Lasher

Twenty-three

AH, YOU CANNOT imagine the miracle of her voice, and how much I loved her, loved her completely whether she was Cortland’s child or not. It was a love we feel for those who are our own and like unto us, and yet too many years lay between us. I felt desperate and helpless and all alone, and when I sat down on the side of my bed, she sat beside me.

“Tell me, Evelyn, child, you see the future. Carlotta came to you. What did you see?”

“I don’t see,” Evelyn said in a voice as small as her round little face, her gray eyes appealing to me to accept and to understand. “I see the words and I speak the words, but I do not know their meaning. And long ago, I learned to keep quiet and let the words fade away unread, unspoken.”

“No, child. Hold my hand. What do you see? What do you see for me and my family? What do you see for all of us? Are we one clan with one future?”

Even through my tired fingers I felt her pulse, her warmth, the witches’ gifts, as we always said, and I saw that small, that evil sixth finger. Oh, I would have had it cut off, painlessly and with skill, if I had been her father. And to think that Cortland was-my own son. I meant to kill Cortland.

First things first. I held tight to her hand.

Something shifted in her perfect little circle of a face; her chin lifted so that her neck seemed all the more long and beautiful. She began to speak the poem, her voice soft and rapid, borne by the rhythm itself:

One will rise who is too evil.

One will come who is too good.

’Twixt the two, a witch shall falter

and thereby open wide the door.

Pain and suffering as they stumble

Blood and fear before they learn.

Woe betide this Springtime Eden

Now the vale of those who mourn.

Beware the watchers in that hour

Bar the doctors from the house

Scholars will but nourish evil

Scientists would raise it high.

Let the devil speak his story

Let him rouse the angel’s might

Make the dead come back to witness

Put the alchemist to flight.

Slay the flesh that is not human

Trust to weapons crude and cruel

For, dying on the verge of wisdom,

Tortured souls may seek the light.

Crush the babes who are not children

Show no mercy to the pure

Else shall Eden have no Springtime.

Else shall our kind reign no more.

For two nights and two days she stayed in this room with me.

No one dared to break in the door. Her great-grandfather Tobias came and threatened. His son Walker roared at the gate. I do not know how many others came or what they said, or even where all the quarrels took place. Seems I heard my Mary Beth screaming on the landing at her daughter Carlotta. Seems Richard knocked a thousand times, only to be told by me that all was well.

We lay together in the bed, the child and I. I did not want to hurt her. Nor can I blame on her what took place. Let me say we sank into the softest of caresses, and for a long time I cuddled her and sheltered her, and tried to drive away the deep chill of her fear and her loneliness. And fool that I was, I thought that in me, tenderness was now something safe.

But I was too much of a man still for anything so plain and simple. I gave her kisses till she knew she must have them, and opened herself to me.

Through the long night we lay together, musing when all the other voices had died away.

She said that she liked my attic better than her attic, and I knew in my sorrow that I would die in this room, very soon.

I didn’t have to tell her. I felt her soft hand on my forehead, trying to cool it. I felt the silken weight of her palm on my eyelids.

And the words of the poem, she said them over and over. And I with her, until I knew every verse.

By dawn, she did not need to correct me any longer. I didn’t dare to write it down. My evil Mary Beth will burn it, I told her. Tell the others. Tell Carlotta. Tell Stella. But my heart was so sick. What would it matter? What would happen? What could the words of the poem mean?

“I’ve made you sad,” she said gently.

“Child, I was already sad. You have given me hope.”

I think it was late Thursday afternoon that Mary Beth finally took the hinges from the door and opened it.

“Well, they are going to bring the police in here,” Mary Beth said by way of excuse, very practical and nondramatic. Her way of doing things.

“You tell them they can’t lock her up again. She’s to come and go as she wishes. You call Cortland now in Boston.”

“Cortland is here, Julien.”

I called Cortland to me. Stella was to take the child down to her own room and sit with her, and not let anyone take her away. Carlotta would be with them, just to make sure the girl was safe.

Now this son of mine was my pride and joy, as I’ve said, my eldest, my brightest, and all these years I had tried to protect him from what I knew. But he was too shrewd to be protected entirely, and now for me he had fallen off his pedestal and I was too angry not to judge him for what had become of this girl.

