Gravity Box and Other Spaces (27 page)

“Bennington—” Thomas murmured.

The congregation pressed together tightly, moving as one in small twitches and jerks, heads swaying and bobbing. A number of them raised their arms toward their minister.

Thomas skirted the edge of the gathering, trying to glimpse his wife among the rapt faces. But for the solid flesh, they could have been more of the dead struggling up from the ground; their open mouths and vacant stares fixed on the single condition of their obsession. There seemed in them no other life but that which Bennington fed them. Thomas felt the hairs on his neck stir; the humid air pressed close. He wanted to call his wife's name, but the throng seemed sealed together into a privacy he could not bring himself to disturb.

“If ye've come to pray, ye should be humble!”

Bennington glared at him from the wagon.

“I've come to find my wife,” Thomas blurted out. A few heads turned in his direction. The seal broken, he called, “Abigail!”

Heads swiveled, frowning, as if searching for someone to blame her for Thomas's intrusion. One face remained motionless, eyes fixed on him. For a moment he did not recognize her—she had lost weight and her skin was
browned from sun, but her eyes, pale blue, sparked with recognition, and he knew her.

“Abigail!” he called and waded into the crowd.

He stepped on feet, kicked a few knees; hands groped at him, but he shoved through, his cane raised. Abigail began to turn away just as he reached her. He caught her arm before she could flee.

“Abigail!”

“Sir!” Bennington snapped. “Sister Abigail is one of this congregation and has our sanction!”

“Abigail, sir, is my wife, and I caution you not to interfere. There are laws, sir, that even you may not disregard.”

“Thomas, please,” Abigail said quietly. She looked frightened and anxious.

“Please what?” he wanted to ask. Instead, angry and silent, he clasped her hand and led her from the crowd. Once free, he released her hand even though he was afraid she wouldn't follow. When he reached the tree line, he looked back. She walked with her head bowed, as if ashamed. He went a few yards further, till he could no longer see the congregation, then drew her into an awkward embrace. He held her for a time, eyes shut, waiting, hoping that she would speak first, offer an explanation or apology or something that would take from him the responsibility for what might happen next. But she said nothing, her body passive in his arms. After a time, he stepped back.

“I…” he said, “…come home, Abigail. I've come to bring you home.”

“I belong here.”

“For God's sake, why?”

She nodded. “That. God's sake.”

“You can find God anywhere. You don't have to tramp all over the country with a vagabond group of Ecstatics!” She flinched, and he raised a hand to grab her if she tried to run. He took a deep breath and wrestled with his impatience. “I miss you.”

She gave him an excited look. “Then come with us!”

“What?”

“Be saved, Thomas! Join us! We can be together in God's purpose!”

He shook his head. “I have obligations, Abigail, I can't just pick up and leave. I have clients, I have—”

She scowled. “You have things, Thomas. You've always had—things. I have nothing but this.”

Thomas stared at her, stunned. When Richard lay gripped in the fever that eventually killed him, Abigail had stayed in his room, murmuring prayers and the words “This is all I have” over and over. Thomas had feared she would become sick herself. She had slept little, ate less, and refused to come out of the room even to empty the chamber pot she kept beside her chair.

Thomas continued working through the prolonged illness, unable to simply stand by and wait. It was the only way he knew to maintain his sanity and manage his terror and his sense of helplessness, by doing, and doing that which he had always done well. Abigail never said that she resented his absences, but after Richard had died she moved into the child's room. Thomas had thought it was only an expression of grief that would pass eventually and perhaps, afterward, they could start again. He worked harder still, finding inadequate comfort in the effort, but comfort in any case.

One day he discovered that Abigail had left. He had been so busy with a case that later he learned she had been gone nearly a week before he noticed. When he had
discovered that she had gone off with a group of Methodists, his confusion deepened. Understanding of any kind would have been a relief. Instead, Richard's visitations had begun.

“I always thought you had
me
,” he said.

