“That’s the do-gooder answer.”
Mabel bristled. “I don’t go for the bogeyman. There’s plenty of evil to fight in life without having to make up devils and demons and ghosts. If you believe that there is Evil in the world, capital E, doesn’t that take away your belief in free will? I still maintain that people have choices. To do right. To have hope. To give hope,” Mabel said pointedly.
Jericho was very quiet, and Mabel feared she’d insulted him. But then he looked her in the eyes in a way that was unnerving.
“Have you ever had a moment that forced you to question what you believe?” he asked. “Something that forced you to reexamine your ideas of morality, of good and evil?”
“I…” Mabel stopped. “I suppose not. Have you?”
“Once.” Jericho was very still. “I helped a friend end his life. Does that shock you?”
Mabel was stunned into silence for a moment. She wasn’t sure she liked knowing this about Jericho. “Yes. A little.”
“He was very sick and suffering, and he asked me to do it. I had to weigh that choice: Was it murder, or was it mercy? Was it immoral or was it, given the circumstances, the moral choice? I’d thought I’d made my peace with it. But now I’m not so sure.”
Mabel didn’t know what to say. She had constructed an entire idea of Jericho as smart and good and noble, and this sudden confession did not fit neatly into that architecture. Her own life had been built upon a foundation of “doing good.” She’d not had much opportunity to challenge what that meant.
“I’m sorry,” she said. It seemed the flimsiest of comforts, but it was all she could offer.
Jericho pushed his plate away. “No. I’m sorry. That probably wasn’t the sort of thing you say on a date. This evening isn’t going very well, is it?”
“Well, it isn’t as bad as the time I accidentally stepped into a latrine at a labor camp, but I’d wager you’re correct.”
Jericho gave a small Ha! and Mabel had her first genuine smile of the night. “Why, Jericho. You just laughed. Will Nietzsche be mad at you?”
Jericho felt like a heel. He’d picked a fight for no reason at all. Mabel’s only sin was not being Evie. She at least deserved a fair shake as herself. If nothing sparked after that, well, so be it. At the very least, he should try to salvage the evening and end the date on a happier note.
He folded his napkin and stood with his hand out. “Mabel, would you like to dance?”
“Well, I certainly don’t want any more tea,” she said, joining him.
“I’m not much of a dancer,” he said apologetically. “And by that I mean that I don’t dance at all.”
“That’s all right. I’m not much of a dancer, either. But we’re the only people under the age of seventy in here, so I suppose that’s something, isn’t it?”
Jericho winced. “It’s pretty dreadful, isn’t it?”
Mabel wrinkled her nose in agreement. “But the blintzes are good.”
Jericho escorted Mabel to the dance floor, where they stood facing each other, awkward and uncertain. The orchestra struck up a tune whose notes were laced with old-country drama—blood feuds and doomed romance, survival and reinvention.
“May I?” Jericho asked nervously.
Mabel nodded. Jericho placed his hand at the small of her back and she jumped just slightly.
“Sorry. Did I…?”
“No! It’s… it’s fine. I’m just… it’s good.” Her cheeks were bright red.
Jericho rested his hand on her back once more, and this time Mabel put her left hand on his shoulder and raised her right hand to meet his, trying to ignore the heat suffusing her cheeks. Slowly, they moved around the dance floor—one, two-three, one, two-three—the older folks looking on approvingly, shouting encouragement in Russian and English. They managed several passes around the floor without incident. At the end, the old folks applauded, and Mabel was both proud and embarrassed.
“We should quit while we’re ahead, I think,” Jericho whispered.
“Agreed.”
On the walk home, the conversation was all about the Diviners exhibit and the brilliance of Charlie Chaplin. By the time they returned to the Bennington, fifteen minutes ahead of Mabel’s curfew, they’d made plans to go to the Strand to see a Buster Keaton picture.
“There might be people younger than sixty there,” Jericho said, and Mabel laughed.
Mabel strangled the strap of her pocketbook as her stomach fluttered. “Well, good night, Jericho.”
