Gravity Box and Other Spaces

by Mark Tiedemann

  A tall, broad-shouldered woman with small, dark eyes regarded him critically. Flour dusted her dark dress in patches. The one hand Thomas could see, pressed against the frame, was veined and thick-fingered: powerful.

  “Yes?” she said sharply. “You here for the diggin’?”

  “Mrs. Masten?”

  She dipped her head once, economically.

  “I’ve come looking for someone,” Thomas said. “I’ve been told I might find her here.”

  “We’ve no guests, no lodgers—”

  “I meant at Mr. Peale’s enterprise.”

  Her eyebrows shifted.

  “I’m an attorney-at-law with the firm representing Mr. Peale—” The lie troubled Thomas; he valued truth above all.

  Mrs. Masten’s skepticism turned now to suspicion. She began to retreat, preparing to close the door.

  “The truth is,” Thomas continued quickly, “I was told my wife would be there.”

  Some of the suspicion seemed to leave her face. “Are you thirsty? It’s quite a walk to the marsh.”

  She led him down a long central hallway. The hardwood floor creaked like new leather. The air smelled of smoke and linseed and felt oppressive.

  Mrs. Masten took him out the back door, onto a small porch. The kitchen shed stood several yards away, separated from the main house by a grassless patch of gray dirt. A hogshead of water stood at the left end of the porch, near a stone well. Beyond that, Thomas saw a large barn, sided by a fenced area in which chickens meandered. He could smell alfalfa-tinged dung.

  “Here.” Mrs. Masten raised the lid on the hogshead and offered him a tin cup from a hook on the porch.

  “Thank you.” Thomas dipped a cupful of cold water. It tasted faintly of iron. “Thank you very much. It’s ungodly hot for this time of year.”

  “Hasn’t rained since April. Will soon.” She nodded westward. Thomas looked toward a ridge in the distance, but the sky above it was clear. “You say you’re lookin’ for your wife?”

  He drained the cup and returned it to the hook. Self-consciously, Thomas pulled a letter from within his coat. “This may explain it more clearly than I,” he said, offering it to her.

  She shook her head. “I don’t have any letters.”

  “Oh. Well, then.” He fumbled open the sheet of paper. “It’s, uh, from my sister in Philadelphia. She wrote to tell me she had heard from my wife last year—”

  “Last year? She’s been gone a time.”

  “Sometimes it seems longer—” Thomas caught a movement at the edge of his vision and looked across at the barn. It seemed someone moved within the shadows just inside. “Sometimes it seems like no more than a month.”

  He shook his head and looked down at the letter. “But it’s been two years.” When Mrs. Masten said nothing, he cleared his throat and read. “‘My Dear Brother Thomas, it is with some reluctance that I write you about a matter which has caused you suffering and, before it is seen to a conclusion, will continue to pain you. Last May, soon after receiving the news of your Abigail’s abrupt disappearance, a group of pilgrims passed through the city on its way south to the Kentuckys. At the time I made no association between your troubles and this event, but they have come north again, and I chanced to discover your Abigail among them. Upon inquiring, I learned that they were a band of Methodists under the Reverend Abner Bennington, who is said to be one of Bishop Asbury’s first converts in New York. We had all heard news of a great gathering in Kentucky of such folk in a place called Cane Ridge. I must assume that this is from whence your Abigail is returning north. I approached her, but she did not seem to know me, so caught by the fever of camp meeting religiosity was she, though she blessed me and talked of continuing on with Reverend Bennington as far as Maine. I write you to let you know with whom she is traveling and give you some hope of finding her again, though I lost track of her after the band left Philadelphia in the wake of the riotous meeting which they held—’ And so on. You see the problem.”

  “How did you come to figure that she was here?”

  “I made my own inquiries among friends more familiar with the rustic faiths. Reverend Bennington’s group isn’t very difficult to find. I learned last week that he was coming here, to your farm, to attend Mr. Peale’s—whatever it is Mr. Peale is doing on your property. I came by ferry up the Hudson from New York.”

  He folded the letter and tucked it back inside his coat. His pulse raced; he had yet to read the letter calmly.

