We Hear the Dead

by Dianne K. Salerni

  “Hurry! Hurry!” he called urgently, throwing open the door.

  Mrs. Bouton grasped me by the arm and thrust me out the door toward her husband, who unceremoniously took me about the waist and swung me to the ground. “Run for the house!” he urged, turning back to deliver his young sister in the same manner.

  I did as I was told. Flinging open the door, I stumbled inside and retreated into the dark safety of their front room. Annabel and Mrs. Bouton followed swiftly upon my heels, and Mr. Bouton came after, leaving his horse hitched to the carriage and bolting the door behind him.

  “Are they there?” gasped Mrs. Bouton.

  “They were behind us the entire way, until the very end,” he said. “I don’t see them now.”

  “Perhaps they’re gone.”

  Mr. Bouton looked doubtful, and he turned to the window, approaching cautiously and peering around the curtain without pushing it aside in a normal manner.

  “Who?” demanded Annabel. “Who was behind us? What is happening?”

  “The men at the river, the ones who said the ferry was gone,” her brother replied. “They were up to no good, I fear, and they followed us in their own wagon when we left. Girls,” he said, turning from the window to face us, “I want you to go to your room and stay there. Do not leave for any reason. I’m sure we’ll be safe enough inside.”

  “Are they out there? What do they want?” Annabel cried.

  Mr. Bouton tried to control his features, but his eyes went to me almost against his will. I felt suddenly cold in my hands and my feet, as if the blood had left my extremities. “I don’t see them,” he said. “Perhaps they have gone.”

  “Are they robbers?” my friend persisted. “Do they want money?”

  “We don’t know, Annabel,” Mrs. Bouton said in her low, reassuring voice. “Please go to your room and try not to be afraid. Robert has everything well in hand.”

  It was useless to tell us not to be afraid after they had shown themselves to be so frightened. But we went to our room like obedient girls and lit the lamp and sat upon the bed together, holding hands. We could hear the indistinct voices of Annabel’s brother and his wife, although we could not make out their words.

  “I wish John were here,” Annabel sighed after a time. I nodded my understanding, but I rather wished myself wherever John was now, instead of him here with us in this house. My heart was beating so hard it felt as if my whole body were shaking. Suddenly this place seemed intolerably strange to me, and I wanted desperately to be back in Rochester with my family. What had possessed Leah to send me here, where strange men waylaid us in the street and followed us home with unknown intent?

  An unexpected thump outside the walls of the house made us flinch. “What was that?” gasped Annabel. She stood and took up the lamp, moving over to the window.

  “No, Annabel!” I cried with sudden premonition, reaching out a hand to her.

  The window exploded with a horrific blast, showering us with flying glass. Our screams were lost in the roar of shotgun fire. I flung myself to the floor on the far side of the bed, covered my ears with my hands, and pressed my face to the floor. The gas lamp fell to the floor and rolled, and it was a wonder that it did not break open or catch the bedclothes on fire. A series of loud crashes followed the gunfire, as rocks and bricks hurtled through the broken window to smash the objects on Annabel’s chiffonier

  I don’t know how long the barrage lasted. I heard Mr. Bouton shouting, and the door to the room flung open. “Annabel! Maggie!” he cried.

  My ears still ringing from the shotgun blast, I crawled out from behind the bed, seeking safety with Mr. Bouton.

  My first sight was Annabel, stretched out across the floor, feebly trying to lift her head. Blood was running in long streaks down her face. I screamed and screamed and screamed until Mrs. Bouton came and shook me into silence.

  ***

  I passed the next three days in blind terror. We were virtually prisoners inside the house. People could come to us, like the doctor who stitched up Annabel’s head and the chief of police, but any time members of the Bouton family stepped outside they were met with flying rocks and pieces of brick. I was locked into a small storage area for my own safety, because it was the only room with no windows. Annabel stayed with me as much as possible, but the resemblance to a prison cell was unmistakable.

  The chief of police, a sly-looking individual with a perpetual sneer, was outwardly sympathetic but useless. He claimed to have thoroughly searched the neighboring lumberyard and the surrounding area for the men who were stalking and spying upon us but to have found no one. He was unmoved by Mr. Bouton’s insistence that we were under siege, because he himself was unable to find any perpetrators. The best he could do, he offered with his slick smirk, was to place some of his men in the Bouton house to provide us a live-in guard.

  The Boutons refused immediately, and once the policeman was gone, Mr. Bouton took action to procure his own source of protection. Soon the house was guarded night and day by a group of men who were friends and associates of the Boutons. Annabel’s young man was among them, but I never saw him.

  I did not leave my room. I shivered, wrapped in blankets that could not warm me; I wept until I vomited; and I slept when exhaustion overwhelmed me.

  “Why?” I cried to Annabel. “Why would anyone want to kill me?”

  “I don’t know.” Poor, devoted Annabel tried to soothe me, although she was the one who had been scarred by the incident.

  “Why can’t the police find them?” It astounded me that such madmen could act freely in a modern city such as Troy. “Who are they, even?” I wailed. “I do not know my enemies! How many are out there?”