“Father, I didn’t know, I swear it. And even now I don’t believe it. It would take me hours to tell you the story of that night. I could swear that Barbara Ann put something in my drink to make me mad. She dragged me out into the swamp with her. We were in the boat together; that is all I remember, and that she was devilish and strange. I swear this, Father. When I woke I was in the boat. I went up to Fontevrault and they locked me out. Tobias had his shotgun. He said he’d kill me. I walked into St. Martinville to call home. I swear this. That’s all I remember. If she is my child, I’m sorry. But they never told me. Seems they never wanted me to know. I’ll look out for her from now on.”

“That’s all well and good for the fifth circuit court of appeals,” said I. “You knew when she was born. You heard the rumors. Make sure this child is never a prisoner again, you understand? That she has everything she requires, that she goes to school away from here if she wants to, that she has money of her own!”

I turned my back on them. I turned my back on my world. I did not answer when he spoke to me. I thought of Evelyn and how she described her silence, and it seemed an amusing power, to lie there and not to answer, to let them think that I could not.

They came and they went. Evelyn was taken back, with Carlotta and Cortland to speak for her. Or so I was told.

Only Richard’s crying broke my heart. I went away from it, deep into myself where I could hear the poem and say the phrases, trying vainly to figure them out.

Let the devil speak his story,

Let him rouse the angel’s might.

But what did it mean to me? Finally I clung to the last verse of it: “Else shall Eden have no Springtime.”

We were the Springtime, we Mayfairs, I knew it. Eden was our world. We were the Springtime, and the simple word Else meant there was hope. We could be saved somehow. Something could stop the vale of those who mourn!

Pain and suffering as they stumble

Blood and fear before they learn…

Yes, there was hope in the poem, a purpose to it, a purpose in its telling! But would I ever live to see the words fulfilled? And nothing struck such horror in me as that sentence: “Slay the flesh that is not human!” for if this thing was not human, what would its powers be? If it was merely St. Ashlar-but that did not seem so! Would it become a man when it was born again? Or something worse?

“Slay the flesh that is not human!”

Ah, how I troubled over it. How it obsessed my mind. Sometimes there was nothing in my mind but the words of the poem and feverish images!

I was senseless finally. Days passed. The doctor came. At last I sat up and began to talk so the nincompoop would leave me alone. Science had made great strides since my boyhood, but that didn’t prevent this knucklehead from standing over me and telling my loved ones that I was suffering from “hardening of the arteries” and “senile dementia” and couldn’t understand anything they said.

It was an absolute delight to rise up and order him out of the room.

Also I wanted to walk around again. I was never one for simply lying there, and this had been my worst hour, and it had ended and I was living still.

Richard helped me dress and I went down all the way to the first floor for supper with my family. I sat at the head of the table and made a great show of polishing off gumbo, roast chicken, and a boeuf daube or some other foolishness, just so they would leave me alone. I refused to look at Cortland, who tried again and again to speak to me. I was really making him miserable, my poor fair-haired boy!

The cousins gabbled. Mary Beth spoke of practical things with her drunken husband, Daniel McIntyre, poor old soul, now so sick he was a slovenly ruin of the fine man he’d once been. That’s what we did to him, I thought. Richard, my devoted one, kept his eyes on me, and then Stella said-Stella said that we should all go driving, since I was up again, and all right.

Driving, an escapade! The car was all fixed. Oh? I hadn’t known it was broken. Well, Cortland took it out…Shut up, Stella, it’s fixed, mon père, it’s fixed!

“I am worried about that girl!” I declared. “Evelyn, my granddaughter!”

Cortland hastened to assure me she was taken care of. She’d been taken downtown to buy clothes.

“You Mayfairs think that’s the answer to everything, don’t you?” asked I. “Go downtown and buy new clothes.”

“Well, you’re the one who taught us, Father,” said Cortland with a little twinkle in his eye.

I was amazed at my cowardice. How I gave in when I saw that affectionate little smile. How I gave in.