  “Methodists,” Mrs. Masten said, looking away. “Well, there’s a group of them out there. I wouldn’t have them in my house. We’re Deists ourselves.” She squinted at him. “Honestly, though, I can’t see why your Mr. Peale is diggin’ out there.”

  “I understood he was undertaking a scientific investigation.”

  “Scientific?”

  “A search for truth.”

  “Hmm. As if he could find it at the bottom of a marsh.” She gestured west. “Over there. Hard to miss the trail now, all the coaches and wagons and boots gone up there these last weeks.”

  She closed the lid on the water barrel and went inside her house. After a few minutes, Thomas realized that he had been given permission to go see for himself.

  He stepped out of the shade of the small porch onto the beaten dirt expanse of the barnyard, the farthest edge of which was marked by a barn and a granary, the road beginning between them. He looked toward the ridge Mrs. Masten had indicated. As she had said, tracks etched a wide road from the end of the farm proper all the way to the top of the rise.

  Thomas came abreast of the entrance to the granary and stopped. He glanced into the shadows of the doorway. A small boy stood just within, watching him. Thomas’s ears began to ring faintly and he felt warm and cool at the same time. Slowly, he approached.

  “Richard—” he whispered.

  The boy gestured for him to follow and walked back into the darkness within.

  A canvas-covered shape lay on the floor. Sweat ran into Thomas’s eyes. He wiped at his face and stepped to the edge of the sheet. He prodded the shape with his cane, the tip finding a hard surface. He knelt and pulled the canvas back.

  Two enormous bones lay side by side, crusted with dried mud.

  “My God,” he breathed.

  “They’re digging up the rest in the marsh.”

  Thomas looked up. Standing on the opposite side of the bones, the young boy watched him, eyes large and wetly intent.

  “So you haven’t left me,” Thomas said. “I thought maybe—”

  “They shouldn’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Dig it up.” Richard frowned. “It’s not right to dig things up after they’re dead.”

  Digging up the dead? Richard wondered. The same admonition. “You—they—shouldn’t do that.” Hearing those words, now, memory welled up, overwhelming the moment.

  Thomas sat down. Richard rarely spoke to him. Usually, the ghost chose to sit in the same room, watching him or playing with unseen toys on the floor. Most times Richard did not even seem to hear Thomas’s words or his crying. In fact, for the first several months, since Richard’s first appearance after Abigail’s sudden departure, that had been the pattern: the specter came, stayed for a time, then, when Thomas slept or distracted himself or simply left the house, he would be gone. Nothing had prompted a response—shouting, weeping, long arguments, reasonable discourse—until Thomas had begun rummaging through Abigail’s bureau. He did not know what he had expected to find—he had been very drunk—but when he found a packet of letters and began, hands shaking, to clumsily unwrap it, Richard had appeared beside him, quite suddenly, and said very clearly, “You shouldn’t do that.”

  Thereafter, Richard’s visitations changed. The ghost began to notice him, sometimes even exchanged a few sentences. Not every time, but with more frequency of late.

  Thomas believed he had gone mad. He had prided himself on his rationality and his freedom from superstitions. He had seen himself as a mem
ber in good standing of the Enlightenment, one with the philosophers, like President Jefferson. Specters and demons were on the level of popery and discredited ignorance. What could he say now that the ghost of his only child continued to visit him and would not vanish in the light of reasoned argument that he should not, could not exist?

  He had continued his law practice, spoke no word of the visitation to his friends, and kept to his house, in the comfort of his scotch at night, waiting for the company of his dead child. When he had left New York for Newburgh, Richard accompanied him; the first time the ghost had ever left what had once been his home.

  “Why are you here?” Thomas asked now. “You’ve never come with me before.”

  Richard shrugged then walked out of the granary, into the bright summer light.

  Thomas pulled the canvas back over the bones and hurried after.

  Richard was gone.

  Thomas trudged up the road toward the ridge. He shrugged out of his coat as he reached the crest. A breeze cooled him briefly. Insects leapt and swirled above the grasses that twitched in the irregular winds, their wings catching the sunlight, gold and silver.

