The Spirit Room (3 page)

“There are many who want to talk to you.”

The prickling sensation on Izzie’s scalp shot down her spine. “Who are they?”

“I’m not sure. There’s a large group all asking to be heard. It’s confusing me.” She stood motionless and appeared to be listening to something.

“Whoever they are, I don’t want to talk to them,” Izzie said.

“Wait,” Mrs. Fielding said.

Anna was breathing steadily and looking off at some point high on the wall. Several moments passed. Izzie was concentrating so hard on Anna, standing there in her green plaid bloomers, with her perfect olive skin and radiant black hair, that she began breathing in rhythm with Anna.

Finally, Anna closed her eyes, then blinked a few times.

“I’m sorry. I had to stop. It was too baffling, too many voices at once. That happens sometimes.”

“I don’t want to speak with them,” Izzie said.

“Why not?” Mrs. Fielding asked.

“Because that’s what my mother did, talk to people who weren’t there.” Izzie’s face burned and tears started to stream down. “Sometimes my mother stayed in that world with her spirits for long periods of time. This last time she didn’t come back to us.” She took a moment to compose herself and wiped her eyes with her dress sleeve. “I won’t be like that.”

Izzie knew she had to leave. It was dangerous here. She shoved her chair back and rose.

“Come on, Clara. Leave with me.” Izzie glanced from Anna to Mrs. Fielding who both looked concerned.

“Are you sure, Izzie? What if Mamma wants to say more to us?”

“Mamma is dead. She’s gone.”

Clara stood, picked up Mamma’s black cape from the back of her chair, walked to Izzie, and took her hand. Then Izzie turned quickly and, pulling Clara along, started down the hallway for the front door.

“Wait, please, Isabelle. Anna gave you a very special message. Please, don’t run away,” Mrs. Fielding said.

Halfway to the door, Izzie stopped and whirled to face Mrs. Fielding who was again calling for her to wait. Anna, watching them, remained behind in the parlor. Clara’s hand trembled in Izzie’s grasp as they waited for Mrs. Fielding to get closer. Mrs. Fielding held out a thick book toward her. Without thinking, Izzie dropped Clara’s hand and accepted it.

“Isabelle, one great lesson I have learned is that life is never what you expect it to be.”

Mrs. Fielding’s blue eyes narrowed as she spoke. She tapped the brown cloth cover of the book. “Your father says you love books. This one is our sacred scripture. Read as much as you can tonight and tell me your thoughts tomorrow.”

The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind
. Izzie pushed the volume back toward Mrs. Fielding, but Mrs. Fielding raised an outward palm and shook her head.

“No, please, just read some of it and return it to me at your next lesson. If you choose not to take the lessons, we will return all of your father’s money.”

Izzie was torn. She did want to know more about how Anna spoke of the white horse, but she was afraid. The weight of the book and the texture of its embossed gold title tugged at her. She had never refused a book and she knew the book itself couldn’t hurt her.

With the big bright windows behind her, Anna’s face was just visible, but Izzie sensed the now familiar encouraging smile. The glass chandelier sparkled above Anna’s head as she waved calmly at them. Clara returned the wave.

“Tomorrow then,” Izzie said to Mrs. Fielding. Tucking the book under one arm and taking her sister’s shaky hand again, she led Clara to the front of the house and then out into the snowy evening.

Two

LATER THAT NIGHT, after they had met with the mediums, Clara perspired by the fire as she sat sewing at one end of the long pine table in the Blue Room. While she worked the needle, she was missing Mamma and trying not to cry. At the other end of the table, near the foolish, giant fire her brother Billy had stirred up, Papa and Billy were playing checkers. Izzie was downstairs in Mrs. Purcell’s library reading the big fat Spiritualism book that Mrs. Fielding had given her. Her younger sister, Euphora, was playing alone with her wooden horses on the girls’ bed. Everyone had been settled like this for hours, no one saying much of anything. Clara’s heart sank every time she looked over at Mamma’s empty rocker.

The Blue Room upstairs in Mrs. Purcell’s boardinghouse, with its sky-colored walls, was both their family parlor and bedchamber for Clara and her brother and sisters. They had a long table with six ladder-back chairs by the fireplace in the middle of the room and two beds with cotton mattresses—a skinny one for Billy and a broad one for the three girls. They also had Mamma’s rocking chair, which no one wanted to sit in now, brought with them from Ohio.

