NE CADANT IN OBSCURUM
NE CADANT IN OBSCURUM
(First published in the British magazine Postscripts, 2010)
This is how the story ends:
There is a farmhouse, tucked into a fertile river valley in Ohio.
On a hot summer evening, dark clouds build behind the northwestern hills, then spread south and east over expanses of corn and beans. Distant arcs of lightning announce the thunder, flash and sound separated by several seconds, but growing closer together as the storm advances. The rain starts as slow fat drops that splat on the rutted dirt lane. It falls harder, heavier, faster, until it pummels the ground so viciously that the drops are shattered into pinprick mist and thrown back upward. Next comes the hail, chunks of ice the size of silver dollars, pounding buckboards and breaking twigs from the trees. There’s no wind, not yet.
As quickly as it begins, the hail stops. The rain stops. The lightning and thunder stop. The clouds directly above assume a churlish green hue, although a gap has now appeared at the horizon where the setting sun peers through. The air has almost a gassy smell. In ominous silence the rotating cloud base lowers, and from that bulging underbelly a slender finger spirals gracefully downward. It grazes the fields, churning up mud and crops and whistling like steam from a teapot. The sound grows louder, deepens. Now it’s a train, now a hundred trains approaching on converging tracks. The sinewy funnel is strangely beautiful, backlit by the sun, its narrow edges limned by fire.
The occupants of the farmhouse are distracted by fiddles and clapping and dancing and, in one dark corner, planning and plotting. They don’t notice the danger, not the rain or hail, not the train sounds. The whirlwind takes the shuttered windows first, which gets their attention but too late, too late. The wood shingles go next, then the entire roof. Without the roof, the walls cannot hold, and they explode inward. The storm tosses the broken frames of two buckboards onto the foundation, and a tree onto the buckboards. Luckily, the horses are in the barn, which escapes the maelstrom’s fury.
Within the house, delicate china and framed photographs are left miraculously untouched while the wood-burning stove is ripped from the floor and hurled into a field of corn. Only one of the fifteen people present survives to tell the tale.
This is how the story ends.
****
Inside a music hall, faded velvet curtains have been pulled back to frame the stage in red. An old upright piano abuts the back wall. No one is playing its chipped ivory keys today. A man prepares to address an audience from behind a podium. Middle-aged stoutness strains against the buttons of his vest. He adjusts his string tie, then his reading glasses. “Religion,” he says, “manufactures narrative out of empty air. It draws straight lines between disparate and incongruous points.”
He’s a courageous man, I’ll give him that, making this claim, to these people, on this day. It is Good Friday, after all. His opponent is an old-time country preacher, a living cliché right down to his black suit and worn bible. The preacher fidgets on a chair to the speaker’s left, waiting his turn. He knows the sympathies here lay squarely with the Lord. Folks are being surprisingly polite now, though, with only moderate grumbling and baring of teeth. The hallelujah and pillory session will start later.
An old farmer in the next seat nudges me with his elbow. He smells of rusted plows and hard work. A woman with leather-tanned skin sits at his right side. “Do I know you, ma’am?” the farmer says. “You with that feller up there?”
“No,” I say, smoothing some imaginary wrinkles in the ridiculous calico dress I’m wearing, “just passing through.”
“We wouldn’t’ve come, but we told the Reverend we would. How ’bout you?”
“I thought it sounded interesting.” Actually, I’m not sure why I’m here.”
“What’s your name?”
The leathery woman must be his wife. She squeezes his arm and whispers, “Henry, let the lady be.”
“It’s all right, ma’am,” I say. “My name is Anna.”
Henry touches his forehead as if tipping a hat. “Pleased to meet you.”
The speaker at the podium pounds his fist into his palm as he makes a point. “The great conflict between North and South is nearly over,” he says, his voice rising in mock evangelical fashion. “We have seen good and evil at work in our lives. It does not emanate from above, or from below, or from without. It resides nowhere but within the hearts of men. Religion imposes false grandeur on small things.”
