“Pearl! Pearl!” the pastor was impatient. “Do you have something to ask of me to be circling around like a pitiful top?”
“Oh, no, Father, I was just thinking about those events. The Fox sisters weren’t at school yesterday. Can you believe . . .”
“There is nothing to believe or to think about from this point of view!”
“It’s said that even Mr. Fox, who has a solid head, is telling stories in the village . . .”
The reverend had a moment of weariness. His face, paled from sleepless nights, turned a little more gaunt. But wanting to appear kind, he corrected the seated posture of his poorly stacked vertebra.
“That Christian man communes more fervently at the saloon than at the church. Alcohol and dominos will end up disorienting everyone, him as well as his peers. When they’re not busy fulfilling their blessed need, sinners have only one eagerness: to distance themselves from the divine light . . .”
Pearl, with the delicacy of an egret, was leaning with the tips of her fingers against the study table, casting the old man one of those heavenly blue stares beneath the shadow of her eyelashes.
“You are probably being too harsh on those poor farmers . . .”
Reverend Gascoigne considered his daughter with an inextricable feeling of annoyance, limitless affection, and profound melancholy: at a few years difference in age, Pearl so resembled Violet when she was a young mother, certainly in thought as well, her form of reasoning was more like protest, almost a reproach, a manner of systematic petition. He admitted without thinking it, deep down, that the mourning of his wife had burned away all true charity in him and hardened the cardiac tissue of his compassion, leaving only a bit of scar tissue for the potentialities of grace. Since his wife’s suicide, his status as a pastor flirted with imposture, yet he never departed from any of his priestly or civic duties. Pearl meanwhile carried on as if morality were still intact. Hadn’t her mother drowned by accident? She understood nothing of the insinuations and other derogatory claims around her. All the battles for freedom and equality written in the Gospel were hers. He suspected her participation in the network helping fugitive slaves, for she had never hidden her radical beliefs in emancipation, as much for blacks as for women. Pearl had a flawless energy and certainly the appearance of those beautiful slender angels papists like to paint. To whom would he marry such a phenomenon as herself in this land of swine? Before the cult of liberty, in the Ancient World, she would’ve ranked among the obstinate being dragged to execution on the racks of infamy . . . The reverend was annoyed by these absurd associations that kept bombarding the mind’s emptiness.
“Could you leave me to work on my sermon, I have to readjust the brains of a bunch of renegades gaining strength . . .”
“Why is it that you don’t believe them?” the mocking young woman confronted him, her eye of infinite blue landing on the knife of his mouth.
“In those stupid stories of knocking spirits? I adhere only to the Blessing of Jesus Christ!”
The reverend watched the outline of his daughter vanish in the shadow of the landing. She didn’t close the door behind her, and her laugh, turned toward invisible presences—undoubtedly her old long-haired Yorkshire tumbling down the staircase or the Mynah bird holding forth in the pulpit of his cage in the vestibule—reverberated back up to him, rendered almost unreal, like another time, long before unhappy Violet’s first attack of neurasthenia.
Forehead lowered over the Bible, he placed his head between his fists to hear no more of the world’s noises. Meditating on a sermon the night before delivering it was a respite for him, a break from his prosaic duty, which was either to entertain a mass of dolts and simpletons or to frighten children. A single ray of true light in these narrow minds could do more harm than a loaded revolver. How to grant them glimpses of the Lord’s ways? Since Luther, the Moravians, and the Holy Club, there was no other way to announce the Good News than by making the church thunder with horrors and curses. Outside or in the coalmines, mortals understand only the thunder of God, all of them blind to his lightning. Back in the day, John Wesley, founder of the Church, ran like Attila through the moors of England, reading and writing his sermons on horseback, the conquest of souls his exclusive ambition. In the haunted high plains of America, it was better to have to deal with masses of unbelievers or papists in favor of slavery than with a single necromancer.
