by Daniel Mills
“It was her,” Ambrose says. “Spring Willow.”
“Shh,” says Sally, rocking him back and forth, and I know I have to stop it, to put an end to it before he says more about the icehouse and Sally comes to recognize herself in the telling, for all she wasn’t yet born. Before the truth makes itself plain to her and she knows them at last. Her mother. Her father. I hammer at the door, shouting, and kick it open despite the latch, ignoring the wail of pain from Ambrose’s lips.
Sally looks at me. We don’t speak, any of us, and there’s no sound but for Ambrose’s breathing. “Get up,” I say to him.
Sally says: “He isn’t well.”
“The Circle Room,” I say. “We got to get it ready for tonight.”
“Can’t you see he’s sick?”
“Ambrose.”
“Don’t,” she says, but she doesn’t know him, not like I do. He hears his name and that voice like Father’s and pulls himself free of her. Swings round his legs. Sets down his feet and shuffles toward me.
She says: “You can’t make him sit for you. Not tonight.”
“Isn’t for me.”
“No? Who else, then?”
I don’t respond.
She smiles cruelly, the teeth sharp and pointed like a cat’s. “John Turner, I suppose. God knows you care for him more than you ever did for Ambrose. Or for me. You’d give him whatever he wants and think nothing of it and me your own sister—”
I advance on her, shaking with fury and choking on breath, that sourness rising to the back of my throat. Ambrose moans and turns his face to the wall, fists clenched tight and hanging. I reach the bed. Stand towering over her with arm upraised as though to strike, but she just keeps smiling, those cat’s teeth glinting.
“Will you hit me again, Thaddeus?”
I don’t speak. Just lower my fist and leave with Ambrose behind me. I’m up the stair and halfway down the hall when I collapse, blood pounding inside so the memories surge and slacken, flooding me with rooms and faces like scenes from a stage play.
Spring Willow, dancing. Snow in the air and Ambrose beside me. His eyes follow her every movement even after she’s gone, tracing the paths she took through the snow, which fell and hid the tracks she left like as though they were never there at all.
John Turner. Digging beside me, his eyes red and brimming over. Other things, too. Shame at the way he’d run when found out in his sin. Guilt for keeping away through the long months following. A hate in him like the Fire that Consumes.
Later, I remember, we heard him crying over his betrothed and the life we’d taken from him, just as he means to take mine, ours. The trap is closing round us with Flood to one side with his questions and John Turner hungry and waiting, ready to pounce and devour her, his own blood, in the way some animals do.
If Ambrose remembers—
If he tells Sally, Flood—
There could be no wedding. John, betrayed, would betray us in turn. Bring Benson here and direct him to that spot in the orchard where we sunk the body, the two of us together, though it’s me who’ll hang for it, as he said. I feel it now. Feel the trapdoor fall away, the snap of my neck in the noose, and all while Ambrose watches from the gathered crowd, understanding none of it. Alone at last and with none to come to him in rescue, not like before.
Late morning, August ’53. We heard the crash which was the broken figure. Heard Father shouting, the wet slap of closed fists, bloodied skin. He collapsed Ambrose’s nose and thrashed the hearing from his ear and probably would’ve killed him if Rebecca hadn’t come running, wearing her nightgown, short like a tunic, for it was early yet and she wasn’t dressed. She bundled Ambrose to her breasts and fled down the stairs while Father started up crying and fell to gathering the fragments of the statue, cutting his hands on the jagged pieces. His blood ran out onto the floor and pooled and rippled with the tears that dropped in it.
Next day, Ambrose said he’d seen an angel. I thought at first of Falmouth and of Father on the riverbank, but no, he said, it wasn’t like that.
“A girl,” he said.
“A girl?”
“An Indian.”
He’s behind me now, his breathing fast, but he doesn’t speak nor think to help me and I drag myself up. Stand gazing back at him, his cheeks flushed and fat and a long drip hanging from his nose. I dig out the handkerchief still bloody from my pocket and jam it up under his nostrils. “Blow,” I say.