The preacher smiles grimly and scribbles a note in his bible, the chapter and verse of his rebuttal.
“You got somebody in the War?” Henry says to me. “Sweetheart, brother, papa?”
“No, luckily, I don’t.”
“Well, ain’t that somethin’? Most ever’body does. Our boy was with Sherman in Georgia. ’Spect he’ll be comin’ home soon. Got a letter from him just … when was it, Mother?”
The wife shakes her head sadly. “We got a letter. Not from him. Our boy ain’t comin’ home.”
“Is so,” Henry mutters, his eyes suddenly glassy and fixed on the floor.
“I’m sorry,” I say. I stand up, a sense of tragic familiarity pressing in on me. “Excuse me.”
“Ma’am?” the farmer says.
I retreat up the aisle toward the door. The hall is only half full, common folk in work clothes, bankers in bow ties and their petticoated wives, a few young men in tattered Union blue, and, surprisingly, a family of recently emancipated slaves. Faces turn to me as I pass, approving. They, too, wish they could walk out on this nonsense, but they promised the preacher.
****
A nine-year-old girl in a lacy white dress sits primly in a Catholic church in Parker, Wisconsin. Her name is Anna. She has no family to hold her hand during the Requiem Mass. How brave she is trying to be. Two hearses wait outside to carry her parents away to dwell with the saints in darkness. It was a car accident, a missed stop sign. I see her, I see myself, as if I were watching from a dream, from outside the boundaries of this earth. This is 1958, just before Vatican II. Everything is still in Latin. Even at her young age, the girl knows all the verses and their English translations. At this far remove, the one that especially sticks in her mind, in my mind, is:
Libera eas de ore leonis Deliver them from the jaws of the lion,
ne absorbeat eas tartarus, lest hell engulf them,
ne cadant in obscurum; lest they fall into darkness;
Sed signifer sanctus Michael but let the holy standard-bearer Michael
repraesentet eas in lucem sanctam Lead them into holy light …
Ne cadant in obscurum. Lest they fall …
Since then I’ve often felt as if I live under a sphere of darkness, a streetlamp that casts not light but shadow. Only time can lead me to holy radiance, but time is no angelic flag waver. It’s a Trickster, a laughing Coyote which lacking mind nonetheless has purpose. I move, and forget in the direction of the movement. Go forward and I can’t foresee the path, go back and I can’t remember it. The future in the past is unknowable until it happens. The past in the future is learned from books, but the relevant threads are always absent when it’s most important to recall them. It’s an ongoing cycle of forgetting and remembering and forgetting that I remember.
It’s time toying with me. Memories are not restored until it’s too late, or too early, to do anything about them. I affect nothing, I change nothing. I experience history, but only as a spectator, with neither foreknowledge nor recollection of the now, whenever now is. As soon as I stop to witness I become part of the scenery.
That little girl in the white dress grows up. She moves on. She goes from family friends to orphanages to foster homes, from school to school. She never bothers with playmates because she’ll lose them anyway. Nothing is constant but the words in books. She hoards knowledge as if she is the last repository of the world’s memory. It’s all interesting, but in a life where her only lights have been borne off to the saints, she withdraws, she becomes sullen. And when Vietnam begins, when the assassinations come, when Watergate shames a nation, when Three-Mile Island reminds us to be humble before the power of the atom, she allows herself to be seduced more and more by thoughts of war, and murder, and storms, and dark things …
****
It’s Good Friday, a warm and sunny April morning. Dogwood trees are in bloom. The fragrance of garden flowers almost cancels the stench of horse droppings. Soldiers are trickling back into the city, exhausted, elated. Five days ago Lee accepted Grant’s terms of surrender at a home in Appomattox Courthouse.
I’m thinking of a similar home, not Appomattox, but a farmhouse from a story my parents told me when I was a child. The memory is incomplete now, but momentary images still peer through: a valley, a whitewashed house and red barn, fields of corn and beans. Inside there is music, dancing. One wall is lined with picture frames displaying black-and-white photos of children living and dead.
