Moriah

by Daniel Mills

  Sally is seated by the fire, cross-legged, the tongues of flame between us. She sees me and extends a hand. Beckons for me to come and sit beside her, and I do.

  She says: “You’ll miss the sitting.”

  “As will you. It’s nearly dark.”

  “So it is.”

  Silence. The fire seething, fed by cedar twigs and rubbish. Scraps of newspaper. A length of coarse fabric. A stench like burnt hair.

  I say: “John Turner came to the house. He meant to see you, I believe.”

  “Maybe I didn’t want to be seen. Not by him, anyhow.”

  “You’re not his fiancée, then?”

  She chuckles dryly, lifts the char-black stick at her side. “Is that what he’s been saying?”

  She thrusts the stick into the base of the fire, tumbling the cedar logs over one another and setting the ash to whirling. Up. Up. The sparks rise and strike the stone over our heads, spinning free to vanish into the woods surrounding.

  I say: “Ambrose told me about this place.”

  “Spring Willow’s Cave.”

  “Yes, that’s what he called it. Who was she?”

  “A spirit. An Indian girl.”

  “Like Evening Star.”

  More laughter, dry as chalk. “Yes,” she says. “Like Evening Star.”

  “Tell me about her. Spring Willow.”

  “There’s hardly enough to tell. Truth is, I never knew much. Thaddeus called her up long ago when he was just a boy himself. I wasn’t born yet but I gather she came a lot in those early days. She would tell fortunes, sing songs—and she’d dance. Least that’s what Ambrose says. Thaddeus doesn’t like to speak of it, but that isn’t unusual.”

  “And she doesn’t come anymore?”

  Sally will not look at me. Her eyes in the flames. The light inside them.

  “No,” she says. “She doesn’t.” She exhales. “But Ambrose hears her sometimes.”

  “She speaks to him?”

  “He hears a lot of things.”

  “Has he always been—different?”

  “Long as I’ve known him. Mama used to say how he was a bright child. Mild as a lamb, she said, and utterly devoted to his sister. His older sister, I mean.”

  “Rebecca.”

  “I never knew her, of course, and anyway, she died young. Ambrose wasn’t the same after that. That was Mama’s explanation, but I suspect there’s more to it. Our father was a beast of a man. It seems he hated his sons, though the Lord knows he didn’t spare the rod—or the belt for that matter. Ambrose is deaf in one ear and carries such scars on him as you wouldn’t countenance. And there’re his headaches—no predicting when they’ll come and no telling why. Sometimes months go by without him having such a spell. Other times he suffers them each day. Summers are the worst, it seems. He often comes here. When he feels one coming on.”

  “Why this place?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Least not for certain.”

  “But you suspect . . . ?”

  “I found him here once. Last summer. He was curled up in a ball with his legs folded beneath him, wedged between the ground and the stone above us where it slopes to the ground. Balled up like that I thought of a turtle in its shell or a rabbit lodged in its burrow. I said his name, and he must have known I was there, but he didn’t say anything, and we didn’t speak of it afterward. I didn’t want to embarrass him, I suppose, but I doubt he feels much embarrassment. He was crying, though. Calling out her name. Spring Willow.”

  “She came to them here?”

  “Probably. But I don’t know if it’s important. He feels safe here, that’s all. It’s a place of shelter for him like Mama’s room. It’s his place, a place of hiding.”

  “Yet here you are.”

  She laughs again but as though for the first time: a fluted sound like music, all bitterness gone. With the stick she spears a scrap of burning cloth, shaking it furiously so the sparks fly free of it. There is something familiar about the cloth, a detail I cannot place—but then the fabric shreds, dissolves into whirling points, and the moment is lost.

  “Here I am,” she agrees. “But I’m not hiding.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “If John Turner wants me, he can come and find me.”

  “As I did,” I say, half in jest, but her response, when it comes, is entirely in earnest.

  “As you did,” she says. “And now you have me.”

