Rochester Knockings

by Hubert Haddad

  What a commotion at home when she decided to dictate how we spent our time! First of all, she wanted to sit in on this spirit act. That was the first night. The eagle owl was ululating high in the cedar. Coyotes called after the moon on the hills. At the first crack, Katie began the invocation in her way: “Do like I do, Mister Splitfoot!” And then snapped her fingers to encourage him. Suddenly there was a hellish racket, as if the entire skeleton of Goliath was cracking. And then it was decided that the spirit must find Leah attractive. He revealed to her, in little counted blows, details that even she was unaware of, the little beauty mark on the back of her neck, hidden by her hair, and a birthmark on her lower back. And it was up to me to confirm the one completely out of view: right in the crease of her large buttocks was a wine-colored mark the width of an index finger. Mother swore, befuddled, that she had forgotten these details since forever.

  The night before her departure, after several hours of sleep on a mattress unrolled in the living room, Leah had a magnificent idea: why don’t we all come live closer to her in Rochester! Our parents treated the idea as extravagant. They didn’t consider it for a second. Kate and I of course liked the idea, but who would look after the farm? Today, while reading the letters she’s sent since leaving, we’re starting to understand what she has in the back of her mind.

  Troubles began for us right after her departure. Most people live in haunted houses without even realizing it. Some in harmony, others causing worry or up to some other devilry. What was upsetting in our house was that the spirit had broken the ice. All because of Katie, I believe, because of her way of sleepwalking from one world into the other.

  XV.

  The Columns of Duality

  That sunny Sunday, the Hydesville church was stormed the moment it opened by everyone the district counted in its more or less zealous flock; added to that were a number of Protestants from other parishes, all wildly curious about the event, including local personalities, politicians, men of law, doctors, officers in uniform. And even, arriving that morning from Rochester in a convertible pulled by four horses, Henry Maur, the rich trader of furs and opium, flanked by Miss Charlene Obo, the famous actress and curious specimen with a beautiful waxy face, dressed all in black under her vicuña cloak.

  Reverend Gascoigne did not go up to the pulpit alone. Alexander Cruik, a brilliant preacher in the Methodist Church formed at the University of Oxford, came expressly for the occasion from the Adirondack mountains, the barren territories of the adjacent Hamilton County, where he was trying to convert surviving Indian tribes: Cruik, who claimed to descend from George White-field and the Great Itinerants, had called in reinforcements with a choir of young black women that the public received in a mixed uproar of delight and fury. After the reverend’s sermon on excommunication, which his own sermon would have to follow under the banner of the Great Awakening, the evangelist intended to pay a visit as discreetly as possible to the seditious family. An annunciator of the return of Christ would not be able to misjudge the unceasing gift of His Blessing. Alexander Cruik considered the crowd assembled between the brick walls, under the nave ceiling. Never at church had he seen such a diverse landscape. There was, beyond a majority of Methodists, all species of Puritans come from the neighboring villages, Sunday Baptists, Adventists, Lutherans, and even a sampling of dumbfounded Quakers, with some Negroes sitting in the back released from the corn plantations for church.

  The reverend swiftly defied heresy: “There is no obstacle between God and his faithful, no border, no customs, and the New Jerusalem is open to all Christians keeping faith and good will. Each of us draws conscientiously from his own reading of the Scriptures. However, didn’t Christ declare to the Apostle Peter that what binds us and what unties us on Earth will bind us and untie equally in Heaven? That is why we condemn without appeal dialogue with the dead as senseless and heretical. The occultists are all imposters who are ill-advisedly seizing and using the memory of the departed in order to feed the demons of evil and resentment with a putrid blood. These misguided ones conjure the dead from out of their own terrors and ramblings. But necromancy is the opposite of spiritual experience. There is no place for our dust and ashes in the afterlife! Yesterday again, without success, we warned the incriminated loud and clear, we have implored them to abandon their nefarious practices. As it is taught by the Apostle Matthew:

  ‘Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother. But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established. And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the church: but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as a heathen man and a publican.’

  Therefore, by ecclesiastical decision, we find ourselves solemnly obliged to put the fate of the family of John D. Fox back in the hands of God; from this day forward they will be considered as banished from the Episcopal Methodist Church. They will no longer take part in our brotherhood! Whoever would follow their example or be tempted to accompany their erring will swiftly suffer a similar ostracism . . .”

  The crowd of farmers and stable boys gathered at the back of the room could not restrain an animal grunt of satisfaction that made Pearl, seated in the first row, turn back to look. In this worried gesture, after staring down several faces with low foreheads and thick jaws, she crossed glances with William Pill seated five rows back in the span of men. Embarrassed, she blinked her eyelashes and gave a vague polite smile that she immediately regretted. That man had an unpleasant way of fixing his steel-blue eyes on her, as if with his silence he was speaking crudely and in his full right. Pearl turned back around and hunched her shoulders. Her neck was burning. She had no doubt that he was studying the back of her head and each stray hair that had fallen loose.