They used to photograph dead children. I shudder.
“By a single stroke of grace,” my father said the last time he told the story, “was our family line continued. It was the hand of God reaching down to preserve the future.” Two days later he missed a stop sign, and his future was over.
I turn right onto 10th Street. Brick and wood buildings line both sides. Even now they look old and dilapidated: boarding houses, saloons, a theatre with a placard advertising the actress Laura Keene. A soldier whistles at me, a horse whinnies, a dog barks. Across from the theatre is a house with rooms to let. In this place and time it’s improper for a woman to travel alone, but in my innocuous calico dress surely I look like any one of tens of thousands of war widows. Still, the lady inside, someone called Mrs. Peterson, is suspicious that I intend to employ the room for immoral purposes.
“I’m not a whore,” I protest, but she turns me away.
“Only a whore would use the word ‘whore,’” she adds, apparently unaware of the inherent implication of that statement.
When I come out of the house it’s raining and a week earlier. The city is abuzz. There are rumors that Lee might surrender.
****
Sometimes it seems as if I’m remembering someone else’s life, but it’s so clear in my mind, this past that is yet to come.
Anna extricates herself from the arms of her lover, and I can still feel his sticky sweat, hear his piggy snores, smell his rancid breath. They’re sharing a mattress in a Hollywood dive in February 1922. Morning sun sluices in through holes in the window shade. Yesterday’s newspaper is on the nightstand—perhaps scandal sheet is a better term. Anna doesn’t turn on the light. The headline is in big block letters. Two days ago the moving picture director William Desmond Taylor was murdered.
“It happened again,” she says, tossing the paper down. The floor is already cluttered with empty bottles, dirty clothes, boxes of junk, food crumbs, and skittering roaches. Of course, now she remembers, two days too late. Damn the Trickster.
Her lover is a two-bit wannabe actor who was once onscreen briefly as an extra in a one-reel comedy. He is drunk and hopped up on reefer. He grunts once, makes a burbling sound, opens his eyes. He tries to hook an arm around her but misses. “Huh?”
“Go back to sleep.”
“No, I’m list’nin’, baby. What d’you say?”
She has so few people besides herself that she can talk to, tell things. She’s careful to keep her secrets, the world’s secrets, the ones she can remember—not that time would let her give away anything important anyway—but this man is too wasted to understand what she says, so he’s safe. “I wanted to find out who killed the Dahlia in 1947, but I overshot the date by a few days.”
“What’s a Dahlia?”
Anna sits up and dangles her feet over the edge of the bed, her back to him. She is still naked. “Nickname of a girl. Someone cut her in half, then brought her body to an empty lot on South Norton here in Hollywood. The murder has never been solved.”
Her lover pulls himself up to his elbow. “Cut her in half? In Hollywood? I oughta’ve heard ’bout that.”
“It was January 15, 1947. I couldn’t save her, because she’d been missing for a week, and history never recorded where the murder happened, but I thought I could at least give her justice. I meant to be in the lot that morning to see who put her body there so I could tell the police. But then I overshot the date, got there too soon, and couldn’t remember why I’d come. I know now, but in 1947 I didn’t know any more about what was going to happen than the people living then. I didn’t realize there was a Dahlia, or that I needed to go to the lot, until after it happened. Whatever sick bastard did that to her got away with it and will always get away with it. I can never seem to hit on the right date.”
“The hell you talkin’ ’bout, 1947? Nineteen-forty-seven?”
“One nine four seven, yes. Who can I warn now? She won’t even be born for two years. They’ll put me away if I come to them with a story like that—pretty, sad girl’s going to be butchered in 1947 and left in a field.”
The man laughs, collapses onto his side. “You kill me, baby. You can see the future, why not do somethin’ useful with it? Who’s gonna win at the track today? Chaplin ever gonna hire me?”
“Shut up. It doesn’t work that way.”
“You whooshed in here, why not just whoosh on back to 1947?” He’s laughing so hard now Anna thinks he might pass out. She hopes he does.
