Lasher (52 page)

Indeed, sometimes weeks went by when he did not have the fortitude to come into me. Just as well, as it took me two days to recover. And as Mary Beth grew, Lasher used Mary Beth very often as his excuse. Fine with me, I thought. My reputation’s bad enough, and I’m growing older.

Also as Mary Beth gained in beauty with every passing day, my soul became more and more troubled. I detested the charade that she was my niece and not my daughter. I wanted my own children, indeed, I wanted sons. My values came down to such a pitiful and powerful few that I was appalled by the simplicity of it.

But my life ran on an even keel. I remained sane, in spite of the demon’s assaults. I never even approached true madness. I made money in all the new postwar enterprises—building, merchandising, cotton factoring, whatever opportunity there was, and I perceived also that to keep my family rich, I had to extend its interests far beyond New Orleans. New Orleans went through waves of boom and bust; but as a port we were losing our preeminence.

I made my first trips to New York in the postwar years.
With the fiend happily occupied at home, I lived as a free man in Manhattan.

I began in earnest the real building of an enduring fortune. My brother, Rémy, went to live in the First Street house. I visited often.

And in time, convincing myself that there was no reason I could not have everything a good man should have, I fell in love with my young cousin Suzette, who reminded me of Katherine in her innocence. I prepared to occupy the First Street house as master, with my brother and his family living there agreeably as part of the household.

Now, something else was coming across to me, in bright flashes, about the villain and his memories. As I continued to “recall” the Cathedral and the glen, the town of Donnelaith, images became more vivid to me. I did not move back and forth in time very much, but I saw more detail. And I came to realize that the euphoria I felt in my dream of the Cathedral was the love of God.

I learnt this for sure one weekday morning. I was outside the St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square, and I heard a lovely singing. I went inside. Little quadroon girls, very beautiful all, “colored children” as we would have called them then, were making their First Communion. They were dressed in gorgeous white, and the ceremony was breathtaking, like so many child brides of Christ filing up the aisle, each with her rosary and white prayer book.

The love of God. That is what I felt in the St. Louis Cathedral right in my own little city. And I knew it was what I knew in the glen in the ancient Cathedral. I was stricken. I wandered about all day, evoking the feeling and then doing my best to dispel it.

In flashes I saw Donnelaith. I saw its stone houses. I saw its little square. I saw the Cathedral itself in the distance—oh, great great Gothic church. Olden times!

I sank down finally in a café, as always, drank a cold glass of beer and rolled my head on the wall behind me.

The demon was there, invisible.

“What are you thinking?”

Cautiously and deliberately
I
told him.

He was silent and confused.

Then in a timid voice, he said: “I will be flesh.”

“Yes, I’m sure you will,” I said, “and Mary Beth and I have vowed to help you.”

“Good, for I can show you then how to remain, and come back yourself, it can be done, and others have done it.”

“Why has it taken so long for you?”

“There is no time where I am,” he said. “It is an idea. It will be realized. Only when I am in your body is there a sort of time, measured by noise and movement. But I am out of time. I wait. I see far. I see myself come again, and then everyone will suffer.”

“Everyone.”

“Everyone but our clan, yours and mine. The Clan of Donnelaith, for you are of that clan and so am I.”

“Is that so? Are you telling me then that all our cousins, all our ilk, all our descendants…”

“Yes, all blessed, the most powerful in the earth. Blessed. Look what I have done in your time. I can do more, much more, and when I am come into the flesh again, for true, I will be one of you!”

“Promise me this,” I said. “Vow it.”

“You shall all be upheld. All of you.”

I closed my eyes. I saw the glen, the Cathedral, the candles, the villagers in procession, the Christ Child. The fiend screamed in pain.

Not a sound anywhere. Only the dull street, the café, the door open, the breeze, but the demon was shrieking in pain and only I, Julien Mayfair, could hear it.

Could the child Mary Beth hear it?

The fiend was gone. All around me the flat natural world lay undisturbed anymore and beautifully ordinary. I got up, put on my hat, picked up my stick, walked across Canal Street into the American District and on to a nearby rectory. I don’t even know the church. It was some new church, a neighborhood filled with Irish and German immigrants.

