Hubert Haddad - Rochester Knockings - A Novel of the Fox Sisters

“Turn away from me the demons that don’t exist, tell them not to scare me like this, and in exchange I will not go anymore into the woods to visit the Redskin with green glasses, I will no longer go through Miss Pearl’s affairs, I will help mother kill the moles in the vegetable garden. . But I beg you, turn away from my sight these devils even more terrifying than Father after he’s been drinking.”

There was a loud noise below while the clock struck one: the family was returning from the barn, slamming the door and noisily taking off their boots in the entryway. Maggie laughed, scolded by her mother who was already stoking the fire.

“You’re going to wake your sister!”

But when the flame grew high in the oil lamp, the girl appeared before them curled midway up the stairs, her arms around her knees.

“Blood of Christ!” cried the farmwoman. She would catch her death in this drafty air. .

They led the little girl back to her room, where, feverish, she was forced to submit to the torture of dry cupping, those four or five copper cups inserted with a burning wick and snapping like a balloon on the skin of her back.

It’s a little girl cow, a pied-colored heifer, hummed Maggie, nearly asleep.

Mother left the room with her equipment and lamp turned down low. Father’s snoring could already be heard in competition with the stove overloaded with charcoal. Little by little calm returned to the house.

Kate, alone, couldn’t sleep. Disjointed images were jostling between the surrounding darkness and the unfathomable cavity of her eye sockets. Her eyes undoubtedly open, she was surprised at the subtle changes in her surroundings in the closed room, this sum of impressions overrun by phosphenes and frayed memories, as if everything was about to revolt, inside and out. The sensation of her left hand stiffening a bit consumed her, it felt like it was taking on gigantic proportions while the rest of her body was shrinking. It was so unpleasant that she wanted to change position, but an invisible armor held her in place so firmly that she couldn’t move even her pinky. Powerless to extract herself from these stocks, tempted to call out for help, no sound passed through her lips. She wasn’t asleep, however, and it was precisely in her room that she was struggling so, changed into a statue of stone. Then by the force of her struggling, Kate suddenly recovered use of her body; she had sprung out of a cement tomb and her voice rang audibly again in this world.

“Now what’s wrong with you?” asked her frightened sister as she propped herself up on her elbows.

“I was dreaming. . no, I wasn’t dreaming, how can I explain it, I was dreaming that I wasn’t dreaming because I was dead. .”

“It’s the fever! Go back to sleep!” Margaret, annoyed at having lost the thread of her own dreams, turned to the other side and pulled the covers up over her shoulder.

The cold darkness seemed to solidify the way water freezes. It was necessary to open the door to let in the heat from the stove; but Kate no longer had the strength to get up, it even seemed to her that she could get lost in what, similar in almost all ways, was another world. When closing her eyes, the ground of reality grew unsteady inside her. What meaning should she give to this tiny chaos of gestures and feelings? Did there exist, behind that door, something other than a magma of earth, air, and water ready to take on every aspect of fire? The world was out of balance because in it one could die. The image of a hovel of cloth and boards substituted for her little brother’s ivory face. There a black wind roared, heaping on confusion. Everything was flying above and below, parents, cows, her sister Maggie, and even the Redskin with forest-green glasses in the middle of battens and sheets unfurling from the armoire, under a beating rain of drops more enormous than the wet kisses of all country women. The dress and flounced petticoat of Miss Pearl fortunately protected her under a bell of pink and black organza. It was necessary to distract herself from the demon singing with a closed mouth:

O sister, O sister, come go with me

Go with me down to the sea!

Winter lingered in the frosts of March. The glacial wind kept turning from the north to the eastern sea. Uncertain snows of glass and feathers continually swept over the first blooms. But there was always an hour for escaping under a spot of sun before night fell. After having walked half way up Long Road, Maggie and Kate usually parted ways at the fork on the farm’s path, each one heading toward her own curiosities.

That day, the presence of Samuel a hundred steps away, also returning home after school, invited them to be more circumspect. He had taken the time to drench himself up to the shoulders in a tub at the public fountain; inundated, he went along like a rain cloud. The adolescent could very well want to take something out on one of them, toss rocks at them, threaten them with the scout knife he’d inherited from his father, or simply pass on his way while throwing them some furtive glances. Despite his size, Kate was not afraid of him; quick to compare him to those prankster coyotes lurking around farms, she didn’t hesitate to defy him. As pusillanimous as he was unpredictable, the High Point widow’s son would only bite out of necessity or surprise. An intent look alone was enough to disconcert him. As he approached, muzzle down, at least twenty steps behind them, his obscene barking frightened the older girl while the other would’ve almost been amused if the words he uttered didn’t rouse in her a sort of emotion close to disgust. What did this mixture of insults and flattery registering in the hidden parts of their bodies mean? In his blue lumberjack coat, arms too long, and with a pointy head, Samuel grew louder and more worked up, a cruel tone in his voice, until the moment the girls’ mother appeared in the middle of the vegetable garden or on the edge of the farm’s property. The idea of complaining never occurred to either of them, so impossible did it seem and surely grotesque to repeat such things to an adult. Likewise, the Fox sisters wouldn’t tell anyone about Pequot’s naughty acts, some nights, as he was leading the goats and ewes back from the high pastures. The difference between him and his dog, a Great Shepherd with red fur, was more in their posture than in their behavior. It was said that he had been taken in as a child by Mohawk Indians after being abandoned by his family, degenerate colonists who left in a caravan for the West, and then that once an adult he’d been chased out of his adopted tribe for unknown reasons. Pequot lived like an animal among animals. No one ever complained about him; he brought the livestock back home and required little. When they heard the cowbell from the hills outside of town, Kate and Maggie quickly turned on their heels to flee from the demon or else climbed up a tree. It was almost a game. The countryside next to their farm was full of natural refuges to share with the martens and squirrels.

Behind the leaning barn, beyond the field of reeds and ferns where wild geese love to fly through, the black pond deeply hidden in the conifer forest was more disturbing than any encounter with Pequot could be. On the alert, Kate paced up and down its edges, attentive to the least trembling. The tall firs packed together on the other side threw down their shadows that were enlarging with the setting sun. That the mother of Miss Pearl had entered these dark waters of her own free will fascinated her to the point of dizziness; she couldn’t take her eyes off those ripples of sickeningly floral scents sometimes agitated by gurgling and hiccups of air bubbles. It curled itself up there like an informed intention, ready to expand in tentacles of steam. How could one have existed, and then no longer? Obviously death was hiding a big secret.