by Rice, Anne
“All that’s true,” said Quinn. “They can do everything, actually. They can do the cooking and the cleaning, and they can meet and greet the drop-in guests. They can host the Easter Feast and Christmas Supper and every other imaginable event. Jasmine is extremely talented as a manager and a guide. Fact is, they can all do far more than they believe they can. And they all have plenty of money, money enough to walk away from this place and be comfortable wherever they go. That gives them a feeling of security, and an air of independence. But they want to be right here. This is their home. But they want for there to be a presence, a Blackwood presence, and without that, they’re insecure.”
“I see,” she said. “You can’t make them think like owners of the place.”
“Exactly,” he said. “I’ve given them every opportunity,” he went on. “Every type of advancement and profit sharing as well, but they want me in residence. They want my authority. And Tommy wants it. And then there’s Tommy sister Brittany to think of, and Tommy’s mother, Terry Sue. They’ll be coming frequently to visit. They’ve become part of Blackwood Farm because of Tommy. Someone has to be at the very heart of this house to receive them. And Jasmine wants me to be that heart, not only for herself but for my son, Jerome, and I’m not sure that I can continue to be the Master of Blackwood Farm as I would have been if only—.”
“The answer’s simple,” I said.
“What is it?” Quinn asked, startled.
“Nash Penfield,” I said. “You make him resident curator, to run and maintain this property on your behalf and on behalf of Tommy and Jerome.”
“Resident curator!” Quinn’s face brightened. “Ah, that sounds brilliant. But would he take the job? He’s finished his Ph.D. He’s ready to start teaching.”
“Of course he’ll take the job,” I said. “The man spent years in Europe with you and Aunt Queen. You described it as a luxurious journey.”
“Oh, yes, Aunt Queen broke the bank,” replied Quinn. “And Nash did seem to make the most of it in the best ways.”
“Exactly. I suspect Nash is thoroughly ruined for ordinary life. He would love nothing better than to be curator here, to maintain the Easter and Christmas traditions for the sake of the parish, and whatever else you want, while earning a high salary, having a gorgeous bedroom and ample time to write a couple of books in his academic field.”
“Perfect,” Quinn said. “And he has the style and the grace to pull it off. Oh, this could be the answer.”
“Run the idea by him. Suggest that in his idle hours he could begin to build a proper library on shelves put up on the inside walls of the double parlor. And he could write a short history of Blackwood Farm, to be printed up for the tourists, you know, with architectural details and blueprints and legends and such. Throw in the limousine and driver twenty-four hours a day, and a new car of his own every two years, and a deep-pocket expense account and paid vacations to New York and California, and I think you’ll have him.”
“I know he’ll go for it,” said Mona. “Downstairs he was desperate to intervene when the sheriff was acting like an idiot. He just didn’t feel he had the right to do it.”
“Precisely,” I said, without looking at Mona. “It’s a dream position for a man of his gifts.”
“Oh, if he only would,” said Quinn, with mounting excitement, “that would be key. And I could come and go from this room, with you and Mona, anytime that I wanted.”
“It’s far more interesting than what awaits Nash elsewhere,” I said. “And he can play proper host to Tommy’s mother, Terry Sue, and exert a guiding influence on little Jerome, maybe tutor him, in fact, and you don’t have to tell him how to treat Jasmine and Big Ramona; he knows. He adores them. He was born in Texas. That’s the South. He isn’t some ignorant Yankee who doesn’t know how to speak two civil words to a black person. He respects them completely.”
“I think you’ve hit on it,” Quinn said. “If he were ensconced in Blackwood Farm, it would work. It would work for a long time. Jasmine would be ecstatic. She loves Nash.”
I nodded and shrugged.
“That’s a grand idea,” said Quinn. “In time I’ll tell them Mona and I were married in Europe. They won’t protest. It will be perfect. Mona, you really think he’ll go for it?”
I refused to look at her.
“Quinn, he’s already part of Blackwood Farm,” she said.
Quinn went to the phone. “Jasmine,” he said, “I need you up here.”
Almost instantly we heard the vibration of the staircase as Jasmine came running up, and then breathlessly she opened the door.
“What’s the matter, Little Boss?” She was panting. “What’s going on?”
“Sit down, please,” he said.
“You scared me to death, you miserable boy!” she declared. She took her chair. “Now what’s on your mind to call me like that! Don’t you know this whole place is in a state of crisis? And now Clem’s saying he won’t sleep in the bungalow, either, because he’s scared of Patsy coming to him too.”
“Never mind all that, you know perfectly well Patsy can’t hurt you!”
