Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  “… Oh, Lawdy, pick a bale a day.

  Oh, Lawdy, pick a bale of cotton,

  Oh, Lawdy, pick a bale a day.

  “Jump down, turn around …”

  Down they’d jump, round they’d turn, holding the harvested contents of the hollowing head high above them (“Look what we’ve picked!”), and the hands of the Volga Boatmen (the only parts of them visible through the dense fog) would force their way skyward, all of them maypole dancers spinning cat’s cradle patterns with their ropes in the air, singing away in de land ob cotton as the Volga (oh, Lawdy) became, from bank to bank, an impenetrable entanglement of jammed boats, barges, and rafts stacked high with wood.

  “… To pick a bale of cotton,

  Jump down, turn around,

  To pick a bale a day …”

  Papa’s face would sag inward like a leaking balloon, and become a flimsy crumpled mask – a shriveled death mask – with no head to wear it. The head caved in, ceased to exist, whooshed into nothingness, melted in warmth.

  Look away, look away, look away, Dixie land! Macy! Macy! Lawks-a-mercy, it was Macy.

  Old time dar am not forgotten.

  “… Me and my Papa can

  Pick a bale of cotton.

  Me and my Papa can

  Pick a bale a day.

  “Oh, Lawdy, pick a bale of cotton,

  Oh, Lawdy, pick a bale a day …”

  “Look at what happens when you pick your nose!” she would cry warningly, demonstrating to an eagerly appalled audience, as they leaned forward to obtain the best view. There were gasps – horrified, rather pleased – and the thunderous applause started. “Bravo!” someone shouted, clearly one of those embarrassingly demonstrative enthusiasts from the opera. “Bravo!” If the defunct nose-picker had been a woman, he would have shouted “Brava!” You just knew he would be pedantically correct in his expressions of acclaim. It took one pedant to recognize another, to admire his technique with a certain cool jealousy.

  She leaned forward, going up on to tiptoe to try to see the death-changed face more closely, straining over the giant toothless grin of the neck.

  Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;

  I never saw a brute I hated so …

  Me and my Papa …

  Me and my Papa …

  Curse him! Curse him! Curse him!

  She should be chanting these words in a double-double-toil-and-trouble incantation, circling counterclockwise, pointing her finger the whole time at the body of the suicide around which she moved.

  She should grasp an ear in each hand, and tilt the bald head forward, adjusting the swivel, to see if her reflection still swam darkly within it as in a looking-glass.

  Tilt. Tilt. Tilt.

  It would creak with the wetness and the snow.

  Alice moved her face closer to the curve of the skull, dropped forward at her tugging, to make out the details of the creased flesh in the whiteness of a little limb beneath the surface of glass, the tiny fingernails of a snow-colored arm.

  (“Let me in – let me in!” a child’s voice sobbed. “I’m come home, I’d lost myself on the moor!…It’s twenty years …”)

  Tilt. Tilt. Tilt.

  If she tilted the head too far forward, if …

  If the gash …

  If the gash had been too deep …

  The head would fall forward, bounce, and roll across the floor …

  Me and my Papa …

  Me and my Papa …

  She would find herself looking into the smooth hairless surface above his left eye, the tips of her fingers letting go of the ears and reaching forward to touch the polished bumps. The main areas began just above the eye. She avoided looking at the eye, the dead eye of a mackerel glaring accusingly at her from a plate at lunchtime and spoiling her appetite. Mackerel sky, mackerel sky,/Not long wet, and not long dry. The clouds – cirrocumulus and altocumulus – patterned the sky, and what the weather would bring could be read within them. That’s what you could see in those clouds.

  I have died so that you might eat me!

  That was what the eye was saying. It made her feel guilty if she did eat the fish, and made her feel guilty if she didn’t.

  (“Eat me, drink me, love me.”

  (That was what Lizzie said to Laura in “Goblin Market.”

  (She had tasted the forbidden fruit for her sake.)

  She wished cook would cut off the heads before she served them.

  Just above the eye, left of center – his left, her right: she had to reverse everything in her mind, looking in a mirror – there was Order, Neatness, and System. That was Papa, all right. There should be a huge bump there, like a cyst bulging out. She couldn’t bring herself to touch it, to see, in case it burst into sticky wetness. Her fingers hovered above the other nearer areas. Locality and Exploration. That was one. Further back, and a little more to the right, there were Humor, Mirthfulness, and Wit. Her hand would sink into a hollow up to her wrist, her fingernails digging at the walnut of the brain. The body would twitch restlessly, like Frankenstein’s creature starting to come alive, as she activated areas of stimulation. Behind that, an area twice as large, was Blandness, Agreeableness, and Youthfulness. In the middle of the very back of the head, in the place where a murderess would place the barrel of a gun before she pulled the trigger, there were Parental Love, and Love of Children.

  She flexed her index finger.

  Her trigger finger.

  Bang!

  Bang!

  Bang!

  “What horror is he in!” Belford had written of Belton in Clarissa. “His eyes look like breath-stained glass!”

