Rochester Knockings (4 page)

His face imprinted with a wild exultation, young Samuel Redfield paused momentarily in front of the disappeared roads. He bent down to stir this expensive treasure, eating some snow and spreading it all over his face. Without looking for anyone coming to help, he considered the heights of Long Road, then stepped into the footprints of the last horse with a joyous refrain on his lips:

               
A nice young ma-wa-wan

               
Lived on a hi-wi-will

               
A nice young ma-wa-wan

               
For I knew him we-we-well

V.

When Heaven and Earth Shall Tremble

T
orrents of rain swept by a gusting wind crashed down on Monroe County. It was one of those random nights crossed with omens between two seasons, one just coming to an end before the next has quite begun. In the upstairs bedroom opening onto the staircase, Kate, seated on her bed, watched the glimmers from the woodstove that sporadically revealed three steps of the staircase and the landing. Through the sheer intensity of her concentration on this scene, an immaterial figure began to float in the thick shadow. The clock struck eleven. There were no other lights on and the house was empty: mother and father were keeping watch in the barn over their only cow, a beautiful Devon dairy cow who was certain to calve this night. Maggie, curious about everything, had demanded to assist them at the happy event for educational purposes. Wasn't she now a young woman, after all, with her pointed breasts and all she unreservedly revealed on bath days?

Her younger sister tucked the blanket under her chin. Kate's body had not yet begun to develop, but unusual phenomena were inside her, impatient or annoying sensations all throughout her body, altering her every feeling and mood. Waves of sky beat
down against this wooden house like Noah's ark at the time of the Flood, and she relished her solitude even while spiders of fear traveled a long shudder across the skin of her arms and down her thighs. The image of Abbey, their little brother dead in his bed, forcefully came back to her: at that moment, she had found herself just as alone as now, a little before dawn; her parents had gone out to feed the animals. Maggie, also sick, was asleep on the other side of the house in the childhood bed of Leah, who, more than twenty years their elder, had just left their farming life for good and with no regrets. That was in Rapstown, many years ago. Mother had left Kate in charge of taking care of the little one, for just an hour. His fever had risen the night before and now he seemed to be getting better, his skin fresh and eyes closed gently in the consolation of sleep. But he was no longer breathing. She realized it with the breaking daylight, her scream shattering the glass of a portrait of Grandfather Fox drawn in pencil by a starving artist from some day of revelry.

Kate sneezed. The whistling wind rushed down the chimney, the light flickered with more animation on the landing. It was then that she heard a repeated banging; she counted out a dozen strongly hammered knocks followed by three even more powerful and spaced out, exactly like the brigadier's knocks on the floors in old theatres, signaling the Apostles and the Trinity. She thought for an instant that a nocturnal visitor was announcing himself at the door and leapt out of bed, half-naked and panting. Worried, quickly putting on her nightshirt, Kate ventured to the staircase. All the noise had ceased, the winds outside were holding their breath, even the storm had paused its rumbling downpour on the roof. This sudden silence worried her even more. It was in this way, with a wolf's step, that an assassin might worm his way in.
Overtaken by chills, her legs gave way despite herself and she found herself seated in the dark, on one of the winding steps. Those raps, regular, distinct, determined—there was no doubt she'd heard them. If no one was knocking at the door, who or what could she attribute them to? Certainly not the clock or the stove. Taken with the urge to pee, Kate ran toward the landing, bumping against the wall and knocking over a vase that rolled under the bed. The sound of spilling water was almost reassuring. She rubbed her shoulders, thinking of the hostility of strange houses. How it takes time to coax them, to no longer be hurt by their teeth and claws.

Certain long-poisonous houses seem indifferent, bored with human lives, and then one eye half-opens suddenly from the depths of their comatose sleep. Shivering at this thought, Kate had the impression of being thrust inside
the jaws of a wolf
: with its steep steps, didn't the staircase have a toothy look? Maybe it was about to snap shut with a large jerk and grind her ewe's-flesh between its wooden teeth. However the knocks started up again, this time muffled and from under the staircase, from the basement it seemed, she could feel their vibrations all the way into the little bones of her skeleton. Never again would she go down there: basements belong to houses' pasts, all of them are cursed just like the painted crypts of Roman Catholics. It was because of death that the first one was ever excavated—it was to make Abel's grave.

