Lasher (48 page)

As the Civil War raged, as the city fell, as fortunes were destroyed overnight, as Yankee troops went through our streets, she reared her boys in the First Street house, among American friends and traitors. Katherine thought she had left the family
curse behind. Indeed, she had given back the emerald on her wedding day.

The family was frantic. The witch was gone. For the first time I heard many of them whispering the word. “But she is the witch!” they would say. “How can she desert us?”

And the emerald. It lay on Mother’s dresser among all her voodoo trash, like a hideous trinket. I picked it up, finally, and hung it round the neck of the nearby plaster Virgin.

This for me was a dark time, a time of great freedom and also great learning. Katherine was gone, and nothing else much mattered to me. If I had ever doubted it, I knew it now—my family was my world. I could have gone to Europe then; I could have gone to China. I could have gone beyond war and pestilence and poverty. I could have lived as a potentate. But this small part of the earth was my home, and without my loved ones around me, nothing had any flavor.

Pathetic, I thought. But it was true. And I learned what only a powerful and rich man can ever know—what it was I truly wanted.

Meantime, the fiend was ever urging me to new lovers; and watching what went on as eagerly as ever. He imitated me more and more. Even when he visited Mother now, he came in a guise so like me that others thought it was I. He seemed to have lost any sense of himself, if he had ever had any.

“What do you really look like?” I asked.

“Laughter. Why ask me such a question?”

“When you are flesh what will you be?”

“Like you, Julien.”

“And why not like you were at first—brown-haired and brown-eyed?”

“That was only for Suzanne, that was what Suzanne would see, and so I took that shape and grew in that shape, a Scotsman of her village. I would be you. You are beautiful.”

I pondered much. I gambled, drank, danced until dawn, fought and argued with Confederate patriots and Yankee enemies, made and lost fortunes in various realms, fell in love a couple of times, and in general came to realize I grieved night and day for my Katherine. Perhaps I needed a purpose to my life, something beyond the making of money and the lavishing of it upon cousins far and wide, something besides the building of new bungalows on our lands, and the acquisition of more and more property. Katherine had been a purpose of sorts. I had never had any other.

Except for the fiend, of course. To play with him, to mutate flesh, to court and use him. Ah, I began to see through everything!

Then came the year 1871. Summer, and yellow fever, as it always struck, running rampant among the newest of the immigrants.

Darcy and Katherine and their boys had lately been abroad. In fact, for six months, they had been in Europe, and no sooner had the handsome Irishman set foot on shore than he came down with the fever.

He’d lost his immunity to it in foreign lands, I suppose, or whatever, I don’t honestly know, except that the Irish were always dying of this disease, and we were never affected by it. Katherine went mad. She sent letters to me in the Rue Dumaine; please come and cure him.

I said to Lasher, “Will he die?”

Lasher appeared at the foot of my bed, collected, arms folded, dressed as I had been dressed the day before, all illusion of course.

“I think he will die,” he said. “And perhaps it’s time. Don’t fret. There is nothing even a witch can do against this fever.”

I wasn’t so sure. But when I called upon Marguerite she began to cackle and dance: “Let the bastard die and all his spawn with him.”

This disgusted me. What had little Clay and Vincent done, those innocent children, except be born boys as I had been with my brother, Rémy?

I went back to the city, pondering what to do, consulting doctors and nurses, and of course the fever raged as it always did in hot weather, and the bodies piled high at the cemeteries. The city stank of death. Great fires were burned to drive away the evil effluvia.

The rich cotton factors and merchandising giants who had come south to make a buck after the war went down to the Grim Reaper as easily as the Irish peasants off the ships.

Then Darcy died. He died. And there was Katherine’s coachman at my door.

“He’s dead, Monsieur. Your sister begs you to come!”

What could I do? I had never set foot in that First Street house since it had been completed. I did not even know poor little Clay or Vincent by sight! I had not seen my sister in a year, except to argue with her once in a public street. Suddenly
all my riches and my pleasures seemed nothing to me. My sister was begging me to come.

I had to go and I had to forgive her.

