“Have you lost your minds? Leave these people alone!”
“Let them hang!” some in the back cried out again, quite giddy at her appearance.
A large decapitated body gone running in its own blood, the crowd had already begun lunging when a gunshot added confusion, cutting short its momentum. Each person looked around for a possible victim. A second shot froze that little world for good.
His Springfield gun held up in one hand, William Pill dug his knees into the saddle, spurs back, and pulled the reins so his monumental mare sprang from the dark, rearing up with a whinny at the shocked villagers.
“You all can kindly go home now,” he said in a tone both cheerful and firm, his gun lowered to the right height. “Go back to your wives! What a shame it would be for them to end their days with nothing but a poor rapping spirit for company . . .”
Relieved, with a radiant pout on her lips, Pearl had rejoined the Fox family inside. For his part, Mr. Fox was encamped with his shotgun behind the broken window, determined to hold his ground. His wife and two daughters were huddled in the hall at the foot of the stairs.
“Everything’s safe for now,” said the pastor’s daughter. “They’re dispersing. But they will come back more numerous, tomorrow or in a month if nothing changes here.”
“What can we do?” declared Mrs. Fox with the aplomb of the elect.
Pearl noticed Kate’s small hands who, in the background, was entertaining herself by snapping her fingers. Even despite the biggest frights, she allowed, nothing stops the appetite for play in children.
In the silence that had returned, the youngest of the Fox sisters cried out in a raucous little voice:
“All right, Mister Splitfoot! Do as I do! One, two, three, four . . .”
The parquet floor took back up noisily in echo, leaving Pearl seized with disbelief.
At that precise moment, the hinges of the front door seemed to let out a meow. Paralyzed, the farmer took aim into a haze of mist bathed in moonlight. A figure on its guard stayed without advancing further. The voice was quickly recognized as the stranger with the pockmarked face.
“Your horse is getting impatient, Miss Pearl! It would be best if I accompanied you back home on this troubled night . . .”
Part Two
Rochester
One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—
One need not be a House—
The Brain has Corridors—surpassing
Material Place—
—Emily Dickinson
I.
I Want Only a Long Drunkenness
At this time of the year, all the mills of Rochester, which alone furnished more flour than the whole of New York state, were busily grinding grain both upstream and downstream of High Falls, the three powerful waterfalls of the Genesee thundering for eternity in the heart of town, echoing other falls just as powerful along the course of the river between Canandaigua Lake—where several Seneca and Onondaga tribes still lived—and this sea of freshwater that was called Lake Ontario, at the southern point of four others that were even vaster. Thanks to hydraulic energy, several industries had rather quickly established themselves along the river in the capital of Monroe County: textile mills, paper mills, manufacturers of clothing, and various tools, all of which, ever since the Erie Canal linked the city to Albany and also to New York via the Hudson, were able to export quantities of merchandise aboard houseboats, barges, and steamboats whose paddle wheels evoked water mills. The increasing prosperity of Rochester—the first American boomtown, founded a half-century earlier by industrious landowners—accommodated more than ever before an influx of miserable immigrants freshly disembarked. The center of Flour City, as this mill city was nicknamed, had recently been developed with imposing stone buildings, while on the peripheries new neighborhoods of log houses were being constructed, crammed with workers’ families, Germans or Irish escaped from typhus or cholera, wandering pioneers, African-Americans in the delicate status of free men without civil rights, who at any time could arbitrarily be chained up again, farmers ruined by drought or the Indian wars. Between the shores of the Great Lake, the docks of the Erie Canal and the winding banks of the Genesee, in the beautiful avenues around Midtown Place or the dirt roads beyond Mount Hope Avenue, a diverse world evolved of dock workers and sailors, scrawny beggars looking for work, preachers of the apocalypse and street vendors, transportation workers of all kinds, artisans working in their booths, fortune seekers in waiting—not to mention the blind mendicants and street orphans, pieceworkers, inventive traders, and finally, the recent bourgeois. The latter keeping their distance much more than they or their fathers had previously, who, with a Bible in hand, extracted themselves without regard or remorse from the marshes of survival, while from their dry footing still giving orders to managers, procurers, and other intermediaries, who along with government workers and the liberal professions constituted the middle class that made the town habitable and even commendable to all pious souls, young girls from institutions, and congregation members of various denominations continually on the move toward universal salvation. In Rochester more than in most states in the North or South, the spirit of enterprise was opening to the ultraliberal aspirations of abolitionists and pacifist democrats, women’s rights movements, preachers of the Second Coming, or anarchist federationists in clandestine work for refugees from four continents.
