Rochester Knockings (12 page)

Running alongside the pond, Kate hurried back toward the farm. A pale light stretched over the hills to the edges of the high forest while the blue light turned to purple. She perceived litanies of some sort, screams, like someone calling out. Out of breath, madly worried about her family, she reproached herself for this escapade. Soon she saw wandering lanterns and made out the silhouettes of many people. Even more than these unwelcome strangers who'd come to investigate every draft of air, she feared their neighbors, all the farmers of placid temperament who, gripping their elbows in fear, were capable of transforming into a mob the moment one of them let loose a curse. They were who prowled and howled like a bunch of wolves around their farm.

Finally getting close, in a darkness swept by torchlight, a feeling of shame to be coming back in such a poor state overcame her, her dress stained with dirt and blood. Farmers gathered outside their windows were shaking their fists while waving their lanterns. One of them threw a rock at the front door.

“Death to the witches!” he bellowed.

Those most excited went one better: “Let them hang!”

Then there was a commotion. A rain of pebbles rang across the wooden walls. A window on the ground floor broke, adding to the tumult.

“Stop! Stop!” cried Kate, rushing to the doorstep.

There was a furious movement toward her, a tempest ready to carry her away, but at that moment the door opened and Pearl Gascoigne, undoubtedly the final visitor of the day, pushed the girl behind her back and threw herself in front of the crowd, stunning in her Amazon behavior, wearing a linen jacket and English skirt, with lace collars and sleeves. Defiant, without the least hesitation, she took them head on.

“Have you lost your minds? Leave these people alone!”

“Let them hang!” some in the back cried out again, quite giddy at her appearance.

A large decapitated body gone running in its own blood, the crowd had already begun lunging when a gunshot added confusion, cutting short its momentum. Each person looked around for a possible victim. A second shot froze that little world for good.

His Springfield gun held up in one hand, William Pill dug his knees into the saddle, spurs back, and pulled the reins so his monumental mare sprang from the dark, rearing up with a whinny at the shocked villagers.

“You all can kindly go home now,” he said in a tone both cheerful and firm, his gun lowered to the right height. “Go back to your wives! What a shame it would be for them to end their days with nothing but a poor rapping spirit for company . . .”

Relieved, with a radiant pout on her lips, Pearl had rejoined the Fox family inside. For his part, Mr. Fox was encamped with his shotgun behind the broken window, determined to hold his
ground. His wife and two daughters were huddled in the hall at the foot of the stairs.

“Everything's safe for now,” said the pastor's daughter. “They're dispersing. But they will come back more numerous, tomorrow or in a month if nothing changes here.”

“What can we do?” declared Mrs. Fox with the aplomb of the elect.

Pearl noticed Kate's small hands who, in the background, was entertaining herself by snapping her fingers. Even despite the biggest frights, she allowed, nothing stops the appetite for play in children.

In the silence that had returned, the youngest of the Fox sisters cried out in a raucous little voice:

“All right, Mister Splitfoot! Do as I do! One, two, three, four . . .”

The parquet floor took back up noisily in echo, leaving Pearl seized with disbelief.

At that precise moment, the hinges of the front door seemed to let out a meow. Paralyzed, the farmer took aim into a haze of mist bathed in moonlight. A figure on its guard stayed without advancing further. The voice was quickly recognized as the stranger with the pockmarked face.

“Your horse is getting impatient, Miss Pearl! It would be best if I accompanied you back home on this troubled night . . .”

Part Two

Rochester

               
One need not be a Chamber
—
to be Haunted
—

               
One need not be a House
—

               
The Brain has Corridors
—
surpassing

               
Material Place
—

—Emily Dickinson

I.

I Want Only a Long Drunkenness

A
t this time of the year, all the mills of Rochester, which alone furnished more flour than the whole of New York state, were busily grinding grain both upstream and downstream of High Falls, the three powerful waterfalls of the Genesee thundering for eternity in the heart of town, echoing other falls just as powerful along the course of the river between Canandaigua Lake—where several Seneca and Onondaga tribes still lived—and this sea of freshwater that was called Lake Ontario, at the southern point of four others that were even vaster. Thanks to hydraulic energy, several industries had rather quickly established themselves along the river in the capital of Monroe County: textile mills, paper mills, manufacturers of clothing, and various tools, all of which, ever since the Erie Canal linked the city to Albany and also to New York via the Hudson, were able to export quantities of merchandise aboard houseboats, barges, and steamboats whose paddle wheels evoked water mills. The increasing prosperity of Rochester—the first American boomtown, founded a half-century earlier by industrious landowners—accommodated more than ever before an influx of miserable immigrants freshly disembarked.
The center of Flour City, as this mill city was nicknamed, had recently been developed with imposing stone buildings, while on the peripheries new neighborhoods of log houses were being constructed, crammed with workers' families, Germans or Irish escaped from typhus or cholera, wandering pioneers, African-Americans in the delicate status of free men without civil rights, who at any time could arbitrarily be chained up again, farmers ruined by drought or the Indian wars. Between the shores of the Great Lake, the docks of the Erie Canal and the winding banks of the Genesee, in the beautiful avenues around Midtown Place or the dirt roads beyond Mount Hope Avenue, a diverse world evolved of dock workers and sailors, scrawny beggars looking for work, preachers of the apocalypse and street vendors, transportation workers of all kinds, artisans working in their booths, fortune seekers in waiting—not to mention the blind mendicants and street orphans, pieceworkers, inventive traders, and finally, the recent bourgeois. The latter keeping their distance much more than they or their fathers had previously, who, with a Bible in hand, extracted themselves without regard or remorse from the marshes of survival, while from their dry footing still giving orders to managers, procurers, and other intermediaries, who along with government workers and the liberal professions constituted the middle class that made the town habitable and even commendable to all pious souls, young girls from institutions, and congregation members of various denominations continually on the move toward universal salvation. In Rochester more than in most states in the North or South, the spirit of enterprise was opening to the ultraliberal aspirations of abolitionists and pacifist democrats, women's rights movements, preachers of the Second
Coming, or anarchist federationists in clandestine work for refugees from four continents.

