Shadows in Summerland

by Adrian Van Young

  William Guay, who appeared terrified—weren’t there Negroes in Poughkeepsie?—stole glances at me as the trap went ahead, cresting a hill and then hunkering downward.

  Midway down the hill we stopped.

  This was in front of a large, handsome building with red brick colonnades out front and one lamp lit above its door. The Negro with the mottled skin came down from his bench to let us out and to deal with the corpse trammelled up in the back. The man was stronger than he looked; he knelt in the street with his back to the train, rose with the body humped over his back, carried it up and then over the curb and paused before an iron door.

  “I say, what is this place?” I said.

  He gave a great big-bellied knock.

  And then I heard a mustering. And then the corpse was floating in. And then the double iron doors appeared to part on Light itself, revealing a vision of glory, Bill Christian, who held a lantern in his hand.

  “Witless, Willies. Willies, Witless.” He shone the lantern back and forth.

  Witless passed the body seamlessly on to Bill who handed the cabman, this Witless, the lamp.

  “Witless hears you fine,” said Bill. “The thing is he don’t talk that much.”

  Witless turned to Guay and me as if these facts explained it all. That the man was a mute stood to reason somewhat; that he still had his hearing was what had surprised me.

  “Mumler,” I said and took his hand. His bones were raw and very strong.

  Bill Christian walked ahead of us, the slumping corpse astride his back, the lantern falling far in front and too little behind. I stumbled. “Negro,” said Bill. “This is no place to wait. Lord, a man could lose his mind.”

  I stumbled again, this time irretrievably. The dark ground rushed up and I banked my weight left, just missing a grey, perpendicular object. I rose in the dark and looked about and saw, as the lantern played over them, graves.

  “Man was dug in like a gopher,” said Bill. Witless heard Bill and then ran to catch up. “His people on the hill,” said Bill. “His momma mighty sad, I’ll tell you.”

  The ground began to grow uneven, and up ahead the two men stopped. They stood, I perceived, at the edge of a hole. But they weren’t looking in it, just left of it rather.

  Here two legs in dirt-smeared trousers stretched into the lantern-light.

  Witless looked briefly and firmly at Bill and vaulted down into the hole. He beckoned to Bill and Bill vanished from sight and returned seconds later with shovels and picks. He ferried the shovel down into the hole and hung the pick upon a grave.

  The two men went about their work. Guay and I mightn’t have been there at all. Bill passed Witless Algernon who folded him into the dark at the bottom, an effect of the coffin down there, hid from sight, which Witless began to hammer shut. And every single hammer blow jarred my nerves and made me wince, the cheap wooden coffin absorbing these sounds and pitching them back in my face like light slaps.

  The Spirit—the Positive Mind—Reason’s Flame, may they protect him all, I thought.

  Witless climbed out of the grave with the hammer and Bill and he started to shovel in earth. The shovelfuls seemed to come from nowhere, sailing through the fan of light before raining down on the lid of the coffin. I toured the gravesite as they worked, stepping through the nearby stones and over the legs of the disinterred corpse, whose face I could barely make out in the lamplight, as withered and dark as an overripe plum.

  Bill Christian had known this man, which suddenly made our work seem strange.

  “Will you take him back to Blackstone square, tuck him in Algernon’s bed?” I asked Bill.

  “The resurrection game,” said Bill. “I don’t guess they play it downtown, Mist’ Mumler.”

  “Downtown they call it grave robbing,” I said.

  Bill Christian shovelled, not pausing for breath. “Lucky for you two gents,” he said, “they call it murder everywhere. And I reckon a white man would raise a few eyebrows down at the medical college.”

  I drew in close to Mr. Friday, angling to see his face, and though the indignities of the grave had made a ruin of his skin, he could not have been more than five-and-twenty, scarcely older than myself.

  “Who was he?” I said.

  Bill and Witless dug on.

  “Bill, who was this man?” I said.

  Bill hitched the shovel again. Then he grinned. “A Negro,” Bill said. “Y’all know his damn name. You got them thirty greenbacks handy?”