“Good night, Mabel,” Jericho said. He wasn’t precisely sure about the protocol of ending a mostly-but-not-entirely-disastrous first date. A handshake seemed too formal. Kissing a girl’s hand seemed like something only swashbuckler matinee idols could get away with and not feel like a complete fool. And so, rather impulsively, Jericho kissed Mabel sweetly and briefly on the lips and then took the stairs up to his own flat.
Mabel slumped back against the wall feeling summer-light. And even the sight of Miss Addie roaming the halls, trailing salt from her dressing-gown pockets and mumbling about the dead coming through the breach, couldn’t dampen her spirits.
The moment Mabel went inside, she bolted for the telephone, ignoring her mother’s pleas for information. She grinned as Evie’s voice came over the line.
“Sweetheart Seer residence. How may I direct your call?”
“Evie, it’s me.”
“Mabesie! How do you like my secretary voice? Do you think it gives me an air of mystery?”
“I knew it was you.”
“Oh. How disappointing. But you sound out of breath! Are you running from wolves? Do tell.”
“You won’t believe it. I don’t believe it!”
“What is it?”
“I… I’m still pinching myself.”
“Mabel Rose! If you don’t stop torturing me and tell me this instant, I’ll… I’ll… well, I’ll do whatever clever threat I can’t think of just now.”
“Are you sitting down?”
“Pos-i-tute-ly prone and ready to hear this story already!”
“Jericho kissed me.”
There was such a profound silence on the other end that Mabel was afraid she’d lost the connection. “Hello? Evie? Operator?”
“I’m here,” Evie said quietly. “Jeepers. That’s swell news, honey. How… how did it happen?”
“It was after our date this evening and—”
“Wait a minute—you had a date? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Well, Evie, you’re awfully hard to catch these days,” Mabel said, hoping Evie caught her drift: You’ve been too busy for even your best pal.
“Tell me about the kiss. Did he kiss you a lot?”
“No. Just the once. What happened was—”
“Did he say anything to you first?”
“Not… well, he—”
“What was his expression? Could you read anything in his face?”
“Evie! Will you please let me tell the story?” Mabel pleaded into the receiver.
“Sorry, Mabesie.”
Mabel continued. “We went to the Kiev Tearoom—”
“Ugh. They have such sad little blintzes. If blintzes could frown, those would.”
“And in the beginning,” Mabel said, without stopping for Evie, “it wasn’t going terribly well, to be frank. But then, then he asked me to dance, and, oh, Evie. It was so romantic. Well, to be perfectly honest, it was terrible until we got the gist of it. Why, oh, why didn’t I let you teach me how to dance?”
“One of the great mysteries of our time. And the kiss?” Evie asked, biting her lip.
“I’m getting there. He walked me to my door. He was very quiet and—”
“Regular quiet or brooding quiet?”
“Evie, please.”
“Sorry, sorry. Go on.”
“He said, ‘Good night, Mabel,’ and then he… just… kissed me.” Mabel gave a little squeal.
Evie closed her eyes and pictured Jericho’s face in the first
light of morning.
“I can’t stop playing it over in my mind like the best Valentino picture ever, except that I’m Agnes Ayres, and Jericho is Rudy.”
“Well, he’s no Rudy,” Evie grumbled, “but I get the gist.”
Mabel was telling her something else, but Evie didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She’d done the right thing by Mabel and, most likely, by Jericho. She’d thrown him over. Why did doing the right thing feel so awful? Did that mean it wasn’t the right thing, or did right things always feel awful, which would in fact be a terrible deterrent to doing right?
“Evie?”
“Hmm?”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Oh. Sorry, Mabel. There was a, um, a spider. On the floor. Dreadful!”
“Eek! You’d think such a fancy hotel wouldn’t have spiders.”
“Yes, I’ll… uh… I’ll just call down for a bellhop. Sorry, Mabesie.”
“Wait! What do you think I should do?”
“I wouldn’t rush into anything. Boys like girls who seem to have other beaus. They’re fickle that way.” Evie sniffed. After all, she’d been pretty easily forgotten.
