Morton tells Maggie, he was certain he heard Elisha’s final words, the truest words a man could speak. They were nothing profound nor original nor quotable for the ages. No, they were the ordinary sentimental ones of a son’s love for his mother. But Jane Kane did not hear, perhaps because she was looking so intently at her bible, her nail gliding along a passage.
“But now I see that she didn’t love him,” Morton continues. “She scorned him, like. And you could see the loss of her love were like a black pit under his feet. Sure, but love’s end is as mysterious as its beginning. It’s why Elisha tried so hard at all things, to regain her regard. And can you fashion a thing crueller? To not attend his last words?
Maggie cannot. She manages to ask if her name was uttered. If Elisha gave any message to Morton. For her.
“No, ah, he barely spoke, miss.”
“Mrs … it is Mrs. Kane.”
“What happened next, mind, is the reason I came to call. And that is to warn you about his mother. You need watch your back with her, she’s a Gorgon bitch in a fine lady’s hat is what.”
“Tell me the rest of it,” Maggie says, astonished at her own composure.
The second stroke came on the 10th of February 1857. For five days Elisha gaped and gasped, his limbs fixed as if caught in a net, and then he died. He said not one more intelligible word. It was Jane Kane who closed the lids over the blue wonder of his eyes, and in the gentle way mothers do to coax their little ones to sleep.
Then came the crowding and wailing about the deathbed. A good ten people were in the room at this point. As such, Morton didn’t notice when Mrs. Kane left. When at last he did notice, he sought her out immediately. She might be doing herself harm was what he thought. He found her on a filigreed balcony of the hotel. She was on her knees, her skirts like a moat about her. She held a lucifer. Morton gaped at the pile of blackened, smoking papers.
“Hello, Morton,” she said. “My, but these letters are hard to burn. They smoulder, see. But what else would they do? That Fox creature dared write of the sordid things she and Elisha have done together, oh, but in such veiled little words. She’s even signed herself ‘his wife’ when she’s naught but a dashed adventuress. She shan’t see a penny, of course.”
“Where did you—”
“The letters? Stashed close to Elisha’s heart, but you knew that. Perhaps their oiliness was what caused his poor heart to combust.”
She stood and brushed ash from her hands. It was then Morton saw the glass at her feet, the shards of the ambrotype clinging to her hem. Saw Maggie’s face in fragments.
“Did you ever see such an image, Morton? The girl was got up like a Greek slattern. Now fetch me that little round portrait, the Fagnani. I know you have it.”
Morton, aghast, shook his head.
“Well, Morton,” Jane said calmly. “Damn you to hell.” And then she plucked a glass shard from one elegant finger, and sucked it to stay the leaking blood.
“I did have it, ’course,” Morton explains to Maggie now. “Sure but I kept the Fagnani safe all through the whole two winters we were trapped in the arctic ’cepting when Elisha took it into his sleep sack, as a comfort, like. And don’t you know that it started to have a kind of life. You could have sworn to its warmth. Mayhap that’s why it disappeared once. William Damned Godfrey, it was with him. I saw him sneak it back to Elisha’s hand. What’d he been using it for … oh, a lady needn’t know, ’cepting it’s a long two years and some can’t stand having only men for company.”
Morton stops, shamefaced. Reaches into his vest pocket and pulls out the Fagnani portrait of Maggie, and dangles it before her on its blackened chain.
“It was no small irony that, by turning night into day, modern technology also helped obscure our oldest path to the human psyche. No longer did most sleepers experience an interval of wakefulness in which to ponder visions in the dead of night. That, very likely, has been the greatest loss. To paraphrase an early poet, we have been ‘disannulled of our first sleep, and cheated of our dreams and fantasies.’ ”
A. Roger Ekirch,
AT DAY’S CLOSE: NIGHT IN TIMES PAST
“The concept of the Good Death was central to mid-nineteenth century America. Dying was an art, and the tradition of ‘ars moriendi’ had provided rules of conduct for the moribund and their attendants since at least the fifteenth century: how to give up one’s soul ‘gladfully and willfully’; how to meet the devil’s temptations of unbelief, despair, impatience, and worldly attachment; how to pattern one’s dying on that of Christ’s; how to pray.”
