“Unless that’s Mother!” Maggie corrected, laughing even louder. “But what about the knocking at this hour?”
“It’s not the first time.”
“What, don’t you ever sleep?”
“It seems to me like it’s getting louder each night. Maybe someone’s trying to get through to us . . .”
“Are you crazy? There’s no one here except our parents and you and me! At least . . .” Fear crept between her skin and the cotton sheet all over again. Frozen, mouth dry, breath held, hands clasped around her throat, Margaret shuddered with the feeling that all of her senses were pointing her toward who knows what kind of abyss—her sight, her sense of smell, her hearing, every inch of her skin—perceived the moment with excess intensity. Powerless, however, she felt like a block of plaster inside of which a frantic bird was desperately flapping its wings.
The noises stopped both inside and out. The wind lay quietly down at the feet of tall trees. Even father had stopped snoring. The silence became so total that the thought of nothingness quickly reached a kind of perfection.
“Something’s there!” Maggie quavered from the bottom of her terror, her voice collapsed into the register of a very old woman. Through the open shutters, a ray of moonlight slid over a drawn silhouette perfectly motionless just in front of her bed. Her eyes bulging at this apparition, the adolescent let out a howl empty of any substance, convinced that she herself must be dead or unconscious.
“Come on!” said the shadow. “Follow me to the staircase . . .” Recognizing the muffled voice of her little sister, Maggie let out a mouse’s squeak. Immediately the catalepsy that had nailed her in place fell away like a lead suit of armor. She threw back the sheets and, unperturbed by that rush of air, walked fearlessly behind Katie.
“It most often comes from right there,” she said, pointing to an interior wall. “Other times it rises up from the basement.”
“I can’t hear anything now,” the adolescent noted with a survivor’s relief. Kate raised her little mammalian face up to her on which two pupils blacker than night surfaced.
“That’s because he’s waiting,” she said.
“What? And first of all, who are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s waiting for us to give him a sign.”
With a slow look up and down, Maggie examined the ceiling’s beams, the somber wood walls, the worn steps that sank into themselves in the dark, the dying glow of the woodstove, and the surrounding darkness.
“But who? Who are you talking about?” she repeated.
“The spirit!” Kate shot back.
“You mean a . . . a ghost?”
Her sleepy consciousness was filled with the image of a huge coffin, laid out with a huge glowworm inside it. Overtaken by a shapeless sense of panic, Maggie finally swooned and tumbled half-unconscious down to the foot of the stairs from the terror of being devoured by the glowworm. The fall resulted in a house filled with commotion. Their grumbling father, lamp in hand, and mother, distraught, came to the rescue of the fainted one whose younger sister imagined could be cured by hugs and tickles.
They led her, a big ragdoll with tangled legs, back up to her room. While their mother had already set about trying to revive her with salts and slaps, their father lit a tallow candle at her bedside table.
“What on earth were the two of you doing on the staircase at this hour?
Withdrawn, resolutely silent, Kate smiled at her own thoughts.
“It’s impossible to put oneself into such a state!” their mother added. “Smart young girls such as yourselves! What, were you going berry-picking for jam together under the full moon?”
Maggie’s eyelids fluttered a few seconds on a shadow silhouetted in the doorframe. Under the candle’s dancing flame, Kate’s angelic smile took on a bit of a demonic air, while her lips, animated by the golden reflections, seemed to hold back silent, mocking, curses addressed to the company.
“Well, ask her!” Maggie blurted, pointing with an accusatory finger. “Katie was leading me. She claims there’s a ghost in the house . . .”
Their mother, disconcerted, threw worried looks at her spouse and at the dark corners of the room. She was a thick and well-groomed woman, eternally dressed in an embroidered bonnet, her black hair gathered at the nape of her neck, with plump and, despite farm labors, very white hands, a copious bosom beneath her blouse, and a strong nose in the center of a rather pleasant face that, with makeup, would have appealed to a horse breeder or a Rochester merchant. Her keen eye landed finally on the younger girl.
“What is this story frightening everyone, hmm, Katie?”
“It’s not a story. You must have heard the knocks in the walls and furniture downstairs . . .”