Strolling a little drunk at dusk between the aqueduct and the old cemetery, Lucian Nephtali thought about the strangeness of these multiple existences in this city, of all the inundations that he'd practically seen be born, like at the end of the world. To look deep into the heart of things, the cascades of adventures carrying along this not particularly scrupulous, but neither exceedingly wicked individual were somewhat explained by credulity. It was in his temperament to believe everything suggested to him, even the impossible. His profession of lawyer, left behind for that matter, couldn't have been the cause: a promoter of justice does not prejudge any truth and coldly puts into doubt everything, including the surveyor's calculations. Lucian Nephtali on the contrary sought the enchantment in every circumstance, even if it meant marveling at a blade of straw in the hollow of his palm after a river had just washed over him.

Surreptitiously, between two buildings off an empty street, he entered into a dark courtyard feebly indicated by the flicker of a lantern. A series of winding staircases, each designated by a candle sconce, led him to a landing lit this time by an oil lamp, and then, after showing his credentials, into a vestibule with no distinct feature apart from a bronze knocker in the shape of a Chinese dragon. The colossal man at the entrance dressed in Western clothes merely bowed to let him pass by. Through mixed vapors, Lucian followed the padding step of a young servant to a room where two or three clients sprawled on ottomans quietly smoked their water pipes behind curtains. The manager of the establishment, a Chinese man from Hong Kong with an exemplary British
accent, who'd recently arrived with a large staff from the forest-town of Cleveland, came over personally to set three trays on the adjoining coffee table.

“Not many people tonight at the Golden Dream?” the visitor inquired while taking off his boots and cape.

“Not many. Your friend the coroner is sleeping like an angel in the corner. You didn't bring the missus?”

“It's not good for her. She's playing tonight at the Eastman Theatre . . .”

Stretched out, head propped on a cushion and an ivory-tipped cigarette holder between his lips, Lucian watched the manager go off while inhaling his first puff. Propriety demanded that Charlene Obo, who was barely his mistress, be viewed as his wife in such a place. Besides raw opium or the chandoo imported in brass boxes, they also served absinthe, among other alcohols, and black tea. Lucian could very well settle for a hot drink, like this automaton of a police officer, during the times he needed to keep his faculties alert. But tonight would require a descent from the cross into hell. The funeral of Nat, so young and such an old ally, at the Buffalo Street cemetery marked his entry with no return into a grand canyon of loneliness—he'd known it intuitively when looking down at Nat's coffin earlier and then up at the suddenly indifferent faces hovering above the graves of a few other close friends. Giant cranes swiveled on Pinnacle Hill in the background, where the last building of a large and still vacant hospital was being constructed. Nat Astor had lain at the bottom of his hole for barely three hours, but from now on he would be a contemporary of all the disappeared who'd ever haunted this Earth, a thousand eternities of lived lives. Lucian thought of Harry Maur's awful words before the still-warm cadaver of his friend, in the
winter greenhouse where the servants had moved him: “This is worse than revenge—one doesn't go kill himself like that in his host's home.” In his right hand, as if he were going to empty the barrel into the dead man, he grabbed the Colt Paterson with which Nat had shot himself right in the heart. The day before, or two days before his death, last week, they had all three found themselves outside of a reception in the new villa of Leah Fish, on South Avenue. The music teacher and rather mediocre pianist was becoming a celebrity ever since the Hydesville affair. It was Harry, the most superstitious of millionaires, who'd been taken with the oldest of the Fox sisters, a divorcée envious of her maiden name and full of ambition for her little family.

The faint bubbling of the pipe and the snoring of a neighbor lost in illusions mixed with the sounds from outside, the river's waterfalls and a sudden rain shower falling on the slate or zinctiled roofs. On one of the trays, the wick from an oil lamp was opening a golden fan aged by the fire of centuries; within it very ancient and translucent figures were coming to life, an inexhaustible wildlife where memory silently dispensed its effigies, immediately unfurling in endless floral hybridizations with an exuberance at least equaling nature. The visions of an opium smoker are more entrancing than any siren song. There where a member of the Temperance Society or of the Anti-Saloon League might discern a face or shape in the background, between other inept rebuses, there universes were opening up for him, bringing their demonic engineering to the surface, pulled from unfathomable equations. A pinch of opium was enough to melt the wax of the seven seals. For a few hours, a freedom more elusive than the dream of dying would cease altering all feeling in him. His wells and fountains were now dry; his only friend in the ground, where would he find
a semblance of intimacy again in this world? Charlene Obo only expected a bit of fun out of him. And if Harry Maur, whom courtesans and other fawners mobbed incessantly, had gladly paid the lawyer to advocate for clouds or the roses in his park, it was only from the cruel lack of interlocutors.

A filiform servant filed between the smokers' compartments, which were similar to tiny theatre boxes. A regular, solid man with a bull's neck and sloping shoulders painfully stood up and staggered in the bronzed half-light of the room, undoubtedly just informed of the time. His sluggish steps managed to keep plantigrade: a bear coming out of hibernation. Lucian didn't try to hide from him. The coroner knew all the customers of the Golden Dream, most of them lawyers and functionaries. They constituted in all casualness, through a tacit agreement of discretion, a sort of the extrasensory vision club.