“So did I. But other things had you first—continue to have you.”

Thomas waved his cane in the direction of the congregation. “This is better than what we might have if we worked for something new?”

“Reverend Bennington preaches from gospel that there are no new things. There is only the past. That is where truth is found.”

“And the truth you've found is that nothing can be different?”

“Please, Thomas—”

“I love you.”

Abigail turned her back to him. Thomas waited for the response he expected.
I told her I loved her
, he thought;
she should agree, concede, repent—

But she had gone to Reverend Bennington to repent for things which Thomas had no power to forgive. Through the trees he heard Bennington's voice, though the words remained unclear. More railing against the world, Thomas imagined.

“If there is only the past,” Thomas said, “and that is where the truth is found, then was our time together a lie?”

“No,” Abigail said quickly, facing him. She blushed. “It was what it was. No lie, just—”

“Just different than we thought? So we lied to ourselves.” He laughed sharply, a cynical bark. “God knows I have no argument against the possibility. These last two years I've lost the ability to tell real from false. Even the evidence of my own eyes has become
undependable. I see what cannot be there. And now, when I had thought it was only a hallucination prompted by painful associations with place, the impossible follows me all the way from New York to this. It speaks to me now as well, so I no longer trust my hearing. For all I know you've just told me that you still love me and will come home now, but I've misheard everything and will end up going back alone.”

“What hallucination?”

“I see him, Abigail. He comes at odd times, unpredictably. I'll enter a room and find him playing with his soldiers or blocks, or sitting by the window where he used to read and watch the carriages go by on the street. I never know when or why. Sometimes I wake from sleep to find him looking at me. I thought at first it was a fever, that I was ill. But I'm physically unaffected. Nor, as far as I can tell, has it damaged any other part of my life. When I work, I work well and do as competent a job as ever! Only when I'm home—alone—”

“We must all—” she began, but stopped, staring at him, eyes red and frightened, mouth open. Finally, she shook her head and looked away as if embarrassed at what she almost said.

“Do you see him, too?” Thomas asked.

“No. But I wish I did.”

He reached for her. She stepped away and glared at him.

“I hated you,” she said. “God forgive me, but I did. My husband, my protector, my—you left me there, alone, watching him die while you went about your life. I hated you up until Richard exhaled his last breath. Then there was nothing. No love, no hatred. I wasn't even angry anymore, just empty. I'd given everything—to you, to Richard, to our friends and family, to the trappings of a
modern life. It was almost all used up when Richard fell ill, and he took what was left when he died.” She scowled at him. “And now you tell me you see him, that he visits you. He took what I had left to give and brought it back to you. How am I supposed to sympathize, Thomas? You still have him, real or imagined. If anything I envy you.”

“Is that why you ran off with these people? Because you thought I'd taken what is yours?”

“I want something that won't change or go away! I want something that stands still for me! I want something that won't die when I love it!”

Thomas had no reply. He shook his head, saddened and angry, and looked off in the direction of the Methodists. He listened to their murmurs, mingled with the sounds of workmen shouting and the creak and slosh of the giant water wheel.

“Is that why Bennington is here?” he asked. “To keep the past from changing?”

“The past is what it is. It never changes.”

“Then why is he afraid of what Peale might dig up?”

“It should be left alone, not dragged into our lives.”

“A pity the past doesn't give us the same respect.”

A drop of water struck his hand then another splashed on his cheek. He looked up at the ponderous clouds. The sun still shone brightly from the west, but within minutes, Thomas guessed, the thunderhead would hide it. He turned back to Abigail.

“Your answer is no?”

“To what would I be answering yes?”

“A new beginning. Something other than what we had.”

“And
your
ghost?”

Thomas shrugged. He wanted to believe that if Abigail came home, Richard would go away. He did not know if he
wanted that; the specter was all he had of Richard beyond a few articles of clothing. But Richard's image was poor company and a reminder of his own neglect.