“I can’t,” she says, “except the same way you do: day-by-day. By then I’ll be twenty-five years older and will have forgotten, again, what I was there for. Time is like that. I probably came here thinking I could solve Taylor’s murder, too.”
“I saw him on a set once, him and his hoochy-koo, Mabel Normand. Goodbye, I say. Asshole didn’t hire me, either. I gotta pee.” Her lover stands up, scratches himself. He takes a half-smoked marijuana cigarette from the chair on his side of the bed and offers it to her. “Have some reefer. Or a story like that, maybe you already did …”
Anna watches him lumber toward the toilet, and I watch with her. Anna, I remember saying in her mind, how on earth did you end up in bed with that?
****
It’s March 1865, and the war is going well for the North. Near the White House I and the man escorting me see the President and Mrs. Lincoln out for a carriage ride. The President’s face is so care-worn, and yet, today, from my brief glimpse, he looks almost peaceful. Perhaps his burdens have been eased by promising news. He smiles at his wife and pats her gloved hand. My companion tips his hat stiffly as the carriage passes. I wave. The President doesn’t notice, but Mrs. Lincoln gives me a stern look.
I’m now wearing petticoats and lace. I don’t recall changing clothes, but then I never do.
“He means to make citizens of niggers,” my companion says. I don’t know his name. “Is that what this war is for?”
The Anna from 1922 whispers in my ear, Yes, well, where did you get this one? I jerk my hand away from the man’s elbow. “I hate that word. Mr. Lincoln has a wonderful vision.”
“A vision, is that what it is? I call it treason. I’m afraid, madam, that this is where you and I part company.”
He brushes the sleeve of his topcoat where my fingers had touched the material, as if cleansing it of contagion, then marches off in the direction opposite that of the carriage.
Where did I get this one? If my jumps are too small, I can’t know what I might have done, or who I might have met, last week. Did I sleep with him, too? Anna is laughing.
The President’s carriage crests a hill and disappears into a fine spring afternoon. Earlier this month he gave his stirring second inaugural speech. I realize there are blind spots in my understanding, events I cannot know because the knowing has potential to change the thing known, but what magnificent, hopeful words they were! Words to carry the nation through the war and his second term. They’ve already been reprinted all in the newspapers.
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
I allow myself a moment of optimism. I would have to stop my sojourn and live my days and years forward to see the war through to its end, but reading those words, I feel confident that the North must have won, and that the South was accepted back into the Union with the grace and mercy that Mr. Lincoln wanted.
****
But in truth, optimism rarely enters Anna’s thoughts. Why the allure of darkness? she wonders. Why the song of death? Is it the loss of her parents, of my parents? The upheaval of the sixties, the rebelling against traditional values? Is it loneliness, bitterness, or simply a seeking out of the pain of others, pain worse than her own? Perhaps it’s no more than morbid curiosity.
Anna, you cannot know, I remember telling her, but it doesn’t stop her from trying. It doesn’t stop me. It never has.
Having learned her lesson in 1947 and 1922, she leaves reminder notes in her pockets and heads for the East End of London in early November 1888, chasing the holy grail of unsolved murders. By 1900 she’s changed clothes and the notes are gone, but she still remembers she needs to find Mary Kelly’s room at Miller’s Court in Dorset Street. Twelve years earlier, though, in different clothes still, she’s fending off amorous drunks in the rainy back alleys of the Minories, listening to horror stories about the Ripper, and wondering what the hell she’s doing in the slums of London.
Actually, with all the hysteria on the streets and in the papers, it’s pretty obvious why she’s come. She just doesn’t know when the next killing will occur. Without that information, she’ll just have to wait and see, like everyone else. This journey, like all the others, is useless.
It’s time to move on again. Her birth era is irrevocably lost to her now, except via the grave. Day-by-day from 1888, at her current age, she could reasonably expect to live until 1940 or so. She won’t be born until 1949. How odd her tombstone would look: born 1949, died 1940, aged 82.
