Moriah

by Daniel Mills

  My features blur. I see the ghost of a face, my own, past and present suspended within it, the real with the unreal and everything vanishing as the train rounds a bend and the shadow passes over me, a darkness like that of the Lynches’ Spirit Cabinet.

  The lamp swings back, revealing the dead child’s mother, her face in the glass: bloodied and hollow and with the look of death upon it. I remember the wounded near Wilderness Tavern as they met us on the road, bandaged and limping, retreating from the battle to which we flew, and eagerly, as though to meet the night in its falling.

  The lamplight veering: Kitty again and the empty way she looked at me. Her voice that night as she sat at the spinet. This was December ’63, the evening before our regiment left for Brandy Station. She was pregnant then, a month gone and ghastly pale. She sickened to sing of Little Musgrave, waking in the night, and of the voice of his Lady beside him.

  Is not your hawk upon its perch? Your steed is eating hay.

  There she stopped and sang no more and her fingers ceased from moving on the keys. The song had dried up in her mouth and no words sufficed to bridge the brooding stillness that came between us, a place of perfect silence, like the fall of dark after a battle or the wordlessness that follows a death: hers and the baby’s and the child that went under the train.

  The last time we spoke. The things she said.

  “Is it so much, Silas, to ask that you might stay? You are a man of principle, of faith, and in this alone you have given me no cause to doubt you. But such righteousness is as nothing beside the life that you would leave behind you—and with such cruel ease—while this war will kill a woman slowly with want and worry before it lets her follow her husband to Virginia. You will leave while I remain, having no choice. You know this as I do, as did my father in the days before we were wed. You depend on it and so I am lost to you already.”

  The engine jerks and rattles, slowing. The brakeman reappears. He retrieves his lantern where it hangs and carries it with him into the next coach. Beside me the soldier, sleeping, comes awake snorting as the whistle shrieks.

  We are nearing the platform, the lights of the station.

  Rutland.

  November 13th, 1854—

  This room. I will try to describe it to you.

  First there is the bureau which serves as my writing desk with drawers which hold ink & paper & in which I keep this journal. There is a looking glass over the bureau & a standing basin at my right where I wash myself in the morning. Behind me is the bed that was my mother’s when she was a girl & which I would have shared with my sister had she lived.

  The door is shut. The key is turned within it so I cannot see out, though I hear them in the hall, their voices. This room is in the upper corner of the house. There are windows to north & east but these too will not open, the sashes nailed to the frames.

  Moriah is some two miles away: you cannot see it from here. Stand at the eastern window & you can make out the woodlot down by the road where we cut our winter firewood. Go down the road toward town & you’ll reach the biggest of the fields where Father grazes the cattle & where I used to meet J. when the working day was done.

  The northern window is a dormer with the roof sloping down around it. From here you can just see over the kitchen to the barn where we store feed, the summer’s hay.

  The icehouse is gone. Father knocked it down himself. This was in September. He retrieved an axe from the barn & drove it through the uprights ’til the wall collapsed inward, taking the roof with it so the old sawdust whirled up from inside in a cloud. My brothers were there, watching as they did before & did not look behind to see me at the window.

  I wake early. The sun is down, the east more grey than blue.

  I collect my bags from the station and board the first train north to Brandon, where I hire a farmer with a cart and team who agrees after some persuading to take me to the Yellow House. Moriah lies some miles east of Brandon and the roads leading there are little travelled, with some stretches washed away entirely by the summer rains.

  The journey lasts an hour or more, the farmer’s wagon rattling past farm fields and pastures and the day’s heat looming before us: seen more than felt, a glow beyond the mountains.

  My companion, a lifelong New Englander, is characteristically taciturn, unspeaking for all I sit beside him. I attempt to draw him into conversation, but he answers my questions in grunts or monosyllables, and the boards buck and jump beneath us, wheel and axle groaning as we breast the foothills then descend to basin-bottom, wherein sits a small village, lodged in a winding cleft and ringed by bare hills stripped of tree and shrub.

