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"Me neither," I said aloud and she said:
"Never scorn it. It will hate you for that. Look away always when you see it."
Like hell, I thought, but I didn't confess it.
It wasn't more than a month after that that she died.
I was out in the swamps with Octavius. We had run away to live in the wild like Robinson Crusoe. We had docked our little flat-bottomed boat and had made a camp, and while he gathered wood I tried to make fire with what we already had, and was having no success at it.
When suddenly, the kindling in my hand leapt into flames, and I looked up and what should I see but Marie Claudette, my beloved grandmother, only looking more splendid and vigorous than she ever had in old age, with full, rosy cheeks and a beautiful soft mouth. She picked me up off the ground, kissed me and then set me down, and she was gone. Like that. And the little fire was blazing.
I knew what it meant. Farewell. She was dead. I insisted we go back to Riverbend immediately. And as we drew closer and closer to the house, we came into a heavy storm, and had, at last, to run through the water, against a fierce wind filled with leaves and debris and even sharp stones, until we came to the gates, and the slaves ran to shelter us with blankets.
Marie Claudette was indeed dead, and when I sobbed and told my mother how I knew, I think for the very first time in her life, she actually saw me. I had been a cuddly thing, of course, but in that moment, she spoke to me not as one does to a dog or a child, but as to a human being.
"You saw her and she gave you her kiss," she said.
And then right there in the sickroom, with everyone sobbing and the shutters banging in the wind, and the priest in a state of terror, the damned fiend appeared over my mother's shoulder, and our eyes met, and his were soft with a plea, and filled with tears for me to see, and then of course, like that, he vanished.
That's the way my own tale will end, don't you think? You will tell the final words. "Then Julien vanished." And where will I be? Where will I go? Was I in heaven before you called me here, or in hell? I am so weary I don't care anymore and that is perhaps a blessing.
But to return to that long-ago noisy moment when the rain was blowing in, and my grandmother lay neat and small on the bed beneath layers of pretty lace and my mother, gaunt and dark-haired, stared at me, and the fiend behind took the form of a handsome man, and little Katherine cried in the cradle--it was the beginning of my true life as my mother's cohort.
First, after the funeral and the burial in the parish cemetery--we Catholics never had cemeteries on our own land, but only in consecrated ground--my mother went mad. And I was the only witness.
Halfway up the stairs, coming home from the graveyard, she began to scream, and I rushed behind her into her room before she bolted the doors to the gallery. Then she gave one aching cry after another. All this was grief for her mother, and what she had not done, and had not said, but then it passed from grief into great wild anger.
Why could this spirit not prevent death? "Lasher, Lasher, Lasher." She caught up the feather pillows from the bed and ripped the cloth and strewed the feathers everywhere. If you've never seen such a spectacle, you might rip up such a pillow and give it a try. There isn't anything quite like it, and she tore up three pillows in her rage, and soon the entire air was full of feathers and in the midst of them she screamed, and looked more miserable and forlorn than any being I have ever beheld in all my little life, and soon I began to weep helplessly.
She held tight to me; she begged my forgiveness that she'd shown me such a sight. We lay down together and finally she cried herself to sleep, and the night descended upon the plantation, which, in those days of precious few oil lamps and candles, brought everything to an early halt, and finally only silence.
It must have been past midnight when I awoke. I don't recall the face of the clock; only the feeling of deep night, and that it was spring and that I wanted to push through the netting which surrounded our bed and walk outside and talk to the moon and stars for a while.
Well, I managed to sit up and there before me was the thing itself, sitting on the side of the bed, and it reached out its white hand for me. I did not scream. There was no time. For all at once I felt the stroke of its fingers on my cheek and it felt good to me. Then it seemed the air around me made a caress, and the thing, having dissolved, was kissing me with invisible lips and touching me and filling my body with whatever pleasure it could feel at so young an age, which, as you probably remember, was something!
After it was finished with me, and I lay there, a little puddle of baby juice beside my mother's sleeping body, I saw it materialize again, this being, standing by the window. I climbed out of bed, weak and confused by the pleasure I'd felt, and went towards it. I reached out to take its hand, which dangled at its side like a man's hand, and then it looked down at me and gave me its most tearful gaze and together we pushed the window netting aside and went out on the gallery.