One Blue Room door led out to the top of the stairs and another led directly to Papa and Mamma’s bedchamber, now just Papa’s room since Mamma died. Tonight the Blue Room was full of a broken-heart heaviness, hot and stuffy because of Billy’s mutton-head fire, but there was no place else Clara wanted to be. She wished Izzie was here too, but Izzie was always downstairs reading. Since they got to Geneva and Izzie and Mamma found Papa passed out in the rat-hole hotel down near the train station, Izzie didn’t like being around Papa much. She said she was never going to forgive him for his running off on them. And since Mamma died, it was worse. She hardly spoke to him at all or even stayed in the same room with him.

Billy jiggled his knee while he waited for Papa to make a move. “I heard John Brown went down to Missouri and stole eleven slaves right out from their masters’ plantations and took them a thousand miles to freedom,” Billy said.

“That Brown’s goin’ to get himself shot,” Papa said, keeping his eyes on the board.

Clara pulled the glass candle lantern closer to the shirt she had taken from the pile of seamstress work Mamma had left unfinished. Fifty shirts. Fifty collars to finish. One hundred cuffs to sew to one hundred sleeves. One hundred sleeves to sew to one hundred shoulders. Only eleven shirts, eleven collars and twenty-two cuffs done. Until Billy got his first pay at the tree nursery in a few weeks, this pile of shirts was the only earnings anyone in the family had. Clara studied her loose and uneven stitching on the cuff. “Inferior,” she could hear the tailor saying. Should she tear it out and start over? No, they needed the money now. If she were lucky, he wouldn’t notice.

Billy jumped up for the ninth time and added a log to the fire. The fire was already burning so furiously it looked as if the flames might lick their way up onto the walls and catch the whole tarnal house on fire. Every time he made a move on the checkerboard, he popped up and stoked again.

“That makes thirteen logs, Clara,” he said.

“Twelve.”

“No, thirteen.”

She ignored her twin and went back to her sewing. He might be right. He might have used thirteen logs. She might have missed one. Using that much wood, he was surely borrowing trouble with Mrs. Purcell. She pulled the thread through the sleeve cuff and felt tears try to push out from inside her eyes. When she and Billy were four years old, her brother had taught her to count everything in the world. Now neither of them could stop.

“Billy, are you trying to cook us like pigs on a spit?” Euphora, red-faced and weary looking, clutched her two painted wooden horses. She hadn’t picked up those little blue and yellow horses since they arrived in Geneva. She was too old for them now.

Billy sneered at her. “Go back to your toys.”

Once Billy settled down and fixed himself on the checkerboard again, Clara dropped her mending on the chair, wandered to the window, and opened it. The cold air soothed her. She breathed in the smell of new snow. Euphora left the bed and came and leaned against her side.

“Did you and Izzie really talk to Mamma with the mediums?” Euphora asked.

“We did.”

“You did not. It was some kind of trick,” Billy said from across the room.

She put her arm around Euphora’s shoulders. Even though Euphora was eleven, two years younger, she was lanky and nearly as tall as her. By next summer, Euphora’d shoot past her like a stalk of corn at the end of August.

Clara looked up at the white stars in the black sky and thought of Mamma somewhere out there and then thought of how few people were at her burial. If they had been back in Homer, half the town would have come to Mamma’s burial, but since they had only been in Geneva a short time, there were only seven besides their family: Mrs. Purcell, who knew Mamma when she was young, the two spinster sisters, who were the only other boarders, the man Mamma did the seamstress work for, and Papa’s friends, Mr. Weston, Mr. Payne, and Mr. Washburn, and not even Mr. Washburn’s wife. It was a puny service and the reverend’s high voice reading scriptures had given Clara a headache and it wasn’t like any headache she’d ever had before. It hurt in her head but also made her peaky in the stomach.

“Maybe Mamma is out there looking down on us,” Euphora said. “Maybe she’s sailing in her sailboat around heaven.”

“Maybe she is.”