A peal of thunder snapped his attention around. Rain began to patter through the leaves in a steady, growing pour. When Thomas looked back, Abigail was gone.

He hurried into the clearing. Some of the congregation were climbing into their wagons, but he saw a number of them heading in the direction of the pit.

“Abigail!” he called. He went toward the pit.

As he neared the tents someone grabbed his arm. He spun, raising his cane. Reverend Bennington glowered at him.

“Leave her be, sir,” he said. “I've no quarrel with you, but Sister Abigail came to us of her own accord.”

“How dare you—” Thomas began.

Bennington clutched his jacket and pulled him close. “She wishes to be done with the past. I offer her sanctuary.”

“From what? Her own husband?”

“From the lies of the world!”

“You wouldn't know a lie if you told it yourself.”

The sky rumbled again. Flat, dull, ivory light filled the air around them.

“‘The hearts of men',” Bennington hissed, “‘are full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead. But the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward, but the memory of them is lost. Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished, and they have no more forever any share in all that is done under the sun'.”

Thomas jerked Bennington's hands from his coat and shoved him back. “Quote to me Ecclesiastes all you want, but are you talking about my son or me?”

Bennington pointed at the pit. “Why do you think we're here? Look at what they're trying to resurrect! It's the Beast itself and this land will be the new Babylon! Look!”

Despite himself, Thomas looked. People gathered around the edge of the hole, peering down into it. For the moment the great wheel was still. Thomas heard the sounds of men grunting with effort through the drumming of rain, their voices magnified by the walls of the pit. It sounded like the wail of torment rising from one of Dante's rings and Thomas shuddered.

“‘He who digs a pit will fall into it!''' Bennington shouted, as much to the spectators gathered at the edge as to Thomas. “‘He who digs a pit will fall into it! And a serpent will bite him who breaks through a wall!''' He ran to the crowd and shoved his way in. “You'll destroy everything looking into all the earth's dark places! Stop this before you murder the present with the dead and damn yourselves to faithless lives!”

Bennington had threw himself into the crowd. Thomas wiped rain from his face. People packed against the lip of the pit. Thomas scurried around the outskirts of the spectators, looking for an opening, shouting for Abigail.

Thomas looked skyward and saw a dense, charcoal dark thunderhead looming over the dig. Rain giving way to storm. Large pellets splashed his face. He looked away, wiping at his eyes. When he opened them he found the ghost of his child gazing at him, mutely waiting, as if Thomas should know what he wanted. Thomas felt himself go rigid, unable to look away. He had never noticed before how perfect this false image was—without blemish, skin smooth, hair lustrous and unruffled, mouth the exact shape and color of the infant ideal—the way Abigail had always wanted him, had always seen him, had
always worked to keep him, even in death. Thomas's hands curled into fists.

Of all Abigail's traits, her stubborn rejection of reality had always infuriated him. Her ideas about a prolonged mourning for Richard ended when Thomas returned to work. He had been convinced that a resumption of normal life was the best remedy; she evidently had seen it as a final betrayal of everything she wanted from life.

“You want something that won't change,” he said to the specter. Thomas flinched as the rain increased. “Everything changes, good and bad. I'll take my chances on losing a little good if the bad is also excised.”

The ghost shook its head, then, as if it had heard something, turned toward the pit.

“Careful there!” shouted a voice. “Careful!”

“Secure that rope!” Thomas recognized Charles Peale, standing at the edge of the dig, calling orders down. “Damn it, man, be mindful!”

Umbrellas snapped open all around. People moved ponderously in two directions, one group closer to the edge of the pit, the rest—mostly workmen—away, under cover of tents. A flash of lightning arced across the sky, followed quickly by harsh thunder.

People collided with Thomas. He staggered, and lost sight of the ghost. He shoved back at the retreating spectators, searching now for both Abigail and Richard. For a few seconds he felt carried backward. He dug in his heels and leaned into the throng. Suddenly he burst free and plunged forward.