  I nodded and dug up the sum from my pockets.

  I paid out the cash on the lip of the grave, under the lantern, where Witless could see it. When it was all accounted for, I attempted to hand it directly to Witless but Bill took it from me and folded it up and pressed it on his speechless friend. He pocketed the wad of notes, nodded at Bill, started digging again.

  “You two go on home,” said Bill. “Witless and me, we can take it from here.” But I stood at the lip of the grave, hesitating. “You heard what I said. Go on.”

  So Guay and I wandered away through the dim, birds waking up all around us.

  Guay Peradventure

  November, 1858

  At night I would gather the Children of God to the Throne of the Son and would there let them lie. I brought Him foxes—badgers—rats—a full wolf cub not yet decayed—and He would hang there mournful-seeming choosing what would be their fates.

  Grace Church was a peach to enter.

  All you needed to do was to jimmy the bolt up and over the hinge-part that held it in place and the night wallowment of the place was before you, the skin of the Son all the light that there was. I laid what I’d brought on the altar and prayed and awaited the Grace of the creatures to come. I watched the furry strange long bodies pierce the darkness with their eyes.

  Some got wind and no one liked it. I was warned to keep away.

  Forever have I been a duck and all town wished to see me waddle.

  By my father’s shame I went and yet I took his poisons with me. I set out from the southern edge of the lake that the Red Men had named Cassadaga and came into a supple land where the winter was starting to loosen its hold. They had called me Trapper’s Son—and they had called me Billy Queerly—and they had called me Heretic for seeking intercourse with God but wasn’t I a faithful soul and lost to Grace-ways even so.

  Each town that I came to I went to the church to sit and hear the Sunday service. I had once walked in Calvin’s name though that was all behind me now and in his wake I walked with Mormons—Methodists—Free Baptists—all.

  One day I arrived in the town of Esopus, tottering from out the trees. Congregational Friends of Esopus the banner while Silence the Word that was spoke from the mount.

  The Reverend not got up in robes but plain as a farmer at noon in a feed store: his dull cloth shirt—his coat of serge—his wide and mud bespotted brogues.

  “You there, Friend,” says he to me. “You, child of God, who have come to Esopus. You,” says he, “are welcome here. You who bear, as we do all, the flame of the Light of the Lord in your breast. Tell us your name, Friend, so that you will hear us when we say to you: come. Be our fellow in Christ.”

  “I am William Guay,” says I. “And I come from Fredonia, sirs, to the north.”

  At which the Reverend tells me: “Friends. Call us friends, Mr. Guay of Fredonia, sir.”

  Silence was the Word not spoke. “Abide in quiet prayer,” says he.

  That night in Esopus they set out a meal to welcome me their newest Friend and this in the field out in back of the church where a big wooden table was stationed with benches. Their bread was good—their water cold. I saw the warm entreating faces flickering across a gulf. The Reverend looked down the settings at me and he nodded his head to remember this morning.

  A little girl came down the rows presenting something on a plate—and she rounded the
head—and she stopped at my place—and she lowered the dish with its napkin upon me. Under the napkin was freshly made cornbread and almost half a pad of butter. She grinned at me a little shy. Then her face flattened out and she ran from the scene.

  I ate that bread and ate it well. I ate it gulping bit by bit. Yet no one else but I could see how I sprinkled the poison from one of vials.

  It was like almonds to the nose but also bitter on the tongue and then going down something else altogether. But I could see to do that fine.

  It was that bending of the head profound—and calm—and fierce at once. How you went to God He did not come to you and closer were you for that fact. I would not take enough to die but I would take enough for cornbread. The girl who’d brought it to my place she watched me just inside the light. I waved at her—and she waved back—and then I forgot all at once where I was but then I remembered with harsh clarity before the world went all to spots.

  There were trees in a swirl. There was dark but light too. I parted the fog with the back of my hand. The Quakers were behind me now but I had seen them there of course. They’d been combing the trees at the edge of the light for the man who had followed the taste of the almonds and did I realize. No coat. And did I want it. Suffering, visions. Peter and his flock of beasts.

