The Spirit Room (4 page)

Izzie stayed silent a while longer, then finally stepped right past sweating Papa like he wasn’t there at all and walked over to the bed.

“I’ve come up to say goodnight, girls. Are you ready for bed?”

Clara sighed. Ready for bed? More like ready to hide under it and not come out for a week or two. Lucky stars. Izzie knew to hold her tongue once in a while.

Still clutching his wounded arm, Papa watched Izzie cross the room. Then he muttered something Clara couldn’t hear and drifted back to the table. He picked up his bottle and glass and, still mumbling, shuffled away to his bedchamber.

“Izzie, I wish you wouldn’t stay downstairs so much.” Euphora’s blue eyes were just peeping out over the top of the blanket. “Papa heaved Billy clear across the room.”

Looking over at Papa’s door, Izzie took a deep breath and held it in like she was under water. Clara counted slowly to seven before Izzie sighed it out.

“Come on now, time for bed. I’ll read
The Deerslayer
to you.” Izzie pulled the quilt back onto Euphora’s shoulders and stroked her red hair. Picking up the James Fenimore Cooper book, Izzie found the page where they had left off and began.

“Judith, in the main, was a girl of great personal spirit, and her habits prevented her from feeling any of the terror that is apt to come over her sex at the report of firearms. She had discharged many a rifle, and had even been known to kill a deer, under circumstances that were favorable to the effort…”

Euphora snuggled next to Clara and fell asleep almost immediately. Clara heard some of the story, but her thoughts drifted away from Izzie’s soothing voice as she worried about her twin out in the cold, snowy night.

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LATER ON, BEFORE DAWN SOMETIME, Clara woke to a groan, hollow and horrible, coming from Papa’s bedchamber. Then the groaning came again and rolled on and on. She gnawed at a place inside her mouth just underneath her lower lip. Each night, since Mamma had died, Clara lay awake in bed for hours listening to Papa cry. Hearing him like that was slow torture. When he finished, she would sleep. Usually Clara slept on one side of the girls’ bed, Izzie on the other, and Euphora in the middle. Tonight Izzie wasn’t there, though. After Izzie had tucked them under the quilt and read for a while about Judith and Deerslayer, she told them she had to go downstairs and read more of the Andrew Jackson Davis Spiritualism book.

Clara had been listening for Billy to come back and slip into his bed, but he hadn’t. Papa had scared him badly this time. Was he wandering out in the snow or hiding under an awning or in a doorway somewhere? Maybe he was curled up in the parlor downstairs on the sofa. If he didn’t show up soon, she would go down and see.

Papa was sobbing hard. The soft skin inside of Clara’s mouth was sore from her biting it. She tried to stop, but couldn’t. Papa would be all right without Mamma in due course, she thought, and so would Billy and Izzie and Euphora. They would all take care of Papa. She and Izzie would become mediums and Billy had his job at the tree nursery. They could keep up with their room and board until Papa found work. Mrs. Purcell, the landlady, would feed them well and they would stay in her beautiful house with the gardens. She and Izzie might even become famous like Papa wanted and make him as proud as he ever was in his whole life. Then he wouldn’t shove at Billy or drink so much liquor. Everything would be all right. If she could just make Papa believe it.

“Almira!”

Papa was so loud this time that Euphora stirred. Grabbing the pillow she shared with Euphora out from under their heads, Clara pressed it over her left ear. But Papa’s moans filtered through, straight into her. What if he decided to run away and leave them like he did before? The taste of blood spread onto her tongue. If she told him things would get better maybe he would believe her. She had to try.

She slid from the bed and tiptoed across the cold floor toward his door. It was nearly pitch-dark and, besides following the sound of Papa’s wailing and weeping, she had to feel her way, brushing the end of the bed, then one ladder-back chair, then the family table, then a second ladder-back.

She jammed her toes on the runner of Mamma’s rocking chair and grunted at the pain. The chair set off rocking, thrumming on the wood floor.