He blows. His eyes are damp, like when we were boys and we fought and afterward I hissed my curses into his dead ear even as he embraced me and said he was sorry.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and I can’t listen nor bear to meet that bloodshot gaze with the pain behind it and his pupils like cracks in a mirror showing nothing.
“Didn’t want to tell,” he says.
“I know.”
“Didn’t mean to make you angry.”
“I’m not angry.”
I fold the handkerchief into quarters and slip it down into my jacket. Breathe in, out, remembering it all, sensing Father’s ghost at my back, enfolding me in his arms, and the plan it comes to me at once, fully formed like the dreams of prophets in the Bible, and this the Beast of Revelation, clad in flesh and in Father’s best clothes.
Mama used to say as I looked like him, and there’s no reason Ambrose shouldn’t confuse us, just as he’s heard Sally singing and called her Spring Willow. It’ll quiet him, I know. Make sure he says nothing more, neither to Flood nor Sally. Give us time.
“Go back downstairs,” I say. “There’ll be no circle tonight.”
He doesn’t protest, just goes, and when he’s gone, I open the door to our room, Father’s room, and leaving the key in the lock I open the wardrobe where his old shirts hang, his Sunday coat. The colour’s darker than I remember, black but with greenish stains on it. The same as he wore that long ago day when he heard the river calling and went to meet his Saviour.
Every Sunday he wore it, holding forth from his pulpit which was the table in the kitchen and calling down hellfire which was the lick of his old belt. This, too, is in the wardrobe, pushed to the back and hid beneath her nightgown, Rebecca’s, soiled with blood and afterbirth. Untouched these nineteen years, the same as her diary where it lies behind the wainscoting, hidden there though she meant it for Sally.
The belt. The leather’s cracked and stained, the buckle tarnished near to black. I hold it with my palm open, feel its weight. Then, grasping it firm, snap the leather back against itself so there’s a noise like a gunshot, then silence, the dusk following, moving in waves over the hills and hollows as though to fill the shape of them.
“Tomorrow,” I say, speaking aloud though it hardly matters. The house is quiet as the woods in winter, and if the dead can hear me, God knows they aren’t listening.
March 27th, 1855—
Four o’clock. Late in the afternoon & getting dark.
I must write of it, I know, though I scarcely know how. There are things I cannot say here. The risks are too great: you must ask Thaddeus.
This morning I walked in the orchard for the first time in months. The weather has been uncommonly mild. The ground is mired in snow-melt so I feared my feet would give way or that my knees might buckle in my weakness with the weight of me.
Mother begged me not to go.
You’re hurt, she said, but I had to leave the house. I made it as far as the graves of Jeremiah and Joanna & there saw the place where Thaddeus was digging in the night.
The grave is a foot deep, no more. The ground is scarcely thawed, unyielding as the rocks of the gully. Thaddeus is strong for his age but he is a child still: he could not manage it on his own. He has gone to fetch John & I have withdrawn to my room, this room, which has been ours since September, when Father found me out.
John will be here soon, but I am decided. I will not see him though he comes at last & all these months I have waited. The past does not matter. I remember the way he fled when Father came upon us, leaving us
to face him alone, & last night I was more of a man than ever he was.
My father heard me singing & he came for me. The door swung open & he entered the room with Mother close behind him wailing & pleading. He threw down the belt. He took up the rod from the fireplace & struck the penknife from my hand. And still I did not cease from singing, not ’til the second blow landed & drove the lights from my eyes & falling down I heard them: footsteps on the stair, a shot from Father’s rifle.
And will not stay though your child moves inside me, writhing and kicking like the soul of which you preach of a Sunday but never showed to me for all I begged it of you and humbled myself to this the cross you have made of me and gave you my body ’til there was nothing left to take but the hurting and a prayer unspoken that you might take me with you—
The candle is out.