  She had often pictured eyes like breath-stained glass when she looked in mirrors. She had stared at the dark surface of night-backed windows, trying not to breathe, so that she could see. Moving thro’ a mirror clear/That hangs before her all the year/Shadows of the world appear.

  “His malady is within him,” Belford had written earlier, “and he cannot run away from it.”

  He must be wicked to deserve such pain …

  Would there still be a luster on the gleaming dome, or would it have clouded over in death, become reflectionless breath-stained glass?

  Out vile jelly! Where is thy luster now?

  Lustre.

  All’s dark and comfortless.

  The raised foot stomped down, and passers-by disappeared under lumpy piles of squirted strawberry jelly. They licked their red-clotted lips, unable to stop themselves, and shuddered with delighted revulsion as they sucked the fruits from that unknown orchard.

  We must not look at goblin men, we must not buy their fruits.

  Yum-yum.

  Above them, at the window above the jelly-encrusted railings, the strawberry-smelling scene of carnage, one of Miss Iandoli’s pupils – a beginner – was falteringly making an overambitious attempt at Narcissus.

  After a few notes, there was silence.

  The pupil was bent over, looking at the hands that would not do what she wanted, that would not produce the music that she could hear inside her head.

  She should find a looking-glass, hold it to her father’s lips, punish him, thrust him through into the Looking-glass House.

  If she held it to his lips, and then looked into it and saw her reflection clearly, this would mean death.

  Edward Hyde would pass away like the stain of breath upon a mirror.

  That was what Dr. Jekyll had believed, that image of breath-stained glass again. It was such a revealing image, this linking of the hidden inner monster with the picture of someone looking into a mirror, Dr. Jekyll seeing the reflection not of his face but of the being inside himself, hating and fearing the brute that slept within him. The mirror had the power of Dorian Gray’s portrait. With it he was able to follow his mind into its secret places. It was the most magical of mirrors.

  The drug he took had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prison-house of his disposi
tion; and, like the captives of Philippi, that which stood within ran forth.

  That was how Dr. Jekyll described what had happened to him, though she wished that Robert Louis Stevenson had dispensed with all the apparatus of the drug. No drug was needed to draw out the darker self. It slept until it was woken, and then it roared forth. The mirror in which Dr. Jekyll looked was the perfect mirror for all alienists to employ.

  Look in this mirror, Miss Pinkerton. Tell me what you can see.

  If she looked in such a mirror she would see her true self.

  Dr. Jekyll believed that the evil would pass away, as transient as breath, as breathing, because life was such a fragile thing, lasting for so short a time.

  She was alone in the house with a dead man.

  Me and my Papa.

  Me and my Papa can …

  Me and my Papa can …

  She could not telephone anyone. She had seen the fallen poles. Snow was piled up in drifts, darkening the lower windows, blocking all the doors of the house. She could not leave, was unable to seek help. There was no one to see her, no one to hear her, if she opened one of the upper windows and tried to shout above the noise of the storm.

  (Lizzie.)

  She had almost heard the name being called, a voice far away across fields, a voice from the upper room of a distant house. Her own faint voice calling, calling across time, and not distance.

  (Lizzie Galliant.)

  She almost called for Lizzie Galliant, summoning up herself as a child to call for the comfort she had craved from someone stronger than she could ever be. The time had come, the one time she could use her powers, like a bee defending itself and killing itself by the use of its sting …

  She did not call out the name.

  She was made out of frozen metal, weathered bronze, and should take her place upon Papa’s knee for The Children’s Hour, not moving for year after year, her breathing stilled, just aging slowly as the snow raged around her. He was there, high above her, ready, in the correct pose, waiting for her. There she stands a lovely creature, who she is, I do not know; I have caught her for her beauty.

  She was one of the girls from the statue.

  There should be a large book for Papa to hold, to complete the pose. Often, she had wished to read the words within the book, if words were there to read. Now she could choose the book. His account book would be somewhere close beneath the snow, its pages ripped out, its thick covers – wet and warped – closed upon emptiness. What had once been there was numbers, not words. That could be the book he was reading to her, teaching her all her lessons of addition and subtraction, all the calculations that needed to be made. He’d be more at home with numbers. One, two, three … He’d be Moses, reading the Ten Commandments as his bedtime story. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Honor thy father and thy mother,” he’d be saying in an unfamiliar once-upon-a-time voice. “Thou shalt not kill.”

  “Why not, Papa?”

  “Because it’s what it says in the book. You have to have things the same as they are in the book, otherwise they’re wrong.”

  She sat beneath the flapping cloth, like a corpse covered by an enfolding sheet, as the snow steadily pattered upon it, deepening over their bodies, the three blind little girls and the blind bearded man frozen together, waiting in the darkness for another little girl to unveil them.

  Between the dark and the daylight,

  When the night is beginning to lower …

  Brightness would fall upon them, and there they would be exposed, all of them dead, all of them blind, as an unseen crowd applauded, and – to the sound of the idée fixe, marching to the scaffold – the massed schoolboys of Otsego Lake Academy, their buttons glinting with the red glow of the setting sun, too many buttons to count, would chant the last verse of “The Children’s Hour.” The same red glow would shine from the bright, golden area of her breast, the worn part near her heart, as she listened to the words she could not read.