There’s only one direction to go. She now remembers the events of 1922, and sees no reason to waste a normal life getting back to that. Her answer, if there is one, lies in the past.
****
Nothing is holding me to Washington, or 1865. I missed whatever it was I came here to learn, or solve, or prevent. Since I don’t know what that might have been, I don’t know how much I missed it by.
Nine years earlier, I meet some people, I make some friends, I find a cause.
The Kansas Emigrant Aid Company of Northern Ohio is plotting its strategy. Kerosene lanterns are hung from the ceiling rafters, throwing light, shadow, and fumes throughout the house. The furniture in the main room has been pushed out of the way to create a dance floor. A caller sings out the dance steps and a fiddler plays while four young couples, the future emigrants, promenade and allemande in celebration. A child named Josephine rocks in a chair and watches the festivities. She is fidgeting and pouting. Either she’s bored or she wants to join the dancers but has no partner.
In a corner of the room opposite the child, the Reverend John Lewis is speaking with much animation to myself, the banker Hancock, and the farmer Booker, who is little Jo’s father and, I believe, a distant relative of mine. I’m the only woman in the conversation, so my opinions are not strongly sought.
“We must prevent more bloodshed in Kansas,” the Reverend Lewis says.
“What for?” says Booker. “If the border ruffians have their way, they’ll kill every Free-Stater in Kansas, and the whole country’ll go over to slavery. Just see if it don’t! All we can do is flood the territory with our own people so there’s more of us than them. They kill one of us, we kill three of them.”
“Patience,” the Reverend says. “The Lord will aid us in our good work, but only if we avoid the path of violence. When Kansas and Nebraska become states, we must vote slavery out.”
“He’s right,” Hancock says to Booker. “I hear the New England Emigrant Aid Company has over twenty thousand settlers set to move west and vote for freedom when the time comes. We got to do our part, too. I’ll finance as many as I can.”
“You’re ‘flooding’ Kansas with four couples?” I say.
The men barely give me a glance. “Well, the ruffians ain’t gonna stop killin’ us just ’cause we stop killin’ them,” Booker says. “Eye for an eye, eh, Reverend?”
Jo climbs down from her rocker and approaches me. She tugs on my sleeve. “Miz Anna,” she says, “no one will dance with me.”
I’m irrelevant to the discussion with the men anyway. “I’ll dance with you, sweetie.” I pause, wondering if sweetie is a proper term of endearment here, or perhaps an anachronism that hasn’t entered the language yet. No one seems to notice.
I excuse myself.
She takes my hand and leads me toward the dance floor, stopping en route in front of some black-and-white photos on the wall. There are five of them, all children ranging from a few weeks old to toddlers.
“That’s me when I was little,” Jo says, pointing to the last photo. “The others’re my brothers and sisters. They’re dead now. Consumption, or somethin’. Mama died having me.”
I lean in for a better look. Her siblings’ eyes are closed. I step back, feeling something akin to horror.
“They were dead when the photographs were made,” Jo says solemnly. “It’s all Mama and Papa had to remember them by.”
The square dance caller starts a new song, accompanied by a lively fiddle. Lewis, Hancock, and Booker raise their voices loud enough to be heard over the music. The passions are so high, and not just here in Ohio. It’s the summer of 1856. Despite the Reverend’s commendable desire for a peaceful solution, Kansas is already bleeding hard, the two factions butchering each other over the right to own other human beings. There’s talk of a larger war, one that will engulf the entire country. There’s talk of secession. It’s a conflict virtually written into the Constitution by our Founding Fathers when they compromised over slavery.
“We may have to wait,” I say to Jo. “It’s a square dance, there’s only room for four couples.”
“That’s all right,” she whispers shyly, “I need to go outside first anyway.”
“You know where the outhouse is. You’re a big girl, you can go by yourself.” I open a shutter and look out. The sky has darkened in the northwest. “Hurry, it looks like it’s going to rain.”
“Can I pet the horses in the barn?” Jo says. Already she’s learned to use her pretty brown eyes to good effect.
