really think he’d go so easily?
Maggie can’t but take a certain pride in having disarmed the man who’s so cheerlessly charted their collective course. Until tonight.
Rap rap rap.
They are all wild-eyed for lack of rest. Should Maggie scold Kate or applaud her—treacherous girl—for taking it this far? Too far. Her sister won’t meet her gaze. They have no plans. They know no allegiance in this game, if indeed it is a game, and now for once Maggie’s unwilling to say that it is or isn’t, to ask it, to know. But it’s theirs, whatever it is, and Kate’s sport is catching.
“Now do as I do!” Maggie waves her arms, signaling three times like a mighty hawk flapping phantom wings or a hell-bent angel. Her winged shadow swells, shivering inside the black dance of branches on walls and wardrobe and the graying old quilt Ma spent a whole season of evenings squinting over by the hearth, stitching and squinting.
Rap rap rap, replies the ghost.
“It can see as well as hear!” she exults, but Ma hears only their visitor now. Maggie looks to Kate, smiling with her eyes like Mona Lisa. Kate does not look back, but Maggie smiles anyway. Their ghost commands what they cannot.
“Are you a disembodied spirit?” Ma sways in the balance. “Speak now! I’m so broken of my rest I’m almost sick.”
Rap rap rap.
“Tell me my eldest child’s age.”
A torrent of rapping, on and on till Maggie loses the will to count. First for Leah, and then Elizabeth, Marie, David. Her mind wanders through the storm of noise, a steady thumping as of some giant come to tread their roof, but Ma is breathless, vigilant, counting along. Fifteen raps for Maggie. Eleven for Kate.
“My youngest now,” Ma demands mysteriously, and Maggie thinks, It’s one patient ghost to weather such a taskmaster. Besides which Kate is their youngest. But the visitor raps thrice, faintly, and Ma swoons. So there was another child once. Did Kate know? Why not Maggie? Father’s lips flap in prayer, and Maggie wonders at the secret, mortifying world of adults. What more unspoken? What else?
“Will you continue to rap if I call my neighbors in?” Ma trembles. It’s a terror to see her this way. And a thrill beyond reckoning. Pity and fear catch like a bone in Maggie’s throat, but she has no shame, evidently. It’s too late for that.
“That they might hear it also?” Ma pleads.
Maggie imagines the men and boys out night fishing by Mud Creek. They’ll mill and murmur with eyes full of moonshine. They’ll listen intently, blow into strong hands with icy breath. She will have them in thrall.
Rap rap rap.
Ma stamps out into the darkness of the hall, clutching her shift close round a spacious bosom, Pa stumbling at her heels.
Kate leads their visitor up and back in a hypnotic square, the walls resounding. Doesn’t she see there’s no one left to impress now? Where has she gone to in mind? Her eyes shine like ice.
Rap. Rap. Rap.
Had the river burst its banks and come swirling in under their roof this night, Maggie understands, the Fox sisters could not have seen their way clear.
We were born for this, she thinks.
But when Ma enlists the clever spirit to rap out her neighbor’s age, Mrs. Redfield promptly fetches Mr. Redfield. His ripe old age is likewise disclosed. He, in turn, sends for Mr. and Mrs. Duesler, who summon the Hydes. Before the girls know it (always “the girls,” as if deprived at birth of Christian names), the house swarms with eager Methodists in various degrees of undress demanding audience with the spirit. For shame! Ankles on view everywhere, even the ladies’, and this is something. This is grandeur.
“Is it a human being that answers us?” prompts Duesler in his righteous baritone. His morning beard shadows a doughy jaw. His bare feet with their revolting horny nails—he alone politely removed snow-crusted boots at the door, woolens or no—rivet Maggie. The only sound in the now overheated room is squeaking-wet soles. The occasional dry cough. “Is it a spirit? If it is, make three raps please.”
Rap rap rap.
“Are you an injured spirit, then? Make three raps if you are.”
It does, and it’s deafening.
“Were you injured in this house?”
Yes.
“Were you murdered?”
Yes.
“Can your murderer be brought to justice?”
No comment.
“Is the person living that harmed you?
Yes.
Everyone in the room seems to shrink, for the only expedient way to finger the assailant is list each luckless person they can think of and hope for a match, which is cause for murmuring and downcast eyes. Who will be named? On what grounds? Who will do the naming—offending whom? With a lofty sigh, their leader, Mr. Duesler, proposes, “There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet. Will you rap out the number that corresponds with each letter? One for ‘A,’ two for ‘B,’ and so on?”
Yes.
With this tedious method, their ghost, identified as a Mr. Charles B. Rosna, formerly an itinerant peddler, narrates its violent demise. Five years earlier, for his worldly wealth of five hundred dollars, his throat was cut with a butcher knife in the east bedroom, his body dragged down through the buttery to the cellar and left lying the night long. In due course, he was buried ten feet below the earthen floor.
When Charles B. Rosna intrudes on her thoughts, her rest under the stair is broken. Maggie crawls out, slapping spiderwebs off her dress, to search for Kate, who’s retreated to the empty room upstairs, their room before the rappings began. Kate is wound tight in a blanket, a dead weight that Maggie can’t unravel; nor can she pry her way in, so she lies alongside her sister’s mummified shape, Kate’s breath soft on her cheek and faintly stale in the sweet way of childhood. Maggie watches her sister’s chest rise and fall and the flicker of her pulse at the hollow of her freckled
