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

“It most often comes from right there,” she said, pointing to an interior wall. “Other times it rises up from the basement.”

“I can’t hear anything now,” the adolescent noted with a survivor’s relief. Kate raised her little mammalian face up to her on which two pupils blacker than night surfaced.

“That’s because he’s waiting,” she said.

“What? And first of all, who are you talking about?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s waiting for us to give him a sign.”

With a slow look up and down, Maggie examined the ceiling’s beams, the somber wood walls, the worn steps that sank into themselves in the dark, the dying glow of the woodstove, and the surrounding darkness.

“But who? Who are you talking about?” she repeated.

“The spirit!” Kate shot back.

“You mean a. . a ghost?”

Her sleepy consciousness was filled with the image of a huge coffin, laid out with a huge glowworm inside it. Overtaken by a shapeless sense of panic, Maggie finally swooned and tumbled half-unconscious down to the foot of the stairs from the terror of being devoured by the glowworm. The fall resulted in a house filled with commotion. Their grumbling father, lamp in hand, and mother, distraught, came to the rescue of the fainted one whose younger sister imagined could be cured by hugs and tickles.

They led her, a big ragdoll with tangled legs, back up to her room. While their mother had already set about trying to revive her with salts and slaps, their father lit a tallow candle at her bedside table.

“What on earth were the two of you doing on the staircase at this hour?

Withdrawn, resolutely silent, Kate smiled at her own thoughts.

“It’s impossible to put oneself into such a state!” their mother added. “Smart young girls such as yourselves! What, were you going berry-picking for jam together under the full moon?”

Maggie’s eyelids fluttered a few seconds on a shadow silhouetted in the doorframe. Under the candle’s dancing flame, Kate’s angelic smile took on a bit of a demonic air, while her lips, animated by the golden reflections, seemed to hold back silent, mocking, curses addressed to the company.

“Well, ask her!” Maggie blurted, pointing with an accusatory finger. “Katie was leading me. She claims there’s a ghost in the house. .”

Their mother, disconcerted, threw worried looks at her spouse and at the dark corners of the room. She was a thick and well-groomed woman, eternally dressed in an embroidered bonnet, her black hair gathered at the nape of her neck, with plump and, despite farm labors, very white hands, a copious bosom beneath her blouse, and a strong nose in the center of a rather pleasant face that, with makeup, would have appealed to a horse breeder or a Rochester merchant. Her keen eye landed finally on the younger girl.

“What is this story frightening everyone, hmm, Katie?”

“It’s not a story. You must have heard the knocks in the walls and furniture downstairs. .”

“Goddammit!” their father exclaimed. “So you’d like to make us look haunted to our neighbors? They already mistrust newcomers. I don’t want to hear any more of this madness starting from this day on!”

“Don’t curse at your daughter,” their mother begged, “or it will be you the reverend should punish. .”

“But,” dared Margaret’s flowing voice, “it’s true that there are noises. And what if the house is trying to harm us? I wish so much that we could just go back to Rapstown!”

“There are no noises!” the man cut her off. “Or let the devil take me to burn! It’s an animal, it’s the wind, it’s creaking wood. . Now I’m going to turn my eye toward a last bit of sleep. .”

As her father left, Kate moved quickly toward the window to avoid one of those affectionate slaps marking the end of a minor conflict. It’s just that he had the paws of a bear that could tear your head off! She didn’t despise him, the poor old man. He was just of country stock. So devoid of mind that he could only believe the pastor’s sermons. A descendant of patriots expelled from Canada during the War of Independence, he belonged to the dreary species of farmers, all stubborn bigots and halfway between the slaves, black or white, and the arrogant aristocracy of animal breeders.

As soon as her father left, Kate started to laugh. “It’s not an animal, it’s not the wind, it’s not creaking wood! It’s a cloven foot, I’d swear it on the horns of our only cow!”

Their mother feebly bustled about, frightened, her enormous chest undulating under her nightgown.

“Don’t be crazy! The devil only comes if called. Go back to bed and not another word! You need to sleep now, for the good sleep of little girls chases away all these wicked inventions. .”

Kate slipped under the covers, already half-anesthetized by their mother’s quavering chant. Recovered from her fall, Margaret sighed at her side. Her long lashes fluttered up, silhouetted by the candle next to the bed, giving the impression that they caught fire with each blink of her eye. Then, from below, three raps were distinctly heard.

“Momma!” Kate murmured. “See, I told you someone was there. .”

“Shh, shh, it’s possible, but sleep, sleep without any fear, your good mother will keep him in line with her fire iron. .”

“Don’t hurt him too badly, please! Don’t give Mister Splitfoot too hard a time.”

“Mister Splitfoot? Good Lord, now who is that? Well, forget all of this for tonight, I’m blowing out the candle and the moon, as we used to say.”

Mrs. Fox, standing in the reconstituted dark, and despite being taken aback herself by the phenomena that appeared to be assailing her daughters, thought then of the faraway past, when she was their age, when she believed in the marvelous phantoms of love and of the future. Softly, right there, at the bedside of her little girls, the farmer’s wife began to sing a very old ballad that rose up to her lips from some memory she didn’t know. .

Well a hundred years from now

I won’t be crying

A hundred years from now

I won’t be blue

After the arid mountains of the west and the rocky deserts of Arizona, after the perilous canyons all along the Colorado River where he had escaped from the Mescaleros’ arrows without much trouble, after the ambush with rifles of a band of Catholic deserters returning to their fold, the plain stretched out, infinitely calm. He was leaving behind him Denver and the memory of a night drenched with whiskey in a smooth featherbed. In the saddle on one of his two horses, for three solid weeks now, William Pill had been making his way on the paths leading north, fixed trails grooved by herds of cattle and settlers’ carts in a simmering sea of wild grasses. When the Appaloosa grew tired, he climbed onto the Spanish Barb relieved of his baggage, and so on, from one point of water to the next. The Great Plains were for him the image of a rough paradise without demarcations that left one with complete freedom of movement: all this blondness moving under a sky vaster than the memory of humankind! Step by step or at a gallop, in no hurry, he was returning from the war with a Certificate of Merit in his pocket for having followed General Zachary Taylor on the Santa Fe trail and later distinguishing himself alongside Old Rough and Ready on the heights of Buena Vista. But his greatest achievement as a free man would have to be enduring life in the barracks for months on end in occupied territories, waiting for the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the masterpiece of Manifest Destiny and flying artillery, to be signed: several million dollars of compensation to the vanquished, in return for the reattachment of half of Mexico to the Union, not to mention Texas!