Reverend Gascoigne leafed through his Bible. With the dexterity of a Monte card player, he flipped from the Pentateuch to the Book of Nahum, from Leviticus to the Proverbs. His finger rested without hesitation on the useful verse, echoing from countless homilies. And so the Eternal God said to Moses: “Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them.” And so the king of Manasseh offending the Eternal God placed Baal and Astarte in the Temple and immolated his own son; like the Philistines, he surrounded himself with sorcerers and false prophets.
“O house of Jacob, come you, and let us walk in the light of the Lord!” the pastor whispered.
Then, without reading anything more than folds of his memory:
“May you never find among you anyone who would put his son or daughter in the fire, no one who exercises the trade of diviner, astrologer, augur, magician . . . Enter into the rocks, and hide thee in the dust, so as to avoid God’s terror and the brightness of his majesty.”
Abruptly stopped short, he told himself that if the Prophets, great and minor, were all firmly diverted away from this funereal form of prostitution, it must be because they thought the gift of prophecy was wrong. Ending his arbitration, he exclaimed:
“And the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits and after wizards, to go a whoring with them, I will set my face against that soul, and will cut him off from among his people.”
But what persons, falling into weakness, could be so demonic to have at heart the desire to rekindle the flames of hell? Closing his eyes, he took on a more assured voice:
“Rejoice in being alive and without sin, give to the Lord all authority and power over impure spirits!”
The reverend remembered King Saul in quest of a necromancer capable of intervening in God’s fierce deafness toward him. His servants found him a woman in Endor. In disguise, the king went to visit her and commanded: “Conjure someone from the dead in order to tell me the future.” The woman replied that it would be risking her life, for a royal decree forbade it, but Saul swore to protect her if she obeyed and asked her to make Samuel, the last Judge, come up from the kingdom of the dead. And the terrified woman said that she recognized Saul as her king, then: “I see a divine being, he comes back up from the earth!” But the old man wrapped in a cloak, the very man who during his life put Saul on the throne, did not want to respond to the king’s distress. Why wouldn’t a prophet no longer prophesize once deceased?
In a voice vibrant with indignation, the reverend exclaimed: “The horseman lifteth up both the bright sword and the glittering spear: and there is a multitude of slain, and a great number of carcasses; and there is no end of their corpses; they stumble upon their corpses . . .”
Then, more quietly, coming out of a daze: “No, the dead never answer the pleas of the living, except to announce the destruction of their kingdom! The dead are without memory and without love . . .”
The reverend lowered his voice again, confused. Orating up to this point in the Tower of Babel of his own thoughts, mingling Kings and Prophets, he now turned back on himself in vain exhortation, against his loneliness as a dried up widower, these verses of Ecclesiastes:
“Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that is done under the sun.”
XII.
If You Forget Me in the Desert
On Long Road since dawn, William Pill suspected that he’d crossed the Monroe County limits without there being anything yet to recognize: fields of wheat and other fodder for animals or humans frequent
ly extended to where prairie grass once had alternated with lakes and forests. Those last few days in Ohio, then in Pennsylvania, leisurely riding toward an idea, he’d had the time to turn his memory in every direction. He had a few dollars left of his severance pay to which was added a sterling silver watch won through poker in Cleveland. Not far from Philadelphia, on the banks of the Delaware River, the Appaloosa had started grumbling awfully while the Spanish Barb, encouraged toward mutiny, had decided to lie down like a cow at the slightest halt.
And so at great cost he would have to change horses, for his own, having lost all stamina, would bring him nothing but the price of their carcasses. With most of his luggage piled on his solid new Quarter Horse, 1.6 meters tall at its withers, bought from a wheelchair-bound cowboy who claimed he’d broken his back in a rodeo—which he pretended to believe as much as that the queenly mare appeared to be easy-going—Pill started back up again on Long Road, reassured by his star and at the end of both a war and perilous journey. Despite some fickle Iroquois tribes and some bloody disputes between clans of breeders and families of farmers, New York State was a haven of peace in comparison to the West and the Great Plains at the borders of the Colorado River and the Rocky Mountains. His shoulder healed, the Mexican bullet in his pocket as a good luck charm, he owned nothing, aside from his double-cased pocket watch engraved with an eagle, a Springfield rifle, and the old Bible of his late friend Edward Blair—no inheritance, no family, not even a close friend. The only thing he had was the future, which belongs to no one.
