We were alone with Mother last night when the knocks started up again. Katie, who was pretending to sleep, sat straight up as if spring-loaded. I am always just as terrified when she gets up and walks toward the window or staircase with her arms outstretched, eyes rolled upward. But this time it wasn’t a case of sleepwalking. In the darkness of the bedroom, I could easily see her crafty look, almost cruel when she smiled. Katie is adorable, all slim, with the pretty figure of a theater actress, but there is a bit of a demonic look to her. It could be said that anywhere she finds herself—in the forest, in the village, in the house—she is looking for the secret behind things.
One autumn day (we had spoken the night before at the dinner table of Joe Charlie-Joe, the former slave of the Mansfield ranch hanged from a big oak in Grand Meadow), I noticed Katie preoccupied with blowing on spider webs in the basement while murmuring a stupid nursery rhyme:
Catch me if you can
I’m the spirit of a fly
Devour me if you want
I’m the soul of a hanged man
Sitting in bed, a little later, she all of sudden started to snap her fingers, thumb against middle finger, like the black day laborers who sing prayers after pulling up the corn. I couldn’t stop myself from copying her. We were snapping our fingers in rhythm and then suddenly, Kate called out: “Whoever you are, now do as we do!”
It must be said that the silence of the night overtook us after that command. There is nothing more painful than the silence that follows an incomprehensible phenomenon. Everything was quiet outside, one could distinctly hear the barn owls and the coyotes. Having been spared one night of her husband’s snoring, Mother was sleeping, hands curled into fists. There were soft crashes against the windowpane that could only be a moth in the cool air of this end of March. Without Father’s help, Mother had been too busy with a thousand other tasks to make our bed and bother with the windows.
“Do as I do!” Kate repeated with authority and loudly cracked the knuckles of her fingers. Suddenly, I write this under oath, we heard the exact same sound echo back. But it was an echo that was so close by! Kate exulted. She was terribly excited. At that moment, I believe she hadn’t really imagined the significance of such a phenomenon. Aside from fairies or conjurers, nobody in the world had ever experienced this: we were ordering the invisible to manifest itself and, for the first time since our Lord Jesus Christ, the invisible was answering back! There was my sister who had leapt out of bed and planted herself in the middle of the room, her arms on her hips: a real leprechaun in the dark with her nightgown all tangled mid-thigh.
“Are you a man?” she dared to ask with that hoarseness the voices of girls sometimes have. When there was no response, she continued her line of questions. “Are you a woman? A child? An animal?”
Katie scratched her head and turned toward me. “Help me—do you have any ideas?”
“Maybe we could ask its name and age?”
“That’s not easy, if it’s nobody! And then how would it tell us? The thing only communicates by noise, or at least little knocks, little purrs of a tiger in hiding . . .”
Kate started to turn slowly in place. She fixed herself, arms spread, like a statue. “Are you a spirit?” she then exclaimed, intimidated by her own question.
We heard two knocks of acquiescence, very clean, same as the blow of a hammer or sweep of a broom. Frightened but radiant, Katie came with a leap to join me in the bed.
“We did it!” she whispered in my ear. “It’s a ghost . . .”
With these words, not yet having understood the power such a word could apply, in terms of the invisible, I felt the ice water of terror rise up my throat. Kate firmly clamped both hands over my mouth to stifle the scream swelling up in me.
“Hush!” she said. “Ghosts are shyer than a moon rabbit . . .”
Regaining my breath, I hissed back in panic. “And what if he wants to drink our blood or make us pregnant?” The whites of Katie’s eyes and her sharp little teeth sparkled in the dark.
“Shh!” she said without reassuring me in the least. If it was a ghoul or a vampire, we were soon to be dead for good.
It might have been one in the morning. The house became unusually quiet again but I could tell that all sorts of insanity was brewing inside Katie’s skull. “One thing is sure,” she said finally, “the spirit understands our English, but he seems to have swallowed his tongue, or else Mister Splitfoot has the voice of a mouse, too soft to cross the wall between his world and ours . . .”
Mister Splitfoot! Where did she come up with such a name? Her penchant for mischief is apparently endless.
The exceptional silence of the walls and furniture made her loquacious:
“Imagine a deaf person and a blind person each lost in a thunderstorm. One isn’t able to hear the thunder and the other one
is unable to see the flash. Neither would be able to escape the lightning . . .”
“What are you trying to say, Katie, putting on those marmoset airs of yours?”
“That the two of us are not in danger of being surprised by the storm . . .”
My little sister likes enigmas. And she likes songs even more. When she began to hum one of her favorite nursery rhymes, I must have fallen asleep, lulled by her voice . . .
What’s your name, Mary Jane
What’s your number, Cucumber
My dream continued the adventure from earlier in the night. Except that Katie was in my place and I was in hers. In my case I had kept my reserve as opposed to her playful pixie behavior and I was quite surprised to see myself suddenly intrepid, there, across from the body I was occupying, that big carcass of an adolescent who no longer belonged to me. Anyhow, we descended the staircase, one of us bizarrely in the other, me in her and her in me, and I couldn’t tell anymore which of us was trembling so much that the entire house felt the tremors. “Let’s not be afraid,” I said to Katie in my body, “there is always a step after the last step.” Through the open door of the woodstove, tongues of fire shot up while it roared all the way up its thick iron stovepipe. Leaning over to shut it, despite the intense heat, I saw in this aquarium of embers the skeletons of children the color of molten iron. They were moving slowly like long delicate fish, sea needles, or seahorses. My mirror-faced sister tugged at my sleeve.
