We Hear the Dead Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2007, 2010 by Dianne K. Salerni

  Cover and internal design © 2010 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Marci Senders

  Cover image © Big Cheese Photo/Jupiter Images

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.

  For Bob,

  who believed in me

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Confessions

  Maggie

  Kate

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Two

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Part Four

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Part Five

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Afterword

  A Final Word

  Want to Read More?

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of historical fiction, although the story of Maggie Fox is a true one. I have fictionalized the narrative, using my own interpretation of documented events. Some of the dialogue is taken from correspondence and published writing of the time. On occasion, I have changed the sequence of events to fit the story line and have altered details of place or circumstance.

  CONFESSIONS

  Maggie

  I began the deception when I was too young to know right from wrong. No one suspected us of any trick, because we were such young children. We were led on by my sister purposely and by my mother unintentionally.

  Only with the passing of time did I come to understand the consequences of my actions. As Doctor wrote to me: “Weary! weary is the life by cold deceit oppressed.”

  Kate

  My sister has used the word “deception.” I object to her use of that word, for I do not believe that I have ever intentionally deceived anyone.

  Maggie has a different understanding of all the events that have happened since that night in Hydesville long ago. To her the spirits were always a game. For my sister Leah they were a means to an end. For my mother, a miracle.

  And for me they were my life’s calling. I have no regrets.

  PART ONE:

  THE HAUNTING OF HYDESVILLE

  Chapter One

  Maggie

  My earliest memories always include Kate. With three years between us, there must have been a time when she was a toddling child in infant’s clothes and I an independent youngster, but I do not remember this. As long as I can remember, we were together, friends and sisters, inseparable companions. Later we would come to be known as the Fox sisters, named by the newspapers as a single entity. We grew up together and yet alone, separated from our older siblings by more than fourteen years and allowed to run wild and free by parents astonished to have produced a second batch of offspring.

  We were a mischievous pair, playing tricks on each other, on the neighbor children, and on our parents. Household objects such as my father’s spectacles and my mother’s hairbrush were always going astray. Kate usually discovered the missing objects and was praised for her cleverness. Feeling a bit jealous, I once asked Kate peevishly if the next time she stole some object, she couldn’t let me be the one to find it. She stared at me silently for a moment, her violet eyes steady upon me, and then replied, “Just because I find them doesn’t mean I stole them.”

  A fine thing to say to her companion in devilment! I tied the string to the apple with my own hands when her six-year-old fingers were too clumsy to secure the knots. We used to drop the apple out of bed and let it thump on the floor, then draw it quickly back into bed when my mother tried to find the source of the noise. This was a great game, and after several repetitions my mother would mutter superstitiously about spirits and devils. Kate always wanted to push the boundaries of common sense, dropping the apple when our mother was close enough to see.

  “We shall be caught,” I whispered nervously.

  “No, we shan’t,” she murmured back.

  And we never were. My mother never could see anything but good in us. I believe she must have used up the sharpest of her mothering instincts on my siblings, and by the time we came to her, she was weary.

  My mother’s life had not been an easy one. In my father’s younger years, he had battled a drinking problem, and my mother left him for a time. She moved with her two children, Leah and David, into her sister Catherine’s home. Although these events took place long before I was born, I have had ample opportunity to hear Leah talk about her life without a father and the hardships she endured. I know it was partly to escape poverty that Leah ran away and married Bowman Fish when she was only fourteen years old—not that it did her any good.

  Eventually my father’s reformation and conversion to Methodism resulted in reconciliation with Mother and an attempt to make a living on a farm in Ontario. By the time I was born, David was approaching adulthood and Leah had already presented my parents with a grandchild. Kate’s arrival, three years after me, surprised them even more. Sometimes my father would squint at us through his spectacles as if he were a little confused about who we were and how we came to
be living in his house.

  Kate and I spent our earliest childhood years living on the farm, and when that venture failed, my father moved us to Rochester, New York. We spent some years there, with my father now trying to make a living as a blacksmith. David eventually married and moved to Wayne County, near the town of Hydesville. He spoke to my father about a tract of land near his farm, and in the early part of 1848 my father decided to build a house there.

