“If that’s true,” Gilrein once challenged her, “his little hobby didn’t quite do the trick.”
“In the end,” she acknowledged, “I don’t think anything would have.”
In retrospect, it seems to Gilrein that Wylie had some difficulty directly approaching the subject of the Brockden family’s final days. But she found ways of chronically, if opaquely, alluding to it in a tone that suggested the clan’s horrific demise was somehow, two hundred years after the fact, her fault rather than the result of a man whose brain chemistry had become so unbalanced that he committed the most grievous outrage of all.
We rely on texts to tell us the story. Often, there’s nothing more to go on. And because there’s no alternative, no way to look back and capture our own perception of the truth, we elevate the texts to a level they may not deserve. We venerate them with our study. We consecrate them with the never-ending touch of our saliva-wet thumb. We come, finally, to accept them as more than a representation, a version, one version, of a long-lost reality.
But there were no historians nor anthropologists, psychiatrists nor pathologists present when Edgar Brockden, exhausted from the interminable suspension over his own unique abyss, let go of his ever-weakening hold on rationality and plunged down toward a chasm, a void, toward the mouth of Satan himself. There were no objective observers available to witness the last day. No one to give testament to the progression of facts, to construct a simple time line of fanaticism, delusion, hysteria, terror, and death. And in the absence of an eyewitness, we are left with a succession of theoretical accounts, some better than others and most agreeing on a few basic suppositions, but all of them, in the end, no better than a story. Of which, this is only one more.
We know for certain that on Palm Sunday of 1798, Governor Summer was visiting in Quinsigamond. We know that Governor Summer’s guest on his visit was Ambassador Peltzl, Emissary to the Court of St. Gotthard at Bratislava. We know that the Brockden family had been invited to dine with the governor and the ambassador at the Southwick Mansion. And we know that at some point that morning, Edgar Brockden announced to his clan that they would not be taking the carriage into the city to attend the dinner, but instead would celebrate “the new rites” in the family’s attic chapel. Lucy, though more concerned than ever about her husband’s obvious fatigue, the long nights spent in his chambers below the house, gathered the children without a word and followed the minister up the winding stairways to the top of the tower.
Upon entering the chapel, even the tykes must have been more shocked than amused to find the worship pews, which Brockden had spent weeks sanding and rubbing with oil, now lined with oozy layers of moss and mud, breeding ground for Brockden’s latest generation of vermis. Lucy’s reaction churned from disbelief to a righteous anger when she discovered the altarpiece similarly bedecked with a cover of damp topsoil and writhing with the tumultuous burrowing of countless parasitical vermicelli. To the fright of the little ones, she castigated her husband for this blasphemy, begged Brockden to clean up this insult to the bleeding heart of Jesus and pray for forgiveness, then ran back downstairs with Theo and Sophia.
Brockden didn’t come down until nightfall. His vestments were filthy with earth, his hair matted as if he’d used the worms’ habitat as a kind of pomade. But it was his face that betrayed the news that his condition had worsened rather than improved. His eyes seemed dislocated in their sockets, the muscles around them tight and trembling, the whites shot with branches of red and the pupils dilated into black wells. Lucy tried to pull off his garments, feel his skull for the fever, but he pushed her away. The children watched, holding each other and cowering under the table as their father slapped their mother brutishly across the face, bellowing, “Away from me, demon,” calling his wife “King Mab,” and launching into a screaming barrage of what sounded like some derivation of Latin, but could just as easily have been the nonsensical gibberish of a mind fallen beyond the community of language.
Lucy fell by the hearth and managed to grab a poker which she brandished against this raving stranger as she instructed the children to run to their rooms and block their doors. Brockden made at least one charge at her. Lucy screamed for God’s mercy and stabbed her husband in the area of the groin, slightly piercing a thigh, but causing the madman to retreat into the cellar hole and crawl down among his books and curving tunnelways.
No one has a completely reasonable explanation as to why Mrs. Brockden didn’t then retrieve the children, take the horses and flee into Quinsigamond for aid. There is a stodgy group of traditionalists who insist that a woman of faith could not abandon her husband in what was clearly his darkest hour. But a new generation of feminist readers has proposed the theory that it was the homestead Lucy refused to give up, that she had suffered and slaved as much as Brockden for their City of Words and wasn’t about to turn it over to a delusional louse with a new enthusiasm for glossolalia and spousal abuse.
Whatever the case, she hovered between the children and the cellar hole, trying to simultaneously calm little Sophia’s panic and guard against the return of the monster who resembled her once-loving husband. Brockden did not return to the house proper that night and one can only imagine the long hours Lucy spent seated before the cellar door with, perhaps, her husband’s own hunting musket across her lap.
Very likely, it was sometime after dawn that she ventured down into the labyrinth. Though fear and sleeplessness turned her once-beautiful script into a nearly illegible mess, her journal entry for that day seems to describe finding Brockden before one of the bookbinding altars, his lantern long burned dry, working in the dark, attempting, by touch alone, to create a simulacrum of a book made from a combination of worm-mash and random pages from his dream journals. The fury and wrath had vanished from the man, but now he seemed, as his wife phrased it, “a ghost unto himself. He would not answer my calls, would not deem to look my way. I do not believe Edgar heard my voice fill the small space between us. Pray God he is not lost to us again.”
Dozens of articles have been written concerning Lucy’s use of the word “again.” The majority of Brockdenites interpret the usage as a reference to Brockden’s attack of the previous day. Others choose to believe something much darker about the nature of everyday life within the Brockden clan. Ultimately, we are left with two final artifacts. There is Lucy’s last journal entry from the morning of Good Friday, a single cat-scratch line which reads, “He speaks again, asking us, on this darkest of days, to join him below in prayer to the Redeemer for deliverance from the house of evil.”