It struck her as she creaked her way down the stairs and saw Franklin, bloodless and lost, that the happiest presence at her wedding was Sir.
* * *
A half hour after the service Jane and Franklin boarded the coach waiting to take them to Washington.
“You’ve made me a beautiful promise today,” she whispered to him, so near he could taste her words. “Would you make me one more?”
“I can only know the answer if you ask me.”
“Will you promise to abstain?”
He blanched, and Jane interpreted him as understanding her to be speaking of sex.
“From drink,” she corrected.
Franklin was so happy not to have to debate his conjugal privileges that he promptly accepted. It seemed an easy vow to honor. He liked whiskey, and imbibed it publicly with political men and clients from time to time. In private, he kept a bottle in his office to dull the longest days. But Franklin wasn’t his father. Drink was something he could walk away from if he chose.
“Soon,” she said, offering her hand to be held.
He didn’t know what she was referring to exactly—the start of their married lives, their bed, the arrival of children—but all of it delighted him. He took her hand. So wonderfully small in his.
Franklin knocked his fist against the carriage’s ceiling and the coachman click-clicked the horses into motion. With her free hand, Jane waved out her window facing the road, and he did the same toward those who remained standing on the porch. It was then that he saw a strange thing.
Next to his father stood a younger man he hadn’t noticed at the wedding. In fact, it was someone he was sure he’d never seen before in his life. Tall, straight, his skin shining as if from some internal fire that emitted gray light but mostly smoke. His suit well pressed but plain, like an undertaker before he’d had a chance to put on his vest and tie. The features of his face individually fine—the word lovely came to Franklin—but together had the appearance of a mask designed to hide some wriggling horror beneath it.
Franklin’s hand froze. His father didn’t look his way. It may have been from too many glugs from his flask, or perhaps the bittersweetness that was visiting him upon witnessing his son’s last step into manhood, but Franklin had the distinct impression that he was ill. Lost. His decades of self-certainty bled out of him from his contact with the stranger, whose arm, Franklin saw, lay resting over the old man’s shoulders.
A moment on and the carriage was wheeling distance between themselves and the wedding party, turning his father and the others on the porch and the roadway into porcelain miniatures. Yet he was sure of it nonetheless. Before they were around the first bend and the Amherst house was swept out of view, Franklin saw that the only one still waving at him with his swan-white hand was the stranger.
15
In the morning, once Franklin had left her with a kiss to her forehead, Jane returned to her room on the residence’s second floor to write a letter to Kate Fox. A request to know the girl’s interpretation of the previous night’s events.
“My curiosity is greatest,” Jane wrote, “concerning the word you uttered in the midst of the queerness. Or was it a name? I heard it as Splitfoot.”
Three days passed. Jane supposed she would never hear from either of the Foxes again. And then Hany brought an envelope that hadn’t come by regular mail, but was hand delivered by a boy who’d been given a dollar to do it.
Dear Mrs. Pierce—
I have read your letter several times. I have also thought about the night at the mansion more times still. There is so much to say, yet great difficulty on my part to find a way to say any of it. I will try. For you. But also for the good of the country, given your husband’s position and the grave possibilities that have come into it.
We are much alike, Mrs. Pierce. I don’t know the precise nature of what we share, but I write in the anticipation that you will recognize the unwanted gifts of my life as something also bestowed upon yours.
I will tell you a story.
I had a secret friend as a child. This was back in Hydesville, a fine enough place but of no significance whatever. Many children have imaginary playmates—a talking dog or guardian angel who fades away as the years pass and reality finds a firmer footing in their lives. In my case, the friend never went away.
It wasn’t a fellow child or singing pony. It was a man. His skin so white it appeared to be brushed with flour. Eyes a color that could be seen but never recollected the moment you looked away. His voice was low and dirty and made you feel low and dirty too. He said he would be the only friend I would ever need. He said he’d never leave me, and in truth, up til the other night, he never has.
He first came to me when I was five years old. I was playing with a dead bird the cat had brought to the door. It’s a stupid thing to think of now, but I was stretching its wings out, trying to help it fly again. This was behind our house, my older sisters arguing inside, so they hadn’t yet noticed what I was doing.
I heard something. Like somebody had whistled a note on a bent flute. I looked up and a man stepped out from behind the big oak at the back of the yard.
“Hello, Katie,” he said. “Do you like that bird?”
I said that I did. He said the mean kitty killed the bird and that maybe it was the mean kitty that should be dead.
These were strange things to say to a child, but he said them so naturally it seemed honest and fine. It was later that I realized that what he was saying was exactly what I had been thinking to myself.
I asked his name.
“Mr. Splitfoot,” he said.
When he didn’t join me in laughing I became frightened for the first time. He asked what was funny, and I said the name he’d given himself was the nickname for a demon. Other children had been given thrashings by their fathers just for saying it aloud.
“It’s only a word. What harm can come from saying a thing? The truth is in what you can see. Look at me. Do I not look more like a man than a devil?”
I told him he looked like a very nice man. What I didn’t say—what I couldn’t say, Mrs. Pierce—was that a nice man is just what a demon might try to look like if he was to visit a little girl and tell her he would never leave her. I thought to point this out but worried it would make him angry, and although he was as calm as a surgeon, I didn’t want him to be angry.
I swear to God I knew one thing. He could do things. Awful, amazing things.
Like that time in the backyard.
Before he stepped behind the oak tree again, he whispered something I couldn’t hear. And when the whispering was done, the dead bird flapped its wings.
It was alive once more! It hopped and thrashed away, bitterly tweeting. I watched it throw itself into the hedgerow. In its broken state, it would soon be food for a fox or possum or the cat.
It was brought back just to die again, a worse death the second time. He could do that, but he couldn’t do the beautiful thing. He couldn’t make it fly.
He came back many times over the next years. Sometimes he had something to tell me, other times it was only to watch me.
When I was nine, Mr. Splitfoot told me what the dead were saying from the other side. The raps and knocks act came later. For that’s what it was—what it is. An act. Maggie’s invention. We both have ankles and toes that can make loud cracks with the merest adjustment, and my sister proposed we employ the talent to play tricks on our neighbors.