  ***

  I was not happy about leaving the cheerful and bustling city of Rochester for the dreary, vacant countryside of Wayne County. I had just turned fourteen, and I thought that being banished to “frontiersland” would be the end of my life.

  To make matters worse, the rooms that my family rented in Rochester had become unavailable because the owner, Mr. Isaac Post, had sold the house. It was necessary to move out of our lodgings before the new home was built, so my father rented a small house within the town limits of Hydesville.

  Hydesville wasn’t much of a town, as far as I was concerned, and ours wasn’t much of a house. Its best feature was a south-facing parlor with several windows to brighten the room. The kitchen, however, was dark and dreary. The house’s single bedroom received sunlight only in the morning. There was a buttery off the kitchen, and a cobwebbed attic over the back half of the house. The absolutely most horrible part of the house was the cellar.

  Kate and I explored it while Father and David moved furniture above us. Foul water squelched around our shoes, bubbling up from the damp earth floor. The wood beams supporting earthen walls leaned inward at an alarming angle, giving the unsettling impression of imminent collapse.

  “It smells like an open grave,” I stated in disgust.

  “To be sure,” answered Kate, “and there lies the corpse.” She pointed at the darkest corner of the cellar, where I could dimly make out a mound of loose earth piled carelessly against a crooked wall.

  “What are you girls doing down there?”

  The voice made us jump. We turned and saw my father leaning in through the doorway, peering at us in the dim light.

  I opened my mouth, ready to burst out with fresh complaints about moving into a house built over a pauper’s cemetery. But Kate took my hand firmly and spoke before me. “We were just curious, Father.” She led me toward the stairs, and I followed silently, without voicing my opinion.

  Hydesville was less a town than a cluster of houses and farms that had grown up around a tavern, which later closed down and left the townsfolk wondering why they had come. My mother, I know, was relieved to see the boarded doors on the old Hyde’s Tavern. She had forgiven her husband for his years of drunkenness but had never quite forgotten.

  We had lived in the Hydesville house less than two weeks when a letter from my sister Leah arrived, telling us to expect her daughter to arrive by canal boat within a few days. Lizzie was coming “to lend us a hand.” Only Leah could imagine that feeding and housing another person under our present circumstances would be a help. Especially Lizzie, a great big horse of a girl with the brains of a cow and the liveliness of a fence post.

  Leah obviously needed to be rid of Lizzie for her own purposes. Perhaps she wanted to put a boarder in the girl’s room to make extra money. Leah held piano lessons and rented rooms but always seemed to be in an endless state of acquiring funds. Whenever she could persuade my parents to feed, clothe, and shelter her daughter, she did so.

  Anticipating Lizzie’s arrival did not improve my outlook on the house, Hydesville, or the dismal end of my former life. Kate and I moaned and threw fits, but Lizzie was already on her way, and our mother actually looked forward to her arrival. Honestly, I cannot tell why, unless it was simply because she was the eldest grandchild and the daughter of her precious Leah. Lizzie did not resemble my sister, who was pretty and bold and the center of any gathering of people. I never met Mr. Bowman Fish, who ran off to marry a rich widow when Lizzie was only a baby, but I imagine that he must have resembled his own name and passed those features on to his daughter.

  “Lizzie Fish is a stinky old cod,” Kate chanted out of the hearing of our parents.

  “Face like a path where the oxen trod,” I rejoined, turning the jump rope, which we had tied to a tree.

  “Screwed up little eyes and pale, thin hair—”

  “For a penny and a half I would push her down the stair.”

  “How many steps did Lizzie fall down?”

  “One…two…three…four…five…six…”

  My seventeen-year-old niece, Lizzie, was the least important person in this entire story—and also the most important. She was the reason for everything that was to come: the rapping, the lecture halls, the spirit circles, and the messages from the dead.

  Kate and I did not like Lizzie. We did not look forward to her arrival, and we resented sharing our bed with her.

  Everything that happened—everything—was originally just a plan to scare Lizzie and make her go home.

  Chapter Two

  Maggie

  We arrived home from school one afternoon that week to find Lizzie Fish sitting on our bed and mending a skirt from the pile of sewing I was supposed to have done but hadn’t.

