Moriah

by Daniel Mills

  I offer him my hand. He looks down but does not take it. His accent is like that of his sister but thicker somehow, the words chewed over like cud and slurred through crooked teeth. His clothing is typical of New England farm boys, consisting of a checked shirt paired with a linen waistcoat and trousers, the cuffs overhanging scuffed and muddy boots.

  He says: “Waited two hours for you.”

  I begin to make my excuses, though it quickly becomes plain that he is not listening. He turns round without speaking and vanishes from the doorway.

  I follow him inside. We enter a long and sparsely furnished parlour with two windows facing west and a grandfather clock between them. The clock is old but worthless—Dutch workmanship, at a guess. The base is cracked and splintered and lists to one side so the clock would topple were it not secured to the wall by a length of cord. The mechanism, though, appears to be undamaged. The pendulum swings in its casing, the hands advancing.

  I say, “I believe I met your sister outside.”

  “Sally,” he says. He does not turn around.

  “She will be in soon, she said.”

  “Good.”

  He opens the door to the dining room where the decor is similarly plain. Frames on the wall display pressed wildflowers or starched linens embroidered with Bible verses and a china cabinet houses a few small pieces. A pinewood refectory table, eight feet in length, mirrors the shape of the room itself, rectangular and narrow but cluttered now with the leavings from breakfast: breadcrumbs and grease, an open newspaper. The Rutland Herald.

  At the table sits a woman of sixty or so in a black dress and veil and with a teacup clasped between her fingers, the rim poised an inch from her mouth’s thin line. She is wiry, colourless. Some might call her a severe woman, but to me she bears the likeness of a mourning portrait, the face stretched and fleshless, eyes dull and pearly as she looks on unsmiling.

  Thaddeus says: “Mrs. Ambler.”

  “Silas Flood,” I say.

  “How do you do,” she says, and sips her tea.

  A doorway off the dining room opens into the kitchen wherein sits a man in a ladder-backed chair, visible in profile and staring straight ahead, hands flat upon his thighs. He, too, wears linen and check and the resemblance to Thaddeus is unmistakable. Ambrose.

  Thaddeus continues into the sitting room, which faces east, the curtains open. Rocking chairs cluster about the cold hearth while books and candlesticks jostle for space upon the mantel. Dust whirls at the windows, gleaming at this hour with the sun streaming through, and the room as a whole appears rather less austere than the others in the house.

  We turn left down a narrow corridor which ends at a staircase leading up. A closed door near the stair leads back toward the kitchen while the door opposite stands ajar, a bed just visible inside with its clothes neatly turned down. Thaddeus closes the door.

  “Upstairs,” he says, and so we climb. A hallway runs the length of the upper floor, cool and dim and without windows, sawdust and varnish clouding the air as we pass the new addition.

  The Circle Room, they call it, built over the kitchen to host the Lynches’ séances or “sittings.” I have seen a pencil sketch of the interior. The Spirit Cabinet was visible in cross-section, as I recall, Thaddeus seated within while spectral children joined hands and danced upon the stage. It was all crudely done but nonetheless redolent of wonder, of that world they call the Other and of the things I once believed.

  We reach the end of the hall. Thaddeus halts.

  “This is my room?” I ask.

  He grunts.

  “Are there no other guests?”

  “There’s Mrs. Ambler. Mr. Bauer and his wife. Germans.”

  “Will I meet them tonight?”

  “Maybe. Supper’s at seven-thirty.”

  “And the séance?”

  “After supper. So long as it’s dark. The spirits don’t talk but in the darkness.”

  “Thank you,” I say, setting down my bags. “I shall look forward to it.”

  “Nothing to look forward to.”

  “I only meant—”

  “Is what it is,” he says. “Nothing else, besides.”

  “The Gift, you mean?”

  “Gift.”

  “To call up spirits. To speak to them.”

  He shrugs. “As you say.”

  “Perhaps we might discuss it later?”

  Bluntly: “You want to talk to me.”