Drew Gilpin Faust,
THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING:
DEATH AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
CHAPTER 31.
“Reading, reading again, are you? A reader, that’s what you are. Didn’t I say that when we first met? And, ah, this damned bulb!” I was proclaiming this from the vestibule where the Edison bulb was crackling as was its wont. “Come and go. Wax and wane. No damned reason. No cause.”
I swatted the bulb with my satchel. The bulk shattered and shards rained on my cloak. I marched into the room and swept off my hat, but the pins caught in my hair and I lost a few strands from the consequent wrenching.
I made to sit on the ladderback, but it moved, the damned thing. I kicked at the chair from where I sat on the plank floor. “No matter. Not a trouble. Floor’s as good as any.”
My patient looked at me as indulgently, as one does a child.
“I own I’ve partaken of some refreshments. Yes, yes,” I continued. “Ah, and what of your shilly-shally cad man today?” I said this because she had Elisha’s tome astride her lap.
“They have eaten the puppies. Next will be the rats. Some of his men have deserted. He is having a harsh time of it and sees plots everywhere. Godfrey plagues him.”
“Godfrey. That was your Elisha’s nemesis. Everybody needs one. You had your Chauncey, he had this … Did you ever read his version? Godfrey’s? One man’s truth is another man’s lies.”
“No, I never read it. I swore I would not. I stoppered my ears if anyone spoke of it. Come, Mrs. Mellon, sit here, next to me.”
I thanked her, from what I can recall, then pitched her medicine in her lap before rummaging out my own bottle and stretching out aside her on her little bed. I own that I was drunk. Sotted. Five sheets to a howling wind. I had not been so for, oh, many years. And, ah, oblivion’s beck was as inviting as it had ever been.
“Read on. Read on, then, my little reader,” I said.
And so she did. Read one of the passages about the Dark, because it is ever Dark up there, in Elisha’s Arctic. And then it is ever Light. “We have lost the last vestiges of our midday twilight. We cannot see print, and hardly paper. Noonday and midnight are alike and, except for a vague glimmer on the sky that seems to define the hill outlines to the south, we have nothing to tell us that this Arctic world of ours has a sun. In one week more we shall reach the midnight of the year.”
My patient may have read more. I cannot say, for I had fallen asleep, and when I awoke it was an uncertain time and I was confused, to be frank, as to where I was. Then I saw the three linked windows, saw my patient. She had covered me with a good portion of the bedclothes, and my half-worked cover-all, to boot.
“I took it out of your satchel. I thought it might warm you best.”
I apologized, of course, for the lapse in professionalism and said I hoped I had not made a brouha, nor snored, nor taken the lion’s share of the bed. She assured me I had been quiet as a mouse and that we’d had a genial chat before I fell asleep. We said no more about it, but it was after that our friendship deepened and we began to use our Christian names with each other. She no longer called me Mrs. Mellon, but Alvah or Alvah June. And I no longer called her Mrs. Kane, but Maggie. And I supposed she now understood that I did not attend her out of pity, nor charity, but out of an understanding that comes from stumbling about in the selfsame shoes.
She took out her bible box a time lat
e, and spread the letters all over the bedclothes. “It all comes on down to Pa, you see.”
JOHN HALTS THE BUCKBOARD in the foreyard of the Hydesville house. Hobbles the dun horse and sets him to graze in the blighted peppermint fields. Was it always so quiet around here? As if the birds keep away. As if the very wind does.
He will not go to New York and join his wife and daughters, as Leah continually suggests. They will return to him once he finishes their new house. Once they witness how handsome it is, rising out of the Arcadian fields in sight of their Brother David’s house. Once Leah comes to her senses.
He squelches through the mud towards the saltbox house, past the three balm o’ Gileads with their round, spring leaves. The Gileads have grown fast and tall and sure. The saltbox, however, seems determined to fall to quick ruin. Spring vines runnel over the listing shingles. Brambles cover what was once the garden. The pig trough has become the nest of some uncertain creature. All this disheartens John. A man might labour half a lifetime to build a home and yet the creeping forces of the earth can reclaim it in a nonce.