“Jericho isn’t that sort of fellow,” Mabel insisted.
“Trust me, they’re all that way.” She was mad at Jericho. She had no right to be, but she was anyway.
“Gee, Evie, you really don’t seem very happy for me.”
“Oh, Pie Face, I’m sorry. I am excited for you. Why, I’m pos-i-tute-ly throwing a party for you here,” Evie said brightly, feeling guilty. “I think you should go to the pictures with him and just be your charming self.”
“But I’m not charming. That’s the trouble.”
“Then… this will be good practice?”
Mabel laughed. “You’re the worst friend ever, Evie O’Neill!”
“Yes, I know,” Evie said.
The land has a memory.
Every stream and river runs with a confession of sorts, history whispered over rocks, lifted in the beaks of birds at a stream, carried out to the sea. Buffalo thunder across plains whose soil was watered with the blood of battles long since relegated to musty books on forgotten shelves. Fields once strewn with blue and gray now flower with uneasy buds. The slave master snaps the lash, and generations later, the ancestral scars remain.
Under it all, the dead lie, remembering.
Adelaide Proctor had been on this earth for eighty-one years. She, too, had a history. She was a distant relation of John Proctor, hanged during the Salem witch trials. Witchcraft was her birthright, and as a young girl, Addie had read the accounts with great interest. There had been witchcraft, of course—the simple provenance of cunning folk, midwives, and herbalists: Superstitions practiced in the interest of safety. Curses muttered or occasionally offered with a bound lock of hair and cast into an evening fire to be regretted in the morning or not regretted, depending. But none of it had anything at all to do with the Devil and everything to do with the frailties of the human heart. Here were spells for healing loneliness. Curing the sick. Ensuring good fortune. Assuring safe passage on rough seas. Delivering babies into the world with a boon upon their brows. These tales comforted Addie, for she needed comforting.
Sometimes she’d fall into a dreamy trance. Then she could see into another world of spirits or read messages in the remains of the tea leaves in a cup as clearly as words in a book. She dared not tell anyone these secrets, though she was a little in love with her ability. It made her feel special—almost as special as Elijah Crockett made her feel.
A fine boy was he, her Elijah, with eyes the gray-brown of a river rock. “I’ll take you to wife, Adelaide Proctor,” he’d said, slipping a daisy chain on her head. He kissed her sweetly and marched off to fight in a war of brother against brother.
She could hear the cannon fire and the screams from Harris Farm. The battle raged for two weeks. In the end, thirty thousand casualties littered Virginia’s farmland. A chain of dead boys lay side by side across the field. The boy she loved most lay among them. In his shirt pocket was her last letter to him, caked in blood.
Heartsick with grief, Addie believed that her longing was strong enough to fashion a spell. She wrote her pledge, sealed it with a sprig of laurel and her thumbprint inked in blood, and left it in the hollow of an old elm as she’d read one should do to seek favor of the spirit world. All she asked was to see and speak to her Elijah once more.
This she did and waited.
The war brought other miseries. The men who moved the dead from the battlefields brought typhus back to the Virginia countryside. Whole households fell. On a hot summer morning, pain gripped Addie’s belly, and by evening she was wild with fever. The room wobbled and narrowed, and then she was somewhere else—a colorless world where she could feel the press of spirits about her. There was a lone chair like a throne, and in it sat a tall gray man in a coat weighted with shiny blue-black feathers. His nose was long and hawklike, his lips thin. He had eyes as black as the depths of a country well.
“Adelaide Keziah Proctor. You seek an audience with me.”
Addie hadn’t sought an audience with anyone other than her Elijah, and she told the man so.
“You must speak with me first. Long before your ancestors colonized this land, I was here. The North Star shone its light upon my face. From its people, I draw my power. This nation feeds upon itself. Such dreams! Such ambition! I, too, have dreams. Ambitions. I can taste your desires upon my tongue. Walk with me, child.”
