Copyright © Zulma, 2014
Translation copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Grotz
First published in France as Théorie de la vilaine petite fille by Zulma
First edition, 2015
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.
ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-21-2
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Design by N. J. Furl
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press: Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627
www.openletterbooks.org
In living memory of Élie Delamare-Deboutteville
Real or invented, all the facts and characters evoked in this novel belong to the domain of the imagination.
Contents
Part One: Hydesville
I. The Song of the Iroquois
II. Maggie’s Diary
III. From a Drinker’s Point of View in the Saloon Across the Street
IV. Hast Thou Entered into the Treasures of the Snow
V. When Heaven and Earth Shall Tremble
VI. In the Abyss Where We Got Lost
VII. Some Details About the Meeting
VIII. Polk’s War Was Not a Polka
IX. The Night of Sleepwalkers Recounted by Maggie
X. First Conversation with Mister Splitfoot
XI. Reverend Gascoigne and Family
XII. If You Forget Me in the Desert
XIII. Evening Visitors to the Haunted House
XIV. Maggie’s Diary
XV. The Columns of Duality
XVI. In the Waves of Boiling Blood
Part Two: Rochester
I. I Want Only a Long Drunkenness
II. Maggie’s Diary
III. Exploration of a Mining Field
IV. Oneida! Oneida!
V. Like Galloping Carriage Horses
VI. Assembly at Corinthian Hall
VII. Fox & Fish Spiritualist Institute
VIII. Farewell Dear Mother
IX. The Aspiring Medium
X. When to Burn Her Diary?
XI. The Sleeping and the Dead
XII. The Life of Phantoms
XIII. The Conquest of Ice
XIV. And Now We Roam in Sovreign Woods
XV. With the Permission of Frederick Douglass and Ralph Waldo Emerson
Part Three: New York
I. Recent Disagreements
II. Livermore’s Good Influence
III. The Green Fairy and the Murderer
IV. The Necromancers of the Old World
V. A Normal Life
VI. The Two Widows of Notting Hill
VII. Mens agitat molem
VIII. Three Letters for a Betrayal
IX. Poltergeist at the Academy of Music
X. With Congratulations from Mister Splitfoot
Epilogue
Translator’s Acknowledgments
About the Author
Part One
Hydesville
Some things are inescapable;
when they arrive, one must receive them.
—Jan Van Ruysbroeck
I.
The Song of the Iroquois
The sun at dusk lit the staircase through the upstairs window. Seated on a step of unfinished wood, Kate studied the dust motes. They floated inside a shaft of light, one of the many suspended throughout the house. Fascinated, she held her breath. Each particle seemed to follow its own trajectory in the dancing company of its tiny neighbors, of which there were thousands, millions, more than the stars fixed or spinning through the moonless nights. Motionless, so as not to stir the air, Kate tried hard to distinguish a single mote among them with the idea of not losing sight of its capricious flight; the instant after it was no longer the same one, she had lost it forever and the archangelic spear of sunlight crossed painfully over her face, as if to ignite the pollen lining the bottom of her eyelids. She had gathered so many wildflowers that autumn morning to decorate the grave of her dog, Irondequoit, that nausea had clenched her throat and her whole body was still burning from it. And yet Mother had warned her.
There’s a creak of the staircase behind her and suddenly it’s dark: two freezing hands cover her eyes.
“Leave me alone,” said Kate. “I saw you . . .”
“So now you’ve got eyes in the back of your head?” Margaret sat on a step just above her younger sister. Her torso blocked the ray of sun and its galactic swirls.
“You’re bothering me,” said Kate. “I was thinking of Irondequoit . . .”
“Oh, Irondequoit, poor old thing! Don’t you worry, she’s gamboling through Dog Heaven. There’s no hell for animals, you know.”
“Hell? Do you really believe in that? Why would God exhaust himself by making the dead roast for all eternity? It would be enough to bury and forget them in the ground just the once.”
“Don’t you see, Katie, that’s completely impossible, even for God. Souls are immortal!”
