Ghost Dance

by Mark T Sullivan

  He made me come and watch Caleb’s show so I’d see how it was done.

  Caleb sits in a box on the stage. Before the lights go out, Joshua tells the story about Caleb and him when they was boys back in a place called Vermont. He says his mother’s great-great-grandmother was one of the witches in Salem down in Massachusetts who got burned at the stake.

  Joshua tells the people in the tent that it was from his mother’s great-great-grandmother that he and Caleb got their powers. When they were babies, people used to see ghosts near their cradles. When they were in school, pencils flew near them and windows opened by themselves. Joshua rolls up his sleeves and Caleb’s sleeves and shows the audience the scars on their arms. Joshua’s father burned him and Caleb with afire iron to try to drive the spirits from their bodies!

  Then Joshua says Caleb’s gonna call up some spirits.

  The lights go down. Joshua stuffs Caleb into a wooden box. He closes his eyes and puts his hands on the box. He says he’s helping Caleb into his spirit trance. Pretty soon, a nice-dressed man with a white cloth wound up like a hornet’s nest on his head comes popping out on top of the box and people get right fidgety then. He says he is a spirit from India named Mamood. He plays a flute.

  It took me about ten times watching the show up close to figure out Mamood is Dimitri. But most people are scared and have never seen Dimitri before, so they don’t look close. Later on, Dimitri’s wife, Maura, comes out of the box. She’s dressed as a woman who died tending to the wounded during the Civil War battle at Gettysburg. Everyone likes her. Some nights five spirits come out of Caleb’s box.

  It’s a funny thing. But most everyone wants to believe what they see in Joshua’s show. He’s got a way of making people believe what he wants them to believe.

  My job, Joshua says, is to make the men believe I am Sitting Bull’s Dangerous Daughter. I drank more of that elixir, then went out on stage like I hated the men, which was not hard. I looked at them like I wanted to kill them. That made them crazy. Then I looked at them like I wanted to kill them real slow. And it was like Joshua said: in their lips and their eyes they could not take it no more and I stripped off my shirt and they got to shouting loud and coming toward the stage. Caleb and Joshua and Dimitri had to make sure I got off safe.

  Joshua picked me up and kissed me, said I was a natural.

  That was the worst of it. I’ve been dancing in the tent four months now. When I go out on stage it is like I am someone else, Sitting Bull’s Dangerous Daughter, and not Many Horses. If I think of myself dancing the Ghost Dance with Painted Horses in the cottonwoods near the Grand, I can’t hear the men calling at me no more.

  Except the night before last.

  I was commencing to take my shirt off when a man holding a Bible like the one Miss Mary Parker used to read from came through the tent flaps and yelled at all the men, asking them did their wives know they were in here looking at a naked savage. Them men stopped their hooting and acted like they was whipped dogs.

  Cosotino told Joshua we’d better pack up our tents and skeddadle before things got powerful ugly. But Joshua was in an awful spell. He got a letter that morning and him and Caleb had been in their wagon jabbering all afternoon. Joshua doesn’t like to be told what to do. He said people paid to see him and Caleb summon the spirits and he didn’t want to give that money back. He said he needed that money now.

  So he and Caleb started the show. About the time Joshua laid his hands on the spirit box, the minister charged into the tent with half the men that an hour before were hooting to see me naked. He called Joshua a blasphemer. Joshua commenced to yelling back, and the next thing you know, the minister and his men were coming at the stage. Joshua bolted like a horse that’s been snake-bit. Dimitri, too. Caleb was tied up in the box.

  I hid in the trees and watched the mob drag Caleb outside and tear his clothes off. They painted his body with tar, then tore up pillows and shook feathers over him. They tied his wrists and ankles to a post and carried him into town the way menfolk used to tote dead antelope back at Standing Rock. They rode Caleb around for near an hour, calling him names and kicking him and having a good old time. Then they dumped him in a pile of cow dung beside a barn on the road to Rosedale. I waited until their voices had gone to nothing before I went for him.