There were nine knocks this time. Tiny in her big nightgown ruffled with lace, one eye on the stove's grate where embers were still glowing, Kate believed herself hostage to one of those hallucinations once attributed to madmen and witches. She shook her head, hands over her ears, and started to recite a prayer. Taken
aback, she continued the act of grace in a low voice, invoking in her way Reverend Gascoigne's austere divinity. May it gently come to assist her in that barbaric loneliness of children.

“Turn away from me the demons that don't exist, tell them not to scare me like this, and in exchange I will not go anymore into the woods to visit the Redskin with green glasses, I will no longer go through Miss Pearl's affairs, I will help mother kill the moles in the vegetable garden . . . But I beg you, turn away from my sight these devils even more terrifying than Father after he's been drinking.”

There was a loud noise below while the clock struck one: the family was returning from the barn, slamming the door and noisily taking off their boots in the entryway. Maggie laughed, scolded by her mother who was already stoking the fire.

“You're going to wake your sister!”

But when the flame grew high in the oil lamp, the girl appeared before them curled midway up the stairs, her arms around her knees.

“Blood of Christ!” cried the farmwoman. She would catch her death in this drafty air . . .

They led the little girl back to her room, where, feverish, she was forced to submit to the torture of dry cupping, those four or five copper cups inserted with a burning wick and snapping like a balloon on the skin of her back.

It's a little girl cow, a pied-colored heifer,
hummed Maggie, nearly asleep.

Mother left the room with her equipment and lamp turned down low. Father's snoring could already be heard in competition with the stove overloaded with charcoal. Little by little calm returned to the house.

Kate, alone, couldn't sleep. Disjointed images were jostling between the surrounding darkness and the unfathomable cavity of her eye sockets. Her eyes undoubtedly open, she was surprised at the subtle changes in her surroundings in the closed room, this sum of impressions overrun by phosphenes and frayed memories, as if everything was about to revolt, inside and out. The sensation of her left hand stiffening a bit consumed her, it felt like it was taking on gigantic proportions while the rest of her body was shrinking. It was so unpleasant that she wanted to change position, but an invisible armor held her in place so firmly that she couldn't move even her pinky. Powerless to extract herself from these stocks, tempted to call out for help, no sound passed through her lips. She wasn't asleep, however, and it was precisely in her room that she was struggling so, changed into a statue of stone. Then by the force of her struggling, Kate suddenly recovered use of her body; she had sprung out of a cement tomb and her voice rang audibly again in this world.

“Now what's wrong with you?” asked her frightened sister as she propped herself up on her elbows.

“I was dreaming . . . no, I wasn't dreaming, how can I explain it, I was dreaming that I wasn't dreaming because I was dead . . .”

“It's the fever! Go back to sleep!” Margaret, annoyed at having lost the thread of her own dreams, turned to the other side and pulled the covers up over her shoulder.

The cold darkness seemed to solidify the way water freezes. It was necessary to open the door to let in the heat from the stove; but Kate no longer had the strength to get up, it even seemed to her that she could get lost in what, similar in almost all ways, was another world. When closing her eyes, the ground of reality grew unsteady inside her. What meaning should she give to
this tiny chaos of gestures and feelings? Did there exist, behind that door, something other than a magma of earth, air, and water ready to take on every aspect of fire? The world was out of balance because in it one could die. The image of a hovel of cloth and boards substituted for her little brother's ivory face. There a black wind roared, heaping on confusion. Everything was flying above and below, parents, cows, her sister Maggie, and even the Redskin with forest-green glasses in the middle of battens and sheets unfurling from the armoire, under a beating rain of drops more enormous than the wet kisses of all country women. The dress and flounced petticoat of Miss Pearl fortunately protected her under a bell of pink and black organza. It was necessary to distract herself from the demon singing with a closed mouth:

               
O sister, O sister, come go with me

               
Go with me down to the sea!

