Rochester Knockings. Hubert Haddad

and flattery registering in the hidden parts of their bodies mean? In his blue lumberjack coat, arms too long, and with a pointy head, Samuel grew louder and more worked up, a cruel tone in his voice, until the moment the girls’ mother appeared in the middle of the vegetable garden or on the edge of the farm’s property. The idea of complaining never occurred to either of them, so impossible did it seem and surely grotesque to repeat such things to an adult. Likewise, the Fox sisters wouldn’t tell anyone about Pequot’s naughty acts, some nights, as he was leading the goats and ewes back from the high pastures. The difference between him and his dog, a Great Shepherd with red fur, was more in their posture than in their behavior. It was said that he had been taken in as a child by Mohawk Indians after being abandoned by his family, degenerate colonists who left in a caravan for the West, and then that once an adult he’d been chased out of his adopted tribe for unknown reasons. Pequot lived like an animal among animals. No one ever complained about him; he brought the livestock back home and required little. When they heard the cowbell from the hills outside of town, Kate and Maggie quickly turned on their heels to flee from the demon or else climbed up a tree. It was almost a game. The countryside next to their farm was full of natural refuges to share with the martens and squirrels.

      Behind the leaning barn, beyond the field of reeds and ferns where wild geese love to fly through, the black pond deeply hidden in the conifer forest was more disturbing than any encounter with Pequot could be. On the alert, Kate paced up and down its edges, attentive to the least trembling. The tall firs packed together on the other side threw down their shadows that were enlarging with the setting sun. That the mother of Miss Pearl had entered these dark waters of her own free will fascinated her to the point of dizziness; she couldn’t take her eyes off those ripples of sickeningly floral scents sometimes agitated by gurgling and hiccups of air bubbles. It curled itself up there like an informed intention, ready to expand in tentacles of steam. How could one have existed, and then no longer? Obviously death was hiding a big secret.

      Along the bank, Kate entered almost unwittingly into the prodigiously tall conifer forest. Sprung from a tapestry of needles arranged according to a mysterious order, endless colonnades were topped with an immense vault of branches with multiple domes and continuous stellations from which still filtered, by spears and hatches, broken beams of sun. The creaking of a branch, the belated cry of a bird or, more frightening, from the depth of those colossal galleries vaulted by centuries of sap and weather, the sad echo of a moan, the bark of a wild dog or call of a wolf, startled Kate awake with a shudder after the fascinated torpor in which she contemplated the pond—as if the scattered forest spirits were trying to give her a sign. One time, the Redskin with green glasses reported to her the words of a very wise man of the woods: “Nature does not ask questions, neither does she answer the questions of mortals.” No need for interrogation, an attentive silence was enough. The myopic Indian was able to learn from a broken twig, a dragonfly’s flight, or the shape of a cloud.

      Just as Kate reached the stable in the tawny evening light, she bumped into her father who, holding onto Old Billy’s reins with one hand, had just stepped out of the stirrups.

      “Where are you coming from, you little devil?” he cried in a voice hoarse from alcohol and tobacco. “You should be close to home at this hour!”

      “I was out walking not far from here.”

      “At the edge of that cursed pond? In the forest! There are bears, wild boar, even wolves . . .”

      “I’m not afraid . . .”

      “You’re being foolish! Does the chicken’s courage stop the fox? Now go dress the horse and change his bedding!”

      Kate took the bridle without saying a word. In the half-light of the loose box, she bustled around his long head. It was an unrivalled relief for Kate to rub down Old Billy, brush his dress, unravel his mane, make him eat and drink, while the darkness streaked with gold from the interstices of boards deepened and the penetrating odors of the night were being exhaled from the beaten earth. Old Billy watched her with one big brown eye, lip hanging. Instead of unsaddling him, she could run away with him, gallop far from Hydesville, reaching bright clearings beyond this world, discovering the coolness of water and the stars when solitude is merged with immensity, to reach large prairies of honey described by the Redskin with glasses, there where memory is torn off like an old coat, forgetting her father and fellow creatures, all bitterly clinging to the stinking air of stables and the land of the dead, with no regard for the trees, mountain crests, the sparkling water of rivers, the hidden fountains of wind. “It’s through the murmuring of streams, rivers, and rain that my ancestors speak,” the Indian had told her. Where could her own ancestors be, aside from Grandfather in his plot in the Rapstown cemetery where, later on, her family had slid in her little brother to save the money of digging another grave?

      Old Billy started to neigh softly while scraping the straw from the tip of his horseshoe. Horse, did you understand me, are you also ready to leave this world so infertile in wonders, this world where even the living seem dead . . .

      But who is screaming so bitterly in the moonless night?

       It’s time to go

       The soup is getting cold, father’s going to get angry

       It’s time to return

       The wolf is keeping vigil, the owl spreads its wings

      Distorted by thick layers of thought, a voice reverberates in echo in the darkened countryside. Her sister is yelling for her from the threshold of the house. The night wind stirs the branches of the ashes and elms. Wrapped in her shawl, Maggie scans every preposterous flickering shadow where disembodied hands and heads are moving. She’s surprised when only Old Billy responds to her, but doesn’t dare enter the pond of shadows that separates the barn from the house. For several days now, at twilight, an apprehension has made her bristle. An icy reptile of terror sliding between her thighs, on her stomach, enclosing her within its scaly rings, biting her breasts and neck.

      Suddenly, a clear and frolicking voice resonates in the open air:

       Tramp, tramp, tramp, the girls are runnin’

       Lie still, sweet comrades, the girls will come soon!

      Little by little the dancing silhouette of an elf or leprechaun emerges from the nothingness beyond. It’s Katie, her scrape-kneed little sister, triumphantly returning from chasing after ghosts.

VII.

       Some Details About the Meeting

      On the last day of March in the year 1848, in the last hour, just before the clock on the first floor chimed midnight, Margaret Fox stifled a fearful cry by biting the end of her pillow.

      “Katie, Katie!” she breathed quickly. “Wake up! Something’s happening . . .”

      “I wasn’t sleeping,” responded her bedfellow.

      “Then you heard it?”

      “Of course, and I don’t think it’s done yet . . .”

      No sooner had she spoken than a dry crackling, like bones breaking, resounded from the side of the staircase. Margaret counted seven knocks; the muffled chime of the clock seemed to be giving a musical response.

      “Midnight!” she stammered. “Oh, I’m dying of fright! There’s someone there, it’s certain! A runaway slave maybe, or an Indian from the reservation who’s going to take revenge on us with a knife used for skinning buffalo . . .”

      While Katie remained silent, her big eyes open like a sleepwalker’s shining in the moonlight, Maggie felt an icy blade of terror slide down between her shoulders and, tempted to call for help, was unable to issue any sound but the kind of squeak coming from a chicken being slaughtered. A small hot hand covered her lips.

      “Shh,” Kate whispered, “our parents are sleeping . . .” Her little otter’s nose had such an air of rebellious exultation