  I continued on over the crest of the hill and when I had reached the far edge I rolled off.

  Q

  I woke in a sweat in an indistinct room but for the bed in which I lay and all the walls around me white. There was an empty slat-back chair pushed conference-like beside the bed.

  “Your spirit moves within you now,” I heard a voice from somewhere near. “Your spirit sees such marvels, William. Your spirit traverses the Kingdom of Heaven. And all the while you lie here, peaceful, the temple in you and in all slowly mending, the vastness of your organism gathering upon itself . . .”

  Here was Christ or seemed to be or might be yet the Quaker Reverend. A sharp and bespectacled face with a beard that flowed in ridges to his chest.

  I meant to ask him where was I but all that I managed to say was: “Esopus?”

  He says: “You have come to Poughkeepsie, my son. Or anyway, we brought you here. You lost your way but well,” says he. “You have poisoned yourself, Mr. Guay, don’t you know.”

  But then his words took on some weight for I collapsed again right there.

  There were slats and un-slats—and white walls furring darkly—and sometimes him and sometimes not the man who wore the chest-length beard—and one time not the man at all but a metal contraption that stood in his place. It stood upon a rounded base that fluted up into a ball surrounded by seven concentric hinged circles. Each circle had writ on its lowermost edge I could see when I looked at the thing very closely a single number I through VI ascending from the outmost in. Until upon the metal ball that marked the centre of the sculpture the letters: S-E-N-S-O-R-I-U-M. The letters were writ small and neat.

  “Everything is necessary. The universe reflects,” says he. “It shows the beauty on this earth and beauty uncreated yet and so too beauty in its course and of its course now passed beyond. So riddle me, William, if beauty is formless and exists of a piece with the words that belie it—nascent beauty, earthly beauty, beauty decayed and transformed beyond earth, which brings us back to nascent beauty—beauty coming into being—if all of this is true,” says he, raising his hand from the base of the sculpture, “then what, I ask, is imperfection? Can imperfection be said to exist?”

  “In death,” says I.

  “Why death?” says he. “In death,” says the man, “we are never alone. Those who have died and those yet to be born are as alive as we are here. The universe reflects,” says he, “and in that reflection is all that it holds. The natural world,” the man pronounced and pushed the outmost ring from him and with a creak it turned in place in an outgoing circuit about the six smaller. “The Spirit World,” says he and pushed the second inmost of the rings. “The Celestial Sphere,” says he and pushed. “The Supernatural Sphere.” Again. And fast upon its heels he pushed the fifthmost of the inner spheres—and named it Superspiritual—and stopped to fiddle with his glasses. “Until at last,” he says, eyes dry from the whole thing rotating so close to his face, “the veil of the sun, called the Supercelestial,” and then he pushed the sixthmost ring—and he set the entire contraption in motion.

  All of the rings would align for an instant. He followed their arcs with his spectacled eyes—and he ducked in his hand—and he set the ball spinning. “And here, at the centre, our Sun,” says he. “These are the bounds and un-bounds of our world.”

  I said I was a Trapper’s Son who might’ve been a Suicide but he corrected me: “A pilgrim. That is what you are,” says he. “I am Andrew Jackson Davis. Or that is what my parents named me. We welcome you only as you are. We are Spiritualists,” says he.

  Q

  I soon took a room on the property there. And the Prophet called also the Seer of Poughkeepsie I’d heard from my Brothers and Sisters in Spirit continued to take on healing patients—run his baths—and hold his worships. I lived in a cabin out back of the house among a host of others like it. His Seership, as I’d come to call him, occupied the big main house and that was where he slept and ate along with his partner Miss Mary Fenn Love.

  Everyone in the cabins was held to a job. Mine was to slop out the big iron tubs that were crowded about by whole spokes of pale people dousing themselves in His Mesmerized Water.

