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 in and crush us all. People are poised for something more.”
“A show?”
Leah takes her chin firmly and turns her face up like a child’s. “Listen to me, Margaretta—”
It’s the name Leah uses when she means business, which she mostly does. Maggie relents when her chin gets sore from her sister’s squeezing. “I’ll listen, but I can’t work miracles. I can’t, to suit you, walk on Mud Pond or make shillings from pinecones.”
“You’ll do something better.”
For the first time, Maggie meets her sister’s gaze freely.
“You’ll open a passageway between the mortal and spirit worlds,” Leah adds, nodding as if to reassure her, This is true. “Know what you’ve been given. You and Kate. Me. The Fox sisters,” she adds slyly. “We’ll outwit death. We have that duty.”
Maggie laughs again, nervously. There’s nothing especially funny in the notion (is it morbid or the opposite? Holy somehow? Lifelong Methodist teaching’s done nothing to prepare her for this), and already, in that early moment, the burden begins to wear on her. She senses that she’ll keep the invisible dead like an anvil round her neck her life long, but she’s grateful, too, and ready. Maggie Fox is ready.
“Our brother’s fit to tear out his hair. ‘Better to die together,’” Leah mimics, “‘than live so disgraced.’ He’s been carrying on all day—”
“Well, they’ve stomped all over his plantings—”
“Till Chauncy called in and agreed to help dig, I thought David would send everyone away. I felt sure he would. But he didn’t, Margaretta. He didn’t.”
Maggie hears another wagon arrive. The bodies of neighbors and eager strangers bat against the glass of the bedroom window; a dog barks; and a moth circles the lit tallow candle on the night-stand, singeing its wing. The little hiss is audible even under the groaning of David’s crowded house, the comforts of laughter and clinking glassware, the muffled fray of Ella and visitors’ children issuing threats and challenges (goaded, no doubt, by Kate and Lizzie) and scrambling under furniture.
Maggie nods her consent, and Leah smiles, laying a hand on her sister’s head, as in benediction.
All winter long, Maggie dreamed of returning to Rochester, of strolling beside the windy Genesee in warm weather, in big bell sleeves and a brand-new lace bertha bedecked with ribbons while gulls wheeled on high and great flocks of geese came over pointing their hopeful arrows south, of attending lectures and shows, of taking tea with the Posts and their lively circle of reformers.
But look, she and Kate managed to bring the excitement home instead. How clever!
Why would Leah thwart that—if not to please herself? What does she want? Maggie can’t sleep for wondering. Long after Leah and the other women settle around her in faint moonlight, she lies there rigid, seething with the injustice of it.
Kate and Lizzie sleep back-to-back, joined at the fold like the wings of a butterfly. The youngsters doze at lanky angles, breathing jaggedly. At the rim of the sprawl lie stouter frames: Ma and Leah, Elizabeth and Maria, Mrs. Post and Mrs. Capron and Jane Little … here and there, snoring and twitching in the night, other wives and daughters stationed at David’s while their men commute to and from the cottage. Maggie listens,