  At the pulpit, the minister of the Holy Gospel was finishing his curse. His daughter, her throat tightening, was already frightened of the consequences of this strictness on the Fox sisters, their elderly mother, and that ignorant farmer who, with the help of alcohol, believed himself to be invested in a supreme mission: consoling all the mourners on Earth by opening up the secrets of the other world.

  At the signal of Alexander Cruik, anxious to appease everyone’s spirit, the choir of young black girls started to sing:

  I am free

  I am free, my Lord

  I am free

  I’m washed by the blood of the Lamb

  You may knock me down

  I’ll rise again

  I’m washed by the blood of the Lamb

  I fight you with my sword and shield

  I’m washed by the blood of the Lamb

  The guest speaker experienced slight vertigo at the moment he stood to approach the pulpit. Those hymns of incorruptible faith born in the cotton fields had risen viscerally, with mouths closed, among the millions of slaves evangelized by his church, who on the horizon of their martyrdom aspired to nothing other than freedom. And what then were the impecunious white farmers aspiring to who were whispering into the ears of the dead? Thinner than a rail and with the lividity of a revenant, the preacher was amused by the fright that ordinarily occasioned his appearance amid a crowd of believers. If, by an exception in the Methodist Church Council inclined to sobriety in all things, his outspokenness and inspired wise-man fantasies had been allowed for services rendered, he knew from experience that there was almost nothing held in balance among these crazed settlers, who were pioneers and sons of pioneers with barbaric inclinations and, notwithstanding, were sworn opponents of superstition carried out with the candor of crusaders. With these people—the severe Gascoigne seemed to have forgotten for the moment—a single word too much could make things worse.

  Intuition more than reason guided Alexander Cruik in situations like these, and he let himself go off in a loud voice about numerous parables of his own creation, which his listeners imagined were taken from
the Bible and that the wisest took accurately as apocryphal. But both the illiterate and the learned were under his spell. Under the fur trader’s wide shoulder, a dark figure decked out like a Byronian privateer had the frustrated outburst of a scholar confronted with an undateable document. If Charlene and Harry Maur had rushed to these fields, allured by the story, he, Lucian Nephtali, had agreed to go along with them as a way to find out more about whatever rarified process of excommunication was fomenting under the leadership of a district pastor and a visionary who’d risked his scalp with the Nagarragansetts or the Oregon Indians. Since the young Quaker Mary Dyer had been tried and hung in Boston now almost two centuries ago, trial by opinion was no longer acknowledged in the Union. But where did this strange bird of a preacher find this story of a corpse brought back to life in the bottom of a cave containing jars filled with scrolls of Hebraic manuscripts?

  Now he was quoting the book of Psalms with the same casual fervor:

  “I was nothing more than a lunatic made of water and clay and your eyes saw me!”

  Alexander Cruik heard his own voice resonate under the vaulted ceiling. For nearly an hour he preached to the perfect silence, with no direct allusion made to the case at hand. An anesthetized audience was listening to him, ready for eternal sleep in the cave of Elohim. For what other reason than terror do sinners seek refuge in the church? Exhausted by his own performance and thinking to himself that he still wasn’t done, the preacher started in on the parable from the Gospel of Mark:

  “And when he was come out of the ship, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, Who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no, not with chains: Because that he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces: neither could any man tame him. And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones. But when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshipped him, And cried with a loud voice, and said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the most high God? I adjure thee by God, that thou torment me not. For he said unto him, Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit. And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many.”

  Plagued by the many expressions his eyes met in the audience, Alexander rushed to conclude:

  “If every mistake distances us a little more from the Lord, could a truly righteous man create a world? And if this man existed, could he be anyone other than our Lord?”

  While the gathered crowds had started thinking about how to get back home without mingling any further, the choir took up again its antiphony with a celestial intonation.

  I am free

  I am free, my Lord

  I am free

  I’m washed by the blood of the Lamb

  XVI.

  In the Waves of Boiling Blood

  Head on fire, tormented by a nagging stomachache, Kate was still contemplating escaping through a basement window from the house, which for three days now had been transformed into a tribunal at the heart of which the inculpated were none other than the entire Fox family. Doctors, priests, and judges arriving in succession wouldn’t stop examining every last thing, the furniture, the least object, and even the bodies of the Fox sisters, inside their mouths, the conformation of their organs, the joints of their feet and hands, and submitted further bombardments of questions as if they were seeking a confession from the throat-cutters of Charles Haynes, peddler of his estate. Luckily George Willets and Isaac Post, both Quakers, came as honest witnesses to counter these charges. These two had attended the séances of invocation and could swear on any Bible about the veracity of these phenomena.

  Among the investigators and those faking curiosity, the most unusual was certainly that likeable Mr. Cruik, who didn’t ask a single question, but penetratingly observed the people present, whether they be family members or self-imposed hosts. Quite gaunt, with a hollow face and long hands like a sorcerer’s, the depths of his eyes sparkling with embers, he evoked some kind of convalescent on leave, one of those cursed consumptives to whom one would benignly allow a little breath of fresh air. That didn’t prevent the preacher from catching Margaret’s every word; once so shy, she had become quite talkative in the presence of gentlemen with ascot ties and top hats. He paid particular attention to Kate, deferential, strangely intense, and thought that Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus in the tomb, must have resembled these two.

