Читать книгу Captivity - Deborah Noyes - Страница 11

Night again, another haunted night, and Maggie glimpses the whites of eyes shining like moths in the long black bar between the curtains. Boldly she throws open the panels, an actress taking the stage. She finds at least one eyeball pressed very near the glass out there, and a mashed, waxen cheek or two.

Raised candles make shifting fragments of it all, grotesque half-masks. There are other figures, a great many others fanned out behind, and a huge flickering bonfire in the east meadow. These are not drifting phantoms or witches’ rites but pilgrims, legions of them, come from Newark and farther still to an otherwise unremarkable farming hamlet to get a glimpse of the girls who raised the dead.

When at last Mr. Charles B. Rosna and his audience taxed her beyond reason, Ma removed her girls from “the spook house” to brother David’s farm two miles away.

But soon David’s roof and walls resound with rapping also.

The theory arises that the spirit isn’t one but many spirits, craving the receptive company of the Fox sisters, who needn’t be magnetized—two different newspapers have taken note—to converse with them.

This theory is championed by Leah, the eldest Fox sibling, who arrives some weeks into the affair with trunks and lady friends and her daughter, Lizzie, in tow, exclaiming, What’s all this? and Why didn’t you write me? Leah learned of their trials when a friend saw page proofs of a report soon to circulate in Rochester in pamphlet form. “I came at once,” she pronounced.

Bet you did, thought Maggie.

But no matter. It’s clear to everyone that Maggie and Kate Fox are at the center of this strange affair. Spirits are resolved to be where they are, and when the rapping followed to David’s so too did half of the crowd, even with investigations and excavation still ongoing at the cottage.

The migrant squatters have wreaked havoc on David’s property. With his fields trodden, he makes a poor host. His patience is daily and sorely tested, and his wife, Elizabeth, when not trekking back and forth to the well or sating neighbors grim with controversy, spends thankless hours plucking chickens and crafting puddings, pies, and cakes for the diggers, who return jittery, soiled, and hungry at night.

David and Elizabeth’s little daughter, Ella, is in bliss, though, running wild in plain sight with the neighbor children and the gypsy hordes. It’s a topsy-turvy world, and Maggie vows not to let the rare if barely contained aggression of disbelievers, or muttered words like chicanery and witchcraft, distract from the fun that she and not a few others—for once in their tedious lives—are having.

“Come look, dimwits,” she commands when Kate and Lizzie stray in, nibbling sweetmeats. “It’s like All Hallows Eve out there—”

The other two approach the teeming window but reel away in a rapture of giggling. Emboldened, Maggie plays indignant, lifting her arms like Moses poised to part the waters, aware of being watched by multitudes. It’s a novel feeling, and Maggie likes it rather too well. “That’s enough now.”

When she snaps the curtains closed, a muffled cry of disappointment erupts behind the glass. One child even raps on it, though Maggie—pleased that good Christian country manners are adhered to, even in strange days—hears the mother scold him for it. Many things about her community she finds trying. Others are as warm and familiar as her favorite shawl, and she’ll miss them.

Some dozen transient females in that house have laid stake to Ella’s bedroom (men, as many or more, have claimed the master bedroom). Bedsteads have been stored in the attic, and top and bottom mattresses crowd together like rafts on a sea of hardwood. A tangle of doled-out bedding lies over it all like ship’s rope. Kate leaps deftly from raft to raft, pausing to bounce in place. Lizzie, likewise bouncing, bites the cookie out of Katie’s hand, and they laugh like crazies.

“How will we sleep?” Kate laments, falling still, her bodice specked with crumbs. She seems melancholy all of a sudden, genuinely perplexed, and Maggie vows in mind to protect her … always. But then Kate and Lizzie are sidling out of the room, murmuring into each other’s shoulders, already bored.

Alone with closed curtains, apprehensive in a way she can’t name, Maggie feels a strange surge of relief when Leah comes in. She hopes her sister won’t make her tidy up. The room’s in chaos, and with Elizabeth put-upon, lamenting and enlisting all over the house, it’s a wonder Maggie has eluded labor this long. Ella’s is the only room not teeming with people, and Maggie has discovered she needs her peace. Entitled or not, she thinks, following Leah with her eyes.

Striding to the window with her steaming teacup, Leah peeks between frayed curtains at the horses, wagons, and humans beyond. She lets the curtain fall, setting her saucer on the floor and settling beside Maggie on the mattress with a flick of her hand. “It’s a perfect plague of flies in here.”