If Anna and Mrs. Fielding were real mediums, Clara could talk to Mamma properly and thank her for bringing them all back together with Papa. She wished she hadn’t whined so bitterly about the exhausting, rainy wagon journey from Ohio. If only she had told Mamma that she was right and brave to bring them all that way.

Refreshed from the night air, Clara closed the window and returned to her sewing. Euphora went back to her wooden horses, but instead of playing with them, she lay down and held them to her.

Lifting the whisky bottle by the checkerboard, Papa poured his fourth drink and shot it down. Not all of it made its way past his lips, trickling instead down his chin into his new fuzzy beard. He better stop drinking that whisky now, she thought. Four drinks were usually all right. If she brought him some tea, maybe he’d stop and go to bed.

“Papa, I could make tea. Would you like that?”

Reaching across the checkerboard, Billy took one of his black discs, plopped it over one of Papa’s reds, which he snatched up, and then added to the red wobbly stack in front of him.

Papa slammed his hand flat down on the table. Billy’s tower of red checkers careened over and the rest on the board jiggled, slid, and hopped. Clara’s head pounded.

“Damn you, Billy. You changed it when I wasn’t lookin’.”

“No, sir. I’m beatin’ you fair and square.” Billy’s voice cracked high as he stacked the red checkers up in front of him.

Papa poured a fifth whiskey and clunked the bottle down hard. He took a swig, swilling it round and round in his mouth, then he swallowed and bared his teeth like a mean dog. That was five. Too late for tea, thought Clara. They were all in dutch now. Picking up the shirt and needle, Clara started sewing the cuff again. No sooner did she push the needle carefully into the white cotton than Papa smacked his fist down on the table.

She drove the needle through the cotton and into her index finger. “Ack!” Drawing the fingertip to her mouth, she glanced at the board. Not one red left on the board. Billy had won again.

“Damn you, Billy.” Papa braced both hands on the table like he might roll the whole thing over.

“It’s just a game, Papa, that’s all,” Clara said.

He shoved the checkerboard toward Billy, spilling the red discs into Billy’s lap. Billy flew out of his chair, arms straight out, like the checkers were hot coals. Then Papa lurched out of his chair and came around and gripped Billy’s neck in one hand.

“Papa, it’s a game!” Clara said.

“You think you’re the man of the family now because you got a man’s job up at that Maxwell’s tree nursery?”

Papa squeezed Billy’s neck until Billy’s eyes swelled. Then Billy grabbed Papa’s arm in both his hands and yanked it down hard, breaking free.

Stepping back, Billy pushed his long sandy hair out of his eyes with one hand and held up his other just near Papa’s chest. “You’re drunk, Papa. Stop.” He glimpsed the fireplace irons near him.

Papa followed Billy’s eyes. “Oh, I see, you’re goin’ ta hack down your old man with an iron.” Roaring like a lion, Papa rammed at Billy and shoved him backward all the way across the room. Then he pinned Billy against the wall.

Clara ran over to the bed and plopped down next to Euphora, who was completely hidden under the blanket. This never happened before. Not this. Papa yelled and slammed things, but he never slammed Billy like that.

Reaching down into his trouser pocket, Billy got out something that looked like a rusty nail or old key. He thrust it up into Papa’s arm with enough spike to startle Papa and make him fall back. Rapid-fire, Papa grabbed his arm like a bee stung him. In that slightest second, Billy slid out the door. His footsteps rumbled down the stairs and then the front door crashed shut.

Clara’s heart was thumping hard. Holding his hurt arm, and snorting and sweating, Papa glared over at her and Euphora on the bed. Euphora had wrapped herself into a tiny ball against Clara’s back.

Izzie suddenly appeared in the doorway, her gray-green eyes darting, her light brown hair flowing down her back, and her wide shoulders higher and wider than ever. Izzie looked at Papa a moment, then all around the room, and finally settled her gaze on her and Euphora on the bed. Izzie’s eyes calmed down a little and her shoulders dropped part way. She didn’t say a word. She squared off toward Papa and just stood there in the doorway watching him. Papa stared right back at her for a long time while he caught his breath. If Izzie said the wrong thing like she was sure to, he’d probably knock her clear down the stairs. Euphora was quivering against Clara’s back.