  —and she is in my arms with her lips round mine, her tongue pushing against my teeth. Her breath blows into me with the force of the fire’s breathing, smoky and sour and mingling with the tang of cider on my tongue. Her fingers grasp and squeeze, the nails digging.

  The heat of her touch. The sweat on her, the musk of unwashed hair. I run my hands through it and grasp hold of the pin, pulling it free. Her hair unravels, spilling over me in loops, enveloping me where I lie beneath her, hiding me in its folds and blotting out the light.

  And in that dark we move together, slowly, with her lips clamped over mine and breathing into me, filling me with fire’s heat, the taste of old apples.

  Afterward, we lie together on the ground, and the cold steals over us once more. Night is falling, the shadow of other days: memory and self returning as the fire burns low and fitful, our limbs tangled together and our clothing dishevelled.

  Half-asleep, I hear the guns at Cold Harbor, the music in the Circle Room, the cry of a night bird. A tremor moves through her, through me, like the shivering in the trees above us as a wind passes over, heard rather than felt.

  “Sally,” I say, without knowing why, and she presses herself closer, curling against me. She curves her back to the shape of my chest and takes hold of my hand. This she crushes to her breast and holds it fast with one hand while tracing the lines of my wrist with the other.

  Her fingertips travel from wrist to heel then over the palm ’til she reaches the knuckles, the third finger where once I wore my wedding ring. I flinch despite the softness of her touch. I pull away instinctively, but she does not let go.

  “What was her name?” she asks.

  “Katherine. Kitty, I called her.”

  Sally’s grip is strong, surprisingly forceful. She has worked the same as any man ever since she was a girl and her fingers are callused and tough. She squeezes my hand once more, grinding the knuckles together.

  “She pleaded with me not to leave,” I say. “When the war came. But I was an abolitionist, a minister. A man of God. I thought it my duty. The regiment left for Virginia and I went with them. I wrote to her often—I tried to explain matters—but my letters went unanswered, even after I was wounded and taken to a hospital. Then she died. A fire—”

  “Shh,” she says, and I do not continue, cannot.

  I tell her nothing more, but somehow it is enough, and night has fallen over us, cold as autumn in that shade with the rocks all round, when at last she stands and slips free of my arms and floats over me in the dark with face and hands invisible as she fixes her clothes, her hair.

  Her movements are neat, precise, hands darting like birds. But she is slow to turn around, and slower still to walk away. Her footsteps linger in the walls of the ravine.

  The fire dwindles. The cedar logs smoulder, dusted with ash and sending up thin trails of smoke, recalling the ashes of our house in Rhinebeck. The blaze Kitty built up from her music, my letters, the nightdress that she wore.

  I sit up, button my jacket. I fumble at the clasps, shivering to watch the last embers fade. The remnants of a garment are just visible among the logs and kindling. A dress, I think, though few details can be made out. The neckline is wide like a tunic’s and there are lines of beading about the edges, pink and green and crumbling into ash.

  The old pain returns, forming knots in my chest where the shrapnel tore through me. The blood pounds in my skull and I stand to kick away the logs, scattering coals and cloth and revealing the remnants of a wig, the charred end of it: a black braid, a white ribbon.

&n
bsp; February 28th, 1855—

  Winter is holding on. Six months in this room & every day the same.

  Mother comes & empties the pot before dawn. Mondays & Wednesdays she fills the basin with hot water. Other mornings I must chip the ice out with a penknife.

  I break my fast with water & gruel & later will take the same for my dinner. Father demands this of me as a penance, as though these months of confinement were not sufficient.

  When she can, Mother sneaks me bread or jerky & this morning she brought me a wedge of hard cheese. To keep up your strength, she explained, but it is not enough.

  For days I have been sickening & cannot stir myself to tend the fire. I lie in bed for warmth & listen for the tolling of the clock downstairs, the patter of Mother’s tread in the hall. By these I mark the passing days.