The evening dwelled at length over Hydesville. First tinted blue like the pond’s surface in broad daylight, then almost black and wine-dark, shadows spread down to the bottom of the staircase and across the silhouette of the adolescent it slowly obscured. Already Kate couldn’t make out her sister’s face. Mica-like glimmers flickered between her teeth and on her pupils, giving her the look of a bear cub bewigged with thick black tresses. Straining to fix her attention on where her sister was sitting, Kate thought she was seeing a cruel mask lit from within and in an abrupt jump let out a small cry.
“What’s there?” sounded a frightened Margaret, half-turning back toward upstairs.
“Nothing, nothing, it’s just the darkness . . .”
“You just made me weirdly afraid, as if you’d seen the devil in the exact spot where I’m sitting.”
Margaret considered her younger sister with perplexed irritation. She liked her well enough, her little Katie, she was so pretty and sometimes quite comical, but a compartment or two was missing somewhere in her brain. Kate certainly had brains to spare; even Leah, their older sister who had gone to live in Rochester, agreed; whatever her sustained distractions and funny airs might be, when she focused her cat’s eye into space, it betrayed something more than absent-mindedness, something entirely different, as if a part of her was dreaming while wide awake. At eleven years of age, not yet a woman, Katie had the look of an angel, one of “those gracious birds with a human face who populated in myriad the resplendent spheres,” as the reverend Henry Gascoigne described them one day in a Sunday sermon.
But suddenly everything was so peaceful. One could hear the faint and metallic sounds from the kitchen where their mother, barely recovered from an awful cold, bustled to prepare dinner. Outside, the cows were mooing in the meadows; the tethered horses fidgeted at the sound of an iron-wheeled stagecoach that passed by without even slowing on Long Road leading to Rochester. When the calm soon returned, the frequent bleating of the sheep and goats announced the return of Pequot, the nickname given to the idiot shepherd with his bright red face who terrified the girls of Hydesville with his postures and antics. Their father, also on his way back from the fields and pastures, was putting his tools back in the stable where he had just unsaddled Old Billy, as he did every night.
Knees tucked under her arms, for no apparent reason Kate burst into tears.
“What’s gotten into you?” her sister asked, astonished after their fearful laughter in the dark.
“It’s our little brother! I miss him so much.”
“He’s also in Heaven.”
“With Irondequoit, do you think?”
“Not far from her in any cas
e—children would get bored surrounded by old people.”
“But we buried him right on top of grandfather in the cemetery.”
“Ssh! Skeletons have nothing to do with eternal life!”
Margaret grew quiet, thinking of their former life in another village in Monroe County. Even at fifteen years of age, when one is still dependent on them, adults nevertheless seem about as important as furniture. Maggie had had two precious friends there, soul mates, and even a pretend fiancé, the handsome Lee who frightened all the girls his own age—and then overnight, without warning, they’d decided to empty the house from basement to attic with the help of neighboring farmers, pile an entirety of memories into a big wagon, and that was the end of beautiful friendships and loves, despite promises to see each other again on the occasion of a parish festival or a rodeo. “Three moves equals a fire,” was a line from Benjamin Franklin that she had read in an old issue of Poor Richard’s Almanac dating back to her grandmother. There was a stack of them underneath the armoire in her parents’ bedroom. One move, at the age of fifteen, is as bad as all the griefs of love. Katie, on the other hand, seemed to have only a single regret, as violent as remorse: that they had abandoned their little brother there in his grave. Otherwise she appeared perfectly blasé, or else was hiding something in a virtuosic game of concealment.
But now there she was, turning and lifting a night owl’s vigilant stare up at her.
“Do you think of him sometimes, the landlord’s son?”
“Who are you talking about? Lee?” Margaret cried, shivering from head to toe, her gaze plunged into her younger sister’s eyes.
The glow from an oil lamp was flickering downstairs. Mother was arranging chairs around the table. They could hear the creaking of their father’s boots who, slightly drunk by this hour, was busy at the woodstove. The smell of lard soup floated up the staircase. Outside, the wolf and the owl were crying into the strong night wind that stirs the air and chases maladies away. It was the Song of the Iroquois that nighttime spirits have taken up from the depths of time. Kate could hear it distinctly through the walls of the wooden farmhouse.
