Rochester Knockings

T
he sun at dusk lit the staircase through the upstairs window. Seated on a step of unfinished wood, Kate studied the dust motes. They floated inside a shaft of light, one of the many suspended throughout the house. Fascinated, she held her breath. Each particle seemed to follow its own trajectory in the dancing company of its tiny neighbors, of which there were thousands, millions, more than the stars fixed or spinning through the moonless nights. Motionless, so as not to stir the air, Kate tried hard to distinguish a single mote among them with the idea of not losing sight of its capricious flight; the instant after it was no longer the same one, she had lost it forever and the archangelic spear of sunlight crossed painfully over her face, as if to ignite the pollen lining the bottom of her eyelids. She had gathered so many wildflowers that autumn morning to decorate the grave of her dog, Irondequoit, that nausea had clenched her throat and her whole body was still burning from it. And yet Mother had warned her.

There's a creak of the staircase behind her and suddenly it's dark: two freezing hands cover her eyes.

“Leave me alone,” said Kate. “I saw you . . .”

“So now you've got eyes in the back of your head?” Margaret sat on a step just above her younger sister. Her torso blocked the ray of sun and its galactic swirls.

“You're bothering me,” said Kate. “I was thinking of Irondequoit . . .”

“Oh, Irondequoit, poor old thing! Don't you worry, she's gamboling through Dog Heaven. There's no hell for animals, you know.”

“Hell? Do you really believe in that? Why would God exhaust himself by making the dead roast for all eternity? It would be enough to bury and forget them in the ground just the once.”

“Don't you see, Katie, that's completely impossible, even for God. Souls are immortal!”

The evening dwelled at length over Hydesville. First tinted blue like the pond's surface in broad daylight, then almost black and wine-dark, shadows spread down to the bottom of the staircase and across the silhouette of the adolescent it slowly obscured. Already Kate couldn't make out her sister's face. Mica-like glimmers flickered between her teeth and on her pupils, giving her the look of a bear cub bewigged with thick black tresses. Straining to fix her attention on where her sister was sitting, Kate thought she was seeing a cruel mask lit from within and in an abrupt jump let out a small cry.

“What's there?” sounded a frightened Margaret, half-turning back toward upstairs.

“Nothing, nothing, it's just the darkness . . .”

“You just made me weirdly afraid, as if you'd seen the devil in the exact spot where I'm sitting.”

Margaret considered her younger sister with perplexed irritation. She liked her well enough, her little Katie, she was so
pretty and sometimes quite comical, but a compartment or two was missing somewhere in her brain. Kate certainly had brains to spare; even Leah, their older sister who had gone to live in Rochester, agreed; whatever her sustained distractions and funny airs might be, when she focused her cat's eye into space, it betrayed something more than absent-mindedness, something entirely different, as if a part of her was dreaming while wide awake. At eleven years of age, not yet a woman, Katie had the look of an angel, one of “those gracious birds with a human face who populated in myriad the resplendent spheres,” as the reverend Henry Gascoigne described them one day in a Sunday sermon.

But suddenly everything was so peaceful. One could hear the faint and metallic sounds from the kitchen where their mother, barely recovered from an awful cold, bustled to prepare dinner. Outside, the cows were mooing in the meadows; the tethered horses fidgeted at the sound of an iron-wheeled stagecoach that passed by without even slowing on Long Road leading to Rochester. When the calm soon returned, the frequent bleating of the sheep and goats announced the return of Pequot, the nickname given to the idiot shepherd with his bright red face who terrified the girls of Hydesville with his postures and antics. Their father, also on his way back from the fields and pastures, was putting his tools back in the stable where he had just unsaddled Old Billy, as he did every night.

Knees tucked under her arms, for no apparent reason Kate burst into tears.

“What's gotten into you?” her sister asked, astonished after their fearful laughter in the dark.

“It's our little brother! I miss him so much.”

“He's also in Heaven.”

“With Irondequoit, do you think?”

“Not far from her in any caseâchildren would get bored surrounded by old people.”

“But we buried him right on top of grandfather in the cemetery.”