Blackwood Farm (26 page)

“ ‘Imagine it, this poor girl from the Irish Channel in the dreamland of southern Italy, and think what it meant. It was there that Rebecca cultivated a love of cameos, apparently, as she had quite a collection when she returned, and it was then that she showed them off to Ora Lee and Jerome and their niece, Pepper, explaining all about “Rebecca at the Well,” the theme that was named for her, she exclaimed—poor creature. And ever after that she wore a cameo at her neck and earrings such as those you've found out there.

“ ‘Now, speaking of out there—right after their return from Naples Manfred took to spending more time in the swamps than ever before. And within months there came all the workmen from New Orleans and the deliveries of lumber and metal and all manner of things to make the notorious Hermitage on Sugar Devil Island—this place you've now seen with your own eyes.

“ ‘But as you know, Manfred paid off the hirelings when the secret place was completed, and he took to spending weeks out there, leaving Rebecca at home to fret and cry and pace the floor while my poor father—William—watched the woman change from pretty girl to banshee, as he put it to me later on.

“ ‘Meanwhile, it had become the scandal of the parish that Manfred kept Rebecca in his own bedroom—and that was your room, Quinn, the room with the front parlor to it; it became your room as soon as you were born. Pops, as you know, wants the back room upstairs so he can see out the back windows and keep an eye on the shed and the garages and the men and the cars and all that. So you inherited that front room.

“ ‘But I digress, and it will probably happen more than once. Now, let me see. We left Rebecca, with a cameo at her neck, in her fancy clothes, pacing the floor up there crying and murmuring for Manfred, who was gone for as long, sometimes, as two weeks.

“ ‘And, happy with his new retreat, he often took expensive provisions with him, while at other times he said he would hunt for what he ate.

“ ‘Now, it couldn't have been a worse time for her to do it, but Rebecca wanted Manfred to marry her—make her an honest woman as they used to say in those days, you know—and she told everyone that he would. She even got the priest up here to accost him on one of his rare visits home and talk to him about it, how he ought to do it, and how Rebecca was a proper wife for Manfred no matter what her past.

“ ‘But you know, Quinn, in those days, what man was going to marry a prostitute from Storyville with whom he'd been living for over two years? Bringing the priest proved a terrible mistake, as Manfred was ashamed and annoyed. And the rumor spread that Manfred beat Rebecca for doing it, and Ora Lee had to interfere to make him stop.

“ ‘Somehow or other they made it up, and Manfred went back out into the swamp. Thereafter, when he came back from these forays into the depths of the bog he often had gifts not only for Rebecca, to whom he gave lovely cameos, but gifts of pearls and diamonds for Camille, and even fine stickpins and cuff links with diamonds for William to wear.'

“ ‘So he was meeting someone out there in the swamp,' I said. ‘He had to be. How else could he come back with gifts?'

“ ‘Precisely, he was meeting someone. And his absences from the house grew longer and longer, and his conduct at home reclusive and peculiar, and when he was gone, William (my father) and Camille suffered downright meanness and heavy abuse from Rebecca, who grew to hate them for what they were—part of a family to which she did not legally belong.

“ ‘Imagine it, the poor children, now adolescents, at the pure mercy of this young stepmother, all left alone in this house with only the colored servants, the devoted and loving Jerome and Ora Lee and their niece, Pepper, trying to interfere.

“ ‘Rebecca would pyroot through their rooms whenever she wanted, and then came the incident of her finding Camille's poetry in a leather-bound book, and reciting the poems at dinner to taunt poor Camille, wounding Camille all but mortally so that Camille threw a hot bowl of soup in Rebecca's face.'

“ ‘I have Camille's book,' I told Aunt Queen. ‘I found it in Rebecca's trunk. But why didn't someone else find it when the trunk was packed? Why were there cameos in the trunk? I know everything was thrown in there but still—?'

“ ‘Because the woman disappeared under violent circumstances, and it was Manfred who grabbed up her things and heaved them into the trunk. And besides, the old madman had been absent when the affair of the poetry took place, and who knew how much he knew? He didn't see the book, or care about it, that's plain enough, and he didn't bother to save the cameos you found in the trunk, either, though he did save five cameos as I'll explain.'

