4 Outwitting Death
Night again, another haunted night, and Maggie glimpses the whites of eyes shining like moths in the long black bar between the curtains. Boldly she throws open the panels, an actress taking the stage. She finds at least one eyeball pressed very near the glass out there, and a mashed, waxen cheek or two.
Raised candles make shifting fragments of it all, grotesque half-masks. There are other figures, a great many others fanned out behind, and a huge flickering bonfire in the east meadow. These are not drifting phantoms or witches’ rites but pilgrims, legions of them, come from Newark and farther still to an otherwise unremarkable farming hamlet to get a glimpse of the girls who raised the dead.
When at last Mr. Charles B. Rosna and his audience taxed her beyond reason, Ma removed her girls from “the spook house” to brother David’s farm two miles away.
But soon David’s roof and walls resound with rapping also.
The theory arises that the spirit isn’t one but many spirits, craving the receptive company of the Fox sisters, who needn’t be magnetized—two different newspapers have taken note—to converse with them.
This theory is championed by Leah, the eldest Fox sibling, who arrives some weeks into the affair with trunks and lady friends and her daughter, Lizzie, in tow, exclaiming, What’s all this? and Why didn’t you write me? Leah learned of their trials when a friend saw page proofs of a report soon to circulate in Rochester in pamphlet form. “I came at once,” she pronounced.
Bet you did, thought Maggie.
But no matter. It’s clear to everyone that Maggie and Kate Fox are at the center of this strange affair. Spirits are resolved to be where they are, and when the rapping followed to David’s so too did half of the crowd, even with investigations and excavation still ongoing at the cottage.
The migrant squatters have wreaked havoc on David’s property. With his fields trodden, he makes a poor host. His patience is daily and sorely tested, and his wife, Elizabeth, when not trekking back and forth to the well or sating neighbors grim with controversy, spends thankless hours plucking chickens and crafting puddings, pies, and cakes for the diggers, who return jittery, soiled, and hungry at night.
David and Elizabeth’s little daughter, Ella, is in bliss, though, running wild in plain sight with the neighbor children and the gypsy hordes. It’s a topsy-turvy world, and Maggie vows not to let the rare if barely contained aggression of disbelievers, or muttered words like chicanery and witchcraft, distract from the fun that she and not a few others—for once in their tedious lives—are having.
“Come look, dimwits,” she commands when Kate and Lizzie stray in, nibbling sweetmeats. “It’s like All Hallows Eve out there—”
The other two approach the teeming window but reel away in a rapture of giggling. Emboldened, Maggie plays indignant, lifting her arms like Moses poised to part the waters, aware of being watched by multitudes. It’s a novel feeling, and Maggie likes it rather too well. “That’s enough now.”
When she snaps the curtains closed, a muffled cry of disappointment erupts behind the glass. One child even raps on it, though Maggie—pleased that good Christian country manners are adhered to, even in strange days—hears the mother scold him for it. Many things about her community she finds trying. Others are as warm and familiar as her favorite shawl, and she’ll miss them.
Some dozen transient females in that house have laid stake to Ella’s bedroom (men, as many or more, have claimed the master bedroom). Bedsteads have been stored in the attic, and top and bottom mattresses crowd together like rafts on a sea of hardwood. A tangle of doled-out bedding lies over it all like ship’s rope. Kate leaps deftly from raft to raft, pausing to bounce in place. Lizzie, likewise bouncing, bites the cookie out of Katie’s hand, and they laugh like crazies.
“How will we sleep?” Kate laments, falling still, her bodice specked with crumbs. She seems melancholy all of a sudden, genuinely perplexed, and Maggie vows in mind to protect her … always. But then Kate and Lizzie are sidling out of the room, murmuring into each other’s shoulders, already bored.
Alone with closed curtains, apprehensive in a way she can’t name, Maggie feels a strange surge of relief when Leah comes in. She hopes her sister won’t make her tidy up. The room’s in chaos, and with Elizabeth put-upon, lamenting and enlisting all over the house, it’s a wonder Maggie has eluded labor this long. Ella’s is the only room not teeming with people, and Maggie has discovered she needs her peace. Entitled or not, she thinks, following Leah with her eyes.
Striding to the window with her steaming teacup, Leah peeks between frayed curtains at the horses, wagons, and humans beyond. She lets the curtain fall, setting her saucer on the floor and settling beside Maggie on the mattress with a flick of her hand. “It’s a perfect plague of flies in here.”
Leah begins to plait her thick hair (who can say anymore what’s public time and what private … when it’s safe to unlace a corset or loose your mane … what’s immodest and what isn’t) but soon starts in fussing and smoothing Maggie’s instead, her expression at once stern and tender. “Everyone traipsing through all day.”
Her silence grows unnerving. Leah isn’t around much, but when she is, Maggie thinks of her as a second and inferior mother more than a sister. Twice Maggie’s age or more, Leah is a will to be overcome. And about as willful as they come, Maggie thinks. Go on, then. Say it. Whatever it is.
“Have you any idea what you’ve started?”
Maggie bristles, though she’s steeled herself. Is this prelude to a scold—or congratulations disguised? Leah won’t waste her time if there isn’t something to be had. She sips her tea with agonizing slowness, sets cup in saucer on the floor, and reaches again, annoyingly, for Maggie’s hair. It was coming loose from its bun, despite Kate’s best efforts, which are never very good. Pa won’t hire a girl when his two are “healthy young mares in their own right, fit to be farmed out elsewhere,” so all day Maggie and Kate clean and scrub and husk and card and can and quilt and knit shawls and mend sun-bleached bonnets till their eyes ache at the dim hearthside; but to break the routine, they attend to each other like queen’s maids, bind one another up in corsets, fashion and flaunt jewelry of berries and seedpods, curl and recurl the hair round their ears just so.
It’s a dull life in the country, to be sure, though Ma’s good for a laugh behind Pa’s back. (“She’s the better horse in the team, by far,” Maggie overheard one farm wife snipe. She knows it’s true, though it hurt to hear an outsider get on about it.)
“Of course I know.”
“And what do you mean to do about it?’
“Do?”
Leah stops stroking Maggie’s hair, but her idle hand looks twitchy in her lap. Leah likes to be busy, Maggie knows, likes her fingers racing over ivory keys and her strong hands trained to such useful tasks as orchestrating a human circle round men digging for bones in a basement. (Ma boasted about it all afternoon: Leah saw to it that none got through, even the most abrasive and demanding, who weren’t welcome.)
“You’ve unearthed something here in Hydesville,” Leah says. “Besides your Mr. Charles B. Rosna, I mean.” She speaks the name snidely, drawing out each syllable, though it’s been on everyone’s lips all day.
Those diggers elected to stand watch at the cottage overnight reported gurgling and strangling noises. With digging scheduled to resume at dawn, the murdered peddler reenacted his own demise on the hour, choreographing the crunch of breaking crockery, the repeated thump of a great weight being dragged across the floor, other urgent noises … ugly dripping, wasp-like sawing.
Leah’s expression changes, growing serene and strange. “They found lime down there this morning. Bits of teeth and bone. Did you hear? Strands of reddish hair. While they were digging, the floor above creaked with the weight of so many. I felt sure it would fall