“Goddammit!” their father exclaimed. “So you’d like to make us look haunted to our neighbors? They already mistrust newcomers. I don’t want to hear any more of this madness starting from this day on!”
“Don’t curse at your daughter,” their mother begged, “or it will be you the reverend should punish . . .”
“But,” dared Margaret’s flowing voice, “it’s true that there are noises. And what if the house is trying to harm us? I wish so much that we could just go back to Rapstown!”
“There are no noises!” the man cut her off. “Or let the devil take me to burn! It’s an animal, it’s the wind, it’s creaking wood . . . Now I’m going to turn my eye toward a last bit of sleep . . .”
As her father left, Kate moved quickly toward the window to avoid one of those affectionate slaps marking the end of a minor conflict. It’s just that he had the paws of a bear that could tear your head off! She didn’t despise him, the poor old man. He was just of country stock. So devoid of mind that he could only believe the pastor’s sermons. A descendant of patriots expelled from Canada during the War of Independence, he belonged to the dreary species of farmers, all stubborn bigots and halfway between the slaves, black or white, and the arrogant aristocracy of animal breeders.
As soon as her father left, Kate started to laugh. “It’s not an animal, it’s not the wind, it’s not creaking wood! It’s a cloven foot, I’d swear it on the horns of our only cow!”
Their mother feebly bustled about, frightened, her enormous chest undulating under her nightgown.
“Don’t be crazy! The devil only comes if called. Go back to bed and not another word! You need to sleep now, for the good sleep of little girls chases away all these wicked inventions . . .”
Kate slipped under the covers, already half-anesthetized by their mother’s quavering chant. Recovered from her fall, Margaret sighed at her side. Her long lashes fluttered up, silhouetted by the candle next to the bed, giving the impression that they caught fire with each blink of her eye. Then, from below, three raps were distinctly heard.
“Momma!” Kate murmured. “See, I told you someone was there . . .”
“Shh, shh, it’s possible, but sleep, sleep without any fear, your good mother will keep him in line with her fire iron . . .”
“Don’t hurt him too badly, please! Don’t give Mister Splitfoot too hard a time.”
“Mister Splitfoot? Good Lord, now who is that? Well, forget all of this for tonight, I’m blowing out the candle and the moon, as we used to say.”
Mrs. Fox, standing in the reconstituted dark, and despite being taken aback herself by the phenomena that appeared to be assailing her daughters, thought then of the faraway past, when she was their age, when she believed in the marvelous phantoms of love and of the future. Softly, right there, at the bedside of her little girls, the farmer’s wife began to sing a very old ballad that rose up to her lips from some memory she didn’t know . . .
Well a hundred years from now
I won’t be crying
A hundred years from now
I won’t be blue
VIII.
Polk’s War Was not a Polka
After the arid mountains of the west and the rocky deserts of Arizona, after the pe
rilous canyons all along the Colorado River where he had escaped from the Mescaleros’ arrows without much trouble, after the ambush with rifles of a band of Catholic deserters returning to their fold, the plain stretched out, infinitely calm. He was leaving behind him Denver and the memory of a night drenched with whiskey in a smooth featherbed. In the saddle on one of his two horses, for three solid weeks now, William Pill had been making his way on the paths leading north, fixed trails grooved by herds of cattle and settlers’ carts in a simmering sea of wild grasses. When the Appaloosa grew tired, he climbed onto the Spanish Barb relieved of his baggage, and so on, from one point of water to the next. The Great Plains were for him the image of a rough paradise without demarcations that left one with complete freedom of movement: all this blondness moving under a sky vaster than the memory of humankind! Step by step or at a gallop, in no hurry, he was returning from the war with a Certificate of Merit in his pocket for having followed General Zachary Taylor on the Santa Fe trail and later distinguishing himself alongside Old Rough and Ready on the heights of Buena Vista. But his greatest achievement as a free man would have to be enduring life in the barracks for months on end in occupied territories, waiting for the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the masterpiece of Manifest Destiny and flying artillery, to be signed: several million dollars of compensation to the vanquished, in return for the reattachment of half of Mexico to the Union, not to mention Texas!
