by Daniel Mills
“Seven years.”
“And there are five years between Ambrose and yourself?”
“About that.”
“Forgive me,” I say, “but was he born—different?”
“Queer, you mean.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“No. He wasn’t born that way. Though near enough to it.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”
He shrugs. There comes into his face an impassive look, eyes half-glazed and dull through a fog of bluish smoke, and I know he will say no more upon the subject.
“And your father?” I ask. “Jeremiah Lynch?”
“What about him?”
“You haven’t mentioned him.”
Smoke streams from his open mouth, a long exhale.
“Nothing to say. He left.”
“That must have been difficult.”
“Was for the best.”
“How old were you when it happened?”
“Ten or thereabouts. Ambrose was just a little thing. Remembers nothing about it.”
“And Sally?”
“She wasn’t born yet.”
“So she never knew her father?”
“She was lucky.”
He offers no further explanation. The clock strikes seven, dinnertime, and I realize more than an hour has passed in this strange and halting conversation.
Thaddeus finishes his pipe, his third, and taps the ash into a waiting mug before rising to ready the dinner, or “supper” as he calls it, laying out two trays onto which he places cloths, cutlery, pewter cups. He does not speak. He is done with speaking, and I am left to my reflections: questions to which I will not give voice and he will not give answer.
A clatter on the stair.
It is Sally, come down to serve up dinner, and I rise and steal away toward the dining room, quickening my step as her voice floats down to the kitchen and I reach the long table around which the other guests have already gathered.
Mrs. Ambler occupies the same seat as at breakfast nearest the china cabinet. She greets my arrival with the slightest of nods then returns her attention to her knitting, her needles clicking. On her left, facing the doorway sits a married couple, the husband being much my own age, his black hair streaked with grey. He rises from his chair and smiles (sadly, I think) to take my hand. “I am Friedrich Bauer,” he says.
His English is good, if strongly accented, as is that of his wife, Greta, who extends her hand to me across the table. She is younger than her husband, closer to thirty, but sallow and plain-featured with her mouse-brown hair pinned up to show her widow’s peak.
I address myself to her husband. “Have you been long in this country, Herr Bauer?”
“I left Prussia as a young man. Fifteen years ago now. Greta has lived here much longer.”
His wife explains. “I was a girl,” she says, “when my family settled in Boston.”
Thaddeus enters bearing a tray heaped with bowls and cutlery and with cups for ale and water. He places a single cup of tea before Mrs. Ambler—the same china mug as before. The widow makes no acknowledgment, does not lower her knitting.
Sally follows her brother, carrying a second tray with beans and boiled potatoes, withered cuts of steak. She has changed her dress, I notice, wearing black now instead of blue and attended by the faint impression (imagined, surely) of eau de cologne. She places our dinner before us on the table and withdraws from the room, drawing the door shut behind her. She says nothing, makes no sound.
Friedrich clears his throat. “I am to understand you are from a newspaper?”
“The Sunday Echo, yes.”
“And you have come to write about the spirits?”
“That is my intention.”
“Then you will find much to write about here.”
“You have seen them, then?”
Friedrich nods.
Greta flushes beside him. She glances down into her lap.
Friedrich says: “We came to this house on Friday. Mr. Thaddeus went into the Cabinet after we dined. Three spirits appeared. An old woman bent with age, an Indian warrior, a soldier in his uniform. Saturday, at Mr. Ambrose’s circle, we heard a singing like the angels.”
“Ambrose Lynch is, I believe, a trance medium?”
“The Gift of Tongues, it is called. The spirits speak through him.”
“I have spoken with Mr. Lynch. He does not seem a well man.”
“That may be so.”
“But you believe he can converse with angels?”
Silence, then, as Mrs. Ambler’s needles cease clicking. She lowers her knitting, declares in a voice like icicles dripping:
“We have all heard them, Mr. Flood. On several occasions, we have seen them. Not only those that Herr Bauer has described but others too. There is Yvgenie, the Russian Cossack. Evening Star, the squaw maiden. And the children, of course.”
