Rochester Knockings (8 page)

At least a meter's width apart, Mother and Maggie exchanged a complicit glance. They mustn't wake her up. It's dangerous to wake sleepwalkers. Katie, pupils wide, got out of bed and began to walk in the dark room. She was leaving the cemetery. She's looking for the source of those tears, melodious as the song of a woman weaving baskets. In these unexplored plains, big animals with paws of smoke flee at her approach. What is that noise of cymbals high up in the mountain and these hordes around the final blazing flames? Abbey's face stays with her, a fine mist heading toward a night more blinding than the gates to paradise.

“God, we're sleeping!” she suddenly realized. And then she awoke, wavering, just at the foot of the staircase. Rushing over, the farmwoman and the adolescent led her back to her own bed as she asked. No, she would not be afraid to be alone with the spirit. Their mother had heard it said that one must not disturb a sleepwalker. Even when he looks quiet under the quilt, he's traveling, arms stretched in front of him, toward the other world.

Once Katie was tucked into bed, unable to hear the anguished calls of Maggie, who stayed in her parents' bedroom, Mrs. Fox began to murmur through closed lips a nursery rhyme so gay that
her own dying mother had sung it to her to console her for having to continue alone on the restless path.

               
Good night little girl, sleep tight

               
Keep this ring on your finger, so bright!

               
In your sweet rosebud bed, good night

XI.

Reverend Gascoigne and Family

B
etween two clouds wherein all of memory's tombstones seemed to be knocked over, the April sun suddenly inundated the fields and meadows with a light more delicious than a sip of pure water. Sitting at his old oak desk, his sermon board as he called it, Reverend Gascoigne was considering Pearl's movements. She had come to a halt at the window she'd just opened, slightly bent over, surely captured by the clearing after the storm. One could hear the quiet step of a horse ridden by some cowboy. Was he going to stop in Hydesville or continue on his route toward Rochester? Pearl had closed the window again and lightly, eloquent of beauty and grace in her chiffon dress with its inlaid belt, she pivoted in a turn to the right, exactly like in a waltz, but with a slowness that gave each of her gestures a simple domestic necessity: picking up a jar of sulfide, rearranging a bouquet of forget-me-nots and blue lilies of the valley, a quick blowing away of some pretext of dust . . .

“Pearl! Pearl!” the pastor was impatient. “Do you have something to ask of me to be circling around like a pitiful top?”

“Oh, no, Father, I was just thinking about those events. The Fox sisters weren't at school yesterday. Can you believe . . .”

“There is nothing to believe or to think about from this point of view!”

“It's said that even Mr. Fox, who has a solid head, is telling stories in the village . . .”

The reverend had a moment of weariness. His face, paled from sleepless nights, turned a little more gaunt. But wanting to appear kind, he corrected the seated posture of his poorly stacked vertebra.

“That Christian man communes more fervently at the saloon than at the church. Alcohol and dominos will end up disorienting everyone, him as well as his peers. When they're not busy fulfilling their blessed need, sinners have only one eagerness: to distance themselves from the divine light . . .”

Pearl, with the delicacy of an egret, was leaning with the tips of her fingers against the study table, casting the old man one of those heavenly blue stares beneath the shadow of her eyelashes.

“You are probably being too harsh on those poor farmers . . .”

Reverend Gascoigne considered his daughter with an inextricable feeling of annoyance, limitless affection, and profound melancholy: at a few years difference in age, Pearl so resembled Violet when she was a young mother, certainly in thought as well, her form of reasoning was more like protest, almost a reproach, a manner of systematic petition. He admitted without thinking it, deep down, that the mourning of his wife had burned away all true charity in him and hardened the cardiac tissue of his compassion, leaving only a bit of scar tissue for the potentialities of grace. Since his wife's suicide, his status as a pastor flirted with
imposture, yet he never departed from any of his priestly or civic duties. Pearl meanwhile carried on as if morality were still intact. Hadn't her mother drowned by accident? She understood nothing of the insinuations and other derogatory claims around her. All the battles for freedom and equality written in the Gospel were hers. He suspected her participation in the network helping fugitive slaves, for she had never hidden her radical beliefs in emancipation, as much for blacks as for women. Pearl had a flawless energy and certainly the appearance of those beautiful slender angels papists like to paint. To whom would he marry such a phenomenon as herself in this land of swine? Before the cult of liberty, in the Ancient World, she would've ranked among the obstinate being dragged to execution on the racks of infamy . . . The reverend was annoyed by these absurd associations that kept bombarding the mind's emptiness.