Thanks to the amnesty decree granted to the heroes, William Pill could openly go home. It was just a matter of deciding what home to go back to. All his life he had burned bridges, starting with those rickety ones, his ancestors’, leaving Dublin at the age of fifteen on one of those coffin ships that unloaded the white pines from the Ottawa Valley and then left again with a load of immigrants driven from their land by famine, epidemics, and landowners. Five weeks of crossing on the Brotherhood—a four-hundred-ton former slave ship bought and renovated by a Quebecois ship owner—a sailing ship with three masts, its holds and decks filled with hostages of misery, this time all white and red, had cured him once and for all of belief in divine mercy, after the dreadful overcrowding, the surliness of the crew, a cyclone that carried away the rowboats from under tarpaulins along with a number of reckless passengers clinging inside, the typhus striking the children first and finally one girl in quarantine at Grosse Île in the company of the dying. Many, well before reaching that hellish haven, had been cast in a bag into the sea with the benediction of a priest there for the occasion. One woman thought to be dead had started screaming as she slid down the tipping plank without the sailors even attempting to catch her. Pill had not forgotten the little girls thrown to the sharks under their mothers’ blanched stares. During the crossing, on a mission to Manitoba, an evangelist of the Plymouth Brethren named Edward Blair had by chance befriended him, sharing his victuals and incessantly reading aloud from an oft-consulted Bible even though he already seemed to know each verse by heart. He was the disciple of a German immigrant, the famous George Müller, a former thief and lecher who carried heavy remorse for being drunk during his mother’s dying days. Once converted, he devoted himself to orphans, creating schools everywhere, saving them from destitution by the tens of thousands. On the baleful three-masted ship, Edward Blair had all the time in the world to recount his meeting with the German. The reread Bible he ceaselessly consulted was a goodbye gift from the missionary. Having himself in turn become one of the brethren, he had read and reread it every hour of the day without damaging it, then with his hand on the black binding, nourished his own preaching with it. Aboard the Brotherhood, in the turbulent sea, the only one who listened to him was an illiterate son of famine. The brethren who left to evangelize America hadn’t even succeeded in converting that Irish boy who nonetheless inherited the Bible upon his friend’s death. When they threw the cloth-wrapped cadaver overboard, the young immigrant couldn’t stop himself from opening the book randomly with the certainty of hearing there the friendly voice of Edward Blair.
And the channels of the sea appeared,
The foundations of the world were discovered,
At the rebuking of the Lord,
At the blast of the breath of his nostrils.
After the required stay on Grosse Île where many other passengers of the three-masted ship perished and where an old prostitute taught him how to dance the polka, William Pill finally disembarked in Quebec, where he promised himself to always keep his head above waves, men, and steeples.
At this hour, with no memory of the Old World, the high plains unfurled before him a finally unpopulated sight, immensely empty, with only the wind, the light, scattered birdcalls, the vacant call of the coyote, and, under the sun’s vibrant haze, from a distance, the final foothills of the Rainbow Mountain Range. His Spanish Barb escorting, he was riding the Appaloosa with a shoulder still hurting from the musket shot he suffered during the Battle of Huamantla. After so many days and nights of the sleepy rhythms of horses, Pill had the curious impression of the deterioration of his bearings, of an irreparable loss, as if he were leaving bits of himself on the road, a trail of images flowing down the back of his neck pierced by oblivion. Of his childhood, what still remained today? Not even a face. Sometimes when dusk was holding back its golden wine of shadows, he ruminated over the vague memory of hyacinths in his mother’s garden. But he was alone with the sky. His Springfield rifle ready for use—an 1840 flintlock musket converted to percussion lock—he wondered for the moment if he would find enough among the tall grasses to make a fire to cook the coveted rabbit or quail.