  She tried to answer honestly. She never insulted my intelligence by trying to deceive me. “Robert says there were two men who followed our carriage in a wagon. And he saw two more upon the East Street Bridge, which is why he chose not to cross there. So that makes four, Maggie, that we know of.”

  “How could I have made four mortal enemies?” I sobbed. “I am just a girl. Don’t they know I am only a girl?”

  Annabel put her arms about me, and we held each other close in fear and dread. “We invited you into danger,” she whispered, “but I swear we knew it not. We did not foresee that anyone could find such offense with spiritualism—when there are so many graver sins in our nation.”

  On the third day, the door to my little prison opened and Leah swept in, looking as fierce as a mother bear. Breaking into fresh sobs, I hurled myself to my feet and into her arms.

  Leah turned on Mr. Bouton, her voice tight with outrage. “Why is she shut up in this room?”

  “It is the only room without a window,” he replied wearily. “We didn’t want any more shots taken at her.”

  Perhaps Leah took note of his worried face, or perhaps she saw for the first time how Annabel’s lovely features were red and swollen around the stitches in her forehead. For whatever reason, she modified her tone when she said, “I am grateful to you for keeping her safe.”

  “We need to get both of you out of town as soon as possible,” Mr. Bouton said. “No one accosted you coming in, because they don’t know who you are, but if we try to take Maggie out, shots will be fired.”

  “Men with arms escorted me here from the train station,” Leah said.

  “Those are associates of mine, but they cannot guarantee protection from sharpshooters. Even the rocks can do substantial damage,” he added ruefully, rubbing his head where he had apparently been struck.

  “The police?” ventured Leah.

  “Are no help,” Mr. Bouton finished. “The less contact we have with them, the better. We shall have to smuggle you out.”

  “The wagon,” whispered Mrs. Bouton. At this, there was a long moment of silence while Mr. Bouton and his wife regarded each other. Then they looked at Mr. Bouton’s young sister.
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br />   “You can trust them,” Annabel said simply. “They are supporters of our cause. Amy Post recommends them.”

  Leah narrowed her eyes and looked questioningly at Mr. Bouton.

  “We have a wagon,” he explained, “with a false bottom.”

  And with those words he revealed himself to be a conductor on the Underground Railroad, one of those men who personally transported fugitives from slavery to the border of Canada. This was the reason he had been able to call upon an organized group of men to guard his home. This is why he had not wanted police in the house, and why the police wanted nothing to do with him. Under the Fugitive Slave Act, he was a criminal.

  My chatty friend Annabel, who had filled her letters with pages and pages of information about her life in Troy, had never hinted or given me any reason to suspect what they really did here. I did not even know that she knew Amy Post, let alone that I had been recommended to her as a sympathetic friend. I looked around at the tiny, airless room in which I had been kept and realized that I was not the first occupant to seek safety here.

  “If you can tolerate the wagon,” Mr. Bouton went on, “my associate can conduct you as far as Albany.”

  “You have done right by my sister so far,” Leah acceded. “We will place ourselves in your hands for deliverance.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Maggie

  A diversion was needed to get us out of the house. Annabel assured us with confidence that her brother was a master of misdirection. She little suspected that she was addressing two women quite accustomed to deception, and I marveled at the number of secrets that seemingly open people kept from one another.

  Robert Bouton planned and executed a double diversion that began with a round of fireworks going off near the lumberyard that served as cover for our tormentors. While they were erupting with a frightening show of light and color, Mr. Bouton drove his carriage practically onto the front porch, and a short-statured person concealed in a hooded cloak dashed from the house into the carriage, which promptly took off in a cloud of dust.

  It was supposed to look like me, trying to escape by carriage under the cover of the firecrackers. In fact, it was Annabel’s young man, John, nearly bent double to conceal his height, and the carriage was filled with ammunitions. Anyone thinking to waylay a helpless girl would receive an unpleasant surprise. This was the real distraction, and it served us well, for we saw two men take off on foot to pursue the carriage, and shortly thereafter a wagon with two more men appeared on the road careening in the same direction.

  Leah and I took this occasion to clamber through a window at the back of the house and into an open wagon waiting nearby. One of Mr. Bouton’s friends bade us lie down on our backs in the bottom of the wagon, and then he lay the false floor on top of us.

  It was as though the lid of a coffin had been closed upon us.

  I panicked immediately as the light and air vanished and thrust my hands out to scrabble at the wooden planks, drawing in breath to scream. Leah threw her arms around me, as best she could in the confined space, and held me down. The wagon lurched forward, and we slid unpleasantly backward in the first moment and then hurtled feet first at an alarming speed, helpless and blind in the darkness.

  If I had been in my right mind, I might have felt pity for the others who had traveled in this wagon, fleeing enemies just as single-minded and relentless. Elderly men, women with infants, the injured and the sick had lain here, pressed together, unable to move and much less capable of withstanding this ordeal than a healthy young girl. Instead, I indulged in a shameless terror. Frightened and disoriented, I was immediately beset by a terrible nausea, but I knew that to vomit would only make our situation worse. And so I clamped my lips together and fought the heaving of my stomach.