Leah begins to plait her thick hair (who can say anymore what’s public time and what private … when it’s safe to unlace a corset or loose your mane … what’s immodest and what isn’t) but soon starts in fussing and smoothing Maggie’s instead, her expression at once stern and tender. “Everyone traipsing through all day.”

Her silence grows unnerving. Leah isn’t around much, but when she is, Maggie thinks of her as a second and inferior mother more than a sister. Twice Maggie’s age or more, Leah is a will to be overcome. And about as willful as they come, Maggie thinks. Go on, then. Say it. Whatever it is.

“Have you any idea what you’ve started?”

Maggie bristles, though she’s steeled herself. Is this prelude to a scold—or congratulations disguised? Leah won’t waste her time if there isn’t something to be had. She sips her tea with agonizing slowness, sets cup in saucer on the floor, and reaches again, annoyingly, for Maggie’s hair. It was coming loose from its bun, despite Kate’s best efforts, which are never very good. Pa won’t hire a girl when his two are “healthy young mares in their own right, fit to be farmed out elsewhere,” so all day Maggie and Kate clean and scrub and husk and card and can and quilt and knit shawls and mend sun-bleached bonnets till their eyes ache at the dim hearthside; but to break the routine, they attend to each other like queen’s maids, bind one another up in corsets, fashion and flaunt jewelry of berries and seedpods, curl and recurl the hair round their ears just so.

It’s a dull life in the country, to be sure, though Ma’s good for a laugh behind Pa’s back. (“She’s the better horse in the team, by far,” Maggie overheard one farm wife snipe. She knows it’s true, though it hurt to hear an outsider get on about it.)

“Of course I know.”

“And what do you mean to do about it?’

“Do?”

Leah stops stroking Maggie’s hair, but her idle hand looks twitchy in her lap. Leah likes to be busy, Maggie knows, likes her fingers racing over ivory keys and her strong hands trained to such useful tasks as orchestrating a human circle round men digging for bones in a basement. (Ma boasted about it all afternoon: Leah saw to it that none got through, even the most abrasive and demanding, who weren’t welcome.)

“You’ve unearthed something here in Hydesville,” Leah says. “Besides your Mr. Charles B. Rosna, I mean.” She speaks the name snidely, drawing out each syllable, though it’s been on everyone’s lips all day.

Those diggers elected to stand watch at the cottage overnight reported gurgling and strangling noises. With digging scheduled to resume at dawn, the murdered peddler reenacted his own demise on the hour, choreographing the crunch of breaking crockery, the repeated thump of a great weight being dragged across the floor, other urgent noises … ugly dripping, wasp-like sawing.

Leah’s expression changes, growing serene and strange. “They found lime down there this morning. Bits of teeth and bone. Did you hear? Strands of reddish hair. While they were digging, the floor above creaked with the weight of so many. I felt sure it would fall in and crush us all. People are poised for something more.”

“A show?”

Leah takes her chin firmly and turns her face up like a child’s. “Listen to me, Margaretta—”

It’s the name Leah uses when she means business, which she mostly does. Maggie relents when her chin gets sore from her sister’s squeezing. “I’ll listen, but I can’t work miracles. I can’t, to suit you, walk on Mud Pond or make shillings from pinecones.”

“You’ll do something better.”

For the first time, Maggie meets her sister’s gaze freely.

“You’ll open a passageway between the mortal and spirit worlds,” Leah adds, nodding as if to reassure her, This is true. “Know what you’ve been given. You and Kate. Me. The Fox sisters,” she adds slyly. “We’ll outwit death. We have that duty.”

Maggie laughs again, nervously. There’s nothing especially funny in the notion (is it morbid or the opposite? Holy somehow? Lifelong Methodist teaching’s done nothing to prepare her for this), and already, in that early moment, the burden begins to wear on her. She senses that she’ll keep the invisible dead like an anvil round her neck her life long, but she’s grateful, too, and ready. Maggie Fox is ready.

“Our brother’s fit to tear out his hair. ‘Better to die together,’” Leah mimics, “‘than live so disgraced.’ He’s been carrying on all day—”

“Well, they’ve stomped all over his plantings—”

“Till Chauncy called in and agreed to help dig, I thought David would send everyone away. I felt sure he would. But he didn’t, Margaretta. He didn’t.”

Maggie hears another wagon arrive. The bodies of neighbors and eager strangers bat against the glass of the bedroom window; a dog barks; and a moth circles the lit tallow candle on the night-stand, singeing its wing. The little hiss is audible even under the groaning of David’s crowded house, the comforts of laughter and clinking glassware, the muffled fray of Ella and visitors’ children issuing threats and challenges (goaded, no doubt, by Kate and Lizzie) and scrambling under furniture.