Sally’s breath blows back across me, smelling faintly of apples. The fruit she plucked and offered me when I came upon her in the orchard. She turned with the moonlight on her face and silvering her limbs and hands, which she cupped before her, an apple cradled between them.
“Eat,” she said, grinning—and I did.
That was last night, or rather this morning, when the rest of the house was abed. Sally had left a note inside my waistcoat, scrawled on butcher’s paper in a child’s crude hand. It asked me to meet her in the orchard in the hour after midnight. Below the message she had drawn a picture of apple trees heavy with fruit and of a moon at the full with a man’s beard and moustache and craters for eyes.
I hid the letter. I folded it in two and secreted it under the feather mattress. The day passed, and I tried not to think of it, but midnight came with the promise of its dreaming and I rose from bed, retrieving the letter from where I had hidden it. I read it again. Meet me at twelve-thirty beneath the apple trees. I retraced the loops of her script and resolved that I would go to her.
Now we lie within the barn with the dust raked and scattered round, hidden beneath a horse’s blanket with the saw blades and axes hanging over us, secured by nails to the wall, though I cannot see them. The light is extinguished, the moon long set, the window black though it faces east: a horizon of hills and trees and stars suspended in the branches.
I sit up. Rest my head against the wall to gaze down at her where she lies alongside me. “Sally,” I say, but she does not stir, the darkness impenetrable where it masks her features so that she could be anyone. In memory her face blurs and merges with Thaddeus, with Ambrose, and finally with Kitty, as did her voice in the dream that lingered upon waking.
Take me with you.
These were Sally’s words to me, hours ago, when we were finished and sleep came rushing over us. Her voice was low and murmuring, scarcely audible. I cannot say if she intended me to hear her, but I did, and lifted my head to ask her what she meant.
She did not answer, not at first, and the minutes stretched between us so I thought she was asleep. I listened for her breathing, shallow, rapid, and for the flutter of wings in the hayloft where an owl made its nest.
The bird cried out, sighting its prey.
Sally said: “Away from here. From him.”
“John Turner.”
“Thaddeus, too. Folks in town. They’re all the same.”
She rolled over onto her back. The candlelight flared then faded behind her. She looked up at the ceiling, or past it, her eyes glittering.
I said: “You mustn’t say such things. You are too young.”
“It’s this place,” she said. “Moriah. I don’t know who called it that, but the Lord knows they were right to do so. This place, it makes Abrahams of its men—and Isaacs of its women. Mama worked herself to death in giving birth to us all and Rebecca, my sister, died when she was young, for all that she was loved.”
“They are at peace,” I said, without conviction.
“That will be me one day. Spread-eagled like Isaac, gutted on the stone. And Thaddeus will be there beside me, holding the knife to make of me an offering—not to God but to John Turner.”
“You cannot believe that.”
“You don’t know him.”
“He is your brother. I know that much.”
“Yes,” she said, but distantly, as though she were only half-listening.
Her eyes were open, but she did not blink, and the darkness moved to the guttering of the wick. Her shape met mine in the rafters and joined with it once more, as though in shadow-play, our shapes scribed within a magic lantern’s beam.
I said: “He cares for you. He wouldn’t hurt you. Not knowingly.”
“Yes,” she said again, speaking from the back of her throat, her voice made hollow with exhaustion or longing or simply the beginnings of sleep: a held breath expelled, an owl swooping on its prey. And Sally’s voice like winter’s emptiness, wind in brick chimneys.
“And you cared for your wife.”
Kitty’s face is before me now, discernible in Sally’s where the eastern sky turns purple and thrusts itself to the window. The line of her brow. The shape of her nose. Her features surface from the dark as from memory, and I recall the frost upon her face when I found her in the vault at Rhinebeck.