“Could you leave me to work on my sermon, I have to readjust the brains of a bunch of renegades gaining strength . . .”

“Why is it that you don't believe them?” the mocking young woman confronted him, her eye of infinite blue landing on the knife of his mouth.

“In those stupid stories of knocking spirits? I adhere only to the Blessing of Jesus Christ!”

The reverend watched the outline of his daughter vanish in the shadow of the landing. She didn't close the door behind her, and her laugh, turned toward invisible presences—undoubtedly her old long-haired Yorkshire tumbling down the staircase or the Mynah bird holding forth in the pulpit of his cage in the vestibule—reverberated back up to him, rendered almost unreal, like another time, long before unhappy Violet's first attack of neurasthenia.

Forehead lowered over the Bible, he placed his head between his fists to hear no more of the world's noises. Meditating on a sermon the night before delivering it was a respite for him, a break from his prosaic duty, which was either to entertain a mass of dolts and simpletons or to frighten children. A single ray of true light in these narrow minds could do more harm than a loaded revolver. How to grant them glimpses of the Lord's ways? Since Luther, the Moravians, and the Holy Club, there was no other way to announce the Good News than by making the church thunder with horrors and curses. Outside or in the coalmines, mortals understand only the thunder of God, all of them blind to his lightning. Back in the day, John Wesley, founder of the Church, ran like Attila through the moors of England, reading and writing his sermons on horseback, the conquest of souls his exclusive ambition. In the haunted high plains of America, it was better to have to deal with masses of unbelievers or papists in favor of slavery than with a single necromancer.

Reverend Gascoigne leafed through his Bible. With the dexterity of a Monte card player, he flipped from the Pentateuch to the Book of Nahum, from Leviticus to the Proverbs. His finger rested without hesitation on the useful verse, echoing from countless homilies. And so the Eternal God said to Moses: “Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them.” And so the king of Manasseh offending the Eternal God placed Baal and Astarte in the Temple and immolated his own son; like the Philistines, he surrounded himself with sorcerers and false prophets.

“O house of Jacob, come you, and let us walk in the light of the Lord!” the pastor whispered.

Then, without reading anything more than folds of his memory:

“May you never find among you anyone who would put his son or daughter in the fire, no one who exercises the trade of diviner, astrologer, augur, magician . . . Enter into the rocks, and hide thee in the dust, so as to avoid God's terror and the brightness of his majesty.”

Abruptly stopped short, he told himself that if the Prophets, great and minor, were all firmly diverted away from this funereal form of prostitution, it must be because they thought the gift of prophecy was wrong. Ending his arbitration, he exclaimed:

“And the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits and after wizards, to go a whoring with them, I will set my face against that soul, and will cut him off from among his people.”

But what persons, falling into weakness, could be so demonic to have at heart the desire to rekindle the flames of hell? Closing his eyes, he took on a more assured voice:

“Rejoice in being alive and without sin, give to the Lord all authority and power over impure spirits!”

The reverend remembered King Saul in quest of a necromancer capable of intervening in God's fierce deafness toward him. His servants found him a woman in Endor. In disguise, the king went to visit her and commanded: “Conjure someone from the dead in order to tell me the future.” The woman replied that it would be risking her life, for a royal decree forbade it, but Saul swore to protect her if she obeyed and asked her to make Samuel, the last Judge, come up from the kingdom of the dead. And the terrified woman said that she recognized Saul as her king, then: “I see a divine being, he comes back up from the earth!” But the old man wrapped in a cloak, the very man who during his life put
Saul on the throne, did not want to respond to the king's distress. Why wouldn't a prophet no longer prophesize once deceased?

In a voice vibrant with indignation, the reverend exclaimed: “The horseman lifteth up both the bright sword and the glittering spear: and there is a multitude of slain, and a great number of carcasses; and there is no end of their corpses; they stumble upon their corpses . . .”