We return thanks to the stars and the moon
That offer us their brightness after the sun’s departure
We return thanks to our ancestor He-no
For protecting our children from witches and snakes
And for having given us rain
II.
Maggie’s Diary
My diary isn’t that long yet. I’ve promised myself to put down my impressions each night during our period of getting settled in Hydesville. (I felt so pitiful in the carriage filled with trunks and furniture, suddenly reduced to nothing under the laughing eyes of the cowherds! How is it possible that a move could inflict such shame?) The people of Hydesville showed us real courtesy. I suspect that the Reverend Gascoigne sermonized to them about us before our arrival. And then we are a Methodist family, like most people here. Breaking with our old routines hasn’t really bothered me. But the absence of Lee and my dear friends pains me to no end. And this sadness—nothing new or exciting comes to make it dissipate. On the contrary I would say it seems to make itself at home in Hydesville. The truth is, I don’t like our new house. It’s a poor clapboard and slate farmhouse of the most common sort, without even an awning, with a basement of bare earth and an attic carpeted with dust fallen from the sky. Isolated from the village, on the edge of Long Road, you’d think it’s abandoned, despite its vegetable garden and fence. The stable, the cowshed, and the hayloft in back under the green oaks and the big cedar, are all housed next to the pond in the same shed that leans slightly due to a landslide. This afternoon, after class with Miss Pearl, the reverend’s daughter, Katie and I explored the overgrown shores all the way to the forest where the water disappears, more and more dark. It’s surprising, a pond that doesn’t reflect the clouds; it was as if every schoolgirl who’d ever died of consumption, smallpox, or meningitis had dumped her inkwell into it. Katie started singing in her high-pitched voice. Based on all the swirls and bubbles, I think the carp and pike were following her all along the bank.
That first night when we went to bed in our new bedroom upstairs, the wind and rain whipped against our uncurtained window. We could hear the old roof groaning. A far-off cloud rumbled in the hills. Autumn was charged with electricity after a torrid end to summer. Lightning pulsed soundlessly in the distance. When the window lit up with a bluish glow, preposterous shadows roamed the ceiling and walls. With the covers tucked under my chin, I was paralyzed like a rabbit beneath a barn owl’s wings. Next to me I saw the shine of Kate’s open eye, her pupil black as a beetle. She wasn’t afraid. Katie was only afraid of herself.
Her slightly strangled voice scolded, “Don’t you ever sleep?” She started to laugh softly and then a sigh passed through her. “Do you know what they say in the village?” Without waiting, with her little girl’s eagerness, she invented for me the story of our haunted house. The former tenant of the farm, a certain Mr. Weekman, wouldn’t have anything to do with their father, Mr. Fox . . . At the first clap of thunder, I started to tremble like tree branches in a tornado. My sister, on the lookout, was silent. The beetles of her pupils ran back and forth across her face, which seemed to me at that moment pale as death. The son of the widow in High Point, a tall youth who’d come to watch us moving in, sitting on the roadside under the pretext of having brought us the keys of Mr. Weekman who had parted in a hurry with his horses and cows, found a way to take my sister’s side. He wanted to spare this darling the habit of big chores because of her fragile lungs. With his sealskin face, Samuel Redfield, the widow’s son, took the opportunity to tell her that the house was cursed, that it moved all by itself at night, with moaning and scratching on the walls and floor and some sort of floating lights or apparitions; the ex-occupant had to have been scared yellow several times before deciding to leave the place. And I, hardly more educated than our mother or even Old Billy the horse, laughed to the brink of tears. Those are the superstitions of the Iroquois, or the Scots, nothing more. That’s what I told myself at the beginning. A new house always makes you worry a little; you think about the people who lived and died there. The dead always outnumber the living, and if you could see them all, it would be dreadful, like the huddled crowds at the rodeo. A new house must be broken in like riding a bull or a wild horse so as not to be thrown off in eight seconds. Our father didn’t really seem to like it here. He came home later and later from the pastures or the bar, where he drank much more than he had before, and one could often hear him grumbling about who knows what. It was actually because of his reputation as a drinker that we’d had to leave Rapstown. Every drunk in the area was his friend. He couldn’t go anywhere without a cowboy grabbing him by the arm and leading him off for a drink. Here in Hydesville, based on what I could observe, it seemed like men were watched much more closely by their spouses or mothers, all those sanctimonious devotees of Reverend Gascoigne. The
Methodist church preached moderation in all things, that’s what I learned last Sunday. One shouldn’t be beholden to anyone, above all the seller of rum and whiskey, and we should love one another, that was the doctrine the pastor gave us to digest, always pointing his finger in the air, himself a widower with large coal-colored eyes. Sturdy in his boots, he wore starched collars and a black hat. When he speaks, you’d swear it was thundering. His eyes blaze and then flash with lightning. A magistrate who was ordering us all to hang wouldn’t sound any fiercer.
