Zilpha Marsh tells her own story: one late-October afternoon in an empty country schoolhouse, she sits by a dying fire and idly uses a planchette. The name “Charles Guiteau” spells itself out, and when the spirit threatens to appear, she runs bareheaded into the dusk. After that, spirits swarm around her—Chaucer, Caesar, Poe, Cleopatra, Mrs. Surratt—bringing messages the town calls “mere trifling twaddle.” She shifts from eerie memory to wounded argument. Like adults simplifying talk for children, she says, people who lack her sight and vocabulary force her to sound foolish. The mood is autumnal and uncanny, but the real ache is isolation: Zilpha is trapped not just with spirits, but with a community that refuses to believe her.
Zilpha Marsh — Summary
At four o’clock in late October I sat alone in the country school-house Back from the road, mid stricken fields, And an eddy of wind blew leaves on the pane, And crooned in the flue of the cannon-stove, With its open door blurring the shadows With the spectral glow of a dying fire. In an idle mood I was running the planchette— All at once my wrist grew limp, And my hand moved rapidly over the board, ’Till the name of “Charles Guiteau” was spelled, Who threatened to materialize before me. I rose and fled from the room bare-headed Into the dusk, afraid of my gift. And after that the spirits swarmed— Chaucer, Caesar, Poe and Marlowe, Cleopatra and Mrs. Surratt— Wherever I went, with messages,— Mere trifling twaddle, Spoon River agreed. You talk nonsense to children, don’t you? And suppose I see what you never saw And never heard of and have no word for, I must talk nonsense when you ask me What it is I see!