VI.

In the Abyss Where We Got Lost

W
inter lingered in the frosts of March. The glacial wind kept turning from the north to the eastern sea. Uncertain snows of glass and feathers continually swept over the first blooms. But there was always an hour for escaping under a spot of sun before night fell. After having walked half way up Long Road, Maggie and Kate usually parted ways at the fork on the farm's path, each one heading toward her own curiosities.

That day, the presence of Samuel a hundred steps away, also returning home after school, invited them to be more circumspect. He had taken the time to drench himself up to the shoulders in a tub at the public fountain; inundated, he went along like a rain cloud. The adolescent could very well want to take something out on one of them, toss rocks at them, threaten them with the scout knife he'd inherited from his father, or simply pass on his way while throwing them some furtive glances. Despite his size, Kate was not afraid of him; quick to compare him to those prankster coyotes lurking around farms, she didn't hesitate to defy him. As
pusillanimous as he was unpredictable, the High Point widow's son would only bite out of necessity or surprise. An intent look alone was enough to disconcert him. As he approached, muzzle down, at least twenty steps behind them, his obscene barking frightened the older girl while the other would've almost been amused if the words he uttered didn't rouse in her a sort of emotion close to disgust. What did this mixture of insults and flattery registering in the hidden parts of their bodies mean? In his blue lumberjack coat, arms too long, and with a pointy head, Samuel grew louder and more worked up, a cruel tone in his voice, until the moment the girls' mother appeared in the middle of the vegetable garden or on the edge of the farm's property. The idea of complaining never occurred to either of them, so impossible did it seem and surely grotesque to repeat such things to an adult. Likewise, the Fox sisters wouldn't tell anyone about Pequot's naughty acts, some nights, as he was leading the goats and ewes back from the high pastures. The difference between him and his dog, a Great Shepherd with red fur, was more in their posture than in their behavior. It was said that he had been taken in as a child by Mohawk Indians after being abandoned by his family, degenerate colonists who left in a caravan for the West, and then that once an adult he'd been chased out of his adopted tribe for unknown reasons. Pequot lived like an animal among animals. No one ever complained about him; he brought the livestock back home and required little. When they heard the cowbell from the hills outside of town, Kate and Maggie quickly turned on their heels to flee from the demon or else climbed up a tree. It was almost a game. The countryside next to their farm was full of natural refuges to share with the martens and squirrels.

Behind the leaning barn, beyond the field of reeds and ferns where wild geese love to fly through, the black pond deeply hidden in the conifer forest was more disturbing than any encounter with Pequot could be. On the alert, Kate paced up and down its edges, attentive to the least trembling. The tall firs packed together on the other side threw down their shadows that were enlarging with the setting sun. That the mother of Miss Pearl had entered these dark waters of her own free will fascinated her to the point of dizziness; she couldn't take her eyes off those ripples of sickeningly floral scents sometimes agitated by gurgling and hiccups of air bubbles. It curled itself up there like an informed intention, ready to expand in tentacles of steam. How could one have existed, and then no longer? Obviously death was hiding a big secret.

Along the bank, Kate entered almost unwittingly into the prodigiously tall conifer forest. Sprung from a tapestry of needles arranged according to a mysterious order, endless colonnades were topped with an immense vault of branches with multiple domes and continuous stellations from which still filtered, by spears and hatches, broken beams of sun. The creaking of a branch, the belated cry of a bird or, more frightening, from the depth of those colossal galleries vaulted by centuries of sap and weather, the sad echo of a moan, the bark of a wild dog or call of a wolf, startled Kate awake with a shudder after the fascinated torpor in which she contemplated the pond—as if the scattered forest spirits were trying to give her a sign. One time, the Redskin with green glasses reported to her the words of a very wise man of the woods: “Nature does not ask questions, neither does she answer the questions of mortals.” No need for interrogation, an attentive silence was enough. The myopic Indian was able to learn from a broken twig, a dragonfly's flight, or the shape of a cloud.