Moriah

by Daniel Mills

  “You are still a believer, then.”

  She laughs, softly. “Is belief so important?”

  “There was a time when I would have told you it meant everything.”

  “And now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I hear her breathing beside me, the sound made cavernous in this early hour: the house behind us quiet, the silence heavier for the cooing of the doves overhead, a male and female. They call to each other across an expanse of roof and gable.

  Mrs. Ambler says: “I will tell you something, Mr. Flood. I have never told this to anyone and indeed I once intended to take the story with me to my grave. But now I think it hardly matters. Somehow I have become an old woman and there are few who would care to listen—and fewer still to judge.”

  “You condemn yourself too quickly, I’m sure.”

  “You can be sure of nothing. Of that fact alone can anyone be certain. You look at me and see me for the corpse I will become—and soon—but in truth I was young once and beautiful, called on by men of wealth and of the utmost suitability. There were bankers, lawyers. Two officers, a lieutenant and a colonel, who duelled with swords for the privilege of courting me, the colonel giving way only when his blade was broken. All were rejected in the end, though not by me. My father was a minister, as I have said, and he thought it proper that I should marry a clergyman—as I surely would have done if I had not met James.”

  Her chair moves back and forth, moaning. From inside there comes a closing door, a squealing sound. Sally, I think. Returning to the house and stealing upstairs.

  Mrs. Ambler continues: “He was my second cousin. For years he lived with his father in Virginia. When I was twenty, his father inherited a fortune from his uncle, a ship’s captain, and retired to an estate in Chatham, where we went to visit them, Father and I, one summer when the weather was fine.

  “James was younger than me by two years but he was more experienced. He had grown up with slaves from whom he had learned much. The same things he endeavoured to teach me, his cousin, and yes, I proved a willing pupil. The household dined together in the evening, after which I excused myself and retreated to my bedroom while the men stayed up for hours, eventually retiring to the library where it was my father’s habit to guzzle down brandy until he fell asleep over his Bible. James kept company with the older men. He drank with them and joined in their conversation, but always he lingered by the window, which faced the house, and watched from there for the light in my room to be extinguished. This was our signal as he had taught it to me. The maid is gone, it said. Come to me.

  “We grew careless. Or I did. We returned to Boston in the fall and I wrote James a letter, pouring my very soul into it and making certain—allusions. His father, also James, must have opened it by mistake or otherwise found it for he acted swiftly, removing James to his aunt’s house in South Carolina. I told my father, who was not angry, as I expected, but rather wept to learn of my disgrace. He travelled to Chatham by a fast coach and pleaded admission to his cousin’s study, where he dropped to his knees and begged the other man to arrange a marriage between us. But it was quite impossible. I was no better than a whore, he said. By my conduct I had proved as much. And so I was ruined.”

  Mrs. Ambler pauses. Her face is shrunken, her eyes like those of the drowned. I cannot look at her. The sun, rising, cuts streaks in the dew.

  She says: “I do not blame my father for what transpired. He feared for his position, of course, but also for mine—a man’s reputation can survive such a scandal where a woman’s cannot. And if he moved too quickly it was only for my sake. Within a month I was engaged and wed to Mr. Ambler. Two weeks after that I lost the child.”

  I listen, say nothing. There is nothing to be said.

  “It happened in the night. The pain woke me, the feeling of warmth between my legs. At first I thought I had wet myself but then I smelled the blood. I ran down the hall to the bathroom and birthed it in the copper bath. I spread wide my legs and the slippery mess fell out of me, sounding like a bell when it struck against the metal.

  “The thing was quite dead, or rather lifeless, for it had never lived. I was not yet four months gone and could not have birthed a living child. I did not look at the face. Only bundled the thing into my nightgown and changed in the dressing room. I tipped the mess of it, bloody gown and all, into my handbag and slipped downstairs in silence as not to wake my husband or the maid. I stole outside. Snow was falling, slow and drifting, the first of the season.”

  I ask: “What did you do?”

