“Go Down, Moses”

“Go Down, Moses” is a spiritual Michael Noonan invokes at two points in a sequence where the ordinary present gives way to an uncanny encounter with the past. First he sings it to an apparently empty house; later, seeing Royce Merrill’s cane on the bottom of the lake, he repeats the song’s opening words to the object as he recognizes that he has reached a time before Royce was born.

First Invocation

After writing names associated with the refrigerator messages, Michael puts them in a box and sets them beside other names connected to the cryptic directions to go down nineteen and ninety-two. He then sings, “Go down, Moses, you bound for the Promised Land,” to the empty house. The domestic scene seems to contain only Michael, Bunter, and the waggy clock—until he realizes that something else is present. The song thus falls at the threshold between a room that appears vacant and a presence that has not yet been explained.

The Song at the Lake

Later, Michael approaches a birch above the lake and looks into the water, expecting and fearing the drowned boy he has seen. The boy is absent, but a gold-headed Boston Post cane lies among the rocks, roots, and waterweed. White ribbons edged in bright red spiral around it. Recognizing it as Royce Merrill’s cane, Michael understands why Royce did not answer the telephone: Royce’s life is over, and Michael has come to a time before Royce was born in 1903.

Past Made Present

The repeated song marks Michael’s passage from uncanny signs in the present to the sensory world of an earlier time. After addressing the cane with “Go down, Moses” and “You bound for the Promised Land,” he walks toward music and the sounds of a fair: a barker’s cries, a steam-driven calliope, a striking game, a shooting gallery, guitars, and double bass. He recognizes that he is about to see Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops perform live. The refrain therefore accompanies not a return to safety, but an arrival in a past that has become immediate and physically accessible.