by Daniel Mills
“What, exactly, do you believe she understood?”
“What it meant to be haunted.”
“And you feel the same way? Haunted?”
Mrs. Ambler rose from the chair, her old joints cracking, and withdrew from her gown a set of pince-nez through which she looked down at me. Her eyes, I noticed, were blue, and her tone was similarly cold.
“It is not a question of feeling, Mr. Flood. I hear my child at night and once last year at Ambrose’s circle I heard him crying out to me. In the night when I cannot sleep I listen for the patter of his feet in the hallway. One day, I suspect, he will emerge from the Spirit Cabinet and look for me among the sitters.”
“That prospect does not frighten you?”
“Of course not. We all have our ghosts, Mr. Flood.”
“Perhaps. But many would wish to escape theirs.”
She gazed at me through her pince-nez, the eyes sharp and staring. “And that is why you have travelled all this way? To escape your ghosts?”
I said nothing but thought of Kitty as she was when we were married, of the corpse that awaited me inside the vault—the face hidden, wound about with cloth strips—and of the bundle that rested on her chest, the bones of our child swaddled in rags gone black with frost.
I looked up at the widow. I met her bird-like gaze—and nodded.
“Then you are lying to yourself.”
The dining room. Half-past-ten and still they are assembled: Mrs. Ambler, Mr. and Mrs. Bauer. The room is silent, uncomfortably so, and they sit with their plates before them, untouched, eggs and biscuits mired in congealed fat. No one looks at me when I enter the room or even when I sit down, taking the chair opposite the widow.
I clear my throat, wish them good morning.
Only Greta Bauer returns the greeting. She leans forward with her elbows resting on the table, though Friedrich, beside her, will not wrest his gaze from the tablecloth, his knife and fork and the chipped plate lying between them. He twitches, toys with his knife. He guts his eggs and smears the cold yolks round his plate, scratching lines in the ceramic. His nostrils flare.
Greta says: “We heard you were taken ill.”
“I was, yes. I’m much better now.”
I am aware of Mrs. Ambler’s presence across the table. Resentment pours from her like the heat from a dying ember. Her fingers knead the fabric of her skirts, and I remember the first of the voices we heard last night: a child’s voice, thin, like that of the babe she never bore but for whom she had never ceased to long. Its voice rose up out of that ring of darkness, drawing near—until Greta cried out, weeping, and drove the child away.
Mrs. Ambler, sensing my eyes upon her, flinches as though found out in nakedness. She stands and sweeps from the room and Friedrich rises from his chair to follow her, saying nothing to his wife and ignoring my gaze as he passes into the sitting room.
We hear them, Friedrich and Mrs. Ambler together. Their voices mingle on the steps, their footfalls alternating as they walk the boards over our heads.
I say: “I do hope I haven’t caused your husband any offence.”
Greta shakes her head. “You did nothing,” she says.
“Only he left so abruptly. I worried perhaps I had angered him.”
“He is angry, Mr. Flood. That much is true, but it is not with you.” She sighs. “Two days ago, you spoke of your wife. Katherine?”
“Yes.”
“Then perhaps you can understand what I am going to say. When the circle was over, Friedrich and I retired to our room. We dressed for bed, but Friedrich would not touch me. He would not even look at me. He knelt by the bed to pray and would not consent for me to kneel beside him. I could not bear it. I asked him what the matter was. Tell me, I begged him, but he would not speak to me, and I think, perhaps, I knew already.”
She pauses—I do not interrupt—but I am thinking of Amos Chilcotte’s visit to the house in September of ’62, when first I decided to enlist, and of the year of recrimination that followed. Kitty’s rage. Her weeping as her body began to bloat with the child growing inside her, nourished on blood and the madness therein. She wished it would die, she said. She said she prayed that it would happen. And turning away I sought shelter amidst my books and Sunday sermons ’til the day it came at last for us to part.
Is it so much, Silas, to ask that you might stay?
