by Daniel Mills
“They went toward Pittsfield. They’ll stay there ’til the inquest.”
“And John Turner?”
“He isn’t coming back. He knows he isn’t welcome.”
Her brothers were gone: the house was hers, presumably, to keep or sell. She could buy her living and move elsewhere—away from here, from him—but now, of course, there was no need for her to marry, only ghosts to escape.
And still she gazed at me from the dimness, twin points shining in her eyes where they cast back the light and my reflection as on that morning eleven years ago when I left my wife in the doorway to march across Virginia, a world of fire, and all while Kitty fanned and fed the same blaze within herself, her bones and body, until all lay in ruin, and I told her I was sorry.
“Forgive me,” I said. “For everything.”
She closed her eyes, two lights going out. She could not see me hesitate, then turn away, and she did not speak, though I crossed the threshold and descended from the porch and would not look behind me.
The train is through the cutting. The lantern-show vanishes, dispelled by a wave of hot light which sweeps the open fields and breaks over the car, restoring me to my senses, this solitude. Alone with the view through this window.
August 30th. Summer is nearly over, the cornfields teeming and the maples in rows beyond, red leaves spinning as they fall. The floor vibrates underfoot. The rails flash as the train draws near the scene of last week’s accident.
There is a break in the weeds, the grass trampled flat where men and horses stood and waited for the hospital wagon. The memory takes shape before me: two men walking with a stretcher held between them. A faceless child. A bloodied blanket.
Then the weeds growing higher, hiding all from view.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Daniel Mills is the author of Revenants and The Lord Came at Twilight. Moriah is his second novel. He lives in Vermont.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There is no Moriah, Vermont. The Yellow House of the novel is modelled after the Green Tavern in Chittenden, Vermont, where the Spiritualist mediums William and Horatio Eddy held their séances in the decade following the American Civil War. A detailed account of the Eddy brothers’ mediumship can be found in Henry Steel Olcott’s 1875 volume People from the Other World to which I owe an enormous debt of inspiration.
My thanks to Joseph Citro, whose work first introduced me to William and Horatio Eddy; to Tobin Anderson, who read an early draft of Moriah and offered encouragement at a time when it was most needed; to Ian Rogers for his years of friendship and support; to Samantha Beiko, Sandra Kasturi, and Brett Savory at ChiZine Publications for their belief in Moriah; and, finally, to my family: I would be lost without you.