I smile and pat her cheek. “Don’t be long. You owe me a dance.”
****
Anna has never wondered if there are others like her, others who can do what she does. Nor has she ever considered the mechanism of her travel. Call it God, magic, astral projection, desire, delusion, or pixie dust, it doesn’t matter. After more than two decades of drifting through her natural life as an orphan, always isolated, alone with her books, she discovers she can do it, and does. This is 1979.
The Dahlia in 1947 is not her first stop. Rural Parker, Wisconsin, calls her back, back to her parents, back to the car, back to that stop sign on a country road few people ever use. The date is March 19, 1958. All she wants, all she has ever wanted, is to find a way to say, “Dad, be careful, there’s a pickup coming.” She was in the car as a child but didn’t see the truck, either. Now, as an adult, when she knows it’s coming, knows it, she can’t get to where she needs to be. She overshoots the date and has no idea why she’s there. One moment it’s 1979, listening to disco and fretting about Three-Mile Island, and the next it’s 1958, hula hoops and bobby socks, and Elvis on the juke box. It takes her a long, long time to get her bearings, and when she does, March 19 has come and gone.
Anna has to read about her parents in the paper, and the little girl who survived. The words harrow her soul. It’s like experiencing the accident again, only from outside the car, watching, helpless as the driver’s door crumples inward against the passenger’s door, extinguishing her only lights in a tangle of metal. She replays it all in her head, and the worst of it, by far the worst, is remembering her horror when she awoke in the hospital and realized that, although her mother and father were dead, she was going to live.
Anna tries to get back to 1979, but quickly learns that pixie dust does not work in that direction. She lives forward a few months, then returns to March. She misses the date, and reads about the accident, and is devastated anew.
Time and again, live forward, travel back, live forward, travel back. Anna, Anna, I say, let them go. It’s more than you can bear.
Ne cadant in obscurum … There have been other deaths, other tragedies, millions she will never know about, but a few that she does. Maybe I can change one of those, I remember her thinking. Just one. Solve it, prevent it, avenge it, something. As if that will raise up her parents, as if that will restore to them a single moment in the light above the darkness, or lacking that, give substance to their passing.
Anna, I say, you’re trying to manufacture meaning out of randomness.
She’s seen photographs of the Dahlia, before and after. January 15, 1947. Pixie dust works in space, too. She’s in Hollywood but does not remember to go to the empty lot on South Norton.
****
Little Josephine Booker dashes from the outhouse to the barn just before the clouds unleash a torrent of rain and hail. The storm is very loud, and yet the caller calls, the fiddler fiddles, the dancers dance, and the men discuss, oblivious for the moment to the outside world. In spite of the passions and tensions afoot in the country, it is a time of joy. I turn from the window to observe them. The four young couples, with prosperous and safe lives in Ohio, will soon give up everything they have here for a dangerous frontier, risking hardship and death so that others will not be slaves.
It is a great cause, a noble cause.
But nature makes no distinctions between good causes and bad. I hear an ominous whistling outside, like steam from a teapot. I look out the window as a delicate funnel descends to earth. The roiling black mass scours the fields but bypasses the barn.
This is how the story ends, then. Perhaps time is not such a Trickster after all. Perhaps it has played us straight up all along: The future is yours, use it as you will, but the past is mine. It is a set piece. You can look but do not touch.
“By a single stroke of grace was our family line continued,” my father said two days before his death. Oh, yes, I remember it now, I remember it all, all the history, all the stories, all of my attempts to get back, back, back—to my parents, to victims who were not mine to save, to the darkness, and to my self.
Here is the calling I have heard every day since March 19, 1958.
What now? the Annas of my past future ask. I draw all the fragments of me into myself. That’s it, then, isn’t it? After every tragedy, every lost chance, every stagnant lover, every disappointment, the question is always, What now?
Watch, I say. Watch.
The shutters in the farmhouse’s windows blow in first, and then the screaming starts. Only one of the fifteen people present survives to tell the tale.
Requiescamus in pace, Anna.
I am not the one.
END