  “For the article. There are certain questions. Concerning your family, that is.”

  His jaw moves slowly, the lower lip curling up to suckle at his moustache. His gaze is blank, unreflective, the same as Mrs. Ambler’s, I think, for all the difference in their ages, and I’m fumbling now, hoping for a reaction.

  “Perhaps your brother might assist me?”

  “Ambrose can’t help you.”

  “Oh. Yes, of course. I understand he is something of an innocent.”

  “A what?”

  “An innocent. I believe that was the word Sally used.”

  “She’d no cause telling you that.”

  He sounds irritated, even angry, and I realize I have misspoken, though I hardly know why and haven’t time to explain myself before he speaks again.

  “Come talk to me. I’m always about. Find me in the kitchen most times.”

  I thank him again, but he’s halfway down the hall then disappearing down the steps just as the clock downstairs strikes ten.

  My room is small but comfortable with windows to north and west and pale curtains half-drawn. On the washstand reposes a vase of dry blossoms, rust red and violet, while a patchwork quilt upon the bed lends further colour to the room.

  The washbasin is full, the water cool. I scrub my face with a towel and rinse off the worst of the tiredness before approaching the north facing window.

  From here I can see the new addition, which makes a T where it protrudes from the house. Three windows, evenly spaced, are visible where they look out over the yard, though the sun in them hides the room beyond.

  North of the house is a collection of sheds and outbuildings, including two barns and a chicken coop, a smokehouse. A footpath bends past the latter and vanishes into the undergrowth: weeds, berry bushes, the occasional spreading pine.

  The western window. I draw back the curtains on a scene of wooded hills and fields and, beyond the dome of open sky where the landscape slopes toward the valley, the distant lake. The sash is cracked, the scents of verdure wafting from the orchard below, young trees in rows with the fruit grown fat upon their branches.

  Through the leaves I glimpse a flash of blue, then grey, the colour changing with the light from her dress as she passes from the orchard and into the burial plot beyond. Sally. There are two headstones cut from black slate, separated by a span of fifteen feet with two low markers lying between them. These are limestone rather than slate, pitted by age and furred with moss. Marking infant graves, perhaps, or those of children stillborn.

  Sally stoops before the first of the slates. There she plants the wildflowers, aster and cornflower, thrusting them in with what seems an unnecessary violence. Yesterday’s cuttings she sweeps away with her foot and tramps them into the grass before moving on to the limestone markers, where she places a single flower on each in turn, a purple iris, distinctive for its colour even at this distance. She reaches the final grave where she leaves the remaining flowers then lingers for a time with head bowed and kneeling in the grass. This is the newest grave, I think, the lettering plainly visible, though at this distance I cannot make out the inscription.

  Sally lifts her head, then straightens to start back toward the house, whereupon she glances up, as though by chance, and I retreat behind the blowing curtains. I stand with my back to the wall until I hear the door open and shut. Then step out from the curtains and cast my gaze over the empty yard and orchard: apple trees and tall grass waving, blighted by the sun.

  Sometime later, there comes a rapping at the door, soft and tentati
ve. I sit up, the book sliding from my chest, Longfellow’s Purgatorio. I rise from the bed and cross the room, shuffling like a somnambulist and sweating as I reach the door. The hall is empty: echoes of footsteps receding, a figure in skirts descending the stair. Sally.

  She has left a tray with bread and cured meat and a pot of strong coffee. It is past noon, then, and I have slept through luncheon—or “dinner” as they no doubt call it here. I take the tray into my room and set it down at the writing desk while noon and one o’clock part ways and the sun’s brightness intensifies to burn off the last of the morning’s dew.

  I am ravenous: I am weak. Two hours or more I slept then woke to the same exhaustion, the ache settling over me as I finish my luncheon. The old wound pulses, left shoulder and collarbone malformed where they were shattered at Cold Harbor ten years ago. The pain is great but not unbearable, and I have long denied myself the comforts of laudanum lest it dull the agony of grief, or worse yet, ease the following guilt and sour this suffering, a small atonement.

