This Side of Jordan (40 page)

“You're being cruel,” Edith said, her voice quivering. Oscar Elliotsen took his wife's hand.

“No more so than the vain echo of dreams that murmur hope when life promises none. That light of day I felt from my window facing the eastern sky brought sanctuary from unanswered prayers and led me to Robert Watkins in whose arms my heart at last took flight.”

“I've always refused to speak his name aloud,” said Edith, dabbing one eye with a handkerchief. Alvin heard a faint breeze ripple the burgundy drapes about the room. He thought of those birds in the dark rafters of Uncle Henry's barn.

“A woman loves at her own peril. I hold no bitterness, no remorse. Denying myself that sweet flowering of love for which each of us is born would have been far more shameful. Suppose he had not been destitute of character, and marriage his aspiration, do you imagine me in a pleasant cottage somewhere, belovéd of my own children and content? But that was not my fate. Mother dear, I never shared your unwavering faith in the mercy of the world. When Robert withdrew his love, my sorrow was complete. Alone and bed-ridden with grief, I refused to treat a simple cold until the pneumonia that grew one night out of a sudden fever swept me away from that wretched circumstance.”

“Darling, we prayed so hard that you'd come back to us,” Edith said, weeping now. “When your father brought me the letter from St. Elizabeth's Hospital, I believe my heart stopped beating altogether.”

Alvin noticed a dim gray light in the darkness above the spirit table behind Madame Zelincka. He held his breath as it became a gleam of white that drew nearer the circle.

“Mother, these quiet meadows sustain all my memories of life: the pretty orchard blossoms and sweet clover, that shady brook in the dell, the larks that sang for us each morning, and you and Father whispering beside my cradle and my casket by twilight. Awakening here, I found my blindness merely a fading dream. I walked all day without need of instinct and saw the wind pass through the catalpa trees by the river. I know now, Mother, the soul is like the perfume of the flower, its splendid bloom rising unseen, its essence lovingly savored, its worth beyond beauty.”

Dumbfounded, Alvin watched the white luminance descend over the table by the Elliotsens like a cloud of light. Within the heart of that silver radiance, a hazy shadow emerged in the form of a graceful spirit hand that reached down to Edith and gave her a wild rose, still damp with dew.

“I'll always be with you, Mother.”

Then the luminous cloud faded away to darkness while Edith and Oscar Elliotsen huddled together, weeping. Across the table, Alvin heard the dwarf whisper something to Lillian about teleplasmic arms and spectral phosphorescence after which the spirit room was quiet once more.

Another couple of minutes passed.

Alvin's heart quit drumming. He let out a breath, shifted his shoes on the carpet, hoping to leave. Then he heard Madame Zelincka speak firmly into the gloom, “Ophelia, are you here?”

Rascal sat up on the parlor cushion he had brought for his chair. “Your son has come a long way to speak with you,” said the medium. A light breeze passed across the room, fluttering through Madame Zelincka's robe. The spirit table trembled and thumped.

The dwarf spoke aloud, “Mother?”

A harmony of whispered voices, nearly inaudible, entered the dark and Alvin thought he heard the faint strains of a piano hymn like those Aunt Hattie played after Sunday dinner on the farm.

Madame Zelincka asked, “Ophelia? Are you here?”

The dim tulip lights flickered and a rhythmic knocking chased along the walls as the spirit table slid half a foot sideways while Edith's white rose and the stack of message cards briefly levitated.

The dwarf called into the dark, “Mother? Is that you?”

A warm draft fragrant with sweet honeysuckle swept into the spirit room and the knocking ceased and the table became still once again.

A pleasant female voice spoke from the shadows.
“Arthur?”

Madame Zelincka indicated for the dwarf to remove his message card from beneath the chair. Doing so, he read aloud, “We seek at the end of life's rainbow, a treasure we hope to find there—”

“And wealth we do find, but not of the kind we expected, no, something more rare.”

Across the room stood a woman dressed in white, her features indistinct as if bathed in morning mist.

“Ophelia Glynn Burtnett?” the medium inquired.

“My mother,” confirmed the dwarf, handing his message card to Madame Zelincka.