“Lasher, what do I do?”

“You will see,” he said.

“But there is no female to carry on the line! She will wither as a widow behind closed doors. You know it. I know it.”

“You will see,” he said again. “Go to her.”

The whole family held its breath. What will happen?

I went to the First Street house. It was a rainy night, very hot and simmering, and in the Irish slums only blocks away, the bodies of fever victims were stacked in the gutters.

A stench wafted on the breeze from the river. But there stood this house as it always has, majestic among its oaks and magnolia trees, a narrow and high-flung castle complete with battlements and walls that appear indestructible. A deep secretive house, full of graceful designs yet somehow ominous.

I saw the window of the master bedroom to the north. I saw a sight which many have seen since, and which you have seen, the flicker of candles against the shutters.

I came into the house, forcing the door, with Lasher’s help or my own strength I do not know, only that it yielded to me, and the lock broke and was thereafter useless.

I took off my rain-drenched coat and went up the stairs. The door to the master bedroom lay open.

Of course I expected to see the dead Irish architect lying there putrefying on summer schedule. But I soon realized he had been taken away on account of the contagion. The superstitious Irish maids came to tell me this, that Darcy, poor soul, was already buried, and with the bells of St. Alphonsus tolling night and day, there had been no time for a Requiem.

Within the room, all had been scrubbed down and cleaned, and it was Katherine who lay on the bed, a giant four-poster with black carved lions’ heads in its posts, crying softly into the embroidered pillow.

She looked so small and so frail; she looked like my little sister. Indeed, I called her that. I sat by her and comforted her. She sobbed on my shoulder. Her long black hair was still thick and soft, and her face held its beauty. All those babies lost had not taken away her charms or her innocence, or the radiant faith in her eyes when she looked at me.

“Julien, take me home to Riverbend,” she said. “Take me
home. Make Mother forgive me. I cannot live here alone. Everywhere I look I see Darcy, only Darcy.”

“I will try, Katherine,” I said. But there was no doubt in my mind, I could not make a reconciliation with Mother. Mother was so crazy now, she might not even know who Katherine was, or where she’d been. Things were that out of hand there. Last I saw Mother, she and Lasher had been making flowers spring early from their seeds. And Lasher had told Mother secrets of plants which could make a brew to make her see visions. That was Mother’s life of late. I might tell her Katherine had died and come back to earth and we had to be good to her. And who knows? She might have bought it.

“Don’t worry, my beautiful girl,” I said. “I’ll take you home if you want to go, and your little babies with you. All the family is there as always.”

She nodded her head, and gestured in a helpless graceful way as if to say it was in my hands.

I kissed her and held her in my arms, and then laid her down to rest, assuring her that I would sit with her until morning.

The door was closed. The nurse was gone. The little boys were quiet, wherever they were. I went out of the room to have a smoke.

I saw Lasher.

He stood at the foot of the staircase looking up at me. He said in his silent voice, Study this house. Study its doors, its rooms, its patterns. Riverbend will perish as did the citadel we built in far-off Saint-Domingue, but this house will last to serve its purpose.

A dreamy feeling came over me. I went down the stairs, and began to do what you have done, Michael, a thousand times. Walk about this house slowly, in and around, laying my hands upon its doorframes and its brass knobs and musing at the paintings in the dining room and the lovely plaster ornament that everywhere decorated its ceilings.

Yes, a beautiful house, I thought. Poor Darcy. No wonder his designs had been so much the fashion. But he had had no witch’s blood I supposed. I suspected my nephews Clay and Vincent were as innocent as my brother, Rémy. I went out into the gardens. I perceived what had been done, a great octagon of a lawn, with an octagon carved in the stone posts that ended the limestone balustrades. And everywhere flagstones at angles,
so that one was beset in the moonlight with lines and designs and patterns.

“Behold the roses in the iron,” said Lasher to me. By this he meant the cast-iron railings. And I saw what he pointed out, lines at angles, echoing the angles of the flags, as well as the roses.

