(He’d been much the same . . . distracted and disheveled, scarcely recognizing me but seeming to appreciate my presence. We sat in the parlor and had tea, while he told me stories about the lights in the water, or fish-pale things with starfish hands that he’d seen in his dreams. Disturbing, as always. But I owed him, so I listened to him and I let him talk so long as he was willing.)
At any rate, someone found him and extricated him from that house—stuffed to the brim with all manner of things he’d collected. In the end, the place was only navigable by a series of paths he’d either created or worn with his own foot traffic.
I thought perhaps someone would burn it to the ground and build something new in its place. I couldn’t imagine anyone cleaning it out and restoring it, for the doctor had no family left who might inherit it and feel some sense of obligation to it.
But I’ve been wrong before, and I was wrong again.
Someone bought it for a song, cleaned it out, and listed it for sale. I forget who bought it the first time, and I forget who bought it the second, third, and fourth times, too. No one ever keeps it for long.
Which is why I wonder if he haunts the place.
I think he might. As I said, I remember walking past his house before anyone had emptied it and made it habitable again . . . I remember I was still wearing the black of his funeral, so it must’ve been that very day. (Forgive me, it’s been so long. I forget the finer details, and only remember them by way of other minor particulars, which for some reason remain more firmly fixed.)
I stood outside his house and looked at it, very consciously not looking across the street at that other house—our old house, you know the one. (There are some memories I can’t unfix, not for all the trying in the world.) And inside I saw, just for a flash, a tall shape with a shock of white hair. I would swear to you, this flicker was faster than a gasp—but there was a streak of maroon to it, like the color of the old smoking jacket he used to wear. He practically lived in that thing, in those last years. It smelled terrible. I wonder if they buried him in it. I bet someone buried it, at any rate.
• • •
I am not entirely certain that I believe in ghosts, but there’s no good reason not to, considering.
• • •
I would like to think—and I know you don’t wish to hear this, Emma—but I would like to think that if anyone was going to haunt me . . . that it would be Nance.
God, just writing her name.
I shouldn’t have done it. I’ll cross it out. After all this time, it’s still too awful. No, after all this time, the worst part is not even knowing how awful it really is. For all I know, she isn’t even dead.
That’s not true, though, is it? In some form or another, she’s definitely dead. Or she’s so far gone, so far removed from me that she might as well be dead. I can only hope and pray that wherever she is, whatever became of her . . . she’s happy, or free from pain at the very least. I can only hope, if there’s any God of any merit whatsoever out there, that He’d grant her that much.
But what do I know of God? Not a damn thing.
• • •
Wait. I was going to write about the newspaper, and I almost completely forgot to.
The newspaper, it makes me think of you. Remember how you received so many of them, and so many periodicals, from so many places? Every time I collect the paper, and every time the mailman comes, I think of you.
I still order papers from out of town. I still order magazines, though not the technical ones you always preferred, with all the diagrams and Latin in them. I am but a layman, from a biology standpoint. That was always your field of expertise, my sister.
The things I order these days are either more mundane, or much more strange.
On the one hand, I gather gossip and follow the goings-on of the suffragettes and their continued push for women’s rights. On the other, I order religious treatises from many different faiths, I follow their conferences and their research, and I keep up with where they stand on a variety of issues. (There’s more overlap between the two than you might expect.)
On a third hand, someone else’s hand, perhaps, I’ve become terribly interested in the spiritualism movement. Do I agree with every jot and tittle of their sprawling and flexible views? Not at all. But the fact that their tenets sprawl, and are flexible . . . that’s meaningful to me. Almost as meaningful as their admission that many things happen that are unexplainable by science, or traditional (Christian, one must qualify) religious inquiry.
I know precisely what you’d say to it all—something about me taking my superstitious inclinations too far, right off the deep end. That’s what you’d tell me, if you were here.
Well, you’re not. And if you were, we’d only quarrel about it anyway.
So I watch with interest—and without interference—what becomes of their little enclaves such as Lily Dale in New York, and Cassadaga in Florida, Sunset in Kansas, Chesterfield in Indiana, Pine Grove in Connecticut, Etna in Maine, and so forth, and so on. In some ways, they are so progressive! And in others, I am not so certain. But that’s to be expected, isn’t it? Balance, always balance.
Regardless, I appreciate the broad scope of their search for meaning. I like the way they don’t stick to the usual paths in pursuit of truth. Heaven knows the usual paths never got me anywhere, though in the name of balance I should add that the unusual paths mostly brought me sorrow.
One day, I mean to visit one of these camps.
I’ll do it quietly—it shouldn’t be hard. No one recognizes me anymore; thirty years will do that to a woman. That’s one small grace granted by Father Time, in my case if none other. I am not anonymous here in Fall River, but should I leave, no one elsewhere should have the faintest idea who I used to be, and what I did (or did not) get away with.
The question then, I’m sure you’re asking yourself . . . is why I’ve stayed.