He is loading dressed stone from the buttery wall—he will be using it for his latest project, a springhouse—when a shift of light causes him to look up to the upper windows. He loads a few stones more. Looks again. “You’re a fool,” he mutters, then adds, “darn you, anyhow.” He mops his brow. Takes off his coat. The air is steamy-warm for late April. He sits on the buckboard and swallows water from his canteen. Sniffs hard. Catches nothing frowsy, only the usual smells of spring flowers and spring rot. John can hardly fathom it all began here, in this ordinary saltbox house, with his ordinary family. Advertisements for these séances appear in all the papers. The Spiritualists are said to number over a million strong, and that does not include the newest converts in Canada, England, and Europe. Mere rapping is long past. Trumpets play suspended in the air. Writing pops up on forearms in red welts. Spirit lights float, blue and sparking. Mediums are bound and gagged and stuffed into spirit cabinets, structures the size of privies out of which waft mist and eerie voices. Trances and channelling is being done by all and sundry. Most ludicrous, a petition has been sent to Congress asking for a scientific investigation into the spirit invasion, which is worse, some claim, than the continuing invasion of famished Irish.
John crowbars a heavy stone out of the mortar, then hauls the stone to the buckboard. Slaps it down. Looks back. He hefts his crowbar again and approaches the house. He hesitates for a long moment outside the barred and padlocked door. Then pries off the plank and padlock in one hard go.
He crosses the threshold. The floorboards creak. The hidey-hole door shifts open as he treads above-stairs. The second storey. This is where the four of them were sleeping that March of’48. The latest versions of the story have the girls in separate chambers, as if they had been some family of the middling class and not near to scrabbling poverty. And in the latest versions the girls are younger than they were. Twelve for Maggie. Nine for Katie. But they were two years older than that when it all happened. Old enough.
The small room is scattered with rat droppings, dust, the dank clotted dirt his wife always complained about. “How did it get in? How?” she would ask, and demand John scrape his boots again.
John complied, though it made no difference. Not then. Not now.
He runs his nail over the window moulding, feels a long thread beneath where he so diligently painted. He starts back. Something, or someone, moves in the yard below. He berates his chariness. Rattles the stiff sash and hauls it up. Nothing. No one. It is a figuring of the mouth-blown glass. Such glass gives everything a rippled, gauzy aspect. His new home will have only plate glass, he decides. It is costly, but clear as still waters. He turns and his boot nudges something soft and small. A doll, one of those he made for Maggie and Katie years ago. The dress is in dirty tatters, the wooden limbs scraped and disjointed, the mouth only a single stitch now above a single button eye. This one must be Maggie’s doll. Katie gave hers to Ella, his granddaughter, their niece. Sorrow rushes him at the thought of little Ella. He smoothes the doll’s woollen hair. Recalls something strange about Katie. Other little girls would give audible voices to their dolls. Katie always listened as if to a silent voice, and then replied, and often as not to disagree with the unvoiced comment. Miss Nettie was what she called her doll.
He puts the doll back by the window in a lozenge of sun, alone in that room as any offering.
The gloaming has begun by the time John returns to work on the new house. He funnels his home-brewed burning liquid into the peg-lamp’s reservoir, taking his usual care, then wipes the chimney glass clean with newspaper, checking it first for those black-bordered eulogies and landations to Dr. Kane that leave markings on the glass. But it seems the nation is at last done with remembering Kane. His funeral was reported to have been the grandest the nation has yet seen. The man died in Havana, which meant his remains had to be transported to Philadelphia. But first: New Orleans. Louisville. Pittsburgh. Baltimore. By boat, rail and steamer. Each city paraded Kane’s coffin with pomp and glory. Such a hero. Such an American hero. Kane’s book Arctic Explorations in Search of Sir John Franklin is apparently outselling the Blessed Bible. In Philadelphia, Kane’s body lay in state at Independence Hall, a rare honour. All the public offices were ordered shut. The city’s church bells tolled for five straight hours. It took four pages in the obituary to list the divisions, orders, committees, regiments, societies and clubs that followed the funeral cortaège. Even the Ancient Order of Druids was represented, apparently, there at the tail end. By the time Dr. Elisha Kent Kane was interred at the Kane family tomb in Laurel Hill Cemetery he had been a month dead.
