Isn’t it? He draws back the dirty, strong-veined hand, but “No,” she says. No.
He motions toward the relative quiet of the semicircular exhibit hall, where animals in their cages snuffle and shift, warm bodies settling not in content or resignation but some other rhythm they understand, which all captive creatures understand. “Work’s a solace, ain’t it?”
He doesn’t wink before he goes—that would be impertinent, even for a beast keeper with no grasp of English grammar—but he does reach out almost sadly for her hand and close the charcoal in it. You might suppose they’ve known each other for years and none would think the worse of it. The warmth of him causes a riot in her skin, though his voice calms it again, and in her mind she’s pleading, No, but he lets go, and she breathes him out, and the beast keeper goes his merry way, humming and speaking softly to his charges.
10 Wicked Games
I’ve called on Calvin,” Ma announces at breakfast one day, stabbing her biscuit in gravy.
Calvin lived with them as a teenager after his mother died, and while Maggie and Kate adore their good-natured foster brother, they know this for the ruse it is. The spirits are not pleased.
They let go a volley of brisk raps that leave Ma cringing over her plate. Ma has dark circles under her eyes, which should chasten but instead irritates Maggie. Why must their mother take every little thing to heart? She turns to Leah, who only shrugs. “Pa’s building the new farmhouse,” the eldest says, “and David has the farm. Ma wants a man around here.”
“He’ll arrive next Sunday,” the matriarch adds in the voice of a defiant child, crossing knife and fork over her half-eaten breakfast, laying her napkin over like a shroud.
Back in his bed, Calvin suffers a volley of slippers. “They’re up to some deviltry now!” he calls. “I hear them by me….”
What’s this?
He’s thwacked in the dark with his own walking stick and—ack!—pummeled with a candlestick. He fumbles after nimble attackers, reporting every move. Arriving back in the women’s quarters tangled in bedsheet, he trips and careers into a wardrobe, proclaiming the spirits a solemn malediction. “Devils!” he cries, over and over, and the girls laugh at his calamity while Ma and Leah struggle not to.
The invisibles now make themselves known day and night, gleefully raiding the basement’s winter stores, relieving barrels of apples, potatoes, and turnips; these rain down at random or plop singly into Ma’s soup. The “imps,” as Calvin calls them, remove chairs from under backsides just as the victims would sit. They make water dance in glasses and pluck Ma’s cap from her head.
Ma no longer sees the humor and prays nightly on her red hands and knees. “What have we done,” she pleads, “to be so tormented? Pray, children, for God’s mercy.”
“I can’t pray,” Kate goads. “I feel like swearing.”
It’s next to impossible, from Maggie’s point of view, to know who’s crafting what mischief and what’s real and what isn’t and which innovations will take and which will fail.
The spirits are with them and of them and too willful to predict. All is silent improvisation, cooperative, suspect—like the circus in that you don’t know which ring to look at or whom to blame or credit or what will come of any of it. Kate won’t say. Leah won’t, either. Lizzie, who lacks talent, knows only that it thrills and frightens her. How Ma feels Maggie can’t say, but the question inspires a passing pity, a moment’s mercy.
Night after night the high jinks continue. The spirits rap on the roof, and the family implores them to stay outside. “Leave us be,” Ma wails (she’s later slapped in her sleep for her trouble). The spirits still favor the curtained “green room” and often congregate within to plan an evening’s larks.
But one bleak incident gives even Maggie pause. Calvin and the Fox women are seated in a ring with candles, making to-do with the spirits, when Katie gets that look in her eye, a glazed weariness that reminds Maggie how young she is—a little girl, really, deserving of comfort.
Kate reaches her pale hand into the nothing and lays claim to a dying man wound in white sheets. His death rattle is so intense, she reports in a distant, terrible voice, that it makes the mattress shiver under her like water. She feels the dread of someone drowning.
In great distress, this spirit—all gurgle and vibration—and Kate falls into a sympathetic trance, looking as if someone has pulled the plug and drained her dry.
“Kate!” Calvin feels her forehead, scooping her head into his hands. Lifting her waxen face, he demands a mirror. “Katie?” Maggie fetches one, and Calvin holds the looking glass over her perfect heart-shaped mouth. “She’s breathing.” He looks from one to the other and back to the fog dancing on the mirror.
Ma huddles and mutters while Leah looks stern and Lizzie whimpers with her back to the rest. Maggie feels a desperate need to dash to the outhouse to retch or buckle over laughing. Not quite sane. Understanding this, she remains there rigid for Katie’s sake. They’ve come too far to be frightened now, though Lizzie clearly is. Maggie’s niece keeps her back to them, covering her ears against the sound of Kate’s eerie voice.
More or less revived, Kate sits up and begins rocking to the chant of “To be with Christ is better far,” which alarms her audience even more. Maggie sits silently by, stroking her sister’s freckled arm.
When it’s over and the elders are asleep again, Lizzie sits up in bed and announces that she will no more invite “the invisibles” or play such deathly games. “I don’t care what either of you says. Or Mother, either,” she hisses, glaring at Maggie before she turns toward the wall. “They’re wicked.”
Even or perhaps especially in the deafening silence that Leah grows more and more determined to fill, Maggie means to keep her options open. Despite her occasional mischief with Kate, and Leah’s focused interest therein, Maggie seems to see—every now and then, at the corner of her eye—a flare of invisible matter, a shimmering rip in the air. Just often enough, when she isn’t trying, she’ll glimpse some thing unaccountable to others. It’s a kind of beckoning, isn’t it? The same you feel when you’re walking home across the fields after dark and pass a lighted window. No one prompts you to look in, and you know it isn’t right to peer into the glow of another family’s privacy, isn’t respectable, but the busyness inside, the very square of light against the cricket-roaring black, invites you.
A shimmering rip in the air or a simple certainly; if it isn’t exactly possible, then it’s easy enough to conjure—like the crowd of spirits back in the field in Hydesville—with feverish intensity. And what’s the difference,