  Outside, the waning sun was forging the most beautiful gold. The blue shadows of trees grew long. A marvelous light haloed each leaf. Kate, unable to bear it any longer, had climbed out the window and withdrawn to the side of the pond while clutching her stomach. This crushing heaviness, could it be because of all the clashing inside her, all along her legs and in her insides? Last week, Lily Brown, the oldest student in Miss Pearl’s class, had told her, reenacting with energetic gestures, that some kind of suffocating demon would leap at her throat some nights during her sleep. She also recounted how a water snake had slithered one time into her bed and that she still had its trace on her belly, close to her navel. Kate too had been having awful nightmares, especially since Mister Splitfoot had entered into her life. A horned and hairy little being with the hooves of a goat and huge white eyes would come and sit on her chest, so heavy that she found herself completely paralyzed. After a minute or a century, she’d manage to escape and, as if ejected from a waffle iron, she would immediately recover use of all her vital functions. None of the disgusting details Lily Brown described—a demon’s long, hardened fingers, or mice brains smacking down on you through holes—had happened to her, but she felt the paralysis of a great terror in those nightmares. They were going to think she was dead and put her in a coffin, while she would be squirming and crying out in vain, a prisoner under a spell, which hadn’t happened to anyone else, not even Maggie busy with her daydreams or babbling on at her bedside . . .

  This time it wasn’t a nightmare that she wanted to flee, but a pain quite real beneath her navel. One doesn’t talk to her mother about girl parts, so instead she ran under the big trees, biting her lip. The black pond sparkled in the glow of sunset. Kate made her way to the stream of bubbles and foam, hanging over above on the aspens’ side; it flowed down in cascades from a rock, tumbling between mossy stones before disappearing without a trace into a plane of water where the nascent brilliance of the full moon combined its silver spokes with the golden sequins of the sun. There, in the misty countryside little lights were scattered as if on the prow of a night fishing skiff. A rider in the distance was going in stride, emerging like a strong-chested centaur.

  Under the branches of a willow, on her knees before the stream, Kate rolled her dress up above her thighs and, legs parted, cried out in horror. Blood with an acrid odor was flowing from an unknown wound; it spread in tiny beads on a rock flat as the granite block where her mother decapitated chickens. Then she remembered that one morning last winter, before the stained sheets under her, her sister had claimed a nosebleed, and that she’d asked herself, perplexed, how her sister’s nose could have bled under her buttocks. Soon to be twelve years old, Kate wasn’t entirely ignorant of those mysteries that transform girls little by little into mother pelicans good at laying big, soft, milky eggs ready to hatch. Frenzied, she began to splash her belly with that still sparkling, bracing water while pinkish threads spread out across the rock like veins in a hand. Could this be what old women called the lunar cycle? It seemed to her like her blood was dyeing the whole river. At that moment, on the other bank, she thought she perceived two fiery eyes scrutinizing her between branches. Frightened, she quickly pulled down her dress. Was it an animal from the forest, an otter or a fox attracted by the scent of blood? Or that man-goat of the hills always on the lookout for a hare or flycatcher? But Pequot and his flock had gone camping off into the mountains along with the beautiful season. Other entities, more elusive than bestiali
ty or lust, were roaming these edges in the dark.

  Running alongside the pond, Kate hurried back toward the farm. A pale light stretched over the hills to the edges of the high forest while the blue light turned to purple. She perceived litanies of some sort, screams, like someone calling out. Out of breath, madly worried about her family, she reproached herself for this escapade. Soon she saw wandering lanterns and made out the silhouettes of many people. Even more than these unwelcome strangers who’d come to investigate every draft of air, she feared their neighbors, all the farmers of placid temperament who, gripping their elbows in fear, were capable of transforming into a mob the moment one of them let loose a curse. They were who prowled and howled like a bunch of wolves around their farm.

  Finally getting close, in a darkness swept by torchlight, a feeling of shame to be coming back in such a poor state overcame her, her dress stained with dirt and blood. Farmers gathered outside their windows were shaking their fists while waving their lanterns. One of them threw a rock at the front door.

  “Death to the witches!” he bellowed.

  Those most excited went one better: “Let them hang!”

  Then there was a commotion. A rain of pebbles rang across the wooden walls. A window on the ground floor broke, adding to the tumult.

  “Stop! Stop!” cried Kate, rushing to the doorstep.

  There was a furious movement toward her, a tempest ready to carry her away, but at that moment the door opened and Pearl Gascoigne, undoubtedly the final visitor of the day, pushed the girl behind her back and threw herself in front of the crowd, stunning in her Amazon behavior, wearing a linen jacket and English skirt, with lace collars and sleeves. Defiant, without the least hesitation, she took them head on.