Strolling a little drunk at dusk between the aqueduct and the old cemetery, Lucian Nephtali thought about the strangeness of these multiple existences in this city, of all the inundations that he’d practically seen be born, like at the end of the world. To look deep into the heart of things, the cascades of adventures carrying along this not particularly scrupulous, but neither exceedingly wicked individual were somewhat explained by credulity. It was in his temperament to believe everything suggested to him, even the impossible. His profession of lawyer, left behind for that matter, couldn’t have been the cause: a promoter of justice does not prejudge any truth and coldly puts into doubt everything, including the surveyor’s calculations. Lucian Nephtali on the contrary sought the enchantment in every circumstance, even if it meant marveling at a blade of straw in the hollow of his palm after a river had just washed over him.
Surreptitiously, between two buildings off an empty street, he entered into a dark courtyard feebly indicated by the flicker of a lantern. A series of winding staircases, each designated by a candle sconce, led him to a landing lit this time by an oil lamp, and then, after showing his credentials, into a vestibule with no distinct feature apart from a bronze knocker in the shape of a Chinese dragon. The colossal man at the entrance dressed in Western clothes merely bowed to let him pass by. Through mixed vapors, Lucian followed the padding step of a young servant to a room where two or three clients sprawled on ottomans quietly smoked their water pipes behind curtains. The manager of the establishment, a Chinese man from Hong Kong with an exemplary British accent, who’d recently arrived with a large staff from the forest-town of Cleveland, came over personally to set three trays on the adjoining coffee table.
“Not many people tonight at the Golden Dream?” the visitor inquired while taking off his boots and cape.
“Not many. Your friend the coroner is sleeping like an angel in the corner. You didn’t bring the missus?”
“It’s not good for her. She’s playing tonight at the Eastman Theatre . . .”
Stretched out, head propped on a cushion and an ivory-tipped cigarette holder between his lips, Lucian watched the manager go off while inhaling his first puff. Propriety demanded that Charlene Obo, who was barely his mistress, be viewed as his wife in such a place. Besides raw opium or the chandoo imported in brass boxes, they also served absinthe, among other alcohols, and black tea. Lucian could very well settle for a hot drink, like this automaton of a police officer, during the times he needed to keep his faculties alert. But tonight would require a descent from the cross into hell. The funeral of Nat, so young and such an old ally, at th
e Buffalo Street cemetery marked his entry with no return into a grand canyon of loneliness—he’d known it intuitively when looking down at Nat’s coffin earlier and then up at the suddenly indifferent faces hovering above the graves of a few other close friends. Giant cranes swiveled on Pinnacle Hill in the background, where the last building of a large and still vacant hospital was being constructed. Nat Astor had lain at the bottom of his hole for barely three hours, but from now on he would be a contemporary of all the disappeared who’d ever haunted this Earth, a thousand eternities of lived lives. Lucian thought of Harry Maur’s awful words before the still-warm cadaver of his friend, in the winter greenhouse where the servants had moved him: “This is worse than revenge—one doesn’t go kill himself like that in his host’s home.” In his right hand, as if he were going to empty the barrel into the dead man, he grabbed the Colt Paterson with which Nat had shot himself right in the heart. The day before, or two days before his death, last week, they had all three found themselves outside of a reception in the new villa of Leah Fish, on South Avenue. The music teacher and rather mediocre pianist was becoming a celebrity ever since the Hydesville affair. It was Harry, the most superstitious of millionaires, who’d been taken with the oldest of the Fox sisters, a divorcée envious of her maiden name and full of ambition for her little family.