Then, more quietly, coming out of a daze: “No, the dead never answer the pleas of the living, except to announce the destruction of their kingdom! The dead are without memory and without love . . .”

The reverend lowered his voice again, confused. Orating up to this point in the Tower of Babel of his own thoughts, mingling Kings and Prophets, he now turned back on himself in vain exhortation, against his loneliness as a dried up widower, these verses of Ecclesiastes:

“Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that is done under the sun.”

XII.

If You Forget Me in the Desert

O
n Long Road since dawn, William Pill suspected that he'd crossed the Monroe County limits without there being anything yet to recognize: fields of wheat and other fodder for animals or humans frequently extended to where prairie grass once had alternated with lakes and forests. Those last few days in Ohio, then in Pennsylvania, leisurely riding toward an idea, he'd had the time to turn his memory in every direction. He had a few dollars left of his severance pay to which was added a sterling silver watch won through poker in Cleveland. Not far from Philadelphia, on the banks of the Delaware River, the Appaloosa had started grumbling awfully while the Spanish Barb, encouraged toward mutiny, had decided to lie down like a cow at the slightest halt.

And so at great cost he would have to change horses, for his own, having lost all stamina, would bring him nothing but the price of their carcasses. With most of his luggage piled on his solid new Quarter Horse, 1.6 meters tall at its withers, bought from a wheelchair-bound cowboy who claimed he'd broken his back in a rodeo—which he pretended to believe as much as that the queenly mare appeared to be easy-going—Pill started back up
again on Long Road, reassured by his star and at the end of both a war and perilous journey. Despite some fickle Iroquois tribes and some bloody disputes between clans of breeders and families of farmers, New York State was a haven of peace in comparison to the West and the Great Plains at the borders of the Colorado River and the Rocky Mountains. His shoulder healed, the Mexican bullet in his pocket as a good luck charm, he owned nothing, aside from his double-cased pocket watch engraved with an eagle, a Springfield rifle, and the old Bible of his late friend Edward Blair—no inheritance, no family, not even a close friend. The only thing he had was the future, which belongs to no one.

In the late afternoon, still at a light trot on Her Highness, his boisterous mare with a flaming mane, he finally seemed able to recognize, like a face coming closer, the panorama of landscape. He had no more doubts when, on the left, mists parted to reveal the dense hills of the Iroquois, with their steep rocks here and there, markers between the cultivated plains and the break of high valleys where herdsmen lead their flocks on sunny days. Dividing these two was a river whose appearances varied, sometimes impetuous, sometimes sinuous and calm. Massive expanses of aspens and conifers with huge trunks brought a sort of meditative interiority to the landscape, a shiver of worry populated by bird song and indefinable echoes, as if silence itself were breathing. Two eagles circled in flight, high up, in the bruise of the setting sun.

Once again, with such an insidious fire in the heaths, the river sparkled at the bend of a shadowy valley. Pill finally caught sight of the big windmill-like reservoir and, posted on the lower side, a signboard with the inscription H
YDESVILLE
painted in black. A little farther off, in the middle of a pasture surrounded by low
chalk cliffs where the black roots of pines burst up in places like the crooked fingers of the devil, stood one monumental tree, solitary,
dans son immensité d'ombre.
He recognized the Grand Meadow oak, which, by chance of a random fallen seed, had taken over a third of the sky with its branches, and with its roots doubtlessly explored the depths of Hell. From its low boughs was once hung high and taut, after many other summary executions, a certain Joe Charlie-Joe, son of a slave made white as snow before the Lord by the Mansfield ranchers because of a stolen kiss with the beautiful Emily, the sole heiress of her clan. This fifteen-year-old story had been repeatedly told to him at the saloon. The one who had denounced the unfortunate boy, a mother now with a necklace of the Virgin hanging above her admirable breasts, had been from then on the reigning mistress of the ranch one could see beyond the winter pastures: a large wooden house in the old style with white painted columns. Even further, a little below Long Road, the slate and metal roofs of downtown Hydesville blinked in the sun's last rays. Apart from a few exhausted barks and the transparent noise of birds, no sound rose from the village.