  “Good afternoon, Aunt Margaretta! And to you, Aunt Catherine!” Lizzie pursed her lips in amusement at her own joke. Kate and I used to laugh at being addressed as old aunties by our niece when we were perhaps five years old, but the joke had long since worn as thin as the hem Lizzie was mending.

  “Hello, Lizzie,” I replied.

  “Come here and give me a hug, Kate,” she said, laying aside the skirt. “Look at your hair, all coming loose. Have you been running in the schoolyard like a boy again? And, Maggie, how about a greeting for your niece? I see you’ve torn this skirt as well. I’ll be working my fingers to the bone, I can tell!”

  Lizzie at seventeen was taller than my father and large boned, like a man. She didn’t have her mother’s pretty, plump face or dark hair and eyes. She was a washed-out beige all over, like clothing left out too long on the clothesline.

  We dutifully greeted her, content for the moment to mind our manners. I did not comment on her making my uncompleted chores obvious by overtaking them herself, and although we noticed she had rearranged our meager belongings, we said nothing. Our family was of modest means. Kate and I owned little for ourselves, and most of what we had was in storage in the attic anyway.

  Lizzie was full of news from Rochester, but our initial excitement ebbed away when we realized that it wasn’t any news that interested us. She could tell us nothing of the handsome boy who had lived across the street, for instance, but knew all about his grandmother’s infected finger. She knew who had died but not who had married. She had not seen any plays or stage shows, because she couldn’t bear the thought of attending the theater without a gentleman to accompany her. As if any gentleman would be interested in a damp mop like Lizzie!

  “What word of Mr. and Mrs. Post’s efforts against slavery?” asked Kate. Our family had boarded for two years with the Posts, a Quaker couple active in the abolitionist cause. It was their sudden move to another house that had caused our own premature departure and led indirectly to our renting of this abysmal house. Kate and I had speculated that the Posts’ new house was meant to be an active station on the “railroad” that conducted slaves to the safety of Canada, and we had spent long hours imagining their adventures and dangers.

  “I am sure I would not know,” Lizzie stated stiffly. “As much as I sympathize with the plight of the poor, downtrodden Negro, I cannot presume to know anything about the traffic in fugitive slaves.”

  It was a most disagreeable afternoon in which Kate and I grew more determined about our course of action. We consulted again that evening when we volunteered to wash the dishes from the evening meal, freeing Mother and Lizzie to join Father upon their knees in the parlor, engaged in prayer.

  Never once di
d we imagine that we were commencing an enterprise that would change the course of our lives.

  ***

  Lizzie took the middle of the bed, all knees and elbows, while we balanced on either edge beside her. Darkness still came early, for it was late in March. Mother and Father had not yet retired and were still sitting in the parlor.

  Suddenly Lizzie sat upright in bed. “Did you hear that sound?” she asked.

  “What?” I yawned sleepily.

  “Yes,” Kate whispered urgently. “I heard it. I’ve heard it every night since we moved here.”

  “What is it?” Lizzie sat still, listening. Only a moment later, there was a sharp cracking sound.

  I sat up. “Where is it coming from?’

  “It’s in the room with us,” Kate stated.

  Again we heard the sound, but this time twice in quick succession. Lizzie leaned across me and fumbled for the tinderbox on the table beside the bed. It took a few moments to get a light, for another loud rap caused her to flinch and lose the flame. Once she had the lamp lit, however, she quickly slid past me to the edge of the bed. She cast the light at the floor first, searching for mice, I suppose. Then she eased from the bed and began to look around the bedroom. Our parents’ bed was still empty. There was a trunk and a chest of drawers. That was all.

  Cautiously, Lizzie walked over to the one small window in the bedroom and, holding high the lantern, leaned close to peer outside.

  Crack! Lizzie jumped back.

  “Did you see something?” I hissed.

  She did not reply but strode swiftly across the floor, opened the door, and left the room. Kate and I turned to each other in the dark and linked hands.

  Soon Lizzie returned with our mother, and together they cast the light of the lantern around the room. A few moments later, a light bobbed up and down outside our window, and we could clearly see Father looking around. While he was visible, another volley of raps sounded inside the room. Mother jumped nervously, and Kate and I huddled close in the bed, but it was obvious that Father had heard nothing outside.