“ ‘How did Rebecca disappear? What were the violent circumstances?' I pushed.

“ ‘She tried to set fire to this house.'

“ ‘Ah, of course.'

“ ‘She did it with the oil lamps.'

“I gasped. ‘So that's why everybody believed me!' I said. ‘Jasmine and Lolly and Pops. They knew the story of what Rebecca had done in the past.'

“Aunt Queen nodded. ‘Rebecca set the lamps on the windowsills of the front rooms. She had a blaze started in four places when Ora Lee and Jerome caught her in the act, and Jerome struck her and shouted for the farmhands to come in and put out the fire. Now you know what a risk that was for Jerome, a black man, to haul off and slap a white woman in those days, but this crazy Rebecca was trying to burn down this house.

“ ‘The gossip was that Jerome knocked her unconscious. And that she had almost succeeded in her mad designs, the fire really blazing before they caught it, and the repairs costing a mint.

“ ‘Now, imagine what a danger fire was in those times, Quinn. We didn't have the pumps on the banks of the swamp in those days, Quinn, we didn't have the water out here from town. This house could have really gone up. But it didn't. Blackwood Manor was saved.

“ ‘Of course Jerome kept Rebecca under close watch in the room without candles or lamps until Manfred came back from the swamp.

“ ‘You can imagine the tension, Quinn, with Jerome, a black man, taking on this responsibility, and Rebecca being locked up there in the dark, calling him a “nigger” and threatening to have him lynched and every other thing she could think of through the door. There were lynchings in those days, too. They didn't happen hereabouts that I know of, but they happened.

“ ‘The Irish poor were never great lovers of the black man, I can tell you, Quinn, and the threats Rebecca made, to bring her kin up here from New Orleans, were enough to scare Jerome and Ora Lee and Pepper and all their folks.

“ ‘But they couldn't let her out, and they wouldn't let her out, so scream and rant in the dark she did.

“ ‘Well finally Manfred came back, and when he saw the damage and the extent of the repairs, when he realized that the house had almost been lost, he went wild.

“ ‘He grabbed Rebecca up off the bed where she'd been moaning and crying, and he beat her with his hands and his fists. He slapped her back and forth and punched her until Jerome and Ora Lee screamed to make him stop.

“ ‘Jerome wasn't strong enough to hold Manfred, and he didn't dare hit him, but Ora Lee stopped the brawl simply by screaming over and over so that all the colored and white staff came flooding into the house and up into the room.

“ ‘Rebecca, being surely one of the most unwise human beings that ever lived, was roaring that Manfred had promised to marry her, that she would be his wife or die here, that she would never leave. Jasmine's family were all sort of holding her and reaching out to Manfred to please not hit her anymore.

“ ‘In his raging temper, Manfred sent for her trunk, and it was he, the man himself, who shoved every blessed thing that belonged to her into it, higgledy-piggledy, and told the men to drive her to the edge of the property and throw her off it with all that was hers. He threw fistsful of money at her, raining it down on her where she lay on the floor in a daze.

“ ‘But the wicked and unwise girl rose up and ran to him and wouldn't let go, screaming, “Manfred, I love you. Manfred, I can't live without you, Manfred, I won't live without you. Manfred, remember Naples.” (Everyone remembered that “Remember Naples.”) “Manfred, remember, Manfred, I'm your Rebecca at the Well, come out to be your bride. Look at the cameo at my neck, Manfred. Manfred, I've come to the well to be your bride.”

“ ‘And it was then that he dragged her down the steps, out the doorway, across the lawn and past the cemetery to the landing, where he flung her into the pirogue and pushed away from the bank. When she tried to get up off the floor of the pirogue, he kicked her and she fell back.

“ ‘That was the last anybody saw of Rebecca Stanford alive or dead.

“ ‘Two weeks later—a fortnight as they called it in those days—Manfred came home. When he saw Rebecca's trunk in the middle of the room he was angry, and told Jerome to put it upstairs.

“ ‘Later, Ora Lee discovered a velvet box in the top drawer of Rebecca's bureau, and in it several cameos along with a note in Rebecca's hand. It said “First cameos given to me by Manfred. Naples.” And the date. Now, Ora Lee kept these cameos for at least a year, not wanting them thrown away, as they were very pretty, and then she gave them to Manfred, who tried to give them to Camille.