  In the distance, he saw clusters of trees surrounding a broad open area. The clusters grew closer together toward the northwest until, even farther away, they seemed to close up and become regular forest. Smoke rose from various points among the oaks, elms, and maples. Thomas estimated a good mile to a mile and a half walk.

  Reaching the first clump of trees, Thomas heard the sounds of voices and hammering. To his left a stream flowed into the thickets of thigh-high grasses, thistles, and ivy. Thomas followed it through a line of elms.

  He emerged into a campground. Tents in a variety of pale colors billowed in the breeze, and people moved in thick clots among them. The air was noticeably cooler here, and Thomas slipped his coat back on. A thick bacon aroma enveloped him, cut occasionally by a faint fetid odor from the marsh beyond. The clamors of speech, of horses complaining, of creaking and hammering, all rolled into a seamless murmur. It reminded Thomas of New York harbor: the docks, with its improbable mix of people—workmen in homespun, men in elegant suits and ladies in fine dresses, soldiers, backwoodsmen—and the constant moil of activity.

  Beneath one large tent, tables held what must have been maps and diagrams, over which bent men with compasses and angles and squares. Smoke poured through a hole cut above cook-fires in another tent. Canvas snapped in the wind. Tarps covered stacks of lumber. Light faded the farther in he went, in proportion, it seemed, to the sound of wood groaning under weight and a chorus joined in hymn.

  At the other side of the camp, the stench of the bog overwhelmed all other odors as he came through the last stand of dogwood. He stopped at the edge of a depression and stared up at a giant wooden water wheel, hidden till then by the curtains of trees that encircled a great pit.

  Wide leather buckets scooped out sludge and hauled it high in the air to be emptied into a sluice that carried the liquid thickly through another copse of trees, out of sight. Ladders extended down into the excavation, and Thomas saw men with shovels and picks and more buckets, moving slowly through the black water and slime. A crane on the far rim of the pit was lifting a leather sling filled with mud-caked objects that might have been logs—or bones. Another array of tents stood just beyond the crane.

  Thomas circled the edge of the pit. Smoke drifted from campfires, filling the woods around the edges of the marsh with a thick haze. Near where the contents of the crane were being laid out on the ground, a man in shirtsleeves and waistcoat stood at the center of a circle comprised of several well-dressed men, lecturing, his arms gesturing over the sodden pieces like a magician.

  Thomas hesitated, unsure where to go next. The activity around him made no immediate sense. The singing he had heard earlier had ended.

  A man climbed up a ladder from the pit. His boots were caked with mud and his pants wet to the knees. He gave a backward glance across to the giant wheel, then started walking in Thomas’s direction.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Thomas said. “Who—who’s in charge here?”

  The man frowned, creasing his long face. “I didn’t think no one didn’t know.” He aimed a thick, calloused finger at the tent just by the crane. Workmen were now carrying the newly disinterred pieces from the ground to a table beneath the canvas. The man in shirtsleeves led his group after them. “That be Mr. Peale. This is his doin’.”

  “Charles Peale?” Thomas asked to be certain.

  “You know him, then?”

  “I know of him. I’ve been to his museum in Philadelphia.” Thomas pointed at the wheel with his cane. “What is he doing?”

  “He’s drainin’ my bog, what he’s doin’. Diggin’ up bones.”

  “You’re Mr. Masten?”

  “Aye.” He nodded and gave the excavation a long, almost proud look. “Man’s got pockets, I’ll say that. He wanted the bones I found and the right to dig up the rest of the beast. I figured it to be a good bargain, havin’ someone pay me to drain m’ marsh. I never expected this—this—” He shook his head. “I’ll tell you, sir, I won’t be unhappy when it’s done and they leave.”

  “Perhaps you can help me. I’m not here about Mr. Peale’s excavation. I’m looking for someone. Is there a group of Methodists here?”