“Your father wrote that poem in our wedding album a long while ago when we were very young. Do you know he was the handsomest man I ever saw? I felt so proud to sit in his carriage. When I was a girl, I dreamed of white peonies and bridesmaids all in a row and beautiful oaths of love and duty foresworn. To be blessed throughout my life with the endearment of those nearest my heart gave me such joy. Yet good fortune so often leads to forgetfulness. The road is always best on the other side. What I cherished most, your father held in disregard, and what he sought, I never wanted. Do you believe we can know our destiny before the evidence of it becomes clear? You were my only child, Arthur, born on a summer evening beneath the nursery Grandfather Burtnett built. I needed three days and a wealth of prayer to bring you into this world, and I remember worrying that if I didn't hurry you along, your aunts and uncles would all give up and go home. I wasn't afraid for myself. Augustus said I had a true mother's fight in me and would surely prevail in that good struggle. Early in the season, a family of bluejays had nested in the walnut tree outside my bedroom window and I listened to their chattering all the while. I waited for you longer than anyone thought I could and only when you came forth and drew your first breath as my wonderful child, did I pass on to a life and a purpose that still seems mysterious to me.”

“I grew up without you, Mother, all these years,” the dwarf said in a trembling voice, “only a photograph of you and a poem on my bedstand.”

“You've been very brave.”

“I've tried to be a decent and faithful son, though I admit I've had my trials.”

“Arthur, human nature hasn't changed a particle since I passed. All we know of morals, high and holy, we find in our own hearts. There is no aristocracy of merit on earth or in heaven absent of that goodness. You've walked in a state of grace all your life, and I've been proud to call you mine.”

The farm boy held his gaze on the woman in white across the room whose shimmering spirit garments seemed translucent in the violet dark, her lovely face and slender hands paler than alabaster. Despite the clear white fire of her ghostly countenance, somehow she appeared to Alvin as substantial as anyone else in the spirit room.

The dwarf lowered his eyes. “I've always worried that you'd have been greatly disappointed at seeing me, how I was born to this stature—my deformity. It seems no one in the family had ever in memory…well, I'm told I was quite unexpected.”

“Shame on you, Arthur. Your birth was my greatest joy, my love for you more perfect than heaven's gleam. If all your life were a breath of honey, and heartache left to others, would you have had the courage to come seek me here? One day years from now when your morning room is quiet and the blanket that warms your legs has become thread-worn and faded, you'll know that our truest blessings can never be soiled by vain utterances and that in the eyes of those who love us well, our spirit suffers no lasting stain.”

The dwarf hesitated, his voice fractured by emotion. Then, like a child seeking favor, he asked, “Will I marry?”

Alvin saw the tulip lights flicker while the manifestation appeared to ripple like pond water under a passing breeze.

“That heart which is penetrated by love for thee will indeed prove true.”

Madame Zelincka lightly squeezed the hand of the teary-eyed dwarf who hesitated over his next question, brow furrowed with consternation. What did a loving son require most of his mother's eternal spirit? The farm boy watched intently as the dwarf asked the apparition across the room, “Will my life prove worthy of your sacrifice?”

The woman in white raised her hands toward the spirit table and answered with a radiant smile,
“Arthur, my dear, your life's greatest glory is yet to be revealed.”

With those words, she began to recede into the dark, her lambent spirit form evaporating to a pale translucence like a bright light extinguishing from within.

The dwarf cried out and rose from his chair and stood with his knees at the table as the glowing apparition gradually faded back into the darkness and disappeared. A draft redolent of honeysuckle ruffled the silk curtains and the spirit room fell silent, each of the sitters mute in the wake of the strange spiritistic occurrences.

Alvin heard a creak overhead as somebody walked the floor upstairs.

The dwarf sat back down on his pillow.

After another minute or so, Madame Zelincka spoke up: “Ethan?”

“Yes, ma'am?”

Her lovely violet aura diminishing, Madame Zelincka collected her stack of message cards together and glanced at her guests around the spirit circle. Then she said, “Ethan, may we ask you one more question?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

The farm boy stared at the medium. Lillian Cheney shut her eyes. “Is this world of strife to end in dust at last?” Edith Elliotsen squeezed her husband's hand. The dwarf looked toward the curtained shadows where that perfect reflection of his mother had vanished. Alvin noticed a faint odor waft past his face like a child's breath of sour milk.