  This is Moriah, then, with its rutted streets and low brick houses, churches caked in old whitewash: Methodist, Congregational. The farmer whistles his team to a halt, drawing up before a two-storey building fronted by a wide porch where empty chairs rock back and forth, stirred by a lick of breeze. Fox’s General Store. Signs in the window advertise liver pills and castor oil, faded lettering rimed in dirt. The door is shut, bolted.

  I say: “You were to bring me to an inn. The Yellow House.”

  He does not reply.

  I press him. “You told me you knew it.”

  “Know it too well,” he says.

  “Then why not take me there?”

  He nods toward the general store.

  “Go and ask inside,” he says. “They can tell you the way.”

  “The shop isn’t open yet. There’s no one inside.”

  “Somebody will be along.”

  He leaps down from the boards and retrieves my bags from the back, carpetbag and portmanteau. These he leaves on the porch of the general store and swings himself back into the seat. I follow him to the porch then back and grasp hold of the cart’s reins before he can ride off.

  “Can’t you bring me there yourself?”

  “Isn’t a question of can’t.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No,” he says. “Guess you don’t.”

  And, wrestling the reins from my grip, he whistles to the horses and continues down the road ’til there’s room enough to turn the cart round, which he does. Then he passes by me without a word, his cap tipped to hide his face.

  Alone, I collect my bags from the porch and make my way eastward through the village, drained and exhausted from last night’s broken sleep, with the sweat beading on my scalp, and the cicadas beginning their far off hum-and-rumble.

  Past one church then another: grassy plots hedged with stone and high with milkweed, dry bulbs splitting to shed their tufts of cotton. The Methodist Church is locked and chained. Its west windows are missing, as is the steeple—the victim of lightning-strike, presumably. The bells were saved, however, and now lie side by side behind the church, just short of the lychgate.

  And again I’m thinking of Rhinebeck, where I was a minister, and the night of the great gale, when the church bell sounded once in the late hours, and I ventured outside at dawn to find it broken on the stones, having slipped from its mounting when the gusts were fiercest.

  A new bell was required, but money was short, as is often the case in such small parishes, so it was only with some hesitation that I called on Cyrus Lowhouse. A man of wealth and lands, Lowhouse lived on a farm of some five hundred acres with nine children from two marriages over whom he ruled with all of the ruthless caprice of the Old Testament God. Though baptized into the Wesleyan faith, he had not once entered the church during my tenure, and had instead taken to holding his own fire-and-brimstone services for his family and hired men, full of such shouts and singing that his neighbours were moved to complain.

  I had been in Rhinebeck a scant eight weeks when the bell fell. I had not met Lowhouse, but I had heard the stories and was nervous near to quaking when first I passed the farm’s gate. But it was his youngest daughter Katherine who met me at the door to the farmhouse, and showed me inside to the parlour, and poured me a cup of water.

  “My father is upstairs,” she said, bu
t she did not go to fetch him, and indeed spoke little beyond that, but merely lingered and listened to me with a seriousness such as I had never encountered, and only excused herself after some minutes when we heard her father on the stair.

  Cyrus Lowhouse proved the equal of my worst imaginings and I soon found myself cast out upon the stoop. The old man watched my retreat from the doorway and I was past the gate before I dared to glance behind me to see Katherine’s face in the upper window: its pinched and sombre features, the look she wore about her as of fever.

  We were married in November. Lowhouse, naturally, did not approve and would not render his consent. It would be the death of her, he said, and he was not wrong in this.

  Lowhouse himself married again. He is eighty by now and no doubt still alive, breeding children to outlast us all like seeds sown in trouble and nourished on blood and fear. It is always the way in such places. Beyond the church, I walk the graveyard rows, stirring up clouds of dust while the sun swells up bright and hot and cicadas hum to fill the valley.

  Here, as in Rhinebeck, the dead outnumber the living. Their graves are chiselled with angels and death’s heads and carved with dire words of warning or rebuke, which bespeak the superstitions of the living, their holy terror. Above all, they fear the fires of hell and doubtless they are right to do so, for the living here know more of darkness than all of the unnumbered dead.

