March, 1850
At night they would empty the schoolhouse of children and have me up upon the stage. The stage, in this case, was a dining room table pushed against the schoolhouse wall.
They brought in coal-lanterns and lined the walls with them so nothing would escape their eyes.
The chair that I sat in on top of the table was hard and high-backed to encourage my posture. Below the chair’s seat there were two pillows, on which they said to rest my feet.
The gentlemen lurked below the stage, some of them sitting and some of them standing. Certain of the standers had their hips tilted forward, their arms folded over their chests, their lips pursed.
“Permission to work the rap is granted,” said a man toward the front named Shadrach Barnes.
He was shaggy-haired and blond and big—a healthy urgent country dog.
He was also a Professor at the College of Troy. He had come all the way to Roundot just to meet me.
“Permission to work the rap,” he said, “has been granted the lady, assuming she’s able.”
He started to walk toward the head of the table, his stethoscope swinging on his chest. I let him get a foot away before I gave a single rap. He froze for a moment, assessing the sound, then began to come toward me again with new purpose. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, I rapped in succession to make him walk faster, though I’d rested the muscles in my feet before his hands could get at me.
“Do it one more time,” he said.
I shook my head that I would not.
“Surely, Miss Conant can give us reason explaining why she cannot rap.”
“The spirits won’t speak on command,” I explained. “The spirits resent such ultimatums.”
“The test conditions are not right?”
“The test conditions are too much.”
“The spirits are prone to stage-fright, then? The spirits are seized by performance anxiety? Why the spirits are not unlike an actress, struggling to recite her lines.”
“The spirits will not humour you if you persist in making fun.”
“The spirits will not or you will not?”
“The spirits respond through the medium, sir.”
“Not of, but through. Not will not, but cannot. Such muddy distinctions want candor, Miss Conant.”
At a loss, I shook my head.
“Confess then,” said Barnes, stepping back from the table, gesturing with the hand he’d withdrawn from my foot.
Q
The sessions went on for a week in that schoolroom. They happened long after the classes let out, somewhat past the supper hour. Shadrach Barnes was always there with the likes of the Minister Willets and others: a county judge, some aldermen, a man who’d gotten rich in coal.
Roundot was black with coal dust to the elbows. The mountains and gorges were crisscrossed with chutes. The lives of the miners, our fathers, were hard. Everyone had to do her part. I had heard of the raps from a friend of a friend, and that latter friend from the friend of another, the travelling word come down from Hydesville, courtesy of the sisters Fox.
The following sessions went much like the first. I sat there on the table on the chair beneath the pillow. People came to hear the rap, leaning in close at the top of the table. They leaned in and listened intently and long, like men listening for the sea in a shell. Some of them would smell the air, the space around my feet and legs, breathing in as much of me as decency permitted.
The men called themselves an “impartial committee”—convened in faith to break my will. Other girls who worked the rap had drawn other committees that went on for weeks but I was the first one in all of Roundot who had summoned a college professor from Troy.
Before the fourth session they took me to the basement of the school. A pack of women waited there. These were the wives of the well-to-do men heading up the inquiry. They guided me into a small anteroom that was furnished to look like a janitor’s bedroom and had me lie down on a small iron bed where they started to paw beneath my clothes. They were weak pecking hens and they found nothing on me. Two of them drifted away to report. When these two returned, they conferred with the rest, too far away for me to hear.
They said to wait there on the bed. The six or so women went upstairs.
Shadrach Barnes came through the door. He was in his shirtsleeves with the stethoscope hanging. He stood in the door peering at me intently before turning around to shoot the chain. At last he sat down at the end of the bed. All of me tensed at him being so near. The bed was child-sized, almost too short to hold me, even shorter with a body perched there at the end. He readied up his stethoscope. And then, gently, he found my heart. He listened a minute, moved down to my lungs.
He drove his hand between my legs.
I gasped at the pressure and tried to fold inward, my instinct to pull, to shrink away, but the strong hand continued to grope at my lap. I made a sort of whining sound I didn’t recognize as me, and again and again tried to jackknife my body against Barnes’ hands, which were holding me down. I slowly retreated from what was occurring, so queer and unreal it was happening to me. I tired of kicking out my legs and lowered them onto the mattress again. And I felt a sort of warming or a summons settle in beneath the terror and the shame. The mortification of this man, touching me where no one touched, where I had scarcely touched myself, not for never wanting to but rather because I had never known how. I hated the feeling and willed it away but it was like a far off bell—at once too faint to scrutinize and too persistent dismiss.
Shadrach did not make a sound. He seemed intent that I should feel him. He worked as if it pained him to—to cause me this, to cause on me.
Sharply, he removed his hand and folded it beneath his thigh.
“I allow that you’re clever,” he told me abruptly. “Cleverer than most, perhaps. But sure as I sit before you now, I am every bit your match.”
“You will find me out?” I said.
Shadrach Barnes did not respond.
“You will find me out,” I gasped. “Yes, you, good sir, will find me out. I suppose in the meantime that I’m not to speak of what you did to me tonight?”
I waited a moment for him to respond. Instead, he stowed his instruments and rose and drew his coat about him.
“Do you like it?” he said.
“I despise it,” I answered.
“Not me,” he said and spread his arms to take in the bedframe, the walls. “Your new room.”