He walked with his arm around me now, and I felt a thrill in this, this closeness with him. I had half a mind to invite him into the trees, and give myself over to him. I was addicted as I said. But I had to remember my beloved sister. She might wake and cry and think that I had left her.

“Remember all these things,” he said again. “For this house will last.”

As I came into the hallway, I saw him in the high dining room door with his hands on the frame. How it soared above him with its tapered keyhole shape, more narrow above, and thereby looking higher.

I turned to note that the front door, through which I’d just come, which I had left wide open, was of the same design, and there he stood, as if he had never been in the other place at all, a man like me with his hands on the frame, peering back at me.

“Would you live after death, Julien? Of all my witches you ask me so little about that final darkness.”

“You don’t know anything about it, Lasher,” I commented. “You said so yourself.”

“Don’t be cruel with me, Julien. Not tonight of all nights. I am glad to be here. Would you live after death? Would you hover and stay, that is what I am asking you?”

“I don’t know. If the Devil was trying to take me into hell I might hover and stay, if that’s what you mean, a purgatorial soul wandering about, appearing to voodoo queens and spiritualists. I suppose I could do it.” I crushed out my cigar in the ashtray on the marble table, which is there now, this very day, in the lower hallway.

“Is that what you’ve done, Lasher? Are you some vile human being become a ghost, hovering forever, and seeking to wrap yourself in an undeserved mystery?”

I saw something in the face of the fiend change. One moment he was my twin and then he had smiled. Indeed, he was imitating my very smile and to perfection. I had not seen him do this trick before very often. And as he slumped against the door frame, he folded his arms as I might, and he made a little
sound of cloth brushing the wood, to let me know how strong he was.

“Julien,” he said, actually shaping his mouth with the words, he was so strong, “maybe all mysteries are nothing at the core. Maybe the world is made from waste.”

“And you were there when it happened?”

“I don’t know,” he said, imitating my own sarcastic tone exactly. He raised his eyebrows as I raise mine. I had never seen him so strong.

“Shut the door, Lasher,” I said, “if you are so very mighty.”

And to my astonishment, he reached for the knob and stepped aside, and made the door close exactly as if he were a man doing it. That was the limit for him, for it had been an astonishing feat. He was gone. The air held the heat as it always did.

“Admirable,” I whispered.

“Remember this place if you would linger or come back; remember its patterns. In the dim world beyond they will shine in your eyes, they will guide you home. This is a house for centuries to come. This is a house worthy of the spirits of the dead; this is a house in which you may safely remain. War or revolution or fire, or the river’s current, will not trouble you. I was held once…by two patterns. Two simple patterns. A circle, and stones in the form of a cross…two patterns.”

I memorized this. More proof that he was not the great Devil himself.

I went up the stairs. I had gotten just a little more out of him than I usually did, but nothing much really. And then there was Katherine.

This time I found her awake, and standing by the window.

“Where did you go?” she asked me breathlessly. And then she threw her arms around me again and leant against me. It seemed I felt Lasher stirring near us. I told him through the mind, Do not come here now, you’ll scare her. I lifted her chin as men do to women, though how the little things stand it, I don’t know, and I kissed her.

At that very second, something caught me by surprise. It was the pressure of her breasts against me. She wore nothing but a soft white dressing gown, and I felt her nipples, her heat, and then a stream of heat it seemed from her lips. But when I drew back and looked at her I saw only innocence.

I also saw a woman. A beautiful woman. A woman whom I had loved, who had risen up against me and cast me aside for
another, a body loved by me as a brother should love his sister, with nothing about it unfamiliar to me from all our childhood romps and swims, and yet it was a woman’s body, and it was in my arms, and in a moment of daring, I kissed her again, and then again, and then even once more, and I felt her begin to burn against me.

I was repelled. This was my baby sister, Katherine. I took her to the bed and laid her down; she seemed confused, looking at me. Dare I say spellbound? Did she think it was Darcy come back?

“No,” she whispered. “I know it is you. I have always loved you. I’m sorry. You must forgive my little sins, but when I was a little girl I used to dream we would marry. We would walk down the aisle. It was only when Darcy came that I gave up that silly incestuous dream. God forgive me.”