  SANCTUARY. WOODMAN. TURNER. HINES.

  I see the same names again and again, carved in slate and then in granite with angels then willow trees testifying to eighty years of death and no LYNCH buried among them. So I cross the road to the Congregational burial ground and there apply myself to the same search and with as little result.

  Church bells. The air ripples, moving through me, resounding from the hills and circling me where I stand. Eight chimes. I retrace my steps through the village, breathing easier by the time I reach the general store. The doors are propped open, the shop’s white-haired proprietor installed on a stool behind the counter.

  Fox greets me, smiling, and seems affable enough at first. But his lips twitch at the mention of the Yellow House and his voice changes as well, assuming a naked edge as sunlight floods the southern windows to stain the crags and hollows of his face.

  “Mr. Flood, is it?”

  “You were expecting me?”

  “I wasn’t,” he says, “but Thaddeus Lynch came down for you. Last night. Suppose he must have known no one would take you as far as their place. Anyway, he waited ’cross the street for nigh on two hours, but you never showed.”

  “No. I was delayed.”

  Fox says: “My wife, she saw him from her window upstairs and took pity on him, sitting there sweating in the heat. Most folk hereabouts will have no truck with their family, but Anne, you see, she knew their mother when she was still Mary Turner and had always accounted her a fine woman. So she bade me bring him out a cup of ale, knowing I couldn’t refuse her in this, whatever my own thoughts in the matter.”

  We hear footsteps overhead, the slow, heavy tread of the grossly corpulent or half-infirm. His wife, presumably. Fox stares at me and through me, and he’s suddenly much older than he was before, nearer seventy than fifty, with the pieces of a broken voice rattling in his throat.

  He says: “That’s when he told me about you. Thought maybe you’d changed your mind, that you weren’t coming. He said that and I was glad of it. Not for my own sake, of course, and Land knows it wasn’t for theirs.”

  He exhales heavily, nearly a sigh. His wife continues to move around upstairs, her great bulk thudding through the ceiling. Wasps are stirring, batting at the glass, and I can smell wheat flour and bagged potatoes, aged and unwashed flesh.

  Fox mops his brow.

  “Well,” he says. “You’re here now. Nothing for it, I suppose.”

  The Yellow House is east of the village, two miles away down the Hollow Road and with none (says Fox) to take me there. “You’ll have to walk,” he says, so I do.

  Outside the store, I strip to my shirtsleeves and bundle my jacket beneath my arm, loosening the silk at my throat as I pass beyond the churches and the churchyards. All is stillness. Humidity rises from the dusty macadam, the skies blue and unbroken above the ridgelines yet no less oppressive for it. I hear the rustle of dry weeds, dead grass, aware of nothing as I walk save the sun on my face, the metre of my steps on the dry earth.

  The rhythm of a song. John Brown’s Body. Leading me onward as it did in the spring of ’64 when we tramped the roads near Brandy Station and sang to meet the coming battle, thinking ourselves soldiers in the Army of the Lord and me as their chaplain the worst of all.

  The tune floats back to me out of the heat, the notes high and clear, and the Hollow Road winds back upon itself, following the brook where it cleaves the rocky hills. The waters are running low, the banks bare and cracking, and the hills have been denuded save for clumps of prickling juniper which the sheep would not browse.

  The pre-war days were good here, but the milling herds, two million strong, stripped the flesh from the land itself, and those few bones that remained were picked clean by the war and its aftermath. Entire villages disappeared. Flocks were sold off or slaughtered and many of the old hill farms were abandoned as young men lit out for the West. Moriah, too, must have once been prosperous. This road through the hills and the hollows would have carried horse traffic and stagecoach alike. These days, latter days, the road is little more than a footpath, sun-bleached and narrow and ribbed with last year’s frost.

