in the doorframe. Under the candle’s dancing flame, Kate’s angelic smile took on a bit of a demonic air, while her lips, animated by the golden reflections, seemed to hold back silent, mocking, curses addressed to the company.
“Well, ask her!” Maggie blurted, pointing with an accusatory finger. “Katie was leading me. She claims there’s a ghost in the house . . .”
Their mother, disconcerted, threw worried looks at her spouse and at the dark corners of the room. She was a thick and well-groomed woman, eternally dressed in an embroidered bonnet, her black hair gathered at the nape of her neck, with plump and, despite farm labors, very white hands, a copious bosom beneath her blouse, and a strong nose in the center of a rather pleasant face that, with makeup, would have appealed to a horse breeder or a Rochester merchant. Her keen eye landed finally on the younger girl.
“What is this story frightening everyone, hmm, Katie?”
“It’s not a story. You must have heard the knocks in the walls and furniture downstairs . . .”
“Goddammit!” their father exclaimed. “So you’d like to make us look haunted to our neighbors? They already mistrust newcomers. I don’t want to hear any more of this madness starting from this day on!”
“Don’t curse at your daughter,” their mother begged, “or it will be you the reverend should punish . . .”
“But,” dared Margaret’s flowing voice, “it’s true that there are noises. And what if the house is trying to harm us? I wish so much that we could just go back to Rapstown!”
“There are no noises!” the man cut her off. “Or let the devil take me to burn! It’s an animal, it’s the wind, it’s creaking wood . . . Now I’m going to turn my eye toward a last bit of sleep . . .”
As her father left, Kate moved quickly toward the window to avoid one of those affectionate slaps marking the end of a minor conflict. It’s just that he had the paws of a bear that could tear your head off! She didn’t despise him, the poor old man. He was just of country stock. So devoid of mind that he could only believe the pastor’s sermons. A descendant of patriots expelled from Canada during the War of Independence, he belonged to the dreary species of farmers, all stubborn bigots and halfway between the slaves, black or white, and the arrogant aristocracy of animal breeders.
As soon as her father left, Kate started to laugh. “It’s not an animal, it’s not the wind, it’s not creaking wood! It’s a cloven foot, I’d swear it on the horns of our only cow!”
Their mother feebly bustled about, frightened, her enormous chest undulating under her nightgown.
“Don’t be crazy! The devil only comes if called. Go back to bed and not another word! You need to sleep now, for the good sleep of little girls chases away all these wicked inventions . . .”
Kate slipped under the covers, already half-anesthetized by their mother’s quavering chant. Recovered from her fall, Margaret sighed at her side. Her long lashes fluttered up, silhouetted by the candle next to the bed, giving the impression that they caught fire with each blink of her eye. Then, from below, three raps were distinctly heard.
“Momma!” Kate murmured. “See, I told you someone was there . . .”
“Shh, shh, it’s possible, but sleep, sleep without any fear, your good mother will keep him in line with her fire iron . . .”
“Don’t hurt him too badly, please! Don’t give Mister Splitfoot too hard a time.”
“Mister Splitfoot? Good Lord, now who is that? Well, forget all of this for tonight, I’m blowing out the candle and the moon, as we used to say.”
Mrs. Fox, standing in the reconstituted dark, and despite being taken aback herself by the phenomena that appeared to be assailing her daughters, thought then of the faraway past, when she was their age, when she believed in the marvelous phantoms of love and of the future. Softly, right there, at the bedside of her little girls, the farmer’s wife began to sing a very old ballad that rose up to her lips from some memory she didn’t know . . .
Well a hundred years from now
I won’t be crying
A hundred years from now
I won’t be blue
After the arid mountains of the west and the rocky deserts of Arizona, after the perilous canyons all along the Colorado River where he had escaped from the Mescaleros’ arrows without much trouble, after the ambush with rifles of a band of Catholic deserters returning to their fold, the plain stretched out, infinitely calm. He was leaving behind him Denver and the memory of a night drenched with whiskey in a smooth featherbed. In the saddle on one of his two horses, for three solid weeks now, William Pill had been making his way on the paths leading north, fixed trails grooved by herds of cattle and settlers’ carts in a simmering sea of wild grasses. When the Appaloosa grew tired, he climbed onto the Spanish Barb relieved of his baggage, and so on, from one point of water to the next. The Great Plains were for him the image of a rough paradise without demarcations that left one with complete freedom of movement: all this blondness moving under a sky vaster than the memory of humankind! Step by step or at a gallop, in no hurry, he was returning from the war with a Certificate of Merit in his pocket for having followed General Zachary Taylor on the Santa Fe trail and later distinguishing himself alongside Old Rough and Ready on the heights of Buena Vista. But his greatest achievement as a free man would have to be enduring life in the barracks for months on end in occupied territories, waiting for the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the masterpiece of Manifest Destiny and flying artillery, to be signed: several million dollars of compensation to the vanquished, in return for the reattachment of half of Mexico to the Union, not to mention Texas!
Thanks to the amnesty decree granted to the heroes, William Pill could openly go home. It was just a matter of deciding what home to go back to. All his life he had burned bridges, starting with those rickety ones, his ancestors’, leaving Dublin at the age of fifteen on one of those coffin ships that unloaded the white pines from the Ottawa Valley and then left again with a load of immigrants driven from their land by famine, epidemics, and landowners. Five weeks of crossing on the Brotherhood—a four-hundred-ton former slave ship bought and renovated by a Quebecois ship owner—a sailing ship with three masts, its holds and decks filled with hostages of misery, this time all white and red, had cured him once and for all of belief in divine mercy, after the dreadful overcrowding, the surliness of the crew, a cyclone that carried away the rowboats from under tarpaulins along with a number of reckless passengers clinging inside, the typhus striking the children first and finally one girl in quarantine at Grosse Île in the company of the dying. Many, well before reaching that hellish haven, had been cast in a bag into the sea with the benediction of a priest there for the occasion. One woman thought to be dead had started screaming as she slid down the tipping plank without the sailors even attempting to catch her. Pill had not forgotten the little girls thrown to the sharks under their mothers’ blanched stares. During the crossing, on a mission to Manitoba, an evangelist of the Plymouth Brethren named Edward Blair had by chance befriended him, sharing his victuals and incessantly reading aloud from an oft-consulted Bible even though he already seemed to know each verse by heart. He was the disciple of a German immigrant, the famous George Müller, a former thief and lecher who carried heavy remorse for being drunk during