  “I went down to the river. I pitched in the bag and watched it float down to sea. It bobbed up and down, afloat despite the weight it carried, and vanished out of sight beyond the pier as the sun was coming up, red and glorious—a morning much like this. I returned to the house and sopped out the bath. There was blood in the bed, of course, but my husband was more naive than I was, even before I met James. I told him it was a woman’s problem, as I suppose it was. He asked no questions after that.”

  Then comes a thumping from inside. A man’s heavy step. He crosses the first floor, then re-crosses it, pacing. Thaddeus?

  Mrs. Ambler is quiet, the rocker stilled so it falls to me to breach the silence.

  “Why have you told me this?”

  “Because of what I said before, about my child. So you would not think me mad. I had a child, you see, the same as you. I sinned, yes, and was punished for it, but the Lord is just. He took from me until there was nothing left to take but in time all was returned to me. My child. My lover, as well, after a fashion.

  “This was last year when first I came to the Yellow House. In fact, it was the first night I spent here. It was early in the morning, the shutters dark, and I was still abed when I heard breathing. A wet, sucking sound. The noise came nearer, but I was not frightened. I sat up and saw the babe come tottering toward me, small and unsteady on its feet. It crawled into bed alongside me and by the light of a struck match I saw it—him—clearly for the first time. The head was misshapen, as are the heads of all infants, and smeared with blood and grime, but the face was his, James’s, unmistakably so. I clasped him to my breast. I held him in my arms and promised I would not let him go, and I didn’t, but hours later I woke and he was gone.”

  “Could you have dreamt the incident?” I ask. “Only, the timing of it—”

  “Do not patronize me, Mr. Flood. I am not a fool. It happened in just the manner I have described. And I assure you I was quite awake at the time.”

  “Of course,” I say, quickly. “I did not mean to give offence.”

  “You might not believe me when I tell you this, but for me, at least, it was never a question of belief. Do you understand? If I saw him once, I shall see him again. That is not faith, but reason. The evidence of things seen.”

  “You needn’t convince me of anything,” I say.

  “Perhaps I wish to.”

  “I do not think you are mad. I never did.”

  “No?”

  “No more than myself, at any rate.”

  She laughs, wheezing, and lowers her veil. The east cracks open along its seams, spilling orange light, then yellow: colours of a summer’s day and the tree line black against them.

  I ask: “Of what, precisely, do you wish to convince me?”

  “Nothing, especially. But I was thinking of the Indian girl. Evening Star.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yesterday, you suggested to me she would not appear tonight, but I have seen her many times and always she has come. Tonight will be no different. No doubt you have waited on many trains, hundreds in your lifetime, and always one has arrived—and if it was late? Well, no matter. How many times, then, have you prayed that your wife might be restored to you? Your child?”

  Mrs. Ambler’s ribbon is in my waistcoat pocket, the charred length of it. The ribbon is wrapped around my fingers now, held close like a memory: the fire in Sally’s eyes, reflected, as they bored into mine. It is proof enough, if proof
were needed, but I do not speak, and the ribbon strains as my fist closes round it, tightening ’til it snaps.

  A clap of sound. A noise from inside like a gunshot, resounding from the trees and rolling back toward the house. I stand up quickly and nearly fall, dazed with exhaustion and my hands like weights in my pockets.

  I make my excuses to Mrs. Ambler. “Will you tell the others I will not be at breakfast?”

  She nods and wishes me good morning and I go inside through the front door and the parlour, the dining room. Upstairs to the hallway, encountering no one in the corridor though a faint gleam from the Circle Room betrays a presence within.

  The doors are ajar, cracked to afford a view of the interior. Thaddeus sits alone at the round table with a kerosene lamp before him turned down to a tepid guttering. I can just discern his face, his clothing. A black coat faded near to green and a yellowed shirt (once white) paired with a high collar. His hands rest on the tabletop, laid flat with the tendons showing, and there is something else, a strap of some kind looped around the base of the lamp. A belt.

  Thaddeus’s eyes are closed, the jaw set and trembling.