“All right, make the car ready, and all of you get out,” I said. “Stella and Lionel, we’ll go, the three of us, an escapade, you can believe it. All of you go. Carlotta, stay.”

She didn’t require coaxing. In a moment the vast dining room was still and the murals seemed as always to be closing in on us, ready to transport us out from under the plaster moldings and far away to the verdant fields of Riverbend which they so charmingly rendered. Riverbend, which by this time was gone.

“Did she tell you the poem?” I said to Carlotta.

Carlotta nodded. And very slowly, taking her time, she recited each verse as I remembered it.

“I have told it to Mother,” she said. This shocked me. “Lot of good that it did. What did you think would happen?” she demanded. “Did you think you could all dance with the Devil and not pay the price?”

“But I never knew for sure that he was the Devil. There was no God and Devil at Riverbend when I was born. I did the best with what I had.”

“You will burn in hell,” she said.

A bit of terror went through me.

I wanted to answer, to say so much more…I wanted to tell her all, or all of what there was, but she had risen from the table, thrown down her napkin as if it were a glove, and gone out.

Ah, so she told it to Mary Beth. When Mary Beth came to fetch me, I whispered those dreaded words:

“Slay the flesh that is not human…”

“Ah, now, darling, don’t fuss, please,” she said. “Go out and have a good time.”

When I came out onto the front gallery, the Stutz Bearcat was cooking and ready, and off we went, I and my little ones, Stella and Lionel. We drove past Amelia Street, but we did not stop to see to Evelyn, for we feared we would do more harm than good.

It was to Storyville, to the houses of my favorite ladies, that we went.

I think it was dawn when we came home. I remember now that night as distinctly as all else because it was my last in Storyville, listening to the jazz bands, and singing, and taking the children with me right into the fancy parlors of the brothels. Oh, how shocked were my lady friends! But there is nothing in a brothel that cannot be bought.

Stella loved it! This was living, cried Stella, this was life. Stella drank glass after glass of champagne and danced on her tiptoes. Lionel wasn’t so certain. But it didn’t matter. I was dying! As I sat in the cram-packed parlor of Lulu White’s house, listening to the ragtime piano, I thought, I am dying. Dying! And I was as self-centered about it as anyone else. The world shrank and revolved around Julien. Julien knew a storm was coming. And he could not be there to help! Julien knew all pleasure, adventure and triumph were over! Julien was going to be placed in the tomb like everyone else.

That morning when we arrived home, I kissed my Stella. I told her that it had been a grand occasion, and then I retired to the attic, certain that I would never leave it again.

I lay in the dark night after night, thinking. What if somehow I could come back? What if somehow I could stay earthbound as this thing has done?

After all, if it is Ashlar, one of the many Ashlars, a saint, a king, the vengeful ghost, a mere human-! The dark made noises back to me. The bed trembled. I thought of that verse again…the flesh that isn’t human.

“Have you come to trouble me or content me?” I asked.

“Die in peace, Julien,” he said. “I would have given you my secrets the first day I came with you to this house. I told you then that such a place could draw you out of eternity, that it was as the castles of old. Remember its patterns, Julien, its graceful battlements. And through the mist you will see them, distinct. But you would not have my lessons then. Will you have them now? I know you. You are alive. You didn’t want to hear about death.”

“I don’t think you know about death,” I said. “I think you know about wanting, and haunting, and living! But not death.”

I got out of bed. I cranked up the Victrola just to drive the thing away from me. “Yes, I want to come back,” I whispered. “I want to come back. I want to remain earthbound, to stay, to be part of this house. But God, I swear it, in my soul of souls, it is not greed to live again, it is that the tale is unfinished, the daemon continues, and I die! I would help, I would be an angel of the Lord somehow. Oh, God, I do not believe in you. I do not believe in anything but Lasher and myself.”

I started pacing. I paced and paced and played the waltz of Violetta, a song that seemed utterly oblivious to every kind of sorrow, something so frivolous yet so organized that I found it irresistible.

Then a moment came, so unusual as perhaps to have been unique. In all my long life, I had never been so caught off guard as I was at this moment, and it was by the face of a small girl at my window, a waif of a child crouched upon the high porch roof.

At once I opened the stubborn sash.

