“I don’t miss anything,” said the albino, “not even the masters of my youth, papists who taught me how to read with blows of the whip. Look, this whole town is mine. After they saw all the wagons coming from the east and the north going by, the folks of Osage City ended up following them. Horse breeders and farmers who were killing each other here like Cain and Abel over the slightest dispute, left arm in arm as soon as they got wind of the news: tons of gold in the west, on the other side of the Sierra Nevada. All you had to do was stoop down to pick it up. There they went, all of them, leaving anything that didn’t move behind. Without any customers, the shops closed, the pastor put away his sermons, the sheriff turned in his badge . . . Now there’s nothing left here but me and this pig. Freedom, that’s my gold. Nobody picks a fight with me, the Kansas Indians went back to being peaceful once they were allowed to hunt bison again. Once the whites had left, they burned all their empty ranches and farms, wheat fields, to give the grasslands back to the wind, as the Kaws say. They’re not called the People of the Wind for nothing. The day the Indians started throwing torches into this village, I jumped out of my hideout and yelled: “Osage City is my house, don’t burn it!” I think they took fright of me. A pale Negro materializing out of a ghost town wearing a top hat must surely be a demon. They got back on their horses and, howling like coyotes, off they went!”
William Pill, who had listened to his host for much of the night, thought for no reason of the words to a Mexican song that used to come to him in snatches while in the enemy camp, shortly before dawn, when he was preparing to defend by cylinder cannon a hacienda on a steep pass.
Who will rip out my heart’s flower
What jaguar of chalk, what eagle of blood
The Night of Sleepwalkers Recounted by Maggie
There’s too much craziness right now. My sister Katie must be the devil, or maybe just his wicked little daughter. I’ve written it out just as I understood it, in this notebook Miss Pearl gave me. It started with knocks on the floor, or rather beneath it, seven and eight times, in clusters, in the exact spot of our bed. That March night and the ones that followed it, Father didn’t sleep at home. Squeezed into his venerable black suit, the one for weddings and funerals, he took the stagecoach to Rochester. The poor old man got it in his head that he should open a credit account at the bank, so he gathered his savings in the bottom of his gusseted bag, not a large amount, I imagine. He announced that he would use the opportunity to visit Leah. Our older sister, by coincidence, needed his signature for a right to lease. She gives piano lessons to the daughters of rich flour mill owners in Rochester. Leah despised our way of life. She only loved pretty manners, fancy dresses, and handsome men. The eldest of the Fox sisters dreams of marrying one of the town bourgeois. And at the age of thirty-five, with a few gray hairs, it would be time!
We were alone with Mother last night when the knocks started up again. Katie, who was pretending to sleep, sat straight up as if spring-loaded. I am always just as terrified when she gets up and walks toward the window or staircase with her arms outstretched, eyes rolled upward. But this time it wasn’t a case of sleepwalking. In the darkness of the bedroom, I could easily see her crafty look, almost cruel when she smiled. Katie is adorable, all slim, with the pretty figure of a theater actress, but there is a bit of a demonic look to her. It could be said that anywhere she finds herself—in the forest, in the village, in the house—she is looking for the secret behind things.
One autumn day (we had spoken the night before at the dinner table of Joe Charlie-Joe, the former slave of the Mansfield ranch hanged from a big oak in Grand Meadow), I noticed Katie preoccupied with blowing on spider webs in the basement while murmuring a stupid nursery rhyme:
Catch me if you can
I’m the spirit of a fly
Devour me if you want
I’m the soul of a hanged man
Sitting in bed, a little later, she all of sudden started to snap her fingers, thumb against middle finger, like the black day laborers who sing prayers after pulling up the corn. I couldn’t stop myself from copying her. We were snapping our fingers in rhythm and then suddenly, Kate called out: “Whoever you are, now do as we do!”
It must be said that the silence of the night overtook us after that command. There is nothing more painful than the silence that follows an incomprehensible phenomenon. Everything was quiet outside, one could distinctly hear the barn owls and the coyotes. Having been spared one night of her husband’s snoring, Mother was sleeping, hands curled into fists. There were soft crashes against the windowpane that could only be a moth in the cool air of this end of March. Without Father’s help, Mother had been too busy with a thousand other tasks to make our bed and bother with the windows.
“Do as I do!” Kate repeated with authority and loudly cracked the knuckles of her fingers. Suddenly, I write this under oath, we heard the exact same sound echo back. But it was an echo that was so close by! Kate exulted. She was terribly excited. At that moment, I believe she hadn’t really imagined the significance of such a phenomenon. Aside from fairies or conjurers, nobody in the world had ever experienced this: we were ordering the invisible to manifest itself and, for the first time since our Lord Jesus Christ, the invisible was answering back! There was my sister who had leapt out of bed and planted herself in the middle of the room, her arms on her hips: a real leprechaun in the dark with her nightgown all tangled mid-thigh.
“Are you a man?” she dared to ask with that hoarseness the voices of girls sometimes have. When there was no response, she continued her line of questions. “Are you a woman? A child? An animal?”
Katie scratched her head and turned toward me. “Help me—do you have any ideas?”
“Maybe we could ask its name and age?”
“That’s not easy, if it’s nobody! And then how would it tell us? The thing only communicates by noise, or at least little knocks, little purrs of a tiger in hiding . . .”
Kate started to turn slowly in place. She fixed herself, arms spread, like a statue. “Are you a spirit?” she then exclaimed, intimidated by her own question.
We heard two knocks of acquiescence, very clean, same as the blow of a hammer or sweep of a broom. Frightened but radiant, Katie came with a leap to join me in the bed.
“We did it!” she whispered in my ear. “It’s a ghost . . .”
With these words, not yet having understood the power such a word could apply, in terms of the invisible, I felt the ice water of terror rise up my throat. Kate firmly clamped both hands over my mouth to stifle the scream swelling up in me.
“Hush!” she said. “Ghosts are shyer than a moon rabbit . . .”
Regaining my breath, I hissed back in panic. “And what if he wants to drink our blood or make us pregnant?” The whites of Katie’s eyes and her sharp little teeth sparkled in the dark.
“Shh!” she said without reassuring me in the least. If it was a ghoul or a vampire, we were soon to be dead for good.
It might have been one in the morning. The house became unusually quiet again but I could tell that all sorts of insanity was brewing inside Katie’s skull. “One thing is sure,” she said finally, “the spirit understands our English, but he seems to have swallowed his tongue, or else Mister Splitfoot has the voice of a mouse, too soft to cross the wall between his world and ours . . .”
Mister Splitfoot! Where did she come up with such a name? Her penchant for mischief is apparently endless.
The exceptional silence of the walls and furniture made her loquacious:
“Imagine a deaf person and a blind person each lost in a thunderstorm. One isn’t able to hear the thunder and the other one
is unable to see the flash. Neither would