What the Dead Want(27)

“Esther’s ideas weren’t crazy,” Hawk said.

“Wait, your mother . . . ,” Hope said. “She have long curly hair and brown eyes?”

Gretchen nodded.

“I remember her!” Hope said. “She came over to see Mom’s archive.”

“She was here?”

“Yeah, she and Esther. She runs a gallery, right?”

“Ran a gallery,” Gretchen said.

Hope and Hawk fell silent.

When Gretchen felt she could talk again she said, “You must know if you spent time with Esther. She must have told you.”

Hawk shook his head. “My mother’s gone too,” Gretchen said, her voice breaking.

Hope took her hand and squeezed it gently.

“Did you ever . . .” Gretchen didn’t know how to ask, didn’t want to ask, but she couldn’t help herself. “Did your parents ever . . . ?”

“Come visit after they were dead?” Hawk asked, his tone both playful and full of sorrow. “No, they didn’t. But I feel them. They didn’t stop being my parents just because they stopped living in the same form as us.”

After some time the three went into the living room and slumped into the couch together. Hawk picked up his guitar and strummed it lightly. The sounds of the peepers and crickets from outside had died down and it seemed dawn was making its way toward them. Hope had begun to fall asleep.

“I always thought I’d see my mother again,” Gretchen said. And it felt incredible to say that out loud to people who could understand.

When Hawk looked up, his face seemed familiar. “Maybe you will,” he said.



Dear James,

I am writing you with the heaviest heart to say you mustn’t write me at my house anymore. On Sunday at dinner I showed my parents the acceptance letter from Troy Female Seminary. My father tore it to shreds. He raged against the idea of my leaving. Told me no man would want a woman educated by spinsters. I was so disconsolate and shocked by their narrow cruelty. As I have no money of my own I cannot simply run away. But must find a way to work here—somehow behind their backs—and save enough to leave and go to school. I asked my mother how she could want for me the restricted life she’d had and she slapped my face. Asked me what do I know about a life of restriction.

She had been even more on edge since the fires—and the community picnic notices that have turned up around town. Two Negro families have left Mayville; only the Green family and the Masons remain. She’s told me never to go over and visit with them. Never to talk to the Greens. She’s constantly worried about the way I dress—the way I wear my hair. Always buying me powder for my face.

I’m sorry to say their raging and rules and racism have not stopped there. They ransacked my room and found your letters and accused me of all manner of deceit and ungodly behavior. They are furious with you for the things you wrote me, especially the letter about my lips. And for sending the NORTH STAR, for involving me in “conspiracies.” Which my mother said was her worst nightmare.

Do not write me here. But maybe it’s possible to write to George and he can get letters to me. I hope sincerely that you will do this as I feel now it is my only lifeline. I am determined to find a way for myself in this world—one different than the lives of my mother and her mother. And so long as there is slavery I will never stop helping people escape.

They cannot keep me down. They cannot force me to live a life so controlled. I will go mad if I must sit here and sew and clean and watch children, rendered useless and silent, powerless to do anything to help those who are suffering. I cannot do it. I cannot live a life of enforced superficiality and irresponsibility to my fellow beings or I will go mad.

Yours in eternal friendship,

Fidelia





FOURTEEN


GRETCHEN WOKE FROM A TROUBLED SLEEP STARTLED BY her surroundings, dreams of her mother just beyond her mind’s grasp. Hope was curled up at the other end of the couch breathing easily. Hawk was asleep reclining in the big comfy chair, guitar by his side.

As she lay there in the pale light of morning, the events of the night before rose up, a jumble of images and emotions. Hope had fallen asleep first, and she and Hawk had stayed up. Sometime before she’d dropped off to sleep herself, Hawk had told her about going to Shadow Grove when he was a child. Or maybe she had dreamed that. They had both been drowsy and she’d felt like they were babbling in the end. Maybe she was just remembering Esther talking about Shadow Grove.

He’d said something about learning to see a person’s spirit radiating out around them, and a class he took in clairaudience? Hearing spirits? Could that be true? It was like the things her mother’s friends from the East Village used to talk about, but something in Hawk seemed so stable and put together. He did not strike her as someone who believed in the supernatural simply because he wanted to. He’d had no choice. And now, Gretchen realized, neither did she.

Her mother, her aunt, the journal she’d found from her great-great-great-great-grandmother. How many generations of women in her family had been grappling with the land’s history, trying to excise its ghosts? And now she was the last one. There was no way she was leaving here. Not until she knew what had really happened.

She got up and opened her suitcase and looked for something suitable to wear. What had she been thinking, to pack so many vintage slips and cocktail dresses? While sifting through her clothes she found something she knew she hadn’t packed; she shuddered at the feel of it and thrust it away. It was a filthy graying length of rope, the color of dust. She started trembling, trying to think of any way a ratty rope could have fallen into her suitcase, but as she was looking at it, it disintegrated like a cobweb.