Greta continues: “Like me he was troubled by what we had heard. It preyed upon his mind. That voice, the child’s voice. Friedrich recognized it. Or thought he did.”
“Didn’t you recognize it as well?”
She smiles gently, nods. “So I did.”
“But you no longer believe in it? The truth of what you heard.”
“I do not.”
She halts again to collect her thoughts. We hear from upstairs the voices of those who left us, her hus-band speaking with Mrs. Ambler, his tone wild. Other rooms: the groan of hinges as a door falls shut, a faint rhythmic tapping as in time to an unheard
music.
Greta says: “This year I will be thirty. In my life I have borne two children, two boys. Johannes and Martin. They lived for eight years and seven or for fifteen years together—half of my own span. Despite this, the life in them burned brighter than it does in me. Even in their graves they are more alive than I will ever be. So clearly it is that I remember them.”
Rhinebeck, late November. The chill inside that vault. Shadows in the lantern’s beam.
“Tell me about them,” I say.
“Johannes was born first. He was big even when an infant and grew quickly afterwards, shooting up like a birch. He was always much the largest among his schoolmates. Big John, they called him, and I remember their cries under the window afternoons after school when they played their ball games in the street near our house. Big John! Big John! And they loved him as I did—not because he was strong, though he was, but because he was kind.
“Friedrich doted on him. He taught Johannes to play the viola, which my husband has long esteemed the loveliest of instruments, and Johannes excelled at it, as in all things. In this he was much like Friedrich and I think he was his father’s child more than he was my own. This is only proper, as he was our firstborn. But Martin, our second child? He was mine.”
She leans against the cane-back and closes her eyes, remembering, calling to mind her child’s features, as I can never do. There were no images taken, no photographs, nothing to remember save the blackened wrappings in which I found him—and these I cannot unwind in dreams any more than in life.
Greta exhales. Her lashes flutter and part with the clatter from the kitchen: Thaddeus going back and forth through the pantry, Sally scrubbing up at the basin.
Greta says: “Martin was a quiet boy, much given to daydreaming. He was not musical, and could not sing, but this was only because his talents lay elsewhere. In summer he spent his days in the wood behind our property. He brought with him his sketchbook and drew such scenes from nature as you could not imagine. There were trees with their leaves and the light glittering on them, and ferns which curled and twined round one another with the grace and lightness of men and women together. He saw things others did not, which is true, I believe, of all of the Saints, for that is what he was. Even Friedrich saw this quality in him and remarked once that Martin was like a monk in his habits and the aura of unearthly things he carried with him.
“But he was a loving child, too. Johannes was more demonstrative and would kiss you on the cheek before going to school of a morning, but Martin was thoughtful, as deliberate in love as he was with his drawing. He might blush and turn away from your kiss but in the evening he would come and present you with a gift, a treasure from his daily wanderings. Once he made me a wreath from sedges he had cut by the pond and this he laid down at my feet as though I were a goddess. I did not deserve such worship, being more of earth than of heaven, and when the day it came to bury them, I threaded one of my own hairs through his sedge wreath and buried it alongside them in t
he coffin they shared.”
“They were buried together?”
“Johannes came home with the fever. It was autumn, the evening. He was shaking and cold and could not stand. ‘My head hurts,’ he said. Friedrich and I put him to bed. We called for the doctor, but there was nothing to be done. Johannes died in the night and Martin followed him the next morning. We did not even know that he was ill. He had contracted the same sickness as his brother but took such pains to hide it from us that we knew nothing of it ’til morning when the minister arrived at the house. He came to speak the words for Johannes, but as I have said, he came too late—so quickly did the sickness move. Then Martin came into the parlour and he was pale and shaking and wetted through with sweat. His tongue clicked in his skull but he could not speak. He collapsed upon the hearth-rug, shaking, and moaned when the minister tried to give comfort. Then he was quiet.”