Addie walked with the man in the stovepipe hat through woods where crows perched in trees like sentient leaves. Where he walked, the grass yellowed and curled up onto itself, brittle and dry. They came to the old graveyard on the hill. Elijah’s grave was not more than three months made. Addie’s latest bouquet wilted upon it.
“What would you give to see Elijah again?” the gray man asked.
“Anything.”
“Every choice has consequences. Balance must be maintained. For what is given, something else is taken. Think well upon your motives, Adelaide Proctor.”
Addie had thought upon her motives every night as she cried softly into her blanket so that her sister, Lillian, sleeping peacefully beside her, would not hear. At sixteen, Adelaide had lost the love of her life. The boy who should’ve been her husband and the father of her children lay six feet under the mocking sweetness of summer clover. She did not waver in her choice.
“Anything,” she said again, and the man in the hat smiled. “May I see him, sir? Oh, bring him to me, please!”
“You shall have your Elijah in time,” the man said. “Sleep. For you are young; your days are many. But know this: You belong to me now, Adelaide Keziah Proctor. When the time comes, I shall call upon the promise you make this day. For your patriotism to me.”
He pressed his thumb to her forehead and she tumbled backward through the grave, unable to stop herself from falling.
Addie woke to a great thirst and sweaty bedsheets. Her fever had broken. The moon was a faded wax seal against the pale gold parchment of dawn. But where was Elijah? The man had promised. For days and days, he did not come, and Addie began to believe her promise was nothing more than a fever dream.
Then came the signs.
She would find her diary open to a page about her love for Elijah. Warm winds blew through open windows, and with them came the sweet sunshine smell of him. On a moonlit night, she was sure she heard music coming from the tall grass of the field. It was the faintest whisper of a song Elijah used to sing to her. And the daisies: She’d find them on her side of the bed, lying across her hope chest, or beside her music box. Once, when she took her apron down from the hook, she reached a hand into the pocket and came up with a coating of waxy white petals. Only Elijah knew that daisies were her favorite. Her mother accused her of trying to call attention to herself, but Addie knew these small favors belonged to Elijah. Even in death, he remembered her. Her joy was boundless.
Fever visited the Proctor househol
d once more, this time with a vengeance. When it finally took its leave a week later, it had claimed Addie’s father and younger brother, two servants, and the foreman’s wife and baby daughter.
Balance.
Addie attended their funerals mute and pale, fearful of what she’d done, of what might still come. That night, she heard her name whispered so sweetly that she woke with a fresh tear upon her cheek. Beyond her window, the moon bled bright behind passing clouds. A nightingale chirruped a warning.
Her name came again, soft as moonlight. “Adelaide, my love. I am here.”
Awash in silvery moonlight, Elijah stood at the edge of the field. He’d returned to her, as the man had promised. Addie rushed out after him, following the firefly glimmer of him through the woods, into the old churchyard, past tombstones, until she came to his grave marker. Whispers sounded around them in the September dark. It was cold here, so cold. Elijah shone like a coin in a pond. He was her beautiful love, but there was something of the grave about him now. Weeds wove into his thinning hair. Shadows ringed his eyes and made gaunt his cheekbones. His shirt wept blood where the bullet had done its work.
“You’ve summoned me, my love.”
“Yes,” Addie said, eyes brimming with tears. “I’ve paid the price for you, too.”
“Don’t you know that every soul you give him increases his power? That it binds you to him forever?”
Addie didn’t understand. Why wasn’t Elijah happy? “I did it so that we could be together always.”
“And so we shall. For I cannot rest until you do. I am bound to love you till you die.”
His mouth opened in a scream then. From it fell beetles and maggots and all manner of death. In the trees, the crows cawed, and it sounded like cruel laughter. This creature before her was not Elijah, not the Elijah she’d kissed under the sun. He was something else entirely, and she wanted no part of him. Adelaide ran. She ran past the tombstones and the scarecrows, all the way back to the safety of her bed, which was no safety at all.
In the morning, when she threw back the blanket, she screamed loud enough to wake her sister. There in the covers was a dead mouse with its eyes missing and its entrails ripped out. It lay on a blanket of browned daisy petals.