I turn my attention to the older woman.
“And you are convinced of the veracity of these materializations?”
“Would I be here if I were not? Would any of us?”
She looks round the table, prompting a murmur of agreement from Friedrich. Greta is quiet. She sits beside her husband, red-faced and unblinking, and will not meet my eye.
We talk of other things. Music provides fertile ground for conversation, as Friedrich is currently employed as a teacher of music at a private grammar school. His knowledge of the viola is at once as expansive as it is intimate and despite his habitual modesty I gather he was esteemed a prodigy in his youth.
His wife is herself a cellist, a former student of his and at one time a highly praised soloist, though it has been years, she admits, since she played for an audience.
“And you, Mr. Flood?” asks Greta. “Do you play?”
“I don’t,” I say. “Though once I loved to listen.”
“Once? You mean no longer?”
“Kitty—my wife—she often played.”
“I understand,” she says, and I think perhaps she does, though she does not explain herself further.
Behind me, the door swings open, and Sally is there, this time alone. She does not come into the room as before but lingers in the doorway. Her face is solemn, devoid of all feeling, though her pose seems half-theatrical, assumed from obligation, as Kitty’s laughter always did, at least in those days when still we laughed together.
“The time is come,” she says. “My brother has entered the Spirit Cabinet.”
And so we rise, Mrs. Ambler first. The old woman affects the pace of a funereal march with the Bauers close behind and myself the last to stand so that I lag behind the others as they issue from the dining room.
Sally will not attend the séance. From the foot of the stair, I hear the clatter of trays stacked one inside the other, the ring of tin and pewter as she cleans up from dinner. And Ambrose? I have seen nothing of him, not since his brother sent him from the room. Perhaps he is upstairs, I think, but the upper floor is dark, a shadow at stairway’s end.
Mrs. Ambler braves the steps without hesitation. She proceeds at the same stately pace as before, casting herself in the role of Virgil with the three of us falling into character as Orpheus (Friedrich), Eurydice (Greta), and Dante (myself) to follow our guide upstairs into an unstarred darkness, lit only where two candles flicker in the deeps of the Circle Room.
Despite its name, the room is in fact rectangular, roughly symmetrical, an elongated space of thirty feet by fifteen which overlays the kitchen and the pantry. The lighting is dim but I can discern twenty or more chairs, arranged in two rows of three split by a central aisle which terminates at a low stage or dais towards which we shuffle, with the quiet weighing heavy on us and on all the room, precluding any question of conversation. The windows are blocked with black drapes. To our right along the room’s eastern wall is placed a table crowded with guitars, hand drums, recorders, and saw blades, and a single chair before it, angled toward the stage.
The stage is around one foot in
height and topped by a three-foot railing beyond which the room’s two candles gutter. Mrs. Ambler seats herself in the row nearest the stage. Friedrich is next, and then Greta, his Eurydice, at whom he will not look, so that I am left to find a chair across the aisle.
The Spirit Cabinet is built into the room’s north wall, over the pantry, where it forms a narrow space parallel to the railing, which opens into the stage’s far corner. From where I sit, I cannot see the cabinet’s doorway, but a rustling noise bespeaks the presence of curtains in its mouth, shadows moving as the candles spit. The wood, newly planed and varnished, sends back the gleam from every surface.
By this scant illumination I descry for the first time two figures standing by the music table with heads bent forward and their hands folded before them in an attitude of prayer. The first is Ambrose. I recognize him by his bearing, his stooped shoulders. The other man, who is unfamiliar to me, moves to the table and lifts a guitar by its neck just as Ambrose stiffens and straightens his neck and listens for the first strummed chords.
They come at last, the first words following. The voice belongs to the unknown man. His singing is ragged and unbeautiful, better suited to harmony than lead.
And am I born to die? To lay this body down?