  Caleb was blubbering. I told him not to fret none, that it would be okay once I got the ropes off him. I stole some kerosene and some rags from the cow barn to clean the tar and feathers off his body best I could. Caleb never said nothing while I cleaned him. He just stared at me in the moonlight with them pink eyes. It wasn’t like the soldier with the black teeth neither. I don’t think Caleb thinks like that. But it made me feel windy inside anyway and I told him to stop it.

  You’re right kind for an Injun, he said, and his cheeks went in and out like a horse the flies are after. He asked me if he could tell me a secret and I said okay. Caleb said his scars were for real. His pa used to hurt his ma and his kids. The day Joshua turned sixteen, he shot Caleb’s pa in the back of his head while he slept. Some ways, Caleb’s ma was happy, but she was afraid someone would figure out what happened and it got so she could not stand to see Caleb and Joshua around. She sent them away with a traveling show that come through Lawton.

  We been out here ever since, Caleb said. Fifteen years. Imagine that.

  Caleb looked up at the moon and commenced to sniveling a third time. He said Joshua had gotten a letter in the morning telling the brothers their mother died.

  I went and stole a horse blanket I seen in the barn and we set back up the road toward Gilead.

  On the way, Caleb said Joshua had done the right thing, keeping the show open, because I needed the money, too. I told him I didn’t need it so much he had to get rode on a fence post.

  But Caleb said I did. Joshua was figuring to shut the Spectacular down. Their ma had left them the farm and a passel of money. They were going home to Vermont, after fifteen years. Imagine that. And if’n Caleb had his way, I was gonna go, too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  IT WAS LATE MONDAY afternoon by the time Gallagher and Andie got back to Lawton.

  But Andie did not take the turnoff to her house or the cabin. She kept on straight through town until the two-lane curved west. They went up a road that looped up Gorm Ridge, an imposing edifice of ledge and timber holdings that composed the vast north flank of Lawton Mountain.

  The road’s first mile passed through hayfields that ringed the base of the ridge. Along the edge of the fields, tractors churned up swathed grass and mud as farmers tried to turn over the saturated soil in the hope that the weak sun would dry their fields and allow them to plant crops.

  All too quickly, however, the well-maintained asphalt near the bottomland farms and the tiny vacation homes turned to heaved and potholed macadam; and the broad and fenced level ground gave way to steeps pocked with ramshackle, mountain-hollow farms. Junk cars rusted in dirt front yards along the upper reaches of the Bluekill. Bracken and thorn overgrew what had once passed for pasture. Water shoots throttled the apple trees.

  Finally there were no more farms at all and the road became a muddy, almost washed-out track that serpentined toward a desolate gulf of hemlock, hard-hack and ash. Amid the gnarled, winter-bruised trees stood ponderous granite boulders coughed up by ancient glaciers. Gallagher recalled the boulders in his last dream of Many Horses and shivered as if that bleak landscape had the power to resonate within observers of a similar character.

  ‘When I rented the cabin, you said the Danbys were all dead.’

  ‘What I said was that they were all gone from Lawton,’ Andie replied, her attention on the deeply rutted road. ‘And they have been since I was ten.’

  They bounced across a water bar and then another. Gallagher’s head smacked the roof. Andie strained against the shoulder strap of the seat belt, studying the woods on her left. They approached the crest of the eastern shoulder of Gorm Ridge, where they passed through a gap. A
quarter mile down a grade, Andie’s head jerked in recognition. She slammed on the brakes. ‘That’s it, I think.’

  She wrenched the truck into reverse and it bucked in protest back up the steep, slick incline. She maneuvered it to a flat spot off the road, turned the key in the ignition and pointed to the faintest hint of a path winding into the forest.

  ‘My father showed me the trail to it one time, but I’ve never been down it,’ she said. ‘After reading that piece of the journal and seeing that Many Horses knew Joshua and Caleb Danby, I thought we should take a look.’

  Gallagher got out and zipped up his oilskin jacket. Back in the village of Lawton, the temperature had flirted with sixty. Here, high on the north-facing slope, it was in the low fifties with a raw wind that gusted through crooked tree trunks. Briar, saw grass and stunted saplings consumed much of the trail, but faded ax hash marks on the bigger trees defined the way. After nearly a half mile of fighting brush, they came to a gushing mountain stream, the origin of the Bluekill. Water from a seep feeding the stream had devoured the soil around the footings of a rotting bridge of rude logs spiked to four-by-eight braces. They took turns crawling across.