“ ‘Now, Camille had not gotten over her hatred of Rebecca and frankly never did. She wouldn't touch the cameos, but Manfred kept them, and now and then he was seen taking them out and looking at them and mumbling to himself.

“ ‘When my father married my mother, Manfred offered her the cameos, but my father wouldn't let her take them because he remembered Rebecca with so much hatred, too.

“ ‘Then, when I was a little girl, Manfred gave the cameos to me. I was ten years old. The Old Man said strange things to me. Wild things, things I didn't understand.'

“—And here, Aunt Queen told me the story that she repeated to both of us tonight, of Manfred's wild ravings, only in that first telling, when I was a boy of eighteen, she included less detail—.

“ ‘I had no temerity about keeping the cameos,' she declared. ‘I had never even heard the story of Rebecca, and wouldn't for many years.

“ ‘I had already begun collecting cameos by that time, and had a score of them when I finally told my father how Manfred had given me my first few. But it wasn't my father who told me the story of Rebecca. It was Ora Lee who told me—you know, it was kitchen-table talk—and to tell the truth, Ora Lee had felt a liking for Rebecca, an understanding of the poor Irish girl who had wanted to better herself, a girl who was afraid of her own vicious Irish father and German-Irish mother, a girl who had reached the faraway coast of Italy with Manfred, where Manfred at a candlelight dinner had pinned the first cameo of “Rebecca at the Well” to Rebecca's lace blouse himself.

“ ‘And, Ora Lee insisted, Rebecca hadn't started out being mean to the children, or mean to anybody; it was what came as the result of her dissatisfaction over time. It was what came of Manfred's downright meanness.

“ ‘And as Ora Lee put it, in old age she was more able to understand Rebecca, and make no mistake, Quinn, Ora Lee thought Rebecca was murdered out there—you can be sure of it—but the point I was making was that in old age, Ora Lee was more forgiving of Rebecca and what she had done, though she couldn't forgive Rebecca's meanness to Camille.

“ ‘Even as Ora Lee told me these things, she begged me never to mention Rebecca's name to my father or to my Aunt Camille.

“ ‘ “Your Aunt Camille was done in by those days,” Ora Lee told me. “That poor child was always morbid, but she went deep into her shell and never came out anymore.”

“ ‘To return to the history of your illustrious ancestor,' Aunt Queen went on, ‘I didn't need Ora Lee to tell me that he had kept bringing his Irish girls to the house and keeping them in the front bedroom upstairs for many a year. I was a girl of twenty or so when my mother told me all about it—how just after my birth my father had begged the Old Man to please stop his bad behavior on account of his grandbaby coming into the world.

“ ‘The Old Man had cursed and fussed and slammed his fist down on the dining table so hard as to rattle the silver, but he agreed. For a daughter-in-law he hadn't bothered, but for a grandbaby, well, he would, and so he removed himself from the big upstairs best bedroom, in which you now reside, my blessed nephew, and he took this bedroom here on the back of the house. And even during my early years—before I was too young to remember—he slipped his women in by the back door.

“ ‘The changing of the room had a great significance for everyone. The priest of those days, Fr. Flarety, stopped calling on Manfred for his wicked ways, and by the time I was ten, by the time the Old Man gave me the cameos, he was pretty much just a pitiful slobbering old creature, raving at the empty air and trying to hail with his cane anyone who chanced to pass the door.

“ ‘My mother became the official lady of Blackwood Manor because Aunt Camille was a wounded being who could never take such a place.

“ ‘And as for the trunk, well, I suppose I forgot about it, and it just became one of many up there, full of uninteresting clothes. Oh, of course, I always meant to go and explore the attic, but thinking it a monumental chore to put a lot of chaos in order I never bothered, and neither has anyone else.

“ ‘And now, Quinn, you know more about what happened to Rebecca Stanford than anyone living, even me. Her ghost is a danger to you, Quinn, and to everyone around you.'

“ ‘Oh, but I don't know,' I answered. ‘I found those chains out there, Aunt Queen. Rusted chains. But I don't really know what happened to her!'

“ ‘Quinn, the important thing is you don't call up this ghost again!'

“ ‘But I never really called her in the first place.'