In the late afternoon, still at a light trot on Her Highness, his boisterous mare with a flaming mane, he finally seemed able to recognize, like a face coming closer, the panorama of landscape. He had no more doubts when, on the left, mists parted to reveal the dense hills of the Iroquois, with their steep rocks here and there, markers between the cultivated plains and the break of high valleys where herdsmen lead their flocks on sunny days. Dividing these two was a river whose appearances varied, sometimes impetuous, sometimes sinuous and calm. Massive expanses of aspens and conifers with huge trunks brought a sort of meditative interiority to the landscape, a shiver of worry populated by bird song and indefinable echoes, as if silence itself were breathing. Two eagles circled in flight, high up, in the bruise of the setting sun.
Once again, with such an insidious fire in the heaths, the river sparkled at the bend of a shadowy valley. Pill finally caught sight of the big windmill-like reservoir and, posted on the lower side, a signboard with the inscription HYDESVILLE painted in black. A little farther off, in the middle of a pasture surrounded by low chalk cliffs where the black roots of pines burst up in places like the crooked fingers of the devil, stood one monumental tree, solitary, dans son immensité d’ombre. He recognized the Grand Meadow oak, which, by chance of a random fallen seed, had taken over a third of the sky with its branches, and with its roots doubtlessly explored the depths of Hell. From its low boughs was once hung high and taut, after many other summary executions, a certain Joe Charlie-Joe, son of a slave made white as snow before the Lord by the Mansfield ranchers because of a stolen kiss with the beautiful Emily, the sole heiress of her clan. This fifteen-year-old story had been repeatedly told to him at the saloon. The one who had denounced the unfortunate boy, a mother now with a necklace of the Virgin hanging above her admirable breasts, had been from then on the reigning mistress of the ranch one could see beyond the winter pastures: a large wooden house in the old style with white painted columns. Even further, a little below Long Road, the slate and metal roofs of downtown Hydesville blinked in the sun’s last rays. Apart from a few exhausted barks and the transparent noise of birds, no sound rose from the village.
William Pill pulled the bridle in the direction of these habitations, curious by their silence. Quick to change course, with one ear back, Her Highness ascended onto the main street. Her hooves rang in quarter-time rhythm, raising a white dust. The man had started to have a doubt in this desert; he had seen more of it in the south, where entire villages were empty of inhabitants. People around here had held on to their own good land, but California gold had driven many others mad. However, two young Mohawks crouching on the church steps gave him pause: Indians don’t like abandoned houses. He greeted them by raising a finger to his hat and continued his distracted visit of the place. An old man in suspenders smoking on his doorstep, some toddlers hanging from the skirts of a black nurse, a horse hitched to the gate of a grain counter, a band of cats around a tanner blind in one eye: these fragments of life in the flying dust were part of a community still intact, probably gathered together elsewhere, by the attraction of a healer come from Boston or Rochester, some itinerant preacher or the lynching of someone who’d been stealing chickens. At the window of a rather nice building that he recognized to be the home of Reverend Gascoigne, the tulle curtains parted to reveal a woman’s face, so luminous with her blonde hair let down, that he froze on his saddle to the point that his surprised Quarter Horse turned her neck and flinched.
Piqued by a sensation of unspeakable emptiness somewhere between his diaphragm and throat, William Pill took his reins in hand. He signaled a trot, eager to get back to Long Road, and his horse, mane in the wind, started to pick up speed. That’s when the click of a gun barrel engaged nearby.
“Stop there or I’ll shoot!” yelled a man, rushing over without losing sight of his target in the middle of the road.
The newcomer obeyed in good faith. He had recognized the marshal despite his heaviness and wrinkles. Was it possible that Robert McLeann would have remembered him?
“Get off your horse and approach with your hands up, Willie the Faker! We’ve got a lot to catch up on, the two of us . . .”