Miss Pearl, his daughter, in no way resembles her father, as blonde as he is dark-haired, all rose petals. Her hair, her lips, even her eyes gleamed like honey. But at eighteen, she doesn’t lack authority in the classroom: that’s because of the minister. It is said that her mother suffered from melancholy. Such a pretty word seems so innocuous. Could that be when, under the weight of being sad, one takes a kind of pleasure in one’s sadness? Just like how a drinker starts to acquire a taste for his misfortune. Yet Violet, the minister�
�s wife who was by turns elated and depressed, was found one winter morning in the pond. One night she threw herself in wearing just her nightgown, that’s what they say. Alerted by Samuel Redfield, the High Point widow’s son, stuttering with emotion, some hunters who headed for the woods didn’t take long to identify a human form. Mrs. Gascoigne lay suspended in the water under a pane of ice. Her gown had risen up to her face, leaving her naked like one of those large freshwater fish without scales. Lily Brown, the eldest of Miss Pearl’s pupils, told me that the minister was publicly accused of having lacked charity for the unfortunate woman. He had performed the act of repentance while preaching the Sunday after her burial. Then, having become easily offended over time, he turned against the faithful parishioners and began to threaten them with hell on Earth, the affliction of those without ideals, since eternal life begins at our birth. Every Sunday for months, Lily Brown claims, he threatened the entire village with damnation. That was his way of grieving. Finally one Sunday, terribly emaciated, his black hair standing up on his head and cheeks, he proclaimed the remission of sins, swearing that all men were resurrected in Christ.
We arrived in the village without knowing any of its dramas. But children are quick to reveal everything to you. Lily told me of the unfortunate Joe Charlie-Joe, the son of a former slave of a Mansfield ranch, who was hung from a great oak in Grand Meadow for taking a walk in the valley with the beautiful Emily. Before committing their crime, the lynchers would have obtained her vow that he had kissed her. If every stolen kiss of the young warranted the rope, there’d be none of us left to marry. It’s true, not everyone is black. The beautiful Emily Mansfield was full of remorse. Because of her, a black man hardly twenty years old went to heaven with a kiss for his last rite of Viaticum.
If my dear Lee had been a Negro, the people of Rapstown would’ve had more than one occasion to put a rope around his neck. Tears come now just from thinking of him. Lee and I had promised to write each other every day. My letters were scented with lavender and decorated with petals. I grew tired after a week: there was nothing in return, not a single word. I dream of Lee almost every night. How can I describe him? He’s blond and tan from the sun, with brown eyes, a spice-colored mixture. In my dream, we’re riding bareback on a blazing thoroughbred and, impossibly, both of us are holding on by its long mane as if seated side by side. The stallion gallops so fast that it catches up with the setting sun and, suddenly, as if our mount were disappearing into a precipice, it’s Lee metamorphosed in flight that I’m astride. I feel that soon, in a convulsion, we are going to melt into each other, rider and mount, and that we will reach the sun while crying out our joy. At that final moment, I wake up in a sweat with a feeling of happiness mixed with dissatisfaction. What could a dream like that mean?
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