That was before the War. Before the War, progress on earth had seemed to model progress in heaven. This earthly Republic had grown not just richer but wiser; the principles of peace and loving-kindness would surely expand, following the railroad and the westward wagons. Unlike the Crows of Dar Oakley’s old demesne, the People who participated in the great sympathy knew what the Future was: It was land they were bound for, this land’s true reality, inside them now, outside them as well in times to come.
For all its justice, all its nobility, its necessity—as the President insisted—the War seemed to quench that progress, stifle sympathy in horror, bring back Death’s old dominion. If the true Republic that the fellowship of sympathy had envisioned could begin to advance again, those who had the talents and the will would have to steel themselves to suffering such as they could not before have imagined. Only by entering into the suffering of others with all their being could they free those whose dreadful deaths trapped them in the grief and horror in which they had died. That was what Anna Kuhn must have gained through Dar Oakley: a suffering like that of the mother of Jesus, like Jesus’s own in the dark of the Garden. If this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done. After that suffering came new power, caustic as lye to use; yet to use it was all that she and her sisters and brothers in spiritual science wanted to do for as long as it had to be done: to reach these souls, entangled in their deaths, and free them. For they are inhabiting felicity; they are standing in its environs; they just don’t know it:
Just beyond where the shadows are falling
Is a bright, summer land, ever fair
Surely the powers on the other side would be at the same work. Surely there would be great hospitals and sanitariums there, airy, clean, and temporary, like the ones built by the Sanitary Commission vastly multiplied. There salvation, incomplete at death, would be continued.
And the work of salvation there as here was a work of knowledge.
It didn’t matter that a loved one’s physical frame, the abandoned support of the soul, lay somewhere unknown, didn’t matter that his bones had no rest: that was what Anna Kuhn would tell the heart-shattered mothers in black bombazine who sat opposite her at the trembling parlor table. The soul had left all that behind, didn’t rest or want to rest. In the vastness of heaven the dead began a life busier than their lives on earth, and part of their business was reaching and guiding those still in the body. Every communication strengthened the bond between the living and the dead; it was a work with the same gravity, the same promise, the same wild successes and failures as the laying of the Atlantic cable, and just like that cable it canceled a gulf simply by crossing it. A bond that joined all places and persons in an immediacy that was not different from the instantaneous motion of electricity: an Alternating Current running through the whole extent of Spirit, which was likely infinite.
That’s how it felt, I think. That’s how it must have felt to them.
In the celestial system, however, sender and receiver weren’t so easily and surely joined as in the telegraph system. The chords of sympathy weren’t as certain; a call to that realm might reach many, or none—though the ones who responded to a call, who stepped forth, so to speak, from the murmur of voices indistinctly heard, almost always proved to be if not the one called at least one who knew that one or who agreed to seek for him: the child or brother of the one whose hands Anna Kuhn held.
A precious bit of a conversation I’ve found transcribed in a spiritualist pamphlet my mother preserved, taken down by I don’t know who, sometime in the late 1860s:
MRS. KUHN: Is there someone near? We welcome you. There is someone. There are voices.
VISITOR: Mrs. Kuhn, who speaks to you? Is it—
MRS. KUHN: Hush, I hear. Is it you, D—? Your mother is here.
VISITOR: Oh, oh, my child.
MRS. KUHN (possessed, a different voice): Mother? Is she here? Munny?
VISITOR: D—! His name for me. Oh darling.
MRS. KUHN (possessed): Munny, I am afraid. I cannot see.
VISITOR: Oh my lovey. (Weeps.)
MRS. KUHN: You need not be afraid. Where are you? Can you tell us where you are?
A pause.
MRS. KUHN (possessed): Cold. They are all dead, I know. There is a crow. Something presses me—yet I do not feel it. I feel nothing. I do not know where I may be.
VISITOR: Where is my boy? Ask him to tell me.
MRS. KUHN: Wait, have patience. (Listens.) D—, your Mother is here. There is love here. Yes. Soon you will have comfort.
VISITOR: Tell me what you hear, I beg you.
MRS. KUHN: Gone. I hear—Speak!—No, now silence.—No, don’t weep, he will return, I am sure. Come—
The transcript ends there.
There’s a poorly reproduced photograph, Anna in a straight-backed chair, hands folded in front of her. Her dress is, surely, black. She wears an odd pair of oval black glasses that I don’t think she wore in daily life—Dar Oakley would have noticed them. Her hair—it looks dark here, though it was always described as light—is sharply parted and tied back.
A Crow. I admit that I was startled to read that, and my eyes filled suddenly: the evidence of my friend there. It’s true, I thought; which of course isn’t proven by that. But if it is so?
One other thing: among the spirits who are reported in this cheap little pamphlet (half of it is missing) to have spoken with Anna more than once are an Indian chief and a monk. They both spoke to her in English—but maybe English is the language of heaven. Were a monk and an Indian reached, or did they reach Anna, because of the current that ran through Dar Oakley? Well, I don’t want to make much of this; it appears that a lot of mediums heard from Indians and conversed with them at length. And with George Washington, too, and Ben Franklin.
Enough.
What Anna Kuhn enjoined on Dar Oakley—what anyway he felt compelled to do for her sake—was to go as far as he could to find as many as he could who had died so hard: who were still at war, still untranslated. He was to sit with and listen to each one, because every story, every disaster, every death was different, and had to be experienced freshly if the medium—the coming word for those who stood at the juncture of currents, who both transmitted and received—were to help them make their way, take that single step toward the light.
For this, Dar Oakley became what no Crow had ever been: a night bird. The ones it was his remit to find could be seen in the day—he’d seen them in their numbers coming North, most often at dawn or evening, in fog or mist, as he had seen Anna’s husband and his brother. But they were more numerous at night, brighter against the dark world.