I wish I had a decent answer, but you know I don’t. I have instead a host of indecent answers, each one more frail and ridiculous than the last. I stay because this is my home, and it always has been, despite everything. I stay because I love this house, even without you in it. I stay because you’re buried here, and Doctor Owens is buried here. I stay because Nance left me here, and what if she were to return only to find me gone?
I stay because I like the cats.
The point is, I stay.
You probably thought I wouldn’t. You probably thought that once I was free of you and your infirmity, I’d take to the wind like a dandelion seed. But then again, you were always wrong about that one thing—I never thought you were a burden. You were my beloved sister and dearest friend. I wish I could’ve convinced you of it.
I wish even in my head, right now as I natter in this journal as if you’ll ever read it, that I could not hear you arguing with me. In my head, you’re waving Nance in my face, and it’s unkind of you, really. I wish you wouldn’t.
Maybe it’s not the house you haunt. Maybe it’s me.
• • •
As I mentioned, I turned your bedroom into my office. After I walled up the basement, that is.
I couldn’t stand to be down there anymore, not after everything that happened; and once Zollicoffer was gone, the monsters stopped coming. So I emptied the basement of all the books or notes that might be of some use to someone, somewhere, and dragged the other contents out into the yard to burn them with the fall leaves. I would’ve burned the basement itself, if I thought I could’ve done so without destroying Maplecroft altogether—so I settled for sealing everything shut from the outside, and having some discreet handymen remove the door in the kitchen. They replaced it with a wall of such fine quality you’d never know there was once a passageway there.
Most of the time, even I forget.
But the rest of the time, when I wake up drowsy in the middle of the night and wander downstairs
for a drink of water or to stretch my legs after a nap . . . I look toward that blank space and I’m momentarily confused. It’s times like those that I worry for myself, afraid that my own mind is starting to slide like Doctor Owens’s did. Or worse yet, like Doctor Zollicoffer’s.
But I’m not a doctor of any sort. Perhaps the madness will leave me alone, then, if it exclusively pursues those who aspire to higher degrees.
• • •
So I took your room, and now it’s an office—a fairly ordinary one, considering. To be sure, some of the books and papers are strange, but who cares? No one ever sees them but me. I’ve got a desk in there now, and I’ve moved your bed out into the spare room past the water closet. It took me all afternoon to do it by myself, but the damn thing is heavy as hell and I wanted it out.
Then I was sad that I’d moved it, because the room didn’t smell so much like you anymore. These days, it barely smells like you at all—there’s just a whiff of you, once in a blue moon . . . a tiny current will carry you back to me, a hint of that lavender perfume you always liked, or the jasmine soap you preferred. A note of your own personal chemistry, the scent of your hair carried to me light as can be, out of nowhere . . . and there you are, like you’d never left.
It’s always you, and never Nance.
I’ve sniffed the whole house for her, on more than one occasion—closing my eyes and following my nose up and down the halls, all over the guest room where she last stayed, and all over my room, where she stayed more often. But there’s nothing at all, only me, and sometimes one of the stray cats, and then that last ghost of you trailing behind, saying you’d told me so, all along.
It doesn’t matter. I miss you both terribly.
In my heart there are a pair of holes, one shaped like each of you. No cat can fill it, and no one else even tries.
But I’ve done it again, haven’t I? I’ve forgotten about the newspaper.
I receive one from Atlanta, a city so far distant that it may as well be in another country—and come to think of it, for a brief stint in the sixties, it was. Sherman may have burned it down, but it’s coming right along so far as I can tell. Its newspapers are good, if that says anything in its favor. They cover events well outside the city, in other parts of the short-lived Dixie and beyond it, too.
But obviously, it was not the Atlanta Journal that landed on my doorstep . . . it was our own gazette—and our own gazette has run a story that I first spied in the Southern paper. Thus the connection in my mind. I made it immediately, and you’ll understand why. Here’s the pertinent bit of text:
Still no leads in an ongoing crime wave in Birmingham, Alabama, perpetrated by an armed assailant the locals have dubbed “Harry the Hacker.” To date, some eight people have been assaulted, six of them fatally—by an unknown man with a hatchet. The victims include city residents of every stripe: business owners, pedestrians, and young revelers out for entertainment.
Harry the Hacker . . . that might actually be as bad as the nursery rhyme some fool composed about yours truly. And dubbed by the locals? I strongly doubt it. That handle stinks of a junior journalist who wants to sell papers, and it’s bound to work.
But whatever facts our local source has noted are dated and incomplete. The fuller story (or some version of it) is available through the Atlanta Journal, and I’ve recently mailed a request to receive the Birmingham paper of record as well. Not purely due to some morbid fascination with axe murders, I hope you believe me when I say that much . . . but because I want the details that were left out of our local coverage. The Fall River Gazette mentions the story only as an afterthought, a blurb of nationwide interest to fill a few column inches when nothing else is going on.