“Come on, come,” she said in unknown words, “the fire will go out all by itself.” We let ourselves flow immediately into the swirl of a staircase of whitewater that seemed familiar to me, even if I had not forgotten that a sort of riveted wooden ladder was what led down to the basement. We slipped at full speed down those step-shaped wavelets until soon underground, in the middle of the roots of cedars and tall pines. Green glowworms were performing the service of streetlamps in these depths.
At another moment, I had the sensation of myself being buried in an old rock salt mine or in one of those caves all vaulted with the ribs of branches in full sun. Katie, my little Katie transformed into Maggie (what an unpleasant impression of stiffening!), already below me exclaimed, “It’s Mister Splitfoot! Here he is in his manor house! Mister Splitfoot in person . . .” And singing out loud at the top of her voice without my being able to see who it was, aside from a wicked will-o’-the-wisp climbing up from the entrails of the earth:
Where do you live?
In the grave!
What is your favorite song?
Hello maggot!
Waking with a start, I realized that my bedfellow had hardly finished her nursery rhyme, also perceived with strange deformities, and that my dream had lasted the length of a yawn. But either from precaution or superstition, I felt first for my breasts, rather developed for my age, then for my sister’s almost nonexistent ones.
“What’s gotten into you?” Katie was irritated.
“Oh nothing, really!” I said without laughing. “I just wanted to assure myself that you weren’t me . . .”
Timidly, with one arm numb, I asked if she would repeat the end of her little song.<
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“What song?” she asked with surprise.
“You know, ‘Where do you live . . .?’”
“Oh, Mister Splitfoot’s nursery rhyme! I don’t remember it very well anymore. Wait, it’s coming back to me:
What is your name? Horn of the chin
What is your number? Zero plus zero
What is your country? Far from paradise
What is your address? Street of Two She-devils
Where do you live? In the black house that kills
X.
First Conversation with Mister Splitfoot
Over the course of March nights, these phenomena took on an unprecedented magnitude. The floor shaking in the rooms made the beds tremble and one couldn’t remain standing without feeling, at each blow, a long vibration straight up the spinal column. At the approach of midnight, the sounds—by turns muffled or clashing, far away or close, like an axe chopping into a log or a load of cast iron crashing against some cleanly broken board—grew more frequent and continuous, so that the sleep of the entire family was interrupted by the mysterious tantrums of their home. Only John D. Fox, a man of certainty who would swear only by the beliefs and theories of the Methodist Episcopal Church, quite disinclined to superstition and always skillful at attributing commonplace causes to the unusual, wanted under no circumstances to renounce his stertorous sleep. Faced with the increasing worrying of his wife, he displayed the stubborn countenance of a headstrong convict stupefied by alcohol. According to him the house suffered from age, the wood was tired and worn, the ground had shifted. Those ghost stories were just nonsense. The only thing to fear was being swept away to the bottom of the pond by a landslide. But by the grace of the Lord and several shots of an honest whiskey, his dignified repose was not seen as that of a disturbed person’s.
One night, the last in the month of March, 1848, with Mr. Fox still being away on business in Rochester, the three inhabitants of the farm on Long Road, absolutely exhausted by the previous night’s disorder, all went to bed in the parents’ bedroom in the hope of escaping insomnia’s throes. Margaret and her mother had long been dozing when, just before midnight, the knocks started up again.
Kate always slept with one eye open. Like the night before, she watched for the first signs of the phenomenon, impassive to her core, penetrated by the great miracle of being alive in the heart of these shadows. She could very well have disappeared unexpectedly or metamorphosed into a cat, or a pitcher, which wouldn’t have changed by a hair or a world this strangeness that ticked along with the clock on the very end of each second. To be herself, an insignificant little girl, and to feel with a mad keenness the interlacing of the night’s mysteries was an experience she wanted to relish so as not to die of terror. Mister Splitfoot, once and for all, brought her fantasy together with the enigmas of closed and dusty places, whereas the Redskin with green glasses had accompanied her in open spaces, forests, and high plains, as a messenger of the People of Wind and Light.
Even so, the knocks grew more violent, enough to wake up Maggie lying on the right side of the bed, in the same spot where their father usually snored, whereas their mother softly sighed on the left. Maggie saw her sister busy snapping her fingers, thumbs against middle fingers. To her amazement, the sounds answered back in echo, just after the finger snapping. A knock for a snap, two knocks for two, and so on. Mister Splitfoot was playing the game of give-and-take.
Kate took on the mischievous tone that worked so well with grown-ups, who were simultaneously won over and perplexed by it.
“If you know how to count to seven, prove it!” Seven knocks followed, perfectly spaced one after the other from an alarming proximity.