Out came an Irish priest, for Irish priests were everywhere in those days. We were a missionary country for the Irish, who were out to convert the world as surely then as they had been in the time of St. Brendan.

“Listen to me,” I said, “if I wanted to exorcise a devil, would it help to know exactly who he was? To know his name if he had one?”

“Yes,” said he. “But you should trust such things to priests. Knowing his name could be a great great advantage.”

“I thought so,” said I.

I looked up. We stood at the rectory door at the curb of the
street but to the right lay a walled garden. And now I saw the trees begin to thrash and move and throw down their leaves. Indeed so strong came the wind that it stirred the little bell in the small church steeple. “I’ll learn its name,” I said.

The more the trees thrashed, the more the leaves were whipped into a storm, the more distinctly I repeated it. “I’ll learn its name.”

“To be sure,” said the priest, “do that. For there are many many demons. The fallen angels, all of them, and the old gods of the pagans who became demons when Christ was born, and the little people even are from hell, you know.”

“The old gods of the pagans?” asked I. For I had never come across this wrinkle in theology. “I thought the old gods were false gods and didn’t exist. That our God was the One True God.”

“Oh, the gods existed, but they were demons. They are the spooks and spirits that trouble us by night, deposed, vicious, vengeful. Same with the fairy people. The little people. I have seen the little people. I saw them in Ireland and I saw them here.”

“Right,” I said. “May I walk in your garden?” I gave him a handful of American dollars. He was pleased. He went round inside to open the gate in the brick wall.

“Seems it’s going to storm,” he said. “That tree is going to break.” His cassock was blowing every which way.

“You go inside,” I said. “I like the storm and I’ll close the gate behind me.”

I stood alone among the trees in the crowded little place where the Morning Glory grew wild, and there were a few scattered vibrant pink lilies. A little untended garden by and large, and in a grotto, covered over with green moss, the Virgin standing. The trees were now whipped to a fury. The lilies were torn and trampled as if the wind had big boots. I had to place my hand on the trunk of the tree to steady myself. I was smiling.

“Well? What can you do to me?” I asked. “Shower me with leaves? Make it rain if you will. I shall change my clothes when I go home. Do your damnedest!”

I waited. The trees grew still. A few vagrant raindrops fell on the brick path. I reached down and picked up one of the lilies, crushed and broken.

I heard the great faint and undeniable sound of weeping.
Not audible you understand, not through the ear. Only through my soul, a heartbroken weeping.

There was more than sorrow in it. There was a dignity. There was a great depth, more terrible than any smile or expression of face it had ever made to fright me. And the sorrow mingled in my soul with that remembered euphoria.

Latin words came to my mind, but I didn’t really know them. They sprang from me as if I were a priest and I were saying a litany. I heard the sound of pipes; I heard the bells ring.

“It’s the Devil’s Knell,” someone said. “All Christmas Eve the bells will ring to drive the devils from the glen, to fright the little people!”

And then the sky was quiet I was alone. The garden was still, it was simply New Orleans again, and the warm southern sun was shining down upon me. The priest peeped out from the door.

“Merci, Mon Père
,“ I said, tipped my hat and left.

The streets were soft with sunshine and breeze. I walked home through the Garden District to the First Street house, and there was my beautiful Mary Beth sitting on the steps, and he was with her, a shadow, a thing of air, and both seemed glad to see me.

T
HE BRIGHT FLUORESCENT
lights of the station made an island in the dark swampland. The little phone booth was no more than a fold of plastic around a single chrome phone. The tiny square numbers were now a blur. She could no longer make them out, no matter what she did.

Again came the busy signal. “Please try to cut in again,” she asked the operator. “I have to reach Mayfair and Mayfair. There is more than one line. Please try for me. Say it is an emergency call from Rowan Mayfair.”

“Ma’am, they will not accept the interrupt. They are getting requests for interrupts from all over.”

