, speckled with rain. Through this sea of shadows he made his way, following the lane where it bent past a low stone wall, a row of bare trees. But he was not alone. There was a second shape behind him, a woman. She increased in size even as we watched, drawing up behind him so it seemed certain she would overtake him. Her arms were open and outstretched, the long fingers spread. Her dark hair enfolded him.

  The canvas went dark.

  The men booed and jeered, and the magic lanternist fumbled with the argent lamp, unable to get it re-lit. “Patience,” he cried. “Patience!”

  Through all this the rain had not let up, and later, it soaked through my clothes and spilled from me in torrents as I trudged back to our campsite. Stephen met me outside of my tent. His white face hung like a lamp in the gloom, pallid and dripping as on the day, months later, when we dragged him ’cross the churned-up ground near Spotsylvania Courthouse and shovelled him into a pit with the others as night was falling, and the heat pressed down on me, then as now, where I sit with a view of the car windows opposite.

  The light through the trees, flickering. My shadow on the wall.

  A shape behind me: the conductor.

  He apologizes. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

  His brow yields and softens and he peers down at me with the light on his broad forehead, the shadows joined and flowing together as the train plunges through a pinewood.

  “Saw you last week,” he says. “You were going up to

  Rutland.”

  “I was,” I say—and recognize the conductor by his thinning hair, grey and wispy, the memory of his face heavy with shock as he led us from the train, moving like a general on the march so the ladies would not notice the iron stench of offal or see the red streaks underfoot.

  “The boy,” he says, and shakes his head, comprehending nothing. “A terrible business. Bad as anything I saw in the wa
r. Worse.”

  I nod, say nothing.

  The conductor disappears into the next car and I return my attention to the wall opposite, where the last two days play out with a curious juddering motion as on a dark canvas, the tree-shadows joined and flowing together along the side of the train car.

  Ambrose: open mouth, bloodied hands. The realization took him, and he howled. He knelt upon the stage and struck his skull against the floor, opening a rent in his forehead while we struggled to catch hold of him, John Turner and I, and Friedrich Bauer ran to the next farm for help. We pinned his arms to his body and dragged him ’cross the stage through the wings cast by a single candle then pushed him up against the wall, hard enough to stun him. We held him there so he could not move save for his head, which he whipped back and forth, as though in agony, and the spray from his torn scalp spattered the wall behind him.

  “A rope,” I cried. “Quick!”

  But Sally was gone and Mrs. Ambler was of no use. She would not move from where she stood near the back of

  the room with her hands folded together at her chest and

  her gaze fixed on the Spirit Cabinet, lips moving without sound.

  I shouted for her, but she didn’t hear, and remained unlistening through all the long minutes that stretched ’til Friedrich returned at last in the company of two young men, brothers, who treated Ambrose as they would a stubborn horse.

  They lifted him up bodily by one leg then the other and lowered him into a chair, the same he had vacated an hour before. The men had brought rope with them, which they used to tie off his wrists and fasten his ankles to the chair legs.

  A third brother, I learned, had gone to Brandon for the sheriff, and so we waited, gathered around Ambrose’s chair like congregants to listen as he sobbed and murmured, pleading for the girl Spring Willow. He begged her to come, and swiftly, and later, he sang with the voice of a woman while the blood crusted and turned black on his hands.

  We did not speak, any of us. We did not dare even to look at one another but waited in the candlelight as Ambrose sang and the fires dimmed and Friedrich went to fetch a lamp.

  Dawn came, and the sheriff. He arrived in the company of two deputies who wore dark flannels, with shadows under their eyes as though they had been roused out of bed while they were still dead-drunk. They smouldered. By contrast, the sheriff Benson was soft-spoken and gentle as he untied Ambrose’s wrists from the chair-back and buckled the manacles round and all while Ambrose continued to sing to himself.

  Let me hide myself in thee.

  “Easy now,” said Benson.

  He unknotted the ropes which bound Ambrose’s ankles and helped him out of the chair. The deputies, Benson said, were to remain in order to question the witnesses while he accompanied the suspect back to town.

  Ambrose shuffled toward the door with the sheriff behind him and he was no longer singing but proceeded with a low hum in his throat as of a dying animal—and in that early light I glimpsed the shards of his pain behind his eyes, which throbbed and glittered where the sunlight struck through them, and I said that I would go with them.

  “I’m a journalist,” I said. “You’ll want to speak with me.”

  We passed the doctor on the stair, summoned from Brandon to attend the death. He tipped his cap to the sheriff and hurried past, the bag clutched to his chest.

  Ambrose descended the steps and then walked on ahead of us, shuffling forward with the meekness of a lamb led to the altar. He continued through the dining room and the parlour, then passed outside to where the sheriff’s cart waited, the mare stamping and twitching.

  The driver leapt down at our approach, the crop in hand though Ambrose needed no coaxing. He climbed into the cart-bed and seated himself with his head hung, scalp black where the blood had dried to it. I sat down beside him. I said his name, but he wasn’t listening. The driver resumed his seat on the box and tapped the horse about the flanks.

