Lasher

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 pere, 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.”