Greta’s voice is clear and steady, if somewhat remote. She chooses her words with care, with all the precision of the cellist she once was. Her hands shake but she will not hurry the performance. With me as her audience she is once more the virtuosa, but with no instrument to hand save her words and all the pain immured inside of her.
“So they were lost to us. Friedrich and I—we were cast adrift. Johannes and Martin. Friedrich’s favourite and my favourite, his faith and mine. But that was not the end of it. If grief is like a burn that blisters, weeps, and will not heal, then hope is the fire that burns and is not quenched—and it was hope that brought us here to Moriah.”
“The child,” I say. “Last night. You recognized his voice.”
“That is true. The voice was Martin’s. He sounded no different than he had when living. That morning he died before we knew he was ill and suddenly he was there with me again in that circle. And I did not merely hear him, Mr. Flood. I felt him, his nearness. Friedrich felt it too and that is why we quarrelled. Last night, he would say nothing, but this morning he told me I should not speak to him, that I had chased his son away. His son. Not mine. And I realized it was Johannes’s voice he had heard, not Martin’s, and knew then how we were deceived.”
“But how was it done?” I ask, lowering my voice, for the kitchen is quiet, and it will not be long before Sally enters to clear away breakfast.
She appears puzzled. “How it was done?”
“What was the trick of it?”
She shakes her head. “There was no trick. Ambrose Lynch can say whatever he wants, whatever voices he hears or imagines. It does not matter. In the end we hear only what we wish. So it is that I might hear Martin’s voice just as Friedrich hears Johannes’s, and even Mrs. Ambler hears the crying of a child she never bore.”
Greta falls quiet. She sips her coffee with an air of contemplation, undiminished in dignity or composure. But the saucer rattles in her hand, giving the lie to this performance, and I look away to spare her my embarrassment.
Standing, I busy myself with a study of the china cabinet with its few cracked and worthless pieces, arrayed inside like the rarest of treasures. Only a single piece appears as though it might have some value. This is a French milk jug with matching saucer. Chantilly, I think, probably dating to the last century. The glazing depicts a young man of Oriental extraction wearing a red smock and black cap. He is meant to be a shepherd, shown with a long crook better befitting a Dresden Shepherdess, which rests against his shoulder. He stands, legs spread, with one hand cupped to his mouth and calling to his flock on a distant hillside.
Sally is beside me. She says: “Our father travelled to Quebec once. Long before I was born, when my brothers were small children. He went to sell a bull and brought this back with him. For our mother.”
“It’s a lovely piece,” I say, somewhat disingenuously.
“Others have said the same. I admit I’ve never cared for it myself.”
She circles round the table, collecting the plates from Friedrich’s place and Greta’s. She scrapes off the remnants of breakfast and adds their plates to those stacked in her other hand before returning to the kitchen.
Greta finishes her coffee. She places cup and saucer alike on the table and rises from her chair. Her intentions are plain. Our interview is at an end, and I thank her for speaking with me.
“Your candour was illuminating.”
“I can only hope you find it of some use. Good morning.”
Then she is gone and there is no time for me to recover my thoughts or consider the whole of what she has told me because Thaddeus has appeared in the doorway with his fists in his pockets and his eyes red-rimmed, shadowed for lack of sleep. His jacket is shabby and patched at the armpits, white dust speckling his shoulders.
“Come up,” he says. “I’ll show you the Circle Room.”
The doors are open. We go inside. The room appears larger in the daylight, vaulted and airy with the sun streaming in. The air is thick, scented with sawdust and with something like resin, perhaps, or varnish.
The floor has been cleared and swept and appears bare but for the reflections of windows, two rows of three and each composed of four square panes grouped about a central cross. The chairs have been moved, I notice, stacked seat upon seat and lined up against the wall to my left.
The round table from last night has been upset and rolled onto its side then pushed against the music tables. These play host to a variety of saws and stringed instruments: two guitars with strings missing, a kind of lute fashioned from pine and catgut.