Lamp in hand John navigates about the sawed-off boards and wood curls, newspapers and wallpaper sheaths. I’ll commence the clean-out tomorrow, he decides. David has been grumbling of late that his father’s projects will never end. But they have. Nearly.
He twists the peg-lamp firmly into its wall socket and by its steady burn reads his wife’s letter, pausing often to decipher her accordioned writing.
22 April, 1857
Dear husband:
I’m terribly worried about our Maggie, aren’t I? The poor child is broken and lost like a raggedy doll and she is constantly vowing that she and Dr. Kane were married and that she was named in his will, but Dr. Kane’s brother is being difficult about all that and doesn’t agree at all that she should have a legacy. At least our Maggie has agreed to abide with me here at the Greeleys’ town-home. Isn’t this a better arrangement than leaving her with Leah and Katie at the brownstone? Leah has no patience for Maggie and her tears, does she? But then I suppose she had little patience for Dr. Kane either. And now I can make certain our Maggie rests and eats—she is getting so thin, poor lamb.
Now John, is there any chance or hope that you will come to New York at last? The Greeleys’ town-home is nicely appointed and of goodly size, and Horace is not allowing us to stay out of charity as you might think. He and Mary are most often at Turtle Bay house and Horace has been concerned about the management of the gas lights and general upkeep of the place. I am, you see, a kind of caretaker. But I could surely use your help in this regard, couldn’t I?
Your loving wife, Peggy
John digs through his desk for paper and writing implements. Jabs his pen in the inkwell.
26 April, 1857
Dear Wife,
Your house is near finished. I put gingerbread on the gables and veranda and added a cupola. I have painted and wallpapered but I’ll give over the bedrooms for you women to decorate. There is the springhouse to finish but that will be shortly done.
John writes of the indoor privy. The new cookstove. The stone sink in the scullery. He does not apologize for the impossibility of gas lights. Such false lights are for the godless crowds of New York. Lamps and candles will suffice. And a crackling fire of pine. He plans to burn sage to rid the house of the odours of turpentine and milk-paint. He has no intention of going to New
York, not ever, but this he does not write. He has made that all clear enough to his women. His role is to care for them. How is he to do so if they are scattered hither and yon? They must come here, to the family house that he has toiled to provide.
He considers for some long moments, then takes out his letter to Leah. Each time he thinks it done, he writes further.
I know, Leah-girl, that you’re busy raising the dead each and every day and it starts with hymns and sweet music, then come the floating lights and rat-tats and tales of isn’t-it-lovely-beyond. It’s all entertaining and prettified, but I tell you that when the dead return for bona fide there’s naught a thing pretty about it …
“Fuck Christ,” said John. Brother Able was a slumped-over thing with staring, open eyes. John looked to the field, then to the feeder canal in the middle distance. Not a soul. Only three feral dogs. He could leave Able right here under his giant oak, in this small wood. Leave him as crow-feed, rat fodder. But, no, a stinking corpse would bring questions and Able might have told any number of people of his mission to save John’s whisky-sotted soul.
He propped Able up so he looked to be relaxing in the scant warmth. Loped to the Morning Star, stooping to pick up Able’s little black hat from the rutted field, found a coal shovel and a crowbar—the very one he’d used to pry up towpaths and so sabotage the Sabbatarians, back when the world was fine. At the last instance he grabbed the grey horsehair blanket, then drank down the remainder of the first whisky jug. The second jug was still stoppered. It could wait for his return. The digging wouldn’t take long, he figured. But it did. The earth was rocky and half frozen and John-Before decided he wanted the requisite six feet down so the feral dogs wouldn’t dig up Able’s corpse for curious eyes.
The Dark Page 41