  Mr. Masten hacked loudly and spit an enormous gob at the ground. “Devil’s work, this here, you ask me. I never thought I’d say somethin’ like that, but some of what they’ve pulled out of the muck—” He blinked at Thomas. “Methodists? Back behind there,” he said, pointing again toward Peale’s tent. “Them especially I won’t mind seein’ gone. They been singin’ and prayin’ since they got here. Tellin’ anyone who listens that what’s happenin’ here is evil. What does that make me, then? I allowed Mr. Peale to do this. Am I evil, then?” He grunted, spun around, and stomped off.

  A shadow passed over the site. Thomas looked up at a cloud bank; the mass was heavy, dark, and gray. He did not care for the idea of being caught here in a downpour, but it would be better than being caught halfway back to the Masten house.

  Thomas followed a hard-packed path around the edge of the pit. Beneath the creaking of the great wheel, he now heard the wet sucking sound of men pulling their legs from mud, voices mingled in, words muffled in the jumble of sounds, grumbling and shouts and occasional laughter.

  As he neared the main tent, Thomas saw broad canvas sheets stretched across the ground, caked in drying mud from the huge fragments laid on them. He recognized the pieces as kindred to those huge bones he had seen in the Masten granary. Besides roughly straight sections, there were curved shards like ribs and short, truncated segments, like vertebrae. He studied the pieces, trying to sort them into a shape in his mind. He knelt and reached for one small fragment.

  “If you please!”

  Thomas stood, startled. Peale came toward him, his face slightly flushed. A fine, brown crust coated his wrists and knuckles. Dirt speckled his boots. His hair was thickly streaked with gray and beginning to recede from a high forehead.

  “I am Charles Willson Peale,” he declared, stopping barely an arm’s length from Thomas. “This is my excavation. Those are my discoveries, and you are unknown to me, sir.”

  “Mr. Peale of Philadelphia?”

  “The same.”

  “I’ve heard of you, sir. I’ve seen your paintings.”

  Peale’s demeanor changed immediately. A slight, indulgent smile tugged his wide mouth and one eyebrow twitched, amused.

  “Indeed.”

  “Yes, a portrait you did for Mrs. Bascombe.”

  “Ah, yes! I remember it quite well.”

  “Your pardon, sir, I didn’t mean to trespass. I am Thomas Auerbach.”

  Peale’s eyes narrowed. “Auerbach. I don’t know the name. Are you attached to a university?”

  “No, sir, I’m a lawyer.”

  “A lawyer! Sent by whom? I assure you, sir, my claim here is perfectly legal. I have a good contract with
Mr. Masten—”

  Thomas held up his hands. “Please, sir, you understand me too quickly. I’m not here about, uh—” he waved a hand at the bones, “this. I’m here on an entirely personal matter.”

  “Personal.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m—” He looked past Peale and noticed several people watching. Thomas leaned closer to Peale and said quietly, “I’m looking for my wife.”

  “Your—” Peale caught himself and looked around. Lowering his voice to match Thomas’s, he said, “Your wife, sir? Aside from a few ladies who have accompanied the curious, there are no women here. None attached to my enterprise, I assure you.”

  “She’s not. Attached to your enterprise, that is. She’s with a group of Methodists.”

  Peale’s face twisted. “Oh! Those damned fools!” He flung an arm out impatiently. “They’re over there, huddling together like a company of terrified children, praying! All day and half the night, praying! They came here and began preaching at my workers, preaching at my friends, my family, my admirers! I’m digging up Satan, they say, unearthing the Beast of the last days! Pah!” He lowered his voice again. “Frankly, sir, if you have any influence with them at all I would be willing to compensate you if you could get them to leave. They’re a constant irritant and disruptive. I had to increase my day wages to keep some of my better men. They kept listening to that old fire-breather and fearing the worst.”

  “I just came for my wife.”

  “Of course, of course. Well, even if you lessen their number by one, I’d be grateful. Now, please excuse me.”

  Peale marched back to his audience. As Thomas watched, earthen hands emerged from the ground at Peale’s feet, groping for his ankles. Peale did not seem to notice.

  Thomas squeezed shut his eyes and turned away. When he opened them again he saw torsos half-emerged from the ground, pocked skin eaten through, faces stretched in fear, and gradually sinking back into the solid dirt. In the middle of the field of trapped corpses, Richard stood, hands clasped behind his back, staring at Thomas.