Knowing the unreliable trigger of the type of firearm being pointed at him, he did as he was asked. This McLeann, with his migraine-inducing integrity and respect for procedure, had always amused him.
Seated behind the office desk, gun lowered, the marshal had to admit his blunder while unrolling the Certificate of Merit personally signed by General Zachary Taylor.
“If it weren’t for your name and birth date written out, I might believe that you won this in a poker game from some other heroic fellow!”
“I won it with my own blood!” Pill replied with a certain emphasis, exposing the nasty scar on his shoulder. “And if you were only equipped with a telegraph, like all respectable sheriffs are, you could avoid these unfortunate mistakes . . .”
“That’s not going to prevent me from sending a request for information on your record first thing tomorrow by post!”
Pill laughed, one eye on the closed saloon door through the window, the other across the road.
“So what’s going on around here, Marshal? An outbreak of dysentery?”
“I would have preferred that. Or even yellow fever . . .”
And with these enigmatic words, the Sergeant of the Army Reserve left the former Jefferson County Sheriff, downgraded now to Monroe County police officer because of an inconstant woman or, if one prefers, a woman constant to her own instinct alone.
Night started to fall without resurrecting any more of the Hydesville population. Stray dogs and a lone escaped cow occupied the main street in the false light of dusk. One could easily distinguish lights in the windows, and sometimes the hanging faces of ancestors, but everything with legs seemed to have vanished on a secret pilgrimage. Her Highness took up again the path to Long Road, between the shadowy profiles of groves and the evanescent flight of hills that one could confuse with the malleable contours of dream. Imbued with the mystery of spaces transfigured by the inversion of light, hidden and intensified at once, the spring evenings had a surprising freshness that fell down from the stars. These moments of approaching darkness, between the dog and the wolf, reminded William Pill of a background of exaggerated images and feelings gaping like wounds. But all that was from a different world, now claimed to be old, that on reflection had its cruel youthfulness, with its share of disasters striking children
first. And it was his brothers and sisters brought here to escape the cholera that were, beyond all logic, keeping the youthfulness of this continent intact.
Sailing thus between hill and valley, riding now into the night, his mind taken next by the continuous shipwreck that was his Atlantic crossing on that skiff of bitter discord baptized in derision as the Brotherhood, William Pill thought he could perceive, surrounded by darkness, an entire array of floating lanterns glittering on the sea of tall grasses and boughs.
XIII.
Evening Visitors to the Haunted House
Curiosity pushed to its fever pitch often turns into a riot, but for the moment the crowd was huddled in an avid silence around the Fox family farm, lanterns and lamps in hand, most of them outside, while inside the house, the first-comers pressed against the walls listened with an air of studious fright to Mrs. Fox’s injunctions:
“Don’t move, my dear neighbors, don’t make a sound, that was how we were last night when the knocking occurred against the floor and under our beds, which honestly made us jump. We heard footsteps in the pantry, and right here, at the foot of the staircase. It was impossible to close our eyes: an unhappy spirit was prowling around my daughters and me, looking for any means to make itself known to us . . .”
Crossed with conflicted feelings, from joviality to the most incomprehensible of terrors, the faces of the villagers wrinkled like curtains in the wind beneath the dangerous flames of an oil lamp. More and more assured, the voice of Mrs. Fox was identified with a wave of amazement changing their faces with each moment.
“So I said, ‘Is this a human being who is ready to answer in an honest manner?’ But then, nothing, not even the rattle of a key. I added: ‘Is this a spirit? If that’s the case, knock twice.’ Two knocks, I swear it, immediately followed. I added again: ‘If you are an injured spirit, knock three times.’ The house was entirely shaken by the count. Then I asked, not at all reassured: ‘Were you wounded, then, under this roof?’ The answer came without delay. ‘Could it be that you might have once been attacked?’ It was yes, inarguably! By this same process, I was able to discern that the spirit of the deceased who was giving me all this information had been a peddler and the head of his family when he was alive, and that he’d been killed for his money fifteen years ago in the age of our Lord in this house, that his body is in fact buried in the basement . . .”
Rochester Knockings Page 6