The driver had climbed back up in his cab. She heard the engine start. She made a motion for him to wait, and hastily gave the operator the house number. “This is my home, punch it in for me, please. I can’t…can’t read the numbers.”

The pain came again, the tight wire of wraparound pain, so like a menstrual cramp, yet far worse than any she’d ever experienced.

“Michael, please answer. Michael, please…”

On and on it rang.

“Ma’am, we’ve rung twenty times.”

“Listen, I have to reach somebody. Do this for me. Keep calling. Tell them…”

Some official objection was coming back. But the huge jarring noise of the truck’s diesel engines obliterated everything. Smoke came out of the little pipe at the front of the cab.

When she turned around, the receiver slipped out of her fingers and banged against the plastic enclosure. The driver appeared to be beckoning for her to come.

Mother, help me. Where is Father?

We are all right, Emaleth. Be still, be quiet. Be patient with me
.

She stepped forward, one moment sure of the ground and
the distance, and all points of reference, and the next minute plunging to the asphalt Her knees struck with a fierce pain, and she felt herself going over.
Mother, I am frightened
.

“Hang on, baby girl,” she said. “Hang on.” She had her hands out on the ground to steady herself. Only her knees had been hurt. Two men were running towards her from the office of the filling station, and the truck driver had come down and around to help her.

“Are you OK, lady?” he said.

“Yes, let’s go,” she said. She looked up in the man’s face. “We have to hurry!” The truth was—if they hadn’t been pulling her up, she couldn’t have risen. She leant on the truck driver’s arm. The sky beyond the swamps was purple.

“Couldn’t get them?”

“No,” she said, “but we have to push on.”

“Lady, I have to make my stop in St. Martinville. No way around it, I have to pick up…”

“I understand. I’ll call from there again. Just drive, please. Go. Take us away from here.”

Here. The isolated gas station on the swamp’s edge, the sky purple overhead, the stars peeping through and a great bright moon rising.

He lilted her with considerable ease and set her down on the seat, then came around, released the emergency brake and let the big truck creak and wheeze before he slammed the door and pressed on the accelerator. They were turning back to the marginless road.

“We still in Texas?”

“No, ma’am. Louisiana. I sure wish you’d let me take you to the doctor.”

“I’ll be all right.”

Just as she said it the pain again clamped tight, and made her nearly cry out. She felt the sharp jab from within.

Emaleth, for the love of God and Mother
.

But Mother, it gets smaller and smaller. Mother. I’m frightened. Where is Father? Can I be born into the world without Father?

Not yet, Emaleth
. She sighed. She turned her head to the road. The big truck was racing along now at ninety on the narrow road with its battered shoulders and ditches, and the purple sky darkened above as the trees closed in and grew higher. The
headlamps made a bright path ahead. The driver whistled to himself.

“Mind if I play the radio, ma’am?”

“Please do,” she said.

There came another jab. The smooth dark voices of the Judds came out of the little grill. She smiled. Devil’s music. Another jab, and she pitched forward, steadying herself on the dashboard. Then she realized she had never put on the seat belt. Terrible, and she a mother carrying a child.

Mother…

I’m here, Emaleth
.

The time is coming
.

That can’t be yet. Stay quiet. Wait until we are both certain
.

But another circle of pain wrapped tight around her middle. It pressed white-hot against the small of her back. And there came another jab and a soundless sense of something breaking. Fluid leaked between her legs. She felt the wetness and at the same time the blood seemed to drain from her face. That awful lightheaded feeling—you’re going to pass out.

“Stop the truck now here,” she said.

At first he didn’t understand.

“You need help, lady?”

“No. Stop the truck. See those lights? Stop there. That’s where I’m going. Stop the truck!” She flashed her eyes on him. She saw the intimidation, the fear, yet he eased into the stop.

“Do you know who lives back up in there?”

“Course I do.” She opened the door, and got out, stumbling over the step. Her dress was soaked. No doubt the seat behind her was wet, and now in the glare of oncoming lights he could see it. Poor man. How disgusting it must all seem to him. That she had lost control of her bladder, when that wasn’t it at all.