  My brothers do not visit me. They are not allowed to, though Ambrose comes to the door sometimes & waits outside, too frightened to knock. I sing to him just as I sing to you: softly, so none but we can hear.

  And singing in this way I do not think of my brother or even of you but of another who fled but once walked with me in a place like Eden & sang with me with the tongues of angels.

  These six months I have waited & this evening I stood at the window & watched the dusk pass over me ’til the whole of the sun’s light lay upon the other side of the house.

  He is not coming, will not come.

  Father was twenty-nine, my age, when he met the living God. Least that’s what Mama said and she was there. It happened by the river in Falmouth, near Springfield, where she went with Abijah her brother and a wagon-load of calves to sell at market there. Was her first time off the farm and for all that she wouldn’t have left but for her father’s sickness and Abijah being too timid to go himself.

  Fall it was and the rains fell hard, washing out the track which obliged them to stay the night in Falmouth. Sunday, then, and Abijah insisted on church since he was, even then, a religious man, though nothing like as bad as he’d become—the kind of man who’d raise up a monster and call him a saint and hear no word said against him, trusting in God to sort the sheep from the goats. And on that morning in September the sheep were all gathered ’neath the big tent and bleating with one voice of the surety of their salvation. Mama told us about it, years later, how she laughed inside herself to hear the hymns they sang. But the music went on without stopping and the women fell to howling like dogs in heat even as the men dropped and thrashed about with foam on their lips and eyes rolled back.

  “Let’s go,” Mama said, scared now, but Abijah wouldn’t hear of it, and anyhow the sermon was beginning. The preacher was a young man. A boy, really. Younger even than Mama and she was just eighteen. He was tall, though. Taller than any man she’d met but thin, too, and with a worn and hungry look about him. The suit he wore was frayed and dusty and much too big for him while his arms looked like bones jutting from his sleeves as he raised his hands and called for the quiet, which fell among them like a star so they were at once struck dumb. He talked of corruption, the pleasures of the flesh. (O Jesus have mercy, cried the women). Sin. The stain of it. (The Way O Lord it is long but narrow). Lastly he talked of God’s Grace and Christ’s blood like the river outside.

  “Rising with the storm,” he said. “Redeeming all.”

  The tent erupted in cheers at this, and stomping, and with the Spirit riding hard upon him, the boy led them from the tent and down the hill to the river where it sparkled like a serpent, surging up brown with the previous night’s rain. The boy-preacher waded into the froth still wearing that dusty suit and Mama joked with Abijah that it was the first time it was clean. Her brother hissed at her. Told her to be quiet and she was. Watched with the others while the converts kicked off their shoes and waded out to meet him, confessing their faith so all might hear. He dunked them, man and woman alike. The girls he shoved down and pulled them up sputtering with the hair plastered to their foreheads and the petticoats showing through their clothes. Their faces flushed and red with feeling, the fast blood running through them. The men they stared and her brother, too, for all his talk of holiness, but there was one man, at least, who didn’t look, who’d eyes for none but the preacher-boy.

  This man was handsome and fair and with skin fine as moth’s wings. The light he seemed to take into his person and give it off once more in shimmering clouds, though Mama supposed it was really just the tree-dust in the air and the sun striking through it. She watched him a time but he didn’t move, and she half-fancied him for a ghost—so unearthly he was. Then he started to run, making for the river with the long, loping stride I remember, such there was no way of getting away from him, not ever. But that afternoon she just watched him, as did the rest of the churchgoers, and all eyes were on him when he leapt from the bank and into the mouth of that copper serpent. He passed beneath the water then came up gasping, reborn with the sun on his face so he looked like an angel, like one who’s seen the face of God.

  And so he had. He told her as much when they chanced to meet outside the tent. Chanced to meet. That’s how she said it, but I know she must’ve waited for him, for another glimpse of that face with the light which shone from it. Because she asked him what it felt like.

  “To be in His presence,” she said. “To feel His hand upon you.”