  Shortly, a greater agony overshadowed my need to retch. We lay upon rough planks located directly over the axle of the wagon, and every bump or rut in the road was translated through the wood and into our bones. The pain quickly grew overwhelming as we felt our backbones jarred until it seemed they would break into pieces.

  All the while, Leah was speaking quietly into my ear. I do not remember everything she said. I believe at one point she spoke, incongruously, about her butcher in Rochester, whom she believed was shorting her on the weight of the meat he sold. Her voice served as a distraction, an anchor to sanity, as it was meant to do. I might have replied that I did not think we would live long enough for the butcher to cheat her again, but I did not.

  How long would we be trapped in this makeshift coffin? Mr. Bouton said it was only until we were out of sight, but surely we should have already reached that point? Did that mean we were still in view of our enemies? Had we been followed? I was tormented with visions of our driver forced off his seat at gunpoint, the wagon driven to the edge of a ravine and pushed over.

  Suddenly we came to a halt. Overwhelmed by fear that the worst had happened, I began to scream. Nothing Leah did could quiet me. And then the false bottom was wrenched up and the face of Mr. Bouton’s friend appeared in the bright light of day. “Hush, Miss Fox!” he chastened me with a smile. “You’re safe now. We’re five miles out from Troy, and you can come sit in the wagon like civilized folk for the rest of the trip.”

  Five miles? It had seemed like a hundred.

  ***

  It was more than a week before we made it back to Rochester. Leah rented a room in an Albany hotel for a few days to give me an opportunity to recover from my fright. I took to the bed and cowered under the covers, trembling at footsteps in the corridor and gasping in fright at the sound of loud voices on the street. Leah was sympathetic for a time, but her impatience won out in the end and I was roused from bed by a firm grip on my ear and forced to dress myself. We traveled home by train. I was silent and unresponsive throughout the trip, refusing to speak to our fellow travelers, who must have thought I was Leah’s idiot daughter.

  Something had broken inside me. I did not feel safe at home, and nothing that Kate or Mother could do would repair the damage. I lay upon my bed for days, staring up at the ceiling, wondering whether my enemies would come to Rochester. I imagined that the people in the street were watching the house and sent Calvin, time and again, to hasten away any strangers who seemed to be loitering. This did not please Leah, for the fact was that many people did come to look at the house of the Rochester “rappers,” and most of them were merely curious or seeking an appointment with us.

  I turned seventeen in December. The family made a great fuss over me, with new dresses and books and hair ribbons, but I remained spiritless.

  Mother tried to give me Kate’s tonic. Calvin tried to interest me in the phosphorescent “hands” he was making as a new spirit trick. Amy Post came and read me letters about the National Women’s Rights Convention.

  The only person who brought me any real comfort was Kate, who simply lay down at my side and held my hand.

  The winter passed, and I haunted the house like a mournful specter from one of the novels I loved so much. When I caught glimpses of my own reflection in the looking glass, I saw a thin and pale young woman with large brown eyes and a sad, downcast mouth. Sometimes I sat with Kate in the spirit circles, but I no longer felt the stirring of humor when the table danced upon its legs or when my sisters used a collapsible pole to brush the clothes of the sitters in the dark. My sense of mischief had been snuffed like one of the trick candles we employed.

  It was Leah, of course, who finally decided to break me of my melancholy.

  “I’m sending you to Philadelphia, Maggie,” she announced one morning in early June. I looked up from my breakfast dish in some alarm. She wasn’t even looking at me but was pouring molasses on her oats as if there was nothing unusual about her words. “There is a community of spiritualists there, and in particular, one Mr. Simmons, who has offered to sponsor your visit to meet with them.”

  “I won’t go!” I gasped.r />
  “I have told him you won’t stay at his home.” She laid down the molasses and raised her eyes to mine. “I explained some of the particulars of the incident at Troy, and he agreed that your comfort and safety would be foremost on his mind.”

  I shook my head at her, but she simply continued as if I had already agreed. “Mother will go as your chaperone, and Mr. Simmons has reserved the bridal suite at Webb’s Union Hotel for the two of you.”

  “The bridal suite?” I asked in spite of myself.

  “It is apparently their finest room,” she replied. “Mr. Simmons will personally interview your visitors, and the hotel staff will be instructed to allow no one to your parlor without his prior approval. Truly, Maggie, it should be a restful and pleasant trip. I know how you enjoy a city, and Philadelphia is second only to New York. You will do good for us in the name of spiritualism, and it will do you good to go.”

  “Can Kate come?” I reached across the table and took my younger sister’s hand.

  Leah’s eyes showed a twinkle of satisfaction as she recognized that I would bow to her will. “You know I cannot have you both gone at the same time. We have a business to run, and every one of us must do her part.”

  Thus, I agreed to the trip, although not without reservation. I confided the depths of my fears to Kate. “You did not want me to go to Troy,” I recalled. “I thought at the time that you were jealous because I wanted to visit Annabel Bouton, but perhaps…” I couldn’t believe I was admitting that Kate might have some second sight, but here I was, just like one of our sitters, clinging to the hope that she could offer me some comfort. “How do you feel about my traveling to Philadelphia?” I asked.