The faint bubbling of the pipe and the snoring of a neighbor lost in illusions mixed with the sounds from outside, the river’s waterfalls and a sudden rain shower falling on the slate or zinctiled roofs. On one of the trays, the wick from an oil lamp was opening a golden fan aged by the fire of centuries; within it very ancient and translucent figures were coming to life, an inexhaustible wildlife where memory silently dispensed its effigies, immediately unfurling in endless floral hybridizations with an exuberance at least equaling nature. The visions of an opium smoker are more entrancing than any siren song. There where a member of the Temperance Society or of the Anti-Saloon League might discern a face or shape in the background, between other inept rebuses, there universes were opening up for him, bringing their demonic engineering to the surface, pulled from unfathomable equations. A pinch of opium was enough to melt the wax of the seven seals. For a few hours, a freedom more elusive than the dream of dying would cease altering all feeling in him. His wells and fountains were now dry; his only friend in the ground, where would he find a semblance of intimacy again in this world? Charlene Obo only expected a bit of fun out of him. And if Harry Maur, whom courtesans and other fawners mobbed incessantly, had gladly paid the lawyer to advocate for clouds or the roses in his park, it was only from the cruel lack of interlocutors.
A filiform servant filed between the smokers’ compartments, which were similar to tiny theatre boxes. A regular, solid man with a bull’s neck and sloping shoulders painfully stood up and staggered in the bronzed half-light of the room, undoubtedly just informed of the time. His sluggish steps managed to keep plantigrade: a bear coming out of hibernation. Lucian didn’t try to hide from him. The coroner knew all the customers of the Golden Dream, most of them lawyers and functionaries. They constituted in all casualness, through a tacit agreement of discretion, a sort of the extrasensory vision club.
Which didn’t prevent the coroner for better or worse from conducting his investigations between two divinatory lethargies. In a state of absolute detachment, he made an excruciatingly slow gesture toward the lawyer.
“A car is waiting for me in front of the old cemetery. I’ll take you along?”
“I prefer to stay until dawn,” Lucian murmured.
The coroner nodded with the simple drooping of the face, eyelids, cheeks, and lips. He had hesitated to say something about the suicide of that wealthy old woman’s young hypnotist. Although his self-sabotaging seemed to leave no doubt, this Nat Astor fellow left quite a riddle engraved on his tombstone: who could have been camouflaging himself so long behind such a name! Wide open to invasions, America was a paradise for truncated, concocted, usurped identities. With the kindness of a judge and a few dollars, one could invent a gilt-edged civil status for oneself without a lot of trouble. Nobody would go verify your qualifications or aptitudes in the archives of the Old World. The graduates of not to be found learned societies, officers of Napoleon, international financiers and English or Russian aristocrats abounded in the city as well as the countryside, not to mention the acknowledged charlatans parading on the village squares or in conference rooms.
The coroner came close several times to falling down those damned labyrinthine stairs that echoed like piles of empty coffins. He told himself that the tea was giving him indigestion. He never should have drunk that tea, blacker than bile. Finally somewhat satisfied to be alone in the night, he began to hum, hand on his pocket revolver:
A house without love
Is an empty homestead
But wherever love lives
Is home indeed
II.
Maggie’s Diary
What a whirlwind since our hurried departure from Hydesville! The most bizarre events have followed one after the other with Kate and myself, admittedly the origins of all this disorder, not being able or knowing how to stop any of it beforehand. Spurred on by Reverend Gascoigne, who banished us from his church, the farmers harass us a little more each day, some of them gathering in front of our house with torches. Once, when just the two of us were coming back from the village, a band of cowherds followed us on Long Road screaming horrors. Instead of heading for the farm, Kate ran toward the pond, leaving me no choice but to follow her in that absurd flight. They were throwing pebbles and clods of dirt, treating us like witches or imps of the devil. At the edge of the forest, a dripping figure stood half-naked, holding a white veil like a flag in one hand and in the other, the other . . . It was Samuel, the High Point widow’s son. He buttoned up his pants and with a funny smile signaled to us while the pack kept approaching. Without thinking, lacking any other choice, we followed him into a cave hidden by the river, which at that spot falls in a cascade. Inside, there was lingerie hanging from stakes. My sister guessed it immediately: the rags were Violet Gascoigne’s, the drowned woman of the pond. And below that, items stolen from the laundry lines of young farm girls. When the horde had passed, Samuel hid his face in a flannel pajama bottom. Despite his demented air and curious forms of entertainment, he probably saved our lives.