  So it’s two cups of coffee and out into the corridor. The door opposite me is closed, but I am aware of voices beyond it, lowered, I suspect, from long habit rather than from any desire for privacy. They are speaking German, a language almost surely unfamiliar to the Lynches and scarcely understood by myself, who once served alongside German immigrants and held a young boy’s hand as the life poured from the stumps that were his legs. Here in the hall I recognize the same sleep-numbed intonation, words like Gott and verzeihen, and realize they must be praying.

  I should not be listening. Chastened, I retrace our earlier route to the staircase, which brings me past another bedroom, this one situated opposite the Circle Room and far larger than either my room or the Bauers’. A common bedroom, I should think, such as those often found in wayside inns, with four beds and curtains dividing them. The black-gowned Mrs. Ambler is seated inside, alone among shadows.

  Downstairs, I pass once more through the sitting room, the dining room, and the parlour, and outside onto the heat-fogged lawn, where the flies swarm and bat at my eyes and lashes and the honeybees whir contentedly among the rosebushes and the asters.

  Northward and the footpath turns upon itself to join the various outbuildings. There is the privy, its odours dizzying. A brick smokehouse. A patch of wild earth enclosed by a scorched foundation and beyond it a barn roofed in tin.

  Inside the barn a carpenter’s worktable is set into the near wall on which hangs an assortment of axes and rakes and antique scythes. The latter gleam faintly, golden-white beneath the layers of rust, and the barn’s interior is cool, characterized by a sense of absence: vacant stalls for oxcart and thresher, a series of steel hooks high up in the gloom.

  Past the barn, the path continues into the woods, wending round clumps of barbed junipers, the occasional pine with limbs stretched out. The gradient shifts. The land slopes downward, the path making switchbacks against the angle of decline and the shade thickening to hemlocks and maples, a hickory with its bark flaking. Last year’s leaves are at my feet, obscuring the trail, while the light comes aqueous and filtered through the press of leaf and needle, rippling the shadows where they cover limestone and clay.

  Then the ground tilts and spills me, half-stumbling, into an old streambed running west to east. The channel is muddy, a mess of boot prints set in spiralling cracks. The tracks continue north until they reach a place where the rock walls narrow round a swath of well-trodden earth. A fallen boulder rests at an angle across the streambed, forming a roughly triangular opening six feet in height. A rod wedged between boulder and ravine provides a place to hang a curtain, and there are two crude benches hacked into the walls to either side of me. This, then, is the “cave” of which I have read, where the Lynches held their séances before the new addition was built. Of the footprints on the ground, only one set appears recent, and these are a man’s prints, crudely shod, with two nails showing in the heel.

  I follow the tracks where they lead beneath the boulder and duck through to the other side. Beyond the cave the streambed continues, widening to a delta, though the tracks, I observe, do not. I turn round, look back toward the ravine with its mud and rockfalls, benches piled with last year’s leaves. I imagine the scene as it must have once appeared, silvered with moonlight and the sitters gathered beyond. Black curtains fluttering with the wind behind them. The coolness under this rock. The past, its spirits crowding round:

  The glint of the lamps on Garrison’s spectacles that evening after the lecture, when I cornered him against the lectern and pressed into his hand a sheaf of my writings. A pounding at the door in the wartime September, ’62, when young Amos Chilcotte came rushing in with the news of emancipation. The clink of glass as toasts were made and Kitty watched mutely from the landing.

  Another sound. The clang of the new bell cutting wide the church-silence on that day, our wedding day, as she swept up toward the altar, fatherless, unattended then as she would be in death, a scant four years later, while I lay in the stupor of pain and opium and the white-clad nurses moved like brides among the injured.

  Is it so much to ask that you might stay?