The sun was still full above the hills, but the azure was already darkening on the curved horizon. A couple of buzzards circling in flight drew his attention to the carrion of a mustang being swept by the wings of other raptors. The rider was found close to his mount. Burned in areas and across vast distances, probably by bison hunters, the grassland had dried up little by little to the advantage of bare fallow lands where loose gravel rose to the surface. He continued his voyage at a small trot, satisfied despite the hunger that gnawed at him to see the appearance of the evening star that the Mexican Indians at the officers’ service identified with Quetzalcoatl, their feathered serpent god. Soon some construction stood out at the bend of the trail leading away from the lands unfarmable at this height. A painted wooden sign indicated Osage City. He rode past a tank perched on a scrap iron frame, past gaping barns, some of them in ruin, their metal roofs collapsed over a heap of wooden planks and old fodder. The agglomeration seemed perfectly deserted, abandoned to the winds. Dust from the road blinded windows and the storefronts of pharmacies. Piles of blackened boards alternated here and there with still inhabitable structures. By the looks of the signs on flaking façades, the enclosed spaces to tie up horses and the numerous saloons, there had once been a life here of hustle and bustle. Pill told himself it would offer him and his horses the best place to stay. Lacking a woodcock, a crust of bread and a can of corned beef would garnish his table instead. At that moment, some sort of wild pig crossed the road. But the gun was in his holster on the other horse, and by the time he could seize it, the creature had turned the corner at a watering trough. In pursuit, this time with his pistol in hand, Pill came across a black albino in a top hat and suit, sitting on a box under the drugstore’s awning. The peccary, behaving just like a dog, was lying quietly at his feet.
“Might you be thirsty?” said the stranger, holding up a flask of rum as the rider came to a stop twenty yards away.
Pill jumped off his saddle and holstered his gun. Once his horses were tied to a fence, it didn’t take long to share the bottle’s contents. The man took off his hat, revealing a bald lily-colored head.
“So you’re heading home with a wounded shoulder and a soldier’s certificate of merit to New York State? As a former slave can well tell you, that’s a free land under Heaven’s protection.” The starry night stretched out quickly over the ghost town’s clandestine day. At the side of the road, under the drugstore awning, the t
wo men shared a dish of lentils.
“I don’t miss anything,” said the albino, “not even the masters of my youth, papists who taught me how to read with blows of the whip. Look, this whole town is mine. After they saw all the wagons coming from the east and the north going by, the folks of Osage City ended up following them. Horse breeders and farmers who were killing each other here like Cain and Abel over the slightest dispute, left arm in arm as soon as they got wind of the news: tons of gold in the west, on the other side of the Sierra Nevada. All you had to do was stoop down to pick it up. There they went, all of them, leaving anything that didn’t move behind. Without any customers, the shops closed, the pastor put away his sermons, the sheriff turned in his badge . . . Now there’s nothing left here but me and this pig. Freedom, that’s my gold. Nobody picks a fight with me, the Kansas Indians went back to being peaceful once they were allowed to hunt bison again. Once the whites had left, they burned all their empty ranches and farms, wheat fields, to give the grasslands back to the wind, as the Kaws say. They’re not called the People of the Wind for nothing. The day the Indians started throwing torches into this village, I jumped out of my hideout and yelled: “Osage City is my house, don’t burn it!” I think they took fright of me. A pale Negro materializing out of a ghost town wearing a top hat must surely be a demon. They got back on their horses and, howling like coyotes, off they went!”
William Pill, who had listened to his host for much of the night, thought for no reason of the words to a Mexican song that used to come to him in snatches while in the enemy camp, shortly before dawn, when he was preparing to defend by cylinder cannon a hacienda on a steep pass.
Who will rip out my heart’s flower
What jaguar of chalk, what eagle of blood
IX.
The Night of Sleepwalkers Recounted by Maggie
There’s too much craziness right now. My sister Katie must be the devil, or maybe just his wicked little daughter. I’ve written it out just as I understood it, in this notebook Miss Pearl gave me. It started with knocks on the floor, or rather beneath it, seven and eight times, in clusters, in the exact spot of our bed. That March night and the ones that followed it, Father didn’t sleep at home. Squeezed into his venerable black suit, the one for weddings and funerals, he took the stagecoach to Rochester. The poor old man got it in his head that he should open a credit account at the bank, so he gathered his savings in the bottom of his gusseted bag, not a large amount, I imagine. He announced that he would use the opportunity to visit Leah. Our older sister, by coincidence, needed his signature for a right to lease. She gives piano lessons to the daughters of rich flour mill owners in Rochester. Leah despised our way of life. She only loved pretty manners, fancy dresses, and handsome men. The eldest of the Fox sisters dreams of marrying one of the town bourgeois. And at the age of thirty-five, with a few gray hairs, it would be time!
Rochester Knockings Page 4