“Eve a Lynn,” I said. And perfumed, and soft, and wet from the spring rain, she came into my arms.

“How did you come to me, darling?” I asked her.

“Up the trellis, Oncle Julien, hand over hand. You have shown me an attic is not a prison. I will come to you as long as I can.”

We made love; we talked together. I lay there with her as the sun came up. She told me they were being kind to her now, letting her go places, that she walked in the evening all the way up the Avenue, and down to Canal Street, that she had ridden in a car again, that she had real shoes. Richard had bought her pretty dresses. Cortland had bought her a coat with fur on the collar. Mary Beth even had given her a silver-backed mirror and a silver-handled comb.

At dawn I sat up and cranked the Victrola. We danced to the waltz. It was a crazy morning, the kind of crazy morning that follows carousing and drunkenness and wandering from dance halls to taverns, yet it had all taken place in this room. She wore only her petticoat then, trimmed in pink lace, and a ribbon in her hair. We danced and danced about the room, giggling, laughing, until finally someone…ah yes, Mary Beth, opened the door.

I only smiled. I knew my angelic child would visit me again.

In the dark of the night, I talked to the Victrola.

I told it to hold the spell. Of course I did not believe in these things. I had steadfastly refused to believe in them. Yet now I pared my nails and slipped them in between the bottom wood and the side wood. I clipped my hair, and slipped that beneath the turntable. I bit my fingers and drew blood and smeared it into the dark stain. I made the thing like a doll of myself, like the witches’ dolls, and I sang the waltz.

I played the waltz and said, “Come back, come back. Be at hand if they need you. Be at hand if they call you. Come back, come back.”

I was possessed of a terrible vision, that I was dead and rising and the light was coming, and that I turned my back on it, and plummeted with my arms out, digging deep into an air which became thicker and thicker, as dense as it was dark. Earthbound. And it seemed the night was choked with spirits like mine, lost souls, fools, fearing hell, and not believing in Paradise. And the waltz played on.

I saw finally the futility of all these gestures, that witchcraft is but a matter of focus-that one can apply one’s fierce and immeasurable energies to an act of choice. I would come back! I would come back. I sang it out to the walls.

Come back.

Beware the watchers in that hour!

Yes, come back in that hour!

Else shall Eden have no Springtime.

Else shall our kind reign no more.

Michael, remember now all the verses I’ve told you.

Remember. See what they say! Michael, I tell you I would not be here if the battle were over. The hour we speak of is yet to come. You have used love, yes, you have done that and it was not enough. But there are other tools you can use. Remember the poem, “crude and cruel.” Do not hesitate when you see it. Do not let the goodness hold you back.

Why else have I been allowed to come here? Why else have I been allowed once more to hear that waltz beneath this roof? In a moment you must play it for me, Michael, my waltz, my little Victrola. Play it when I am not here.

But let me tell you now of the last few nights I remember. I’m growing tired. I can see the finish of these words, but not the finish of the story. That is yours to tell. Let me give the few words left. And remember your promise. Play the music for me, Michael. Play it, for whether I go to heaven or hell is not yet known by either of us, and perhaps never will be known.

It was a week after, that I gave the little Victrola to Evelyn. I had taken advantage of an afternoon when no one was about, sending Richard up to fetch her, and tell her to come as soon as she could. I had the boys bring up for me a large Victrola from the dining room, a sizable music box with a fine tone.

And then, when Evie and I were alone, I told her to take the little Victrola up home and keep it and never let it out of her hands till after Mary Beth was gone. I didn’t even want Richard to know she’d taken it, for fear he would blab to Mary Beth if she put the screws to him. I told Evie, “You take it, and sing as you walk out with it, sing and sing.”

That way, I thought, if Lasher were to observe her taking away this mysterious little toy, he would in befuddlement not attach any meaning to what he saw. I had to remember: the monster could read my thoughts.

I was desperate.

No sooner had Evie gone, her high singing voice dying away in the stairwell, than I wound the big new Victrola and called Lasher to me. Perhaps he would not heed her at all.

When he appeared, I appealed to him:

“Lasher, protect always that poor little Evie,” I said. “Protect her from the others, for my sake, will you protect that child.”