  Beyond, the ill-defined trail continued and bisected the hummocks of an old-growth hardwood forest where moss smothered fallen logs. Another five hundred yards and the hummocks gave way to a joyless opening in a dark spruce grove at the far end of which leaned a weathered and swaybacked, tar-papered cabin with a stepless porch.

  The shack’s roof had buckled at its center. Shards of glass clung to the window sashes; tentacles of thorny vines crawled out from inside. A hole had been kicked in the front door’s lower panel. Running up the closest wall was the skeleton of a stovepipe chimney.

  In front of the shack a rusted bedspring lay in the withered curls of last year’s stinging nettles. To the right an outhouse sprawled on its side. The rim of a moldy toilet seat lay nearby. In the woods beyond were the ruins of at least a half-dozen more shacks. And the foundations of a half-dozen more. Ravens croaked from their rookery.

  ‘On the map it’s called Gormtown,’ Andie said. ‘But when I was a kid, everyone in Lawton called it Danbyville. This is where the last of them eked out a living.’

  Andie started around the other side of the cabin, toeing aside shattered brown glass and tin cans. ‘Unless you’ve had your tetanus shots, I’d be careful where you step,’ she called.

  Gallagher stepped gingerly through the debris and went up to look in the window.

  The shack was a one-room affair with a sleeping loft. Wide-planked floors of rough-cut timber. Two-by-four ribwork and plywood walls. A blackened potbellied stove. The door to the firebox was unhinged. Next to it was a larger, wood-burning cookstove, the flue of which had been torn from the side wall to leave a gaping wound. Next to the cookstove stood a crudely fashioned shelf on which were visible a grimy coffee cup and a rusted box of cocoa.

  Squirrels had robbed the couch of stuffing. Twin kerosene lanterns drooped off nails in the corners. Rusted metal folding chairs tilted against a three-legged table; its yellowed Formica top was blistered and curled. A filthy enamel washbasin and a metal bucket. A twin-sized bed crafted of the same two-by-fours and plywood as the cabin walls. No mattress. A yellowed calendar from 1968 was turned to the month of November.

  Gallagher tugged at the door, trying to get it open.

  An owl dodged out of the shadows, leading with talons like curved black knives. Gallagher threw himself backward, arms up and across his face. The talons caught in his coat, tearing and then freeing. He felt the bird’s wings slap at his face and hands. His feet got tangled and he stumbled to the right off the porch and crash-landed in the tin cans of an old dump pile. A porcupine startled and rushed off through the cans.

  Andie raced around the corner, her pistol drawn. She saw Gallagher and his pitiful expression. She saw the porcupine but not the owl which had disappeared into the trees. She began to laugh. The laugh seized her entire body and as she rocked back and forth, the laugh enlarged her somehow. For a moment the demons that lurked about her were banished and Andie became luminescent, serene and extra human in a way that shockingly reminded Gallagher of the vision he’d had of Many Horses the night before.

  She came over to help him up, still giggling. ‘Oh, look,’ she said before he could take her hand. At the edge of the dump pile there was a ten-foot square of pine needles. Growing from the needles were tender green stalks from which hung delicate rose-and-white flowers shaped like dancing shoes.

  ‘Lady slippers,’ Andie said, kneeling to cup one. ‘I haven’t seen one in years. They’re very rare.’

  ‘They’re beautiful,’ he said.

  Andie gazed radiantly at the flowers. ‘Lady slippers remind me that nature can allow loveliness and goodness to occur even in the most desolate time and place.’

  At that moment Gallagher realized he loved her. He leaned across the flower and kissed her. ‘I’ve been wanting to do that all day and I couldn’t bring myself to before now.’

  She smiled, then gave him a puzzled expression. ‘You’ve been hurt as deeply as I have, haven’t you, Pat?’

  Gallagher averted his eyes. ‘It’s more that I hurt someone else.’

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Not now. I just want to enjoy this feeling.’

  They kissed again, then stood there grinning until the porcupine bustled through the cans once more and ended the moment.