It seemed to me that it trembled in the light, that it vanished some three or four times only to reappear, and then it died away, leaving the air very warm behind it. I stood in the warmth and I heard its voice for the first time in my head, its private confiding voice:
"I have broken my vow to Deborah."
"Which was what?" I asked.
"You do not even know who Deborah was, you miserable child of flesh and blood," it said, and went on with some hysterically funny pronouncement upon me that seemed made up of all the worst doggerel in the library. Mind you, I was nearly four by this time, and I couldn't claim to know poetry as anything more than song, but I knew when the words were downright preposterous. And the cunning laughter of the slaves had taught me this too. I knew pomposity.
"I know who Deborah was," I said, and I told it then the story of Deborah as told to me by Marie Claudette of how she had risen high, and then been accused of witchcraft.
"Betrayed by her husband and sons, she was, and before that, by her father. Aye, her father. And I took my vengeance upon him," it said. "I took my vengeance on him for what he and his ilk had done to her and to me!"
The voice broke off. I had the distinct feeling in my little three-year-old mind that it had been about to launch on another long song of rotten poetry but had changed its mind at the last minute.
"You understand what I say?" it asked. "I vowed to Deborah that I would never smile upon a male child, nor favor a male over a female."
"Yes, I know what you are saying," I said, "and also my Grandmamma told me. Deborah was born in the Highlands, a merry-begot, bastard child of the May revels, and her father was most likely the lord of the land himself, and did not raise a finger when her mother, Suzanne, was burnt at the stake, a poor persecuted witch who knew almost nothing."
"Aye," he said. "So it was. So it was! My poor Suzanne, who called me from the depths like a child who pulls a snake from a deep pond without knowing. Stringing syllables in the air, she called my name, and I heard her.
"And it was indeed the lord of the land, the chief of the Clan of Donnelaith, who got her with child and then shivered in fear when they burnt her! Donnelaith. Can you see that word? Can you make it in letters? Go there and see the ruins of the castle I laid waste. See the graves of the last of that clan, stricken from the earth, until such time as..."
"Until such time as what?"
And then it said nothing more, but went back again to caressing me.
I was musing. "And you?" I asked. "Are you male or female, or simply a neuter thing?"
"Don't you know?" it asked.
"I wouldn't ask if I did," I answered.
"Male!" it said. "Male, male, male, male!"
I stifled my own giggles at its pride and ranting.
But I must confess that from then on, it was in my mind both an "it" and a "he" as you can hear from my story. At some times it seemed so devoid of common sense that I could only perceive it as a monstrous thing, and at other times, it took on a distinct character. So bear with my vascillation if you will. When calling it by
name, I often thought of it as "he." And in my angry moments, stripped it of its sex, and cursed it as too childish to be anything but neuter.
You will see from this tale that the witches saw it variously as "he" and "it." And there were reasons.
But let me return to the moment. The porch, the being caressing me.
When I grew tired of its embrace, and I turned around, there was my mother in the doorway, watching all of this, and she reached out and clutched me to herself, and said to it: "You shall never hurt him. He is a harmless boy!"
And I think then it answered her in her head because she grew quiet. It was gone. That was all I knew for certain.
The next morning I went at once to the nursery where I still slept with Remy and Katherine and some other sweet cousins best forgotten. I could not write very well. And understand now on this point, many people in those years could read, but couldn't write.
In fact, to read but not to write was common. I could read anything, as I've said, and words like transubstantiation rolled off my tongue both in English and in Latin. But I had only just begun to form written letters with agility and speed, and I had a hell of a time recording what the fiend had said, but finally, asking, "How do you spell--?" of everybody who chanced to pass through the room, I got it down, exactly. And if you want to know, those words are still scratched deep in the little desk, a thing handmade of cypress which is in the far back attic now and which you, Michael, have touched with your own hands once as you repaired the rafters there.
"Until such time as..." Those were the words the fiend had spoken. Which struck me as powerfully significant.
I determined then and there to learn to write, and did so within six months, though my handwriting did not assume its truly polished form till I was near twelve. My early writing was fast and clumsy.