  I do not disturb him. I continue down the hall, passing closed doors to quiet rooms and breathe deeply at my bedroom door before pushing inside. Inside it is still dark, the curtains drawn across the windows, and the bed yields to my weight as I fall into it, then through it, and the room closes over me, a breech slammed shut.

  In the dream it’s dawn and I walk through the Wilderness after the battle with the ghosts of trees and snags burnt black where fire ripped through, boiling the sap inside them, splintering the bark and dropping their leaves on the ground, setting the grass alight.

  The sea of ash crackles at every step, crumbling beneath me when my foot breaks through. I look down. A man’s ulna tips up toward me, a peeling hand fastened to its end: fingers spread, a wedding ring visible. The bone is cracked where my boot went through it, pores visible where the marrow melted and dribbled out to join the dead man’s voice in the ground, fixed when it went out from him and welling up like tar.

  Can your God give aught to one like me?

  Our sergeant is behind me, the Englishman Edgar Heap, who died at Cold Harbor but who walked with me through the Wilderness at dawn, searching for wounded. In the dream, as in life, he comes abreast of me where I stand and kicks at the earth. His boot connects with the buried skull and sends it skittering, ash rising in plumes behind it.

  “Nothing to do,” he says. “Nothing to save.”

  He does not pause but follows the skull through the falling dusk, disappearing but for the crunch of his boots in the wreckage. The light is failing, diffuse and dim where it streams through the dead trees all round, and the weather is turning.

  I lift my foot, let the bone fall back. It vanishes into the ash.

  I keep walking. Heap is gone—I no longer hear him—but I can make out shapes in the thickening gloom, barrels of cannon bedded in char where the limber wheels caught fire. Rifles stacked stock on stock and fused together by the heat. Scraps and shards of canister. Bones of horses, houses. Our house.

  It is situated in a clearing, the frame erect though the walls have crumbled, collapsing the floors and filling the cellar. A chimney thrusts up from the piled ash, stabbing at the night in its coming, and I’m alone, the war and the regiment left behind and none to walk beside me as I pass the threshold and pick my way across fallen boards and timbers to the hearth. The mouth of it is stuffed with papers and music, burnt pages flapping when the wind comes down its throat: a soughing sound like rustling corn or her breath in my hair.

  Snow drops out of the darkness, falling in wet tufts which strike and spatter the floors before me. The fire is dead, the coals rimed with ice, and the house is deserted, emptier for my own presence within it. The dead are gone, shovelled into the earth of Virginia or Rhinebeck, and here I stand with the snow drifting about me and nothing to do and nothing to save but the memory of this place, this life, and the ghosts of those who dwelt within it.

  Kitty’s face at the window. Her breath mingled with mine. Her footfalls in the corridor.

  The sound rouses me. Eyes closed, half-awake, I hear her steps recede, washing back toward the staircase like waves once broken on the shore. Wooden heels. A woman’s shoes.

  The sun is up, orange under the lids and starred with reddish blotches. The house smells of coffee and cooking, hot grease.

  Sleep again. I do not dream.

  The clock strikes once and is silent. The heat lies heavy on my chest, my breathing strained as through a blanket.

  I sit up, loosen my collar, stumble toward the dressing table. The basin has been emptied, and recently, while the jug brims with cold water, fresh from the well. Sally must have come in while I slept, sprawled and twitching and drenched in nightmare sweat.

  I wash off. Thrust my face into the basin and pour the cold water over my head and neck until the chill takes hold, calling to mind my dreams of the morning: the ruined house that was our own and the manner in which I returned to it.

  November ’64: an hour past dawn, a wet snow falling as the train reached Rhinebeck. Three days previously they had pronounced me cured and discharged me from the hospital and later from my duties. I sent word to Kitty via the telegraph, but she never received it, and I arrived in Rhinebeck to find our house had fallen in on itself. Only the chimneys remained.

  The sexton met me there. He had received my message and turned at my step with his hat held in hand and his bald pate gleaming.