The sexton warned me against it. He tried to stop me but I threw off his arm and scrabbled at the wrappings, tearing away strips ’til the face was revealed. The nose was black, the lips burned away so the teeth pushed through from behind: yellow as bruises, clenched fast. The eyes were pearlescent, frozen, brilliant blue in the lantern-light so I could not see my reflection in them. And the child—
My fingers were cold, numb. The baby’s shroud would not tear. I felt the bones of him through the cloth, my fingers finding the gaps in his ribs so I knew the flesh and skin had flaked away when she cast him onto the pyre. The shroud held little more than a jumble of ashes: the charred skull under my hands, an un-fleshed face I could not see.
The sexton eased the bundle out of my hands, making such soothing noises as a father might. I offered no protest: I had no strength for it. With my back to the wall I watched as the sexton replaced the child on his mother’s breast then turned toward me with a look of such tenderness and pity that I wanted nothing more than to vanish, to be forgotten.
“Extinguish the light,” I said.
“You’ve seen enough?” he asked, and I did not reply.
Then as now I could not face it, the full extent of my transgression: my sin made person in the ruins of her body, our child’s black bone and ash—and I left Rhinebeck in the spring, early, before the earth had thawed. I did not see them buried.
The light is brighter now, more blue than violet. I can pick out the shapes of empty pallets where hay was stored, years ago, the stub of a dead candle and the shape of the window above us. Sally’s face opposite mine. The blood thuds faintly in her neck, the breath steams from her parted lips, and the light from the window is poised to fall upon her, waking her to the coming day and the nightmare of her helplessness. Her marriage to John Turner. Her children born to die in this place, Moriah, where winter is always just before her, always just behind.
Away from here, she said. From him.
I do not wake her. I pull on my clothes and slip from the barn just as the sun is rising, breaching the hills and the trees that crown them and birds are singing, phoebes, as I follow the path toward the house, choosing the fork which bends round the new addition.
It is colder here, the grass wet with dew, and the Circle Room blocks the sunrise save for a faint gleam upon the shutters. I pass beneath the windows of my bedroom and the Bauers’, then pause upon reaching the porch to look out toward the orchard: tree limbs interlaced, black branch and shadow merging.
A voice says: “It’s Mr. Flood, isn’t it?”
Mrs. Ambler. The widow sits in a rocker by the front door, watching the dawn as she must do each morning. Her hands are visible where they clasp the chair’s arms, the flesh so pale as to be colourless, more spirit than flesh. Her body vanishes into the humped shape of her veil.
“You’re awake early,” she says. “Or is it perhaps you have not slept?”
I shake my head.
“Do come sit with me,” she says and indicates the chair beside her.
I sit. The rocker groans, the legs creaking as I nudge them into motion, back and forth, and the sun swings up like a lantern above the crest of trees. A spreading stain: black about the edges, red and seething at its centre.
“Do you remember what you told me?” I ask. “About ghosts. The reasons I have come here.”
A breeze sweeps the porch, making clouds out of the dust. It blows in the widow’s veil, presses the folds smooth against her face. The fabric twitches about her lips.
“I remember,” she says.
“I was lying to myself, you said.”
“Was that awfully unfair of me?”
“No,” I say. “You were right to say so.”
She nods.
“How did you know? I didn’t realize it myself. Not then.”
The breeze withdraws. Her veil comes loose, detaches itself from her lips. The fabric hangs in her face like a curtain, like the entrance to the Spirit Cabinet. Then the pallid hands come up, rolling back the veil to reveal the pinched face, white as chalk.
“We have all lost someone,” she says. “My husband died when I was young but truly he was least among the many I have lost. For years I have seen them in passing on the streets of Boston and in the faces of every man I meet, even strangers. And you, Mr. Flood. I have seen you with Miss Lynch, the way you look at her—and wondered whose face you saw in hers.”
“My wife. Our child, too. They died.”
“The Lord is just, it is true, but certainly He is cruel.”