“Let’s see,” she said, suddenly very weary, “I only had you two and Leah, and my eldest David who is so brave, and poor Big Bill, who we had to put in an institution . . .”
“And Abbey, are you forgetting?” Kate whispered, still in her bed, eyes fixed straight ahead of her.
“That’s true, God forgive me! With little Abbey, that makes six . . .
The farmwoman, absorbed in a painful memory, let out a brief moan.
“The stillborn counts as well? May it be spared from hell! At least it lived happy in my heart . . . That would make one more, then. One plus six . . .”
There was a silence barely disturbed by the creaking of a huge branch of the cedar behind the barn. Through the disjointed slats of the shutters, the entire night threw splinters of light across their sheets and faces like ember-colored insects born in the oblique refraction of stars in the pond’s dark mirror.
Kate and Margaret too were listening to the night’s breathing, infinitely relieved for no clear reason that their mother had entered into their confidence. A large person with wide hips would escort them from now on in these questionable vicinities possibly laid with traps. Katie remembered her farewell visit to the Rapstown cemetery a few days before their move. It was the end of one of the most beautiful autumn days, and the scattered graves of notable people were casting their gloomy shadows into the red grass. Springing out from a freshly dug pit, a squawking band of crows seemed to cast a pall over the azure sky. In a remote corner, away from the stone monuments, the Fox family’s square of grass, with its granite gravestone, had been invaded with a mixture of brambles and passionflower. Grandfather and Abbey were resting there, one on top of the other. By what absent-mindedness had they forgotten her in the twilight, alone among the dead? She held on to the mental image of a field empurpled at the setting sun, with all those stones askew, wooden crosses, inscriptions. Shadows bickered in a violent contrast of light. She would not have been surprised to see Beelzebub’s horns emerge. “Are you waiting for me, little brother, way below, are you waiting for me?” “Don’t leave me all alone, in the night, in the ground.” “Are you waiting for me way below?” “My sister, don’t leave me, I’m cold, the ground is burning me . . .”
At least a meter’s width apart, Mother and Maggie exchanged a complicit glance. They mustn’t wake her up. It’s dangerous to wake sleepwalkers. Katie, pupils wide, got out of bed and began to walk in the dark room. She was leaving the cemetery. She’s looking for the source of those tears, melodious as the song of a woman weaving baskets. In these unexplored plains, big animals with paws of smoke flee at her approach. What is that noise of cymbals high up in the mountain and these hordes around the final blazing flames? Abbey’s face stays with her, a fine mist heading toward a night more blinding than the gates to paradise.
“God, we’re sleeping!” she suddenly realized. And then she awoke, wavering, just at the foot of the staircase. Rushing over, the farmwoman and the adolescent led her back to her own bed as she asked. No, she would not be afraid to be alone with the spirit. Their mother had heard it said that one must not disturb a sleepwalker. Even when he looks quiet under the quilt, he’s traveling, arms stretched in front of him, toward the other world.
Once Katie was tucked into bed, unable to hear the anguished calls of Maggie, who stayed in her parents’ bedroom, Mrs. Fox began to murmur through closed lips a nursery rhyme so gay that her own dying mother had sung it to her to console her for having to continue alone on the restless path.
Good night little girl, sleep tight
Keep this ring on your finger, so bright!
In your sweet rosebud bed, good night
Between two clouds wherein all of memory’s tombstones seemed to be knocked over, the April sun suddenly inundated the fields and meadows with a light more delicious than a sip of pure water. Sitting at his old oak desk, his sermon board as he called it, Reverend Gascoigne was considering Pearl’s movements. She had come to a halt at the window she’d just opened, slightly bent over, surely captured by the clearing after the storm. One could hear the quiet step of a horse ridden by some cowboy. Was he going to stop in Hydesville or continue on his route toward Rochester? Pearl had closed the window again and lightly, eloquent of beauty and grace in her chiffon dress with its inlaid belt, she pivoted in a turn to the right, exactly like in a waltz, but with a slowness that gave each of her gestures a simple domestic necessity: picking up a jar of sulfide, rearranging a bouquet of forget-me-nots and blue lilies of the valley, a quick blowing away of some pretext of dust . . .
“Pearl! Pearl!” the pastor was impatient. “Do you have something to ask of me to be circling around like a pitiful top?”
“Oh, no, Father, I was just thinking about those events. The Fox sisters weren’t at school yesterday. Can you believe . . .”
“There is nothing to believe or to think about from this point of view!”
“It’s said that even Mr. Fox, who has a solid head, is telling stories in the village . . .”
The reverend had a moment of weariness. His face, paled from sleepless nights, turned a little more gaunt. But wanting to appear kind, he corrected the seated posture of his poorly stacked vertebra.
“That Christian man communes more fervently at the saloon than at the church. Alcohol and dominos will end up disorienting everyone, him as well as his peers. When they’re not busy fulfilling their blessed need, sinners have only one eagerness: to distance themselves from the divine light . . .”
Pearl, with the delicacy of an egret, was leaning with the tips of her fingers against the study table, casting the old man one of those heavenly blue stares beneath the shadow of her eyelashes.
“You are probably being too harsh on those poor farmers . . .”
Reverend Gascoigne considered his daughter with an inextricable feeling of annoyance, limitless affection, and profound melancholy: at a few years difference in age, Pearl so resembled Violet when she was a young mother, certainly in thought as well, her form of reasoning was more like protest, almost a reproach, a manner of systematic petition. He admitted without thinking it, deep down, that the mourning of his wife had burned away all true charity in him and hardened the cardiac tissue of his compassion, leaving only a bit of scar tissue for the potentialities of grace. Since his wife’s suicide, his status as a pastor flirted with imposture, yet he never departed from any of his priestly or civic duties. Pearl meanwhile carried on as if morality were still intact. Hadn’t her mother drowned by accident? She understood nothing of the insinuations and other derogatory claims around her. All the battles for freedom and equality written in the Gospel were hers. He suspected her participation in the network helping fugitive slaves, for she had never hidden her radical beliefs in emancipation, as much for blacks as for women. Pearl had a flawless energy and certainly the appearance of those beautiful slender angels papists like to paint. To whom would he marry such a phenomenon as herself in this land of swine? Before the cult of liberty, in the Ancient World, she would’ve ranked among the obstinate being dragged to execution on the racks of infamy . . . The reverend was annoyed by these absurd associations that kept bombarding the mind’s emptiness.
“Could you leave me to work on my sermon, I have to readjust the brains of a bunch of renegades gaining strength . . .”
“Why is it that you don’t believe them?” the mocking young woman confronted him, her eye of infinite blue landing on the knife of his mouth.
“In those stupid stories of knocking spirits? I adhere only to the Blessing of Jesus Christ!”
The reverend watched the outline of his daughter vanish in the shadow of the landing. She didn’t close the door behind her, and her laugh, turned toward invisible