  Sometimes there were daisy chains of telegraphic magnetism where my Brothers and Sisters in Spirit linked hands around a tree His Seership chose at which point he must sensitize it usually amid the dusk. Everyone was awed and gentle. I enjoyed a little talk. I watched His Seership carefully: the muscles working in his jaw—the crease lines etched around his smile—the vast entreaty of his eyes. I watched the words come out of him and form amidst the new still air.

  Q

  One day I went to watch him work. Somnambulism—mesmerism—animal magnetism too—he invoked in the Room of the Tubs and the Benches. He found out ailments small and deep and these he sought to heal at fee: chronic headaches—indigestion—cankers—impotence—ennui. All of the cures were a matter of blockage not of the intestines but rather the Fluids en route to the head or the sides or the feet and these he would clear with the tips of his fingers.

  A man had come to see His Seership ten miles south whence I had come. Or so he said. His name was this: Asahel Lycurgus Nash.

  “Your em’nance,” says he. “I am come down from Mayville. And I am come to you with grumblings. They are powerful grumblings, right here,” says the man, while touching up along his sternum. “And they have made me a mighty phlegmatic Mayvillian. That is a fact you can wear in your button.”

  Says His Seership: “Pressing pains along the ganglionic nerve?”

  “Getting up that way,” says he. “It come,” says he, “with every meal.”

  “Center to north of the common sensorium. Recline on your back if you would, Mr. Nash.”

  The man from Mayville did His bidding. He was a meet and compact man with curly hair and cleanly shaven.

  “Mr. Nash, do you mind,” says His Seership and pointed to where I stood with several others, “if these pupils of the beast-machine convene around your bed to watch?”

  “I don’t reckon I mind,” says he and looked a little worried then. “The beast machine, you say. Well, I . . .”

  His Seership says: “Your body, sir. The instrument that pains you, yes? A curious piece of illogic is man—a luckless breed of beast and angel.”

  Here the men around me laughed as I was meant to laugh myself but the sound that I made was a hectic and shrill one causing them to look around.

  “First and foremost, Gentlemen, we must take a moment to find a rapport. This is best done with the patient reclining as Mr. Nash is doing now. It is optimal, sirs,
that your patient be silent. Do you terribly mind, Mr. Nash?”

  “You’re the doctor.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Nash,” says he.

  I gathered in closer around with the others. Mr. Nash had closed his eyes.

  “The process itself must begin,” says His Seership, “at the least unstable of the poles. The fingers or the nose are best. Mr. Nash, do you take snuff?”

  Nash’s left eye cracked a bit and he sighted the prophet down his nose. “Permission to break the silence, doc?”

  His Seership nodded.

  “Sure, I take it. What man don’t these days?” says Nash.

  “Tilt your head back, if you would.”

  And here His Seership bent in low and looked up Mr. Nash’s nostrils. “In the nose passages of a chronic snuff taker the poles have been blunted, more often than not, which is why it is curious,” says His Seership, “that Mr. Nash’s nose is clear.”

  “Did I say snuff?” says Mr. Nash. “I mean, betimes, a cigarette. I roll them little spuds myself.”

  “If you’ll lie back again, Mr. Nash,” says His Seership. “Gentleman,” says he, “observe: rapport is achieved through the lightest of passes. For the sake of our patient, why don’t we begin near the body’s equator—here at the fingers, then on to the ribs . . .” One by one His Seership took the ends of Mr. Nash’s fingers and squeezed them lightly I could see the way that Nash’s eyelids twitched. “Now that rapport has been made,” says His Seership, “let us examine the patient’s sensorium—what’s called the hypochondria in non-mesmeric texts,” he says. “This,” says he and stroked the ribs at which their owner’s mouth convulsed, “—this, gentlemen, is the body’s equator—the stablest of the vital poles. If I had begun at the head and I might for the eye as a rover prefers north to south, interference from the stars would doubtless complicate my reading. In the same way if I had begun at the feet, the terrestrial fluid that flows south to north would have interfered instead.” Says His Seership: “Is there pain?”