  We descended the hill and were nearly to the woodlot when I chanced to look behind me. There were no fires lit inside the house, the chimneys cold and smokeless. Curtains were drawn across every window save those of a second floor room, Mrs. Ambler’s, where the old woman waited to be questioned, seated in her chair beyond the glass with her face turned to the south.

  And Sally. I spied her where she stood beyond the orchard. She hadn’t changed her clothing but wore the Indian girl’s costume with its foreshortened skirts and her bare legs showing. Her skin was brown and greasy, likely rubbed with hog fat, and there were black flecks scattered up the length of her calves where she had approached too near to Thaddeus’s body.

  By then the sun had come up over the hills and set the light to glimmering about her, crowning her with fire where she lingered over the graves of her mother and sister, keeping vigil, and though she must have heard the cart she did not turn to see me watching, waving goodbye.

  In Moriah, the Sheriff locked Ambrose into a private room at the back of the alehouse, then he led me to another room where he took down my deposition.

  We began with an account of the previous night and what had transpired in the Circle Room. Afterward, I told him of the other séances, the spirits that were said to visit the Yellow House each night, telling him all I had written for The Sunday Echo, nothing more.

  “Did you find it?” he asked. “What you were looking for.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “No proof, then, they were faking it?”

  “No,” I said, lying though it made no difference. “Quite the opposite, in fact.”

  The questioning lasted much of the morning, and afterward, I was left alone for hours in the heat of the day while Benson consulted with his deputies, the doctor. At noon, I was given a simple luncheon of mutton and beer, and in the evening, Benson rejoined me for a cold dinner and a shared pipe. This we took on the porch while mosquitoes swarmed in clouds above the pipe’s glower. We were both hoarse, exhausted. Benson cleared his throat.

  He said: “Appreciate your taking the time to talk with me. Didn’t mean to detain you so long, but I trust your opinion is all. Being an impartial actor as you are. Someone who’s got no part to play in all this.”

  I turned my face away. Benson finished his pipe. He slapped the bowl against his knee, collapsing the air inside with a clap like distant guns, breaking bones. The screams of men made boys in their undoing. A night-bird was singing.

  I said: “He didn’t mean to do it.”

  Benson shrugged, a helpless gesture. He slipped the pipe into his pocket.

  “You saw the wounds,” he said. “Same as the rest of us.”

  “He didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t understand—”

  “Maybe not. But he knows what he’s done. There’s some would say that’s good enough.”

  “What will happen to him?”

  Benson was quiet. He stepped to the porch railing, closed his hands around it. Past the village, the hills rose domed and black with a ribbon of dusk behind them.

  “Isn’t up to me,” he said. “The Lynches, you understand, they have a bad name hereabouts. There’s some would like to see the boy hang, but it mightn’t come to that. Anyone can see his mind’s been broken.”

  “An asylum, then?”

  “If he’s lucky,” he said, and we went back inside.

  My deposition was signed and witnessed. The deputies arrived at the alehouse and Benson declared we were finished. The inquest was to take place in three days’ time but my presence there was not required: I was free to return to New York.

  I asked Benson if I might see Ambrose before I left. The sheriff nodded and showed me to the room in which he was being held. We found him lying on a thin cot, curled up on himself with a bedsheet cast over him despite the heat and there were dark stains in the fabric—sweat, perhaps, or

  urine.

  “Ambrose,” I said, but he gave no response save to whimper and withdraw beneath the sheet. Nothing to do. Nothing to save. Benson did not s
peak, only placed a hand upon my shoulder, and that was how I left him.

  It was ten-thirty by then, too late to return to the Yellow House, so I spent the night in a room behind the general store, watched over by the birdlike Mr. Fox who hovered about me with the practiced solicitude borne of years of caring for his invalid wife, while the woman herself thumped and clattered overhead, her footfalls echoing.

  In the morning, I slipped from the house early, while the Foxes were asleep, and struck out for the Yellow House. The day was warm with the sun flooding the landscape but there was no one about, nobody on the road, and I remembered that it was Sunday, a day of rest.

  It had been seven days since I boarded the train to Vermont. Ten years since last I stood in the pulpit and preached of forgiveness and faith as if I understood what those words meant or ever would, though God knows I have tried. The things I wrote:

  In all this he was unable to uncover any evidence whatsoever of imposture or deceit. In the absence of such evidence, then, he can only conclude these phenomena to be genuine.

  I reached the Yellow House. The windows stared back at me, sightless and shut, the house closed up as fast as any ocean-going vessel. I feared the door would be bolted, the household fast asleep, but the handle yielded at my touch and admitted me to the darkened parlour, which was silent but for the click of the grandfather clock, the dial invisible where it floated in the dimness, curtains drawn to slits.

  Sally had placed my luggage in the doorway, my portmanteau and carpetbag. Her meaning in this was clear enough, I thought, but then I heard her voice from the shadows past the clock and saw where she sat cross-legged on the floor.

  She wore the same blue dress as when first we met, when she stepped from the light with the sun behind her and the sparks of colour in her eyes, which were Kitty’s.

  “They’ve all gone,” she said. “Mrs. Ambler left with Friedrich.”

  “Oh. I did not see them on the road.”