  But I could not, and this she would not forgive me, any more than I could forgive myself. In my saintly convictions, I had become another Cyrus Lowhouse, her father, the man she hated above all else, just as I would come in time to despise my God in those rare moments when I might still believe in Him. His absence felt like hers in the silence of this place, emptied of all sound but the snap of a splitting twig, the sigh of birdsong through the trees.

  The Yellow House hoves into view, a floating island suspended amidst clouds of insects and chaff blown east from the fields. The summer dusk settles in the grass. Cooking fires are lit, and the smell of smoke wafts toward me from the house.

  The footpath has taken me round the far side of the new addition. The yard here is uncut, weeds bursting from out the bowels of old farming equipment. A trash heap: an abandoned plough, a cart without wheels. A side door leads into the kitchen, half-open, with the heat from the range spilling out. There are onions roasting and mutton.

  Find me in the kitchen most times. I let myself inside, but Thaddeus is not there. Ambrose Lynch sits at the table wearing the same jacket and check shirt as before, though now the armpits are damp, the moisture standing out upon his brow. He is stick-thin and delicate, the jaw pointed, grizzled with black hair. His small hands, folded together, rest before him on the tabletop, and his expression is placid. His gaze betrays nothing. It does not flicker, not even when I approach the table and sit myself opposite him.

  He says: “Saw you down the gully.”

  His voice is thin and reedy, his accent thicker than his brother’s.

  “You were there? I didn’t see you.”

  Ambrose does not reply.

  “There was a fallen rock,” I say. “A kind of opening?”

  He looks at me or rather past me and does not blink. When he speaks, his lips move as though independent of the mind behind them, which dreams the words from the darkness inside, a black space seamed in light but otherwise unformed like the hours that follow on ether’s oblivion. “Spring Willow’s Cave.”

  “Spring Willow?”

  He shakes his head, says nothing.

  I recall the benches, the rod from which a curtain would hang—and think of the Red Indians Thaddeus is said to summon from the Spirit Cabinet, braves and old squaws and maidens in buckskin with names like Eastern Sun or Evening Star.

  I ask: “Will Spring Willow come tonight?”

  “No.”

  “You sound quite certain.”

  “I call her but she doesn’t come. Not anymore.”

  A slight sharpening about his features. His eyes stray to the side door through which Thaddeus enters, attired in work clothes and sheened with sweat. He scowls at me, his mouth curving in on itself, and when he speaks, he addresses his brother though his gaze does not stray from mine. “Go and see Sally,” he says.

/>   Ambrose stands without protest and shuffles out with his hands clasped together, the fingers working, kneading. When he is gone, Thaddeus occupies the chair just vacated and glares at me across the table.

  “You want to talk to me,” he says.

  In his words and tone I sense the weight of a life lived past redemption and laid now in offering before me. A burden made heavy with rage and sorrow as of those too long abandoned, the mingled pride and contempt felt by an apostate for his God.

  “I did,” I say.

  I reach into my waistcoat, remove my notebook and pencil. I ready the questions I’ve prepared while Thaddeus watches from across the table, half-sneering. He extracts a pipe from his breast, a hand-carved length of bone-white wood. Strikes a match and touches the flame to the bowl. The stench of shag.

  “Then talk,” he says.

  We begin.

  I ask about the spirits, his family, the farm, framing my questions first in one way then another. Thaddeus listens, puffing at the whittled pipe, watching through the smoke. When he speaks he is evasive, as from long habit, occasionally refusing to reply, but from such clipped responses I am able to glean some few details.

  The Lynch siblings opened the Yellow House in the spring of last year. Mary Turner, their mother, had died three years previously. She was a believer in the spirit realm, though not possessed of the Gift herself. Raised on this farm she later married Jeremiah Lynch, a farm labourer, in the winter of ’36, whereupon she bore him three children in succession, two girls and a boy.

  These were Rebecca, Joanna, and Jeremiah. Of these only the eldest child survived into childhood. Rebecca, says Thaddeus, was born with the Gift inside her—the strongest of them for all that she died young, seventeen, and has lain in her grave these nineteen years.

  I say: “She must have been much older than you.”