He listened as best he could with the music entrancing him. Invisible, he blundered about the room, knocking things from the mantel, rattling the framed pictures. Fine with me. It was proof that he was there!

“Very well, Julien,” he sang suddenly, appearing in the midst of a jolly dance, feet striking the boards with some semblance of weight and sound. What a smile. What a dazzle. How I wished for an instant that I had loved him.

And by that time, I thought, surely Evie is all the way home.

Weeks passed.

Evie’s liberation was now a fact. Richard often took her driving, along with Stella. Tobias took her regularly with him to Mass.

Evie came to me when she wanted, by the front door. But there were still nights when she chose the trellis, seeking me as if she were a fearless little goddess, and whipping my blood, with her courage and her own passion, to an obscene and delirious heat. We lay together for hours, kissing, touching one another. What a wonder that in my dotage I should be a skilled lover for one so young. I told her secrets, but only a few.

The gods had granted me that final pride.

“Julien, I love you,” said the crafty Lasher when he was about, hoping I would play the big Victrola, because he had come to love it so. “Why would anyone harm Evelyn? What is she to us? I see the future. I see far. We have what we require.”

When Mary Beth came home one afternoon, I sat her down beside me and vowed to her that I had told that little girl nothing of importance and that they must look out for her as the years passed.

Tears came into Mary Beth’s eyes, one of the few times I ever saw them.

“Julien, how you misunderstand me and everything that I have done. All these years, I’ve striven to bring us together, to make us strong in number and in influence. To make us happy! Do you think I would hurt a child that has your blood? Cortland’s daughter? Oh, Julien, you break my heart. Trust in me, that I know what I do, that I have done everything right for our family. Trust in me, please. Julien, don’t die in agitation and fear. Don’t let this happen to you. Don’t let the last hours be ugly with fear. I’ll sit with you night and day if I have to. Die calm. We are the Mayfair family…a million leagues from where we were at Riverbend so long ago. Trust that we shall prevail.”

Nights passed. I lay awake, no longer needing sleep.

I knew by this time that Evelyn carried my child. God gives no quarter to old men! We burn; we father. What a dreadful circumstance! But the girl herself did not seem to know. I did not tell her.

I could only trust to Cortland, whom I called to myself and lectured incessantly. I knew the feathers would fly, as they say, as soon as everyone knew Evelyn was pregnant. I could only trust to the edicts and pronouncements I had issued, ad nauseam, that the child must be protected no matter what happened as the years passed.

A night came on, peaceful, warm. It must have been midsummer when I died! Surely it was. The crape myrtles were full of pink blossoms. Surely I have not imagined such a thing.

And I had sent everyone away from me. I knew it was coming. I lay quiet on a heap of pillows looking out at the clouds above the crape myrtle.

I wanted to go back and back to Riverbend, I wanted to sit with Marie Claudette, I wanted to know, honestly, to know who had been that young man who kidnapped slaves and brought them to Marguerite’s chambers for her wild experiments? Who had been that thoughtless knave?

I lay there, and then a most dreadful truth seized me. A little truth, really. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t lift myself up. I could not make my arms obey. Death was stealing over me like a winter chill. It was freezing me.

And then, as if there were a God for raconteurs and lechers, there appeared Evelyn above the edge of the roof, her white hands on the green vines.

Up she came and across the porch top and I could hear her voice through the thick glass, “Open the window, Oncle Julien! It’s Evie, open to me.”

I couldn’t move. I stared at her, my eyes brimming. “Oh darling,” I whispered in my heart.

And then Evie called on her witches’ gifts, and with her hands and her gifts she sent the window rattling upward. She reached inside and took me by my shoulders, so frail and small I must have been by then. She brought me forward and kissed me.

“Oh darling, yes, yes…”

And beyond her, spreading out over the whole sky, the storm gathered. I heard the first raindrops strike the porch roof beneath her. I felt them on my face. I saw the trees begin to move in their fury. And I heard the wind, wailing as if he were wailing, lashing the trees and crying in his grief as he had on the death of my mother, and on the death of her mother.

Yes, it was a storm for the death of the witch, and I was the witch. And it was my death and my storm.