Mrs. Ambler begins to sing, her voice ruined by age or illness, shrill and quaking as she claws for the melody that evades her grasp. Friedrich, too, takes up the song, though his wife does not, and it is only when the hymn reaches its second verse that Ambrose opens his mouth.
He sings with a reverberant baritone, nothing at all like his slurring speech, which floors the creaking melody with a sequence of resounding bass notes which nonetheless evoke within their rising ache that world of deeper shade where all things are forgot.
His voice is solemn, somnolent at times, but soft, too, with melancholy, though he sings of the sounding trumpet and of the final triumph over death.
To see the judge with glory crowned and see the flaming skies.
There are other hymns. We sing Jesus Lover of my Soul and Love Divine, All Loves Excelling, and even I join in with the latter, compelled by my former fondness of it. Greta alone is quiet with face averted, pale hand darting up to daub at her lowered eyes.
The final song is sung. When it is finished, the unknown musician lowers the guitar and slides out from the candles’ halo. He skirts the table’s edge and walks to the back of the room, where he stands with arms folded, his face turned to the Spirit Cabinet.
Ambrose sits himself in the chair beside the music table. He watches the stage expectantly and with the same single-minded purpose with which I’m watching him. But he looks away, as if in disappointment, and in the candlelight, I see her.
An Indian girl has emerged from the Cabinet, slipping soundlessly through the curtains and coming as near as the railing, though the dimming distance makes close scrutiny difficult, and anyway, she does not cease from moving. She turns and leaps, shifting her weight from one foot to the other with the ease and grace of a running deer, spinning as she bounds across the stage and smiling, it seems, with all the joys of youth.
Evening Star, I think. The Indian girl of which I have read.
In age she appears nearer fifteen than twenty, and she wears a tunic-like dress with beading about the neckline, black hair fastened in a tossing braid and tied off with a white ribbon. Her colouring is likewise dark, from the long thin arms to the exposed legs, slim and finely muscled, which flash beneath the tunic. The effect is beguiling, hypnotic, never more so than when she approaches the railing and lingers there a spell, whirling in place with arms extended and back arched like a Russian dancer.
Mrs. Ambler totters toward the stage.
“Your ribbon, dear,” she says. “It has come loose.”
The girl hears the voice and pauses though she does not appear to understand. With one arm raised and her own shadow lying on her face, she looks down blankly at the old woman, who repeats herself, and this time gestures toward her own hair.
The Indian girl smiles and turns to proffer the braid. She lowers her hands to her sides but cannot seem to still the dance which continues to convulse her, causing her to shift and prance, one foot to the other and back again.
Mrs. Ambler takes into her hands the braid and unties and refastens the white ribbon.
“There,” she says, stepping back. “Much better.”
Whereupon the girl shakes herself and leaps into the air, landing soundlessly on her moccasins before spinning once more and dancing toward the Spirit Cabinet. The curtains swallow her completely, scattering light and shadow to the walls ’til at last they settle and reform to make the outline of an Indian brave.
He is thin but muscular and dressed in a leather jerkin with a bow slung across his back and a hatchet clasped in his right hand. He lofts the axe into the air, twirling it blade over haft before catching it with one hand then claps the other to his chest and greets us in English.
“I am Chogan,” he says. “Blackbird.”
His voice is booming, sonorous, but also curiously flat. With the axe in hand, he paces the stage and speaks to himself in broken English and an unmusical voice. From such ramblings we learn that he was a warrior of the slaughtered Pequot, who went with the sachem Sassacus to raid the town of Hartford while the men of Plymouth marched upon Misistuck.
“My wife,” he says. “My girls. Taken in the fire.”
So the curse was placed upon him. In the agony of his grief, Chogan walks the fields and endless forests, unable to die, invisible to all, he says, save those with eyes to see. The hatchet blade flashes, thrown upward, spinning as it cuts the air only to freeze in mid-descent, snatched by his outstretched hand, the sleeve sliding back to show a sinewy forearm chalked with scars.
