Rochester Knockings

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Authors: Hubert Haddad

BOOK: Rochester Knockings
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Copyright © Zulma, 2014

Translation copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Grotz

First published in France as
Théorie de la vilaine petite fille
by Zulma

First edition, 2015

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.

ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-21-2

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Design by N. J. Furl

Open Letter is the University of Rochester's nonprofit, literary translation press: Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627

www.openletterbooks.org

In living memory of Élie Delamare-Deboutteville

Real or invented, all the facts and characters evoked in this novel belong to the domain of the imagination.

Contents

Part One: Hydesville

    
I. The Song of the Iroquois

    
II. Maggie's Diary

    
III. From a Drinker's Point of View in the Saloon Across the Street

    
IV. Hast Thou Entered into the Treasures of the Snow

    
V. When Heaven and Earth Shall Tremble

    
VI. In the Abyss Where We Got Lost

    
VII. Some Details About the Meeting

    
VIII. Polk's War Was Not a Polka

    
IX. The Night of Sleepwalkers Recounted by Maggie

    
X. First Conversation with Mister Splitfoot

    
XI. Reverend Gascoigne and Family

    
XII. If You Forget Me in the Desert

    
XIII. Evening Visitors to the Haunted House

    
XIV. Maggie's Diary

    
XV. The Columns of Duality

    
XVI. In the Waves of Boiling Blood

Part Two: Rochester

    
I. I Want Only a Long Drunkenness

    
II. Maggie's Diary

    
III. Exploration of a Mining Field

    
IV. Oneida! Oneida!

    
V. Like Galloping Carriage Horses

    
VI. Assembly at Corinthian Hall

    
VII. Fox & Fish Spiritualist Institute

    
VIII. Farewell Dear Mother

    
IX. The Aspiring Medium

    
X. When to Burn Her Diary?

    
XI. The Sleeping and the Dead

    
XII. The Life of Phantoms

    
XIII. The Conquest of Ice

    
XIV. And Now We Roam in Sovreign Woods

    
XV. With the Permission of Frederick Douglass and Ralph Waldo Emerson

Part Three: New York

    
I. Recent Disagreements

    
II. Livermore's Good Influence

    
III. The Green Fairy and the Murderer

    
IV. The Necromancers of the Old World

    
V. A Normal Life

    
VI. The Two Widows of Notting Hill

    
VII. Mens agitat molem

    
VIII. Three Letters for a Betrayal

    
IX. Poltergeist at the Academy of Music

    
X. With Congratulations from Mister Splitfoot

Epilogue

Translator's Acknowledgments

About the Author

Part One

Hydesville

Some things are inescapable;
when they arrive, one must receive them.

—Jan Van Ruysbroeck

I.

The Song of the Iroquois

T
he sun at dusk lit the staircase through the upstairs window. Seated on a step of unfinished wood, Kate studied the dust motes. They floated inside a shaft of light, one of the many suspended throughout the house. Fascinated, she held her breath. Each particle seemed to follow its own trajectory in the dancing company of its tiny neighbors, of which there were thousands, millions, more than the stars fixed or spinning through the moonless nights. Motionless, so as not to stir the air, Kate tried hard to distinguish a single mote among them with the idea of not losing sight of its capricious flight; the instant after it was no longer the same one, she had lost it forever and the archangelic spear of sunlight crossed painfully over her face, as if to ignite the pollen lining the bottom of her eyelids. She had gathered so many wildflowers that autumn morning to decorate the grave of her dog, Irondequoit, that nausea had clenched her throat and her whole body was still burning from it. And yet Mother had warned her.

There's a creak of the staircase behind her and suddenly it's dark: two freezing hands cover her eyes.

“Leave me alone,” said Kate. “I saw you . . .”

“So now you've got eyes in the back of your head?” Margaret sat on a step just above her younger sister. Her torso blocked the ray of sun and its galactic swirls.

“You're bothering me,” said Kate. “I was thinking of Irondequoit . . .”

“Oh, Irondequoit, poor old thing! Don't you worry, she's gamboling through Dog Heaven. There's no hell for animals, you know.”

“Hell? Do you really believe in that? Why would God exhaust himself by making the dead roast for all eternity? It would be enough to bury and forget them in the ground just the once.”

“Don't you see, Katie, that's completely impossible, even for God. Souls are immortal!”

The evening dwelled at length over Hydesville. First tinted blue like the pond's surface in broad daylight, then almost black and wine-dark, shadows spread down to the bottom of the staircase and across the silhouette of the adolescent it slowly obscured. Already Kate couldn't make out her sister's face. Mica-like glimmers flickered between her teeth and on her pupils, giving her the look of a bear cub bewigged with thick black tresses. Straining to fix her attention on where her sister was sitting, Kate thought she was seeing a cruel mask lit from within and in an abrupt jump let out a small cry.

“What's there?” sounded a frightened Margaret, half-turning back toward upstairs.

“Nothing, nothing, it's just the darkness . . .”

“You just made me weirdly afraid, as if you'd seen the devil in the exact spot where I'm sitting.”

Margaret considered her younger sister with perplexed irritation. She liked her well enough, her little Katie, she was so
pretty and sometimes quite comical, but a compartment or two was missing somewhere in her brain. Kate certainly had brains to spare; even Leah, their older sister who had gone to live in Rochester, agreed; whatever her sustained distractions and funny airs might be, when she focused her cat's eye into space, it betrayed something more than absent-mindedness, something entirely different, as if a part of her was dreaming while wide awake. At eleven years of age, not yet a woman, Katie had the look of an angel, one of “those gracious birds with a human face who populated in myriad the resplendent spheres,” as the reverend Henry Gascoigne described them one day in a Sunday sermon.

But suddenly everything was so peaceful. One could hear the faint and metallic sounds from the kitchen where their mother, barely recovered from an awful cold, bustled to prepare dinner. Outside, the cows were mooing in the meadows; the tethered horses fidgeted at the sound of an iron-wheeled stagecoach that passed by without even slowing on Long Road leading to Rochester. When the calm soon returned, the frequent bleating of the sheep and goats announced the return of Pequot, the nickname given to the idiot shepherd with his bright red face who terrified the girls of Hydesville with his postures and antics. Their father, also on his way back from the fields and pastures, was putting his tools back in the stable where he had just unsaddled Old Billy, as he did every night.

Knees tucked under her arms, for no apparent reason Kate burst into tears.

“What's gotten into you?” her sister asked, astonished after their fearful laughter in the dark.

“It's our little brother! I miss him so much.”

“He's also in Heaven.”

“With Irondequoit, do you think?”

“Not far from her in any case—children would get bored surrounded by old people.”

“But we buried him right on top of grandfather in the cemetery.”

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