Maggie nods her consent, and Leah smiles, laying a hand on her sister’s head, as in benediction.

But there is more to Leah’s plan, it would seem. A great deal more that Maggie doesn’t know about. She hears Leah down there in the relative quiet after the children are in bed—pleading, extolling, bending Ma’s ear in that nasal voice of hers. The girls should be separated, Leah advises. Let’s see how the spirits fare then. I’ll take Kate with me for a time.

All winter long, Maggie dreamed of returning to Rochester, of strolling beside the windy Genesee in warm weather, in big bell sleeves and a brand-new lace bertha bedecked with ribbons while gulls wheeled on high and great flocks of geese came over pointing their hopeful arrows south, of attending lectures and shows, of taking tea with the Posts and their lively circle of reformers.

But look, she and Kate managed to bring the excitement home instead. How clever!

Why would Leah thwart that—if not to please herself? What does she want? Maggie can’t sleep for wondering. Long after Leah and the other women settle around her in faint moonlight, she lies there rigid, seething with the injustice of it.

Kate and Lizzie sleep back-to-back, joined at the fold like the wings of a butterfly. The youngsters doze at lanky angles, breathing jaggedly. At the rim of the sprawl lie stouter frames: Ma and Leah, Elizabeth and Maria, Mrs. Post and Mrs. Capron and Jane Little … here and there, snoring and twitching in the night, other wives and daughters stationed at David’s while their men commute to and from the cottage. Maggie listens, charting the dwindlings of human concern, sensing at length—within that lullaby of not-quite stillness—some other, unseen presence.

Fate is in your favor, it assures, relaxing Maggie out of anger, soothing her into sleep.

She half-wakes in the dark of early morning in a tangle of limbs. Kate, of course, is cocooned in the only nearby quilt, and Maggie shivers herself conscious. The world is all unaccountable silence.

The breath of the girls and women has steamed the window near the bed. In the other bedroom, some half-dozen men sleep soundly. Outdoors, the pilgrims snore in their cold encampments.

Looking out into a blue half-light, Maggie smears her hand across a pane twice and for a peculiar moment imagines her brother’s trampled fields swarming with the dead. Spirits traipse here and there, tufts of light, farmers and farm wives, soldiers and babies and old ones—some marked by their style of dress and half-familiar. They are made of light mostly, and ride lightly over the earth, treading no soil. And they are everywhere.

She blinks her eyes, suspecting her own mind has planted them like a strange crop in the field. The strangeness of seeing them is new, but Death itself is no stranger, surely. Not a day goes by in Arcadia when one among her community isn’t lost to fire or drowning, typhus, yellow fever … a mule’s kick. These deaths are real and ever present, reported daily in neat columns of newsprint along with farmers’ reports of stray pigs, sentimental poems, ads for patent remedies, or word of the war with Mexico, the abdication of the French king, Whigs battling Democrats.

But what if they aren’t gone over Jordan after all? What if they are just across the way, a hand’s reach, waiting to be seen and heard from?

Now, that’s strange, and she will seize the strangeness in her hands and shape it. She will not be afraid. In truth, Maggie Fox is afraid—how vast a thought it is—but not of the spirits themselves, who seem to her just strangers full of secret need. Out she goes into the blue dawn and passes them in the field, holding out her hands to feel them streaming through, to fancy their shuffling woe crowding close round her like cattle. Too close. She breaks away and strides past a stand of crooked trees under which bruised apples have lain all winter long, frozen many times over.

The sun rises as she walks and warms her. She comes out on the cart road again and dips back into the dappled wood, thinking ahead to the sweet smell of the battered peppermint fields, which sport their pink flowers like finery.

Maggie wanders without a thought, and when a thought does come, it stops her in her tracks, and her eyes brim with tears. Here she is, out on a muddy track ruining her good boots—when all she wants is to mill about in city drawing rooms in a lovely big-bustled gown and be admired. Kate will get there first, it seems. Without her.

Recalling the harmonious tangle of limbs back in Ella’s bedroom, and Kate and Lizzie asleep with their foreheads touching, Maggie is already lonely. Katie … stay. But Katie won’t. She can’t, Maggie knows, not once Leah has her hooks in.

Maggie spots a perfect little basket near the crook of a young tree, an oriole’s nest, brittle and fine. Pinching it down, she cradles it carefully, as once it cradled eggs.

She walks all morning with the nest on her palm, and the dead do not follow. They are gone when Maggie enters David’s kitchen, where the women are assembling breakfast. Even the murdered peddler two miles away at the cottage lies asleep, she expects, soundless in his mud-and-limestone bed below the floorboards.