  “… And there will I keep you for ever,

  Yes, for ever and a day …”

  She saw the fortress rising high above her, dark, windowless, its many levels of stone blocking out the light.

  “… Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,

  And moulder in dust away!”

  As it crumbled, the grit hissed and pattered down upon her, crunching under her feet like spilled sugar, making her hair itchy, and her reddened eyes water, tears blurring her vision to give an underwater sway to everything she saw.

  There he would keep her for ever, Yes, for ever and a day.

  The first thing she had said to Mama, when she and her sisters and brother finally managed to reach the house, was “Promise me you won’t marry again.” She’d insisted that Mama make the promise, insisted that she sign a piece of paper.

  Mourning had been a strain, remembering to look decorously sad, and speak in a low, brave voice. The black clothes of full mourning put on each morning – mourning for morning, mourning for night – were a useful reminder of what would be appropriate behavior, a tactful little nudge that no one saw happening, and the solemn expressions were assumed (a too-revealing choice of verb) with the dark clothes. It was like a ritual for which you had to wear special clothing, an assigned task. Soldiers wore special clothes to kill. Butchers wore special clothes to hack meat. Sweeps wore special clothes to clean chimneys. The Happy Families pack was a guide to appropriate fashions, miniaturized fashion plates helpfully gathered together. Miss Pinkerton, the Mourning Daughter. LOOK SAD she was reminded by the carefully ironed memento mori. DON’T LAUGH. SIGH INTERMITTENTLY AND GAZE INTO THE MIDDLE DISTANCE, as incipient tears poised in the about-to-fall position. Sometimes she believed that she felt these feelings. Surely – as a demonstration of her real, deep, and sincere grief – she ought to have blacked her face as well, in decorously tasteful minstrel show mourning, applying the burned cork with slow, thoughtful movements between sighs? How those movements would have moved Papa and impressed Mrs. Albert Comstock, a suitable Symbolic act of homage.

  “Gone are the days …”

  – “… de days …” Mrs. Albert Comstock corrected firmly, but Alice ignored her –

  “… when my heart was young and gay …”

  – She might manage a sad little quaver in her voice –

  “… Gone are my friends from the cotton fields away:

  Gone from the earth to a better land I know …”

  (“Some folks like to sigh,

  Some folks do, some folks do …”

  (It began quietly, far away in the distance, but drew closer, became louder.

  (“… Some folks long to die,

  But that’s not me nor you.

  (“Long live the merry, merry heart

  That laughs by night and day …”)

  After a while, Dr. Severance of Staten Island was drawn on like more dark clothing. Then, heaviest and blackest of all – as thick as winter clothing, but failing to keep out the cold – the deepest of deep, deep mourning, it was time for Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster. Miss Pinkerton, the Madwoman in the Attic.

  23

  Twenty-five years ago, as a blizzard raged around the house, she had walked down the stairs in darkness to see Annie, and helped her find the woman who would kill her. Fifteen years ago, in another blizzard, she had gone downstairs to find her father’s body.

  She had felt that she had watched all night during the 1888 blizzard – her short periods of sleep had been shallow – and some words of Robert Louis Stevenson had kept going through her head. She half drowsed as she sat and watched the storm, hypnotized by the featureless whiteness. In the morning – a morning scarcely distinguishable from the night; it was as dark, as bleak – the storm was raging as fiercely as ever, and the words were still in her head, like a tune that could not be shaken off.

  … among the desert sands

  Some deserted city stands,

  All its children, sweep and prince,

  Grown to manhood ages since, />
  Not a foot in street or house,

  Not a stir of child or mouse,

  And when kindly falls the night,

  In all the town no spark of light …

  There had been a profound silence inside and outside the house, beneath the sound of the gale. The obliterating snow was still hissing across as thickly as ever, looking as if it would never end. Chestnut Street was blocked, with a huge drift piling up toward their side, and Chestnut Hill, running downward beyond, was impassable. The telegraph poles, the elements torn from their positions, lay collapsed all the way down the street like the masts and spars of shipwrecked galleons – a destroyed armada of Hesperus es and Hispaniola s in the midnight and the snow – crashed down through the ice from the sky into a lower, colder, element, their snow-thickened wires thrumming like storm-torn rigging.

  The pole outside Miss Iandoli’s house had fallen right across the street to their house, dragged down by the weight of the snow, and she looked down upon it, expecting to see a frozen corpse, still clutching a telescope, staring up at her from a smashed crow’s-nest, its dead eyes all iced and glittering. She saw it as distinctly as a Doré engraving of the Ancient Mariner as he once had been, a young man leaning against a mast, his head bowed and his arms extended out from his sides, like an exhausted crucified figure.

  She could lean down from her window, and press her lips against that cold face, so that they would freeze against it as she had once imagined them doing against the buttons of a uniform, against a bronze statue, as the snow beat against her, closed her eyes and mouth, and penetrated to the inner parts of her ears.