“Now count to ten.”
While the knocking continued, their mother, awakened by the racket, exchanged a long look of astonishment mingled with circumspection with Margaret, sitting up now on her side of the bed. The whole thing was so outlandish, in this solitude without recourse out in the countryside, that the emotional rush of assailing thoughts must have suddenly opened in both of them, a simple woman given to superstition and a young girl hurt by friendship, the subtle and radiating channels of the psyche. Without any warning, because of the imagination of an insomniac girl, another world was knocking on the walls and floorboards. This sort of spontaneous communication took on such an uncontrollable vehemence that their mother lost all her reserve and ventured to ask the entity a personal question.
“Hey there, how many children have I had?” Seven knocks thundered in response.
“That’s false!” she cried, suspecting with a secret desolation an artificial and mechanical cause for the phenomenon. “How many, how many do I have in my only life?”
Seven knocks followed once again.
“Let’s see,” she said, suddenly very weary, “I only had you two and Leah, and my eldest David who is so brave, and poor Big Bill, who we had to put in an institution . . .”
“And Abbey, are you forgetting?” Kate whispered, still in her bed, eyes fixed straight ahead of her.
“That’s true, God forgive me! With little Abbey, that makes six . . .
The farmwoman, absorbed in a painful memory, let out a brief moan.
“The stillborn counts as well? May it be spared from hell! At least it lived happy in my heart . . . That would make one more, then. One plus six . . .”
There was a silence barely disturbed by the creaking of a huge branch of the cedar behind the barn. Through the disjointed slats of the shutters, the entire night threw splinters of light across their sheets and faces like ember-colored insects born in the oblique refraction of stars in the pond’s dark mirror.
Kate and Margaret too were listening to the night’s breathing, infinitely relieved for no clear reason that their mother had entered into their confidence. A large person with wide hips would escort them from now on in these questionable vicinities possibly laid with traps. Katie remembered her farewell visit to the Rapstown cemetery a few days before their move. It was the end of one of the most beautiful autumn days, and the scattered graves of notable people were casting their gloomy shadows into the red grass. Springing out from a freshly dug pit, a squawking band of crows seemed to cast a pall over the azure sky. In a remote corner, away from the stone monuments, the Fox family’s square of grass, with its granite gravestone, had been invaded with a mixture of brambles and passionflower. Grandfather and Abbey were resting there, one on top of the other. By what absent-mindedness had they forgotten her in the twilight, alone among the dead? She held on to the mental image of a field empurpled at the setting sun, with all those stones askew, wooden crosses, inscriptions. Shadows bickered in a violent contrast of light. She would not have been surprised to see Beelzebub’s horns emerge. “Are you waiting for me, little brother, way below, are you waiting for me?” “Don’t leave me all alone, in the night, in the ground.” “Are you waiting for me way below?” “My sister, don’t leave me, I’m cold, the ground is burning me . . .”
At least a meter’s width apart, Mother and Maggie exchanged a complicit glance. They mustn’t wake her up. It’s dangerous to wake sleepwalkers. Katie, pupils wide, got out of bed and began to walk in the dark room. She was leaving the cemetery. She’s looking for the source of those tears, melodious as the song of a woman weaving baskets. In these unexplored plains, big animals with paws of smoke flee at her approach. What is that noise of cymbals high up in the mountain and these hordes around the final blazing flames? Abbey’s face stays with her, a fine mist heading toward a night more blinding than the gates to paradise.
“God, we’re sleeping!” she suddenly realized. And then she awoke, wavering, just at the foot of the staircase. Rushing over, the farmwoman and the adolescent led her back to her own bed as she asked. No, she would not be afraid to be alone with the spirit. Their mother had heard it said that one must not disturb a sleepwalker. Even when he looks quiet under the quilt, he’s traveling, arms stretched in front of him, toward the other world.
Once
Katie was tucked into bed, unable to hear the anguished calls of Maggie, who stayed in her parents’ bedroom, Mrs. Fox began to murmur through closed lips a nursery rhyme so gay that her own dying mother had sung it to her to console her for having to continue alone on the restless path.
Good night little girl, sleep tight
Keep this ring on your finger, so bright!
In your sweet rosebud bed, good night
XI.
Reverend Gascoigne and Family
Between two clouds wherein all of memory’s tombstones seemed to be knocked over, the April sun suddenly inundated the fields and meadows with a light more delicious than a sip of pure water. Sitting at his old oak desk, his sermon board as he called it, Reverend Gascoigne was considering Pearl’s movements. She had come to a halt at the window she’d just opened, slightly bent over, surely captured by the clearing after the storm. One could hear the quiet step of a horse ridden by some cowboy. Was he going to stop in Hydesville or continue on his route toward Rochester? Pearl had closed the window again and lightly, eloquent of beauty and grace in her chiffon dress with its inlaid belt, she pivoted in a turn to the right, exactly like in a waltz, but with a slowness that gave each of her gestures a simple domestic necessity: picking up a jar of sulfide, rearranging a bouquet of forget-me-nots and blue lilies of the valley, a quick blowing away of some pretext of dust . . .
Rochester Knockings Page 5