A noise from off stage. The warrior’s head snaps round and he’s bounding across the stage with bow unslung and arrow nocked to slay his spectral adversary. He does not hesitate but passes through the curtains and the quiet overtakes us once more.
Another figure materializes out of the Spirit Cabinet, an old woman. She wears a plain grey gown like a nun’s habit with a veil that flows down toward her shoulders, hiding much of the withered face. Yet there is something kindly in its lines and wrinkles, and when she glides from the box, we see the children at her feet. Two boys, I think, though they are shy by nature, and the old nurse cannot shoo them any closer.
“No,” the first boy says. “I’m frightened—”
Friedrich leaps from his chair. He dashes to the railing with a queer and high-pitched cry. “Johannes,” he says. “Martin.”
He thrusts his hand through the rail, the fingers extended. The children fall to weeping and will come no nearer, though the silent nurse continues to usher them toward the railing.
“Papa,” says the second boy. He is the younger, I think, his voice not yet broken, and the nurse inclines her head as though to whisper into his ear. The boy nods. His brother, the elder child, glances up at the nurse and then at his father through the railing. His lips curl, red as leaves in autumn. He says: “Do not despair, Papa. There is a God and we are with Him.”
They are words of solace, of hope, but Friedrich, I see, is beyond either. He gives no response but only whimpers softly as the nurse retreats with the children and Greta appears beside him. She kneels, takes him in her arms. She rocks him back and forth until his breathing slows and they rise together, resuming their seats beside Mrs. Ambler, who, for her part, appears distinctly embarrassed, her chin outthrust and turned away.
Greta hides her husband’s face within the folds of her dress. Runs her hands through his thinning hair, heedless of my eyes upon her. Her shamelessness rouses the ghost of my own guilt, the knowledge of my weakness, which will not leave me though I cover my face, my eyes, hiding from the past, even as a young soldier, wounded, steps from the Spirit Cabinet and staggers toward us dragging his left leg.
He reaches the railing, stumbles, catches himself against it. There is blood on his hands
, and the stench of the abattoir follows with him. His blue uniform is torn and stained beneath the sternum, flapping down to hide the open wound, and his face is blackened, obscured by smoke and powder stains. He scrabbles at the rail, smearing it red as his fist closes round it and the blood spatters the stage at his feet. On his chest the brass buttons flash and wink.
“Father?” he says.
Silence answers him, unresounding, like the void in which no loving God awaits. I think of Kitty and our child and of the boys felled in the Wilderness. With one voice they cried into the roaring darkness, shrieking as the fire took them and gathered them to its breast, and all while I quivered and shook as I’m shaking now, and prayed until the words had left me and His name passed from my lips, sent up like a flare into the rattling dark and there to be consumed, never spoken again.
“I heard you,” he says. “You were singing.”
No singing now. Just the breath that steams from us in the heat of the room with the windows shut, the shadows like dark trees glimpsed through the flames. The boy, slumping forward, makes his final plea to us through the bars of the railing.
“Send for a priest,” he says. “A man of God. My death, it comes and quickly.”
His eyes settle on me. A light comes into them like a spark of recognition so that I cannot look away, any more than I can rise to give him comfort, or to beg forgiveness of him, as I would the boys, just children, whom we left to die alone among the burning trees. For a time we simply watch each other, unmoving, until he heaves himself up and limps back toward the Spirit Cabinet, vanishing through the curtains though his blood remains behind, a black pool shining.
December 28th, 1854—
The house is frigid. The fire burns without warmth though with light enough to see by as I sit & write at the dresser, my fingers gone numb inside my gloves.
This winter is as bad as any I remember. Mornings I wake shivering & feverish, sweating into the quilts which I wear about my shoulders like a shawl. I walk through the day to keep warm, circling this room ’til I am too tired to continue & my ankles are swollen & throbbing.