  ‘So tell me the myth of the Danbys,’ Gallagher said.

  Andie sat on the front porch and wove a story of a family in an ever-downward trajectory. The old Danby homestead used to stand on the flat at the base of Gorm Ridge along the Bluekill River. It was there Joshua and Caleb and their siblings held their fabled seances. But after Joshua disappeared and Caleb killed himself, the surviving Danbys had been unable to keep up the farm. The house burned down, the land changed hands and the money was squandered. The Danbys were forced into exile on the back side of the ridge, the most isolated spot in Lawton.

  The Danbys became what Andie’s father used to call hedgehogs. The men logged for a living when they worked, collected dole payments when they didn’t. One Danby or another was forever under arrest for jacklighting a deer or chucking dynamite in the Bluekill to float trout or burgling some flatlander’s vacation home. Over three generations the Danbys died, one by one, by all manner of calamity: crushed by stones, poisoned by rancid food, stabbed, drowned in the river, suicide.

  By the time Andie was a little girl, the Danby clan had dwindled to the last remaining family. The father’s name was Franklin. People called him Franco. He was six feet six inches tall, two hundred and sixty-five pounds, a logger with a history of violence. The mother was Lulu Belle, Franco’s first cousin, a buxom slut forever cheating on Franco. Lulu Belle and Franco had one son, Terrance, who attended grammar school with Andie.

  ‘He was older, than me, but I remember he used to come to school smelling of woodsmoke, with dirt on his face and overalls that had patches over the patches,’ Andie recalled. ‘For lunch he ate stale white bread with that Velveeta cheese they give out at food banks. I don’t think he had a friend in the world.’

  She looked at the ground and shook her head, then looked at Gallagher with a pained expression. ‘Kids made fun of him.’

  ‘Did you?’

  Andie nodded sadly. ‘One time when I was about six or seven I was playing on the floor of my father’s pickup when I heard my dad say something about Lulu Belle. I sat up quick to see her by the side of the road, hitchhiking by raising her skirt to passing male motorists. Terrance was trying to hide in the bushes. I told all the kids in school.’

  ‘Kids can be cruel,’ Gallagher said, reaching up to touch the knots behind his ear where the rocks had hit him as a child on the playground.

  When Terrance turned ten, Franco caught Lulu Belle busy with a French-Canadian logger in the front seat of a pickup outside a bar. Franco b
roke a beer bottle over the Canuck’s head, then stabbed his wife in her calf with the busted glass while her lover lay passed out on top of her. The Frenchman revived and he came up to Danbyville after Franco. Both men were drunk on rotgut. It was the first hot, humid night of the year, mid-May, early for the kind of stultifying summer weather that for a brief time every year turns Vermont into a tropical rain forest. The biting black flies and the mosquitoes tore at the men’s exposed flesh. They fought with hatchets.

  Terrance was the only witness. Franco and the Canuck circled each other, testing each other with little flicks of their primitive weapons. A nick across the forearm for Franco. A shallow slice along the Frenchman’s jaw. Then Franco got it in the thigh. He raised up and struck the Frenchman at the shoulder. When the Canadian screamed and tried to run, Terrance’s father went after him and swung at the same time that the logger turned and swung, too. Franco’s hatchet cleaved the Frenchman’s left arm at the elbow. The Canadian’s hatchet split Franco’s chest wide open.

  Gallagher flashed on his father swinging from a rope. ‘Terrance saw it all?’

  ‘The whole thing.’

  ‘The logger die, too?’

  Andie shivered and looked off through treetops that clawed the approaching dusk

  ‘Andie?’

  ‘Terrance claimed his father managed to hit the logger one more time before he died, and then the logger died, too,’ she replied. ‘But most people in Lawton didn’t believe it. They thought that when Franco died and dropped his hatchet, Terrance picked it up and chopped at the logger, avenging his daddy’s death. They found the little ax buried in the side of the Frenchman’s head, just above the ear.’

  ‘You’re thinking about the way Charun has killed them all.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Cold raindrops splattered the broken glass at their feet. ‘We’d better get back to the truck before we catch pneumonia or get lost in the dark,’ she said.