I do not wait for Thaddeus but walk toward the centre of the room and pause upon reaching the middle row of windows, where I look up. The rafters are exposed, crossing over my head to form a single steep gable. In the daylight, I can observe the crudeness of their workmanship, the timbers warped and whorled and the nails hammered in crooked, protruding from every joint. I recall the woodlot by the road, the mounds of rubble I passed when first approaching the Yellow House.
Thaddeus is behind me: stale sweat, cheap tobacco.
“The new addition,” I begin, “it is your own design?”
“Built it too.”
“You and your cousin, perhaps?”
“John Turner? He’s nothing to do with it.”
Thaddeus speaks his cousin’s name with obvious distaste, scowling when he looks up at the ceiling.
I say: “I would like to speak with him, I think.”
“Expect you would.”
“Will he come to the sitting tonight?”
“Reckon so. His guitar’s here.”
Thaddeus points, indicating a guitar leaning upright in the corner nearest the music table. From a distance it appears to be the one serviceable instrument of those assembled with all six of its strings in evidence and the body newly polished, rosewood gleaming.
I retrieve the guitar from the corner, lifting it by the neck ’til it catches a beam from the window and the wood takes fire and shines. There is no maker’s label in the sounding cavity, nothing at all save flecks of skin shed from strumming fingers and a few strands of hair, and these not fair like John’s but black and twined together, curled up in the hollow of its base.
“A fine instrument,” I say.
“So I’m told.”
“A family heirloom perhaps?”
“That?” He laughs—a harsh bark of a laugh with nothing of mirth in it. Then he says: “Suppose it is. In a way.”
“A way?”
“Was our money bought it, wasn’t it? After Mama died. When I sold the field.”
I replace the guitar in the corner and examine the instruments on the table, beginning with the makeshift lute, which I shake gently from side to side then peer down inside to ensure there is nothing hidden there—a prop, say, that could be retrieved and sneaked into the Spirit Cabinet when the sitters were distracted.
From the lutes I move on to the hand drums and tambourines then turn my attention to the round table, examining its legs and underside—and I’m so absorbed in the task that some minutes have passed before I realize how little Tha
ddeus has actually told me.
I cannot understand why John Turner would have benefited from the sale at all when the field belonged to the Lynches. And it’s this I mean to ask of Thaddeus only to find he has drifted away from me and stands by the window nearest the stage with his hands folded behind his back.
I go to him. Stand close enough to smell the coffee on his breath, the pipe smoke on his jacket, and still he does not move away. His eyes are fixed on a place beyond the cemetery where the fields, high with hay, rise in waves to meet the wooded peaks.
I see his brother. Ambrose is crossing the hayfield, his bowler hat pulled down to his ears and his chin tucked into his chest.
“I would like to apologize,” I say, “for what happened at the circle. I had no wish to upset you. Earlier as well, in the sitting room. I should not have pressed him.”
“Been pressed enough in his time, I reckon. Things I’d do—”
He trails off, watching ’til his brother is lost to sight beyond the forest’s margin. Likely Ambrose is making for the deeper woods, the place he called Spring Willow’s Cave.
He saw what others could not, said Greta, speaking of her son, and I wonder at Ambrose’s Gift and the voices he carries inside him, whether they might not grow out of the stillness to fill and overbrim the gully, a song like summer’s dreaming.
Thaddeus turns away. “Expect you’ll want to see the Cabinet.”
We approach the low stage, the railing at which the spirit children stood two nights ago. They were more shadow than light, I remember, shapeless and indistinct, overshadowed by the veiled woman who stood behind them. Nonetheless, Friedrich had recognized them, glimpsing his own children in those blurred faces, their perfect pallor—and wept.
Greta comforted him, consoling him in German with such words as he needed to hear, and for a moment, I find I do not care how the trick was done or from what motives. But then I recall Friedrich’s anger at the breakfast table, flaring like the hope he carries (a fire that cannot be quenched, Greta said), and realize again what I have known since the War that some wounds do not heal.