The next day we left Hydesville forever.
So there we were, our dear mother, Katie, and I setting out in a stagecoach for Rochester. Before joining us, our father had to work alone for a little longer at the farm. Our older brother David, whom my little sister and I hardly know because of the many years’ difference in age, was willing to take over the operations of the farm, which brought in a better yield than his. Obviously it was Leah who had organized all of it. We look up to her for her discernment and her resourcefulness. With her corsets and satin dresses, she doesn’t look a thing like the farmwomen of Hydesville! Our big sister is also a piano virtuoso who can play sonatas by Bach and Mozart without missing a note. At thirty-seven years of age, she could easily be our mother. It is so much more chic to have an elegant mother.
Kate and I have had a hard time making sense of our new life. It’s crazy, all that’s happened to us thanks to Mister Splitfoot! A real fairy tale, even if the Puritans treated us like witches. Our mother, who only knows how to read out loud, received dozens of letters a day, often anonymous. Hearing them, there was a lot to be afraid of!
But this is too emotional, I’m mixing everything together, I no longer know the purpose in even telling this. Leah found us a big furnished house on Central Avenue, even more beautiful than her own, a palace compared to our Hydesville dump, with at least a dozen doors, not to mention closets, and ceilings as high as those in churches. We each have our own room, with beautiful new linens acquired at Fashion Park folded in our dressers and chests. Leah of course took care of everything. Even our mother now has the air of a member of the English bourgeoisie. In her fine clothes, s
he no longer talks such nonsense. At the recommendation of her eldest daughter, she makes herself heard as little as possible.
Leah promised to attend to our education. She’s teaching us how to sing correctly and not to swear about everything like country people. We try to make her happy by being accomplished young girls and no longer crying about goblins under the pretext that Old Billy’s mane is all in fairy knots. But Old Billy died of old age this winter! Katie cried about it just like she’d recently cried about our dog Irondequoit, and, sempiternally, our little brother in Rapstown.
Katie hasn’t changed too much, despite having the waist of a dragonfly and small, pointed breasts. So weird, a little coquettish, she has in her such a damned naïveté and a sadness that comes from far away. We’ve remained accomplices so that people could imagine she and I shared the same powers. From my end, I learned plenty of tricks from our nights in Hydesville, as opposed to Katie, who, like all awake dreamers, never lacked resources (they say that sleepwalkers are born with one eye too many). The secret that must remain in this journal is that Mister Splitfoot hasn’t left us. Like cats, ghosts choose their masters. They’re not homebodies so much. Now the spirit accompanies Katie wherever she goes. It was him who asked us to reveal his story to the whole world, on one of the last nights at Hydesville. We know almost everything about his past life, when he was a peddler weighed down by a heavy briefcase full of haberdashery. A spirit, if I’ve understood correctly, is an inkling from infinity struggling with past feelings, or else the shadow of a soul full of regret, still captive either way to our pettiness as living creatures. All because of a violent death, a suicide or assassination, or an immense sorrow or some terrible disappointment at the moment of entering the door to the afterlife.
When her eyes mist over and fix into a stare, Kate sometimes starts to say terrifying things. She claims for example that the drowned woman in the Hydesville pond follows our former teacher Miss Pearl around everywhere with abominable intentions, and that she should run away, far away, otherwise she will depart this world or go mad. How could a mother want to harm her daughter? She also says that there are thousands of shadows watching us, everywhere, but that only some of them try to break their silence. And then her eyes get cheerful again and she invites me to a game of hearts or dominoes. I get the feeling that she is unaware of what happens to her in those moments, like when she gets up at night, all disheveled, arms stretched out, her white nightgown dragging behind her.
Rochester Knockings Page 9