From what I’ve gathered via the Georgia rags, the case is much stranger than a set of simple assaults that fit a general pattern. There’s talk of weird churches, anti-Catholic demonstrations, and eschatological street corner preachings. All this, in the midst of a city already plagued by the Ku Klux Klan—a group more sinister and suspicious than most people have any idea, and their public face is troublesome enough without any secret agenda hiding beneath their ridiculous robes. I tell you, they’re stranger than the Freemasons and not half as well thought out, but they’re radical, blind believers of awful things.
I don’t enjoy researching them, not in the slightest, but how am I to confront evil if I can’t accurately identify it?
This is what I’m trying to say: Something about the case feels familiar to me. Or maybe “familiar” isn’t the right word . . . but I do recognize it, something about the details, something about the things left in between the cracks of what’s reported. There’s a shape to it that frightens me, even as it occurs a thousand miles away.
After what happened here in Massachusetts back in the nineties, is a thousand miles enough distance to feel safe? No, I shouldn’t think so. Not a thousand. Not a million, either.
I wouldn’t feel safe on the moon.
So I’ll watch the matter, and I’ll collect my newspapers, and I’ll tack my clippings up around your old bedroom and we’ll see how big the story grows. Maybe the whole thing will peter out and nothing will come of it, and that’s an eventuality devoutly to be hoped for. But in case it doesn’t . . . in case it spreads, and sprawls, I should really keep an eye on it.
Maybe I ought to go there for a visit. Let some idiot dubbed Harry take a swing at me with an axe, if some lone maniac explains the crisis. It’s been a while since I’ve swung an axe of my own, but I think I could give him the surprise of his life all the same.
Father James Coyle, Saint Paul’s Church
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA SEPTEMBER 15, 1921
Ruth has run away again, or at least I pray that’s what occurred.
She hasn’t come here yet, in any case . . . and it’s clear that she’s come to think of this church as a refuge. Maybe she’s found some different refuge, farther outside of her parents’ grasp. I’m not sure what to hope for. I’d like to know that she’s safe, but I’d also like for her to be safe. The truth is, she might be safer somewhere other than here.
We’ve had to hire guards, for the first time in our recorded history. I can scarcely imagine it; who would’ve thought we’d see such a day? But the Klansmen come to Saint Paul’s, and their brethren come, and at night they try to set little fires and throw little stones, and so we’ve gotten ourselves a tiny army to keep them at bay. This is a place of worship, for pity’s sake! We have children here, learning their letters and their catechism—we feed the poor, and shelter those who lack all shelter otherwise. Why would they harass us like this? Why would they drive us from their city, when we’ve done our best to serve it all these years?
The worst part is this: I know it’s only the beginning. The election looms, and it looks like George is on the way out. Without him, you can safely bet Police Chief Eagan will be sent packing, too . . . and then what? Then who is left to stand between us and the unruly mob?
Nathaniel Barrett’s campaign is a study in horrors. He would make us illegal, in essence—he would starve us out of town if he can’t run us out. His new laws would ban any business from employing any Catholic, a prospect enforced by a series of “vigilance committees” that would, one must assume, terrorize the locals until there’s no place left for our people to earn their daily bread.
For God’s sake, they even let the negroes work . . . and they firmly believe they’re less than human. So what on earth do they think of us?
It all ties together, somehow . . . Ruth and the strange church, Reverend Davis and his “True Americans” . . . I suppose the reverend is the lynchpin there. The bigots have financed Barrett’s campaign, and the bigots are led by the shadowy minister—who likewise lures the Stephenson family out to Chapelwood, where Ruth is subject to scrutiny, abuse, and threats presented like promises.
There’s something black about it. Something dark and nasty, I
know it in my heart . . . though the heart is deceitful above all things—that’s always and overwhelmingly true. I have prayed and prayed and prayed, and listened for all I am worth; but at night, when the scurrilous men in their dumb white sheets sneak about the grounds, I look up to the heavens for some kind of answer and I see nothing, not even the stars.
• • •
I’ve concocted half a plan, with regards to Ruth. She must escape her father, and I must help her. I promised, and I will see it through . . . though my powers are tightly limited, given the circumstances. What can I do, other than offer her a haven that’s under assault? I can pray for her, I can teach her.
I can marry her off.
Pedro and I were talking about this, after he returned from delivering one of the messages that Ruth and I pass between us. (For the last year or so, he’s performed odd jobs for the family—as they’ve repaired and restored their house. He assisted them with some roofing work, and with some windows—I think he also paints, and probably does any number of other useful things. It rouses no suspicion for him to come and go from their home.) Pedro is old enough to be Ruth’s father, and a widower at that. His care for the girl is less that of a lover than a friend, I believe, but he too is concerned for her. He’s seen the fear in her eyes, and heard it in her voice. I’m sure he’s seen it in her handwriting, which shakes more wildly with every missive. The poor dear is falling apart at the seams.
But if she runs away to get married . . . her father has no more authority to drag her back home, or to church, or anywhere else. Pedro is willing. I am willing. I can perform the service—and it would be legal, and binding, no matter what any incoming politicians would care to think.
Now all we can do is hope that she turns up safely.