  Two miles: the distance measured in stony fields and untended orchards, scattered farmhouses bearing all the marks of abandonment. A brick house screened by locust trees. A saltbox caved in upon itself. A brook clouded with flies, and beyond it, a clear-cut ridgeline topped by thorn bushes. Two boys on ponies, riding at a trot, the younger child waving as he passes out of sight.

  I come upon a jutting signpost, the words THE YELLOW HOUSE painted in black strokes on a white background. An arrow points across the brook and through a stand of hemlock and pine, which serves the house, I imagine, as a woodlot.

  The plank bridge is newly made, wide enough to permit a wagon’s crossing, and the road itself has been widened, and recently—doubtless to accommodate spiritists and thrill-seekers. This morning, though, the path is empty where it cuts through the woodlot, and the felled trees have been uprooted, piled carelessly beside the way and gathering rot.

  The woman floats toward me out of the summer’s damp. She is young and lovely with eyes the blue-violet of day’s ending. She wears her dark hair in a knot atop her head and a few curls fall down about her cheeks where the fine bones show.

  Behind her looms the Yellow House itself, a slate-roofed farmhouse of two storeys with twin gables, steeply pitched, and the pine siding painted in a shade recalling jaundice. The shutters are red, the colour of pulped raspberries.

  She smiles as I approach. She carries a basket under one arm with a pair of gardening shears placed inside. Her dress is linen, threadbare, blue faded to grey. In age she appears no older than twenty and when she speaks her voice is gentle, unrefined, her accent that of the hills.

  “Mr. Flood?”

  I nod.

  “Sally Lynch,” she says.

  “A pleasure,” I say, “and please—”

  “We expected you yesterday.”

  Her tone is playful, disarming, tongue flitting at her teeth.

  “Yes, of course, I—my train, rather—”

  She does not interrupt but watches me, smiling still and now at my discomfort. Her teeth are white, flashing, lips as dark and red as the shutters behind her.

  I pause to clear my throat, recover my breath.

  At last I say: “There was an accident.”

  “An accident?”

  “South of Rutland. Somebody on the tracks.”

  The smile vanishes.

  “You had already heard?” I ask.

  “This morning, yes. A child.”

&nb
sp; “I did not realize word would spread so quickly.”

  “It’s Mrs. Ambler. She reads The Herald. Walks down to Pittsfield each morning to collect it. Her constitutional, she calls it. She told us the news over breakfast. The poor boy. He was chasing after a cat, it said. His mother saw it happen.”

  I do not respond. A response would signify nothing. Certainly the days are past when I might have presumed to know the wills of fate or dared to comment upon them.

  “But I mustn’t hold you up,” she says. “Let me show you to the house.”

  “Please, you were gathering flowers? You needn’t stop on my account.”

  She darts a glance into her basket where two long-stemmed irises repose upon a bed of aster and cornflower.

  “For my mother,” she explains. “She is buried out near the orchard with her children beside her. I cut new blooms each day to place upon the stones. Thaddeus insists on it.”

  “Thaddeus is your uncle?”

  She laughs. An eruption of breath, the bells of her voice tinkling. It is a delicate sound but sharp then strangely cutting when she speaks.

  “My brother,” she says. “Though he doesn’t much act like it.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “He’s ten years older than me. Rebecca, our sister, was the oldest among us but she’s long gone. Buried alongside our mother.”

  “And Ambrose?”

  “Between us in age. Five years older than me though you’d never guess it. He’s like a child at times, what our mother called an innocent.”

  She looks away, as though fearful perhaps of having said too much. Red-faced despite the sun on her skin shining. “Go on inside,” she says. “Thaddeus will be about. You might tell him I’ll be along shortly, after I’ve seen to Mother.”

  I leave her kneeling by the path but look back to see the irises, purple and yellow, and Sally’s shears extended, gleaming as they snap shut. I walk up the uncut yard to a long porch, which spans the house’s south wall. The door swings open at my approach, revealing a figure in the doorway, looking weathered and scarred beyond his thirty or so years. Thaddeus Lynch.