  He spoke softly but plainly and did not attempt to soften the blow. He told me what had happened, the bald truth of it, and walked with me across town to the churchyard. He showed me the vault, their bodies: Kitty and the baby (Silas, she called him), the two in white shrouds like Christ after the cross when he was taken down and washed and laid to rest in the tomb with the stone rolled across and dusk descending. Purgatorio. A place of waiting. So, too, the vault in which they were interred, my wife and child, and where they lay ’til spring, a matter of months, but where I have dwelt these ten years and which I cannot leave behind me.

  The clock strikes again. Half past. I scrub myself dry and dress quickly, smoothing down my hair as I hasten down the corridor past the Circle Room and downstairs to the dining room. The table is laid with jellied meats and pickled eggs, blackened links of sausage. The dinner plates are stacked to one side, apparently untouched, and all the chairs are empty.

  Thaddeus is in the kitchen, kneeling at the range with his jacket removed and sweating through his check shirt—a different garment, I realize, than the battered shirt he wore this morning when I spied him alone in the Circle Room. Ambrose is behind him, seated in his chair with his back to me. He is sitting up straight, looking much the same as on my first morning in Moriah, but he is also curiously alert, hands trembling where they hang loose at his sides.

  Thaddeus sees me, scowls. He crosses the room and swings shut the door, the latch rattling where it strikes itself but fails to catch.

  I return my attention to the table, taking bread and sausage and a cup of black coffee. I’m preparing to sit when I see Friedrich Bauer in the parlour, scarcely ten feet away, slumped on the settee with legs crossed one over the other and his gaze fixed on the door.

  I bring his luncheon into him. He thanks me but evinces little interest in the plate. I sit down opposite, perched upon a threadbare footstool. The sausages are cold and slick, oozing fat at each bite, but I devour the meal quickly, forgetting matters of etiquette in my sudden hunger.

  Friedrich pays me no attention. His thoughts, plainly, are elsewhere.

  “Herr Bauer?” I begin. “I do not mean to intrude—and yet I could not but notice our numbers are rather light this afternoon.”

  He blinks, looks past me to the dining room. “Mrs. Ambler has gone to the village. The girl, Sally, she went with her. They left not long ago.”

  “And Frau Bauer? She went with them?”

  He
shakes his head. “Already gone,” he says. “This morning she left. She walked with Mrs. Ambler to the town east of here. Pittsfield, it is called. The mail comes there by coach each morning. It was to take her to the nearest station.”

  I recall waking to the sound of footsteps in the hall. No doubt these had belonged to Greta as she sneaked from their bedroom and downstairs to the parlour, where her husband now waits for her, watching the door with no expression, not even longing.

  I say: “And you did not accompany her?”

  “I could not. What if they were to come tonight? You remember them, how lonely they looked. I could not bear to leave them on their own. Not after that.”

  The ribbon is in my pocket, the burnt ends of it. Weightless.

  “If only she might have stayed,” he says. “She might yet have seen them. Johannes. Martin.”

  He trails off, perhaps sensing as I do the uselessness of the sentiment, the weakness of this argument. I think of Greta, broken with grief as was her husband, though reason had not deserted her, only faith.

  “She heard them,” I say, “the same as you.”

  Friedrich gives no answer, no sign of having heard.

  “She just could not believe in them.”

  Friedrich unfolds his legs, leans back against the settee. Clasps his hands before him and looks at me, pleadingly, and with a desperate earnestness, as though willing me to understand.

  “Jah,” he says. “Such was her choice.”

  “And yours?”

  He does not answer, but walks to the door and pulls it open, revealing the sloping lawn, dappled with white light, and the footpath descending to the tree line, the road beyond. There is no one visible, no one returning to the house.

  “You were a man of the church?” he asks.

  “I was.”

  “But no longer?”

  “The war,” I say—not a lie so much as it is half the truth. “All those young men. Watching them die.”

  He says: “For me it was the same. God is not God who takes the young to Himself and leaves behind the old. There was nothing for us when our boys died. For us no place to turn. The world is mad, dark and Fatherless, but we were not mad, Greta and I. Not then. Our eyes were open. We saw the world as for the first time.”