“Mamma, is that you?” Euphora said.

Clara lurched toward the chair and seized both arms to halt it. “No. It’s me. Clara.”

She let go of the chair. It resumed a gentle rock. She swallowed. “Mamma?” Waving her hand in the air over the seat, she searched the darkness. Nothing. She let out a sigh. That would be just like Mamma to come back as a spirit and sit in her own rocker. Then Papa moaned again, this time horrified, like someone was forcing poison down his throat.

She made her way in the dark to the door and nudged it open, then stepped inside Papa’s room and shut the door behind her.

“Papa?”

“Little Plum? That you?”

“Yes.”

She shuffled straight ahead to the foot of the bed. The room smelled like whiskey and sour dishrags.

“Come here, by me.”

In the dark, Clara inched her way along the side of the bed aiming for Papa’s sniffling and coughing sounds. When she reached him, she accidentally stuck her searching hand into his chest and found he was sitting up against the headboard. Crawling onto the bed and sitting alongside him, she leaned her shoulder into his arm. He took her hand in his and held it, resting it on his thigh.

“My Almira ain’t never comin’ back.” He squeezed her hand and began to cry in choppy snorting fits.

Tears streamed down Clara’s face.

“I know, Papa, but don’t cry so hard. Everything will be all right. We’re all sad now, but Mamma is at peace, isn’t she?”

“I don’t think I’ll ever feel like livin’ again without her. I’ve got nothin’.”

But he had her, she thought. She pressed her tongue against the bleeding spot in her mouth. If he thought she was nothing, she might as well go ahead and die with Mamma.

“You have me and Billy and Izzie and Euphora. We all love you, Papa. We’ll take care of everything.”

He was silent a moment.

“You are my precious one.”

His voice sounded more like himself. This was much better. She was his precious one, not nothing. He was only saying terrible things because he was missing Mamma. Clara put her head against his shoulder.

“If I sit here, will you sleep some, Papa?”

He didn’t answer, but in a moment, she felt him slide down on the bed, turn his back to her, and rest himself lightly against her stretched-out leg. She reached over and placed a hand delicately on his head. After a few minutes, he became quiet, then began to snore softly. He needed to sleep and forget his pain for as long as he could. She’d stay right there, still as a stone as long as she could so as not to wake him. Papa would feel better in the morning. After a long time, she tilted her head back and drifted off.

Three

IZZIE HAD LEFT THE DOOR to Mrs. Purcell’s library open after the ruckus with Papa and Billy. If anything else happened upstairs, she wanted to hear it right away. Billy hadn’t come back, but she wasn’t worried. Even on a snowy night like this, her little brother could take care of himself. Still, she longed to hear the front door open and his footsteps bounding up the stairs skipping two or three at a time.

Before the yelling, before Billy raced out, Izzie had scarcely started reading the introduction of Andrew Jackson Davis’s book, which was written by a scribe for Davis, a Mr. Fishbough. It discussed the history of the world and humankind and its progress toward unification as well as Mr. Davis himself, “amiable, simple-hearted, truth-loving, and unsophisticated.”

It was going to take a lot more than a single night to grasp Fishbough’s and Davis’s ideas. She rose from Mrs. Purcell’s reading chair and carried the eight hundred page book, one of the heaviest volumes she’d ever hoisted, over to the library shelves. She held her book up near the books lining the wall to compare it to the others. This book’s spine had to be at least three inches wide, perhaps the thickest. Mrs. Purcell’s volumes were bound in red, black, brown, and green, written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, John James Audubon, Mason Weems, Lydia Maria Child, Washington Irving, Noah Webster, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charles Dickens, Frederick Douglass.