“Ethan?”

A songbird warbled from a distant tree.

“No, ma'am,”
a small boy's voice echoed in reply.
“Life is everlasting.”

 

Alvin Pendergast waited near the ticket booth at the showgrounds entrance in a dusty wind. By the hour on his new wristwatch, half past nine had come and gone and Chester hadn't yet appeared. Circus-goers passed through the gate flushed with glee as the ringing song of the carousel swept across the early autumn dark. A flurry of gold Roman candles boomed among the stars to the cheers of small children, but tonight the farm boy disregarded the hot popcorn and the bellowing barkers. He had seen the elephant and now he wanted to go back home to the Pendergast farm. In the sanitarium, Alvin had witnessed a slight woman named Anna Cates pass away so beset with chronic phthisis that gangrene had developed in one lung, which alternately hissed and gurgled when she spoke. The doctors pronounced her ghastly infections unmistakably hopeless and left her in the consumption ward to die. Rumor had it she owned a house in Ohio tended to by a trusted neighbor, and two calico cats who slept beside her pillow at night, but no surviving family in the world. Her discharge from the sanitarium back to Oberlin was implacably denied by the administrator, so she retired to bed that last week of her miserable life, refusing to rise day or night until she was called to heaven,
“half to forget the wandering and the pain, half to remember days that have gone by, and dream and dream that I am home again.”

Feeling light-headed, Alvin watched a stocky marshal ride past on horseback wearing a white ten-gallon hat and shiny six-guns on his belt. Deputies from Icaria wandered in and out of the showgrounds, trailed by painted clowns holding seltzer bottles and nickel balloons. He watched two schoolboys in blue denim overalls light a thick firecracker and toss it over the fence into the wagon circle. When it went off with a noisy bang, both ran away to hide in the grassy meadow. Another quarter of an hour went by without Chester showing up and the farm boy grew cold and anxious. He feared both the known and the unknown. His fever rose steadily with a hacking cough he fought to subdue. Windblown grit stung his eyes and drew tears. Buttoning up his jacket, Alvin turned away from the ticket booth and the flapping banners and stared out across the wooded meadow toward Icaria, lit yellow beneath the evening clouds.

Soon, Chester waltzed out of the dark, looking dapper in a striped gray suit with a white carnation on his lapel. He was whistling a smart “I'll Say She Does,” with a hint of satisfaction on his lips. Circus-going kiddies from downtown dodged around him like he was a king. He lit a cigarette and tossed the match into the damp grass. Alvin gave him a short wave, then regretted it when Chester frowned. The gangster angled away from the main gate and Alvin followed him, trying to act more casual now.

Once they were in the grassy shadows away from the big crowds, Chester stopped and gave the farm boy a once-over. “Say, kid, you're looking a little giddy around the gills. You just get off the Whirly-Gig or something?”

“I ain't been nowhere at all,” Alvin answered, wondering how pasty he really looked. Was it so clear? He tried to stiffen up, act ace high like he knew Chester expected.

“Well, don't worry. We won't be here much longer.” Putting his back to the crowds at the showgrounds entrance, Chester told Alvin, “I got it all taken care of after supper. I doped out the plan with Lester over a couple of steaks, and paid a visit to Spud Farrell. He's got an office in the icehouse out by the trainyards. Not half bad for a dump like this. Back in Cicero, he was selling rock candy under a crumb box at the Starvation Army. Of course, now that he's a big wheel out here in hickville, well, some fellows seem to have it in mind these days to turn every square racket into a shakedown, I don't know why.” He stared Alvin straight in the eye. “Do I look like sucker bait to you, kid?”

“No.”

Chester smiled, then took a drag off the cigarette and exhaled into the cold breeze. “I guess good ol' Spud thought he could fry the fat out of us once we tipped over the joint, like he'd nabbed us jaywalking and was going to blow off to our mommies. I don't mind sharing the gravy train, but we haven't been dough-heavy all summer and everyone knows it. When I offered to kick in a third and he wouldn't give, I figured it was time to knock off the song and dance and tell him the bad news. He made a lousy choice. I'm letting you and Lester divvy up his cut.”