  And he said it was like walking on a wintry lake where the ice is much too thin and seems to crack and yield with every step. “That same kind of terror,” he said. Then falling down, screaming, but finding the water warm as a bath, and though this was September, he plainly wasn’t cold, even with his clothes hanging and dripping from him and his black coat the colour of old oil, the belt buckle shining.

  He told her other things, too. Said he was newly come to Falmouth but there wasn’t much call thereabouts for farm work. Reckoned he might move north. Look for work among the hill camps. Then Mama said there was always work on her father’s farm and he smiled. Said he thought he might like that.

  All of this was long ago but I know waking up with the first of the dawn that there’s no escaping it. The past, it’s here but not here, like the Soul Mama believed in and what she used to tell us of. See its crawling shadows on the curtains and the rugs. The closet where hang Father’s shirts and coats and his Sunday suit thrust up against the panelling and the old belt beneath it coiled back on itself like a river. Clothes that never fitted me for all they said I looked like him.

  “The spit of him,” Mama said, though I was always sickly and slight and wore my trousers fastened round the waist with a length of cord. But there was no one besides me once Father was gone. No one to cut the pasture or drive the cattle to market. None to cut wood and build up the fires at night. Rebecca was dead by then and Mother wore black for her, and Ambrose of course was useless, least ’til we found a use for him and the voices inside him. And though I worked the land ’til I was near killed of it, I lost the herd and sold the fields, and those old clothes fit me poorly still, hang like bats in the wardrobe.

  Ambrose is sleeping beside me, spit bubbling up at each breath. I slip out from the covers and take down Father’s grey jacket, the one Mama stitched for him, and later mended each time it ripped about the shoulders on those days he applied himself too forcefully to the work of our upbringing with all the hell and fury of Jehovah on his lips and in his hands.

  Dress myself quick. Thrust my arms through the coat sleeves and the door and down the hall to Sally’s room just as the sun’s lifting into view. I knock, but she isn’t here. Her bed’s empty, the sheets drawn up.

  So I go downstairs and that’s where I find her in the kitchen with the range lit and the oven already hot as though she’s been awake for hours and maybe never slept. She was late in coming to last night’s sitting. Slipped inside after the songs were sung and she didn’t dance with John upon the stage, as was agreed, but watched from the back looking indistinct in that shadow, like faces past the window in the rain. Afterward, she wandered off before I could confront her a
nd later I spied her in the orchard and then beyond it, where she knelt in the grass before Mama’s grave.

  This morning she smiles to see me as she hasn’t smiled in years, not since the day John Turner came to press his suit, and though I fought with him and stayed his hand with promises and more, I couldn’t refuse him, not outright, and Sally came to despise me for all I’d given up everything. A year of hell, then, for all of us and me the worst of all. Then the arrival of this Flood who Sally says will save the house, but God knows it won’t save me, and Sally herself, I fear, is past rescue: John will take her to himself the same as the farm which was entrusted me when Mama died and the fields I was forced to sell.

  Her smile, Sally’s. He will swallow it down and the face behind it ’til there’s nothing’s left but skin and bone and the lightness of the unsouled body. Her lightness like Rebecca’s on the morning we lowered her down while Ambrose stood quiet behind us and Sally just a babe in arms howling. Now she dusts her hands on her apron as the first light comes through the shutters and wishes me good morning. The voice so familiar. The face.

  “John’s coming today,” I say.

  Sally pretends to innocence. Doesn’t speak.

  “Reckon he wants a word,” I say.

  She shrugs.

  “The dancing last night. You went back on your promise.”

  “I didn’t promise anything,” she says, and smiling all the wider, turns her back on me, humming to herself as she sees to the morning’s labour: sliding loaves into the oven, making coffee on the range. Ignoring me, though her voice gets louder, making words or sounds like them. And it’s only when she’s gone outside to draw up water from the well that I recognize the tune she’s singing. Rock of Ages. Cleft for me.