Books about ships, history, cooking, philosophy and science filled her landlady’s shelves. While many had belonged to Mrs. Purcell’s late husband, many were Emma Purcell’s personal collection, including the ones about herbal medicines. On many occasions, Izzie had found Mrs. Purcell taking notes at her desk from
The English Physician Enlarged, Containing Three Hundred and Sixty-nine Receipts for Medicines Made from Herbs
by Nicholas Culpepper. Izzie ran her fingertips over several of the leather bindings. She hoped her family would be at the boardinghouse a long time, long enough to read all the books in the room, every last beautiful one of them. But with Papa acting more desperate, more harsh than usual, she wasn’t sure how long they’d be at Mrs. Purcell’s or even in Geneva.

Sinking back into the chair, she draped Clara’s red woolen shawl over her lap and settled Davis’s
The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind
over it. She wished Anna hadn’t brought Mamma forth in her trance and hadn’t known about the white horse. How could Anna have known about that? Impossible. She flipped the book over and opened the back cover. Seven hundred and eighty-two pages. The fire spat an ember at the screen. She glanced up at the mantle clock. It was nine. Mr. Andrew Jackson Davis would surely put her to sleep within minutes.

Resting her head against the pink upholstery at the side of the chair, she smelled the concoction of rose water, jasmine, orange, and vanilla that Mrs. Purcell brewed to wash her hair with.

Except for the sporadic crack of a beam or wall, or the ticking of the clock, the house was winter quiet, the street without horses, and the trees without wind. She tucked her feet, cozy in wool stockings, under her, and flipping the book over, opened the cover.

She began to read, at first lazily, expecting to be lulled under. As the scribe turned to the biography of Andrew Jackson Davis, she struggled to keep her eyes open.

“Neither father nor mother was particularly inclined to intellectual pursuits and hence felt no anxiety to bestow an education upon their son extending beyond the simplest rudiments that may be acquired in a common school…From early youth, therefore, until he entered his clairvoyance career, he was mostly kept at such manual employments as were adapted to his age, during which time his little earnings and affectionate attentions contributed greatly to the support of his immediate family connexions.”

At least he’d gone to school for the “simplest rudiments,” she thought. She hadn’t even done that. She continued reading the biography. Davis was only nineteen when he started the book and he finished at twenty-one. He didn’t actually write it himself, but instead recited it to Mr. Fishbough while in numerous trances. Over a period of fourteen months, he was magnetized daily, fell into a mesmeric trance in which a spirit would inhabit him, then dictated the words of the spirit. One hundred and fifty-seven sessions later, he had created a tome covering the entire story of civilization and he claimed he had only read one book in his life.

“The fact is, however, it is known to an absolute moral certainty to Mr. Davis’s most intimate acquaintances, that he was, while in his normal state, totally uninformed on all the great leading subjects treated in this book, until he perused the manuscripts of his own lectures.”

Izzie laughed. Magnetic sessions.
Oh, Mr. Davis. Ridiculous
. She slapped the book closed and placed it next to the shiny daguerreotype of Mrs. Purcell’s husband, Richard, on the round table at her side. The photograph of Mr. Purcell made her wonder if there was a picture of Davis in the book. She snatched the volume back and thumbed through it until she found a plate depicting him. Huge black eyes, long nose and forehead, wavy swarthy hair, a perfect fuzzy line of beard from ear to ear, but no mustache over his thin upper lip. Fine coat and tie. Handsome.

Picking up a handful of her long hair, she began to twirl it in her fingers. Well, maybe she’d try just the first chapter. Someone at nineteen, only two years older than she was, writing about spiritual leaders and astronomy and the origin of language and something he called the seven spheres had to be interesting, even if absurd.

Curling deeper into the chair, Izzie poised the book under the light of the oil lamp and began to read. Every five or ten pages, she’d think about going upstairs to see if Billy had returned safely or getting up to lay more coal for the fire, but instead of doing those things, she turned the next page. Finally there was nothing else except the words before her. There were far too many of them, sometimes their meaning muddy, but she kept on.

“Your fire is out.”

“Oh.” Izzie startled at the voice, then saw it was Billy standing in the door, his coat collar up around his neck and his cap pulled low. Snow coated his cap, shoulders, and boots. His trousers were caked white half way to his knees.