He sat back down and he told her the whole plan, how Nash would be the curator, but before he was halfway through what he meant to say, she threw up her hands and declared it was a miracle. The whole parish would be happy. Nash Penfield had been put on this Earth for Blackwood Farm.
“Now, it’s Aunt Queen who put that idea in your head, Little Boss, she’s looking down from Heaven,” Jasmine said. “I know she is. And so is Mamma, who died right there in that very bed. God bless us all. You know what people round here believe? They believe Blackwood Farm belongs to everybody!”
“Everybody?” asked Mona. “Everybody who?”
“All the parish around, girl,” said Jasmine. “The phone’s been ringing off the hook since Aunt Queen died. Are we still going to do the Christmas Dinner? Are we still going to have the Azalea Festival? I’m telling you, they think this place belongs to the whole parish.”
“Well, they’re right,” said Quinn. “It really does. So do I have your consent to ask Nash Penfield to take the job?”
“Yes, indeed!” Jasmine said. “I’ll tell Grandma, you’ll get no argument from her. You just talk to Nash Penfield. He and Tommy are down in the parlor. I wanted them to play the piano. Nash knows how to play. Tommy knows one song. But Tommy says you don’t play the piano for weeks after a person dies. Now, we never abided by that here because we were always a Bed-and-Breakfast. And I say that Tommy can play that song.”
Quinn got up and went out with Jasmine.
I followed them down the stairs. I wanted to see this thing through. I ignored the fact that Mona came afterwards and was behaving with such obvious grace and reticence. A complete facade.
Wise ones must not be deceived by such ploys.
Tommy was sitting at the square grand in the double parlor, an antique that apparently still worked. And he was crying just a little and Nash was standing over him. I could feel the pure love of Nash for Tommy.
“Tommy,” Quinn said. “There was this woman in Beethoven’s time who lost her child. She was bereft. Beethoven would come into her house, unannounced, and he would play the piano for her. She would be lying upstairs, distraught, and she would hear him playing down there in the drawing room, and the piano music was his gift to her, to comfort her. You play the piano if you like. You offer the music up to Aunt Queen. You go on. Part the gates of Heaven with your music, Tommy.”
“You tell Little Boss what you mean to play,” said Jasmine.
“It’s a song by Patsy,” said Tommy. “Patsy sent the CD to us while we were in Europe. I wrote home for the sheet music. Aunt Queen saw to it we had suites with pianos so I could learn the song. It’s very Irish and very sad. I wanted to play it for Patsy, to see if it would quiet her soul.”
Quinn said nothing. His face went pale.
“You go on, son,” I said. “That’s a good idea. Aunt Queen will be pleased and so will
Patsy. Patsy will hear you. You play the song.”
Tommy laid his hands on the keys. He began a simple, very Celtic-sounding ballad. It had its Kentucky Bluegrass sound too. Then, startling us all, he began to sing the lyrics in a low competent boy soprano that was as mournful as the music:
Go tell my friends for me
That I’m not coming back.
Go tell the gang for me
That I can dance no more.
Go tell the ones I love
That I have gone on home.
I’m walking in the graveyard now
And I am all alone.
And I’ll be gone before the leaves
Begin to fall again.
They’re rushing up and down the stairs
The bed is wide and soft.
But I lie still and oh, so cold.
Because my mother’s gone.
Will I soon see her simple face?
I have no dreams or faith.
I wish that I could make a song
That tells how good it’s been.
I had the stage, I had the light.
The music was the tale.
But things are tinged with purple now
And these sad notes I play.
I wait until the autumn comes
And I will be no more.
We stood together, bound by the sorrow of it, as if we were in a deep enchantment.
Quinn leant down to kiss Tommy on the cheek. Tommy just stared at the printed music before him. Jasmine had her arm around his shoulder.
“Now that was beautiful,” she said. “And Patsy wrote that, now, she knew what was coming, she knew.”
Then Quinn drew Nash off with him into the dining room. Mona and I went with him, but there was no real need for us.
I saw this as they sat down to talk.
I saw that Nash understood from the first words, and was completely desirous of this position that Quinn was describing to him. I saw that it had been Nash’s secret dream. Nash had only been waiting for the time to present such a proposal to Quinn.
Meanwhile, in the parlor Jasmine was asking Tommy to play the song again.
“But you didn’t really see that awful ghost of Patsy, did you?” Tommy was asking.
“No, no,” said Jasmine, trying to comfort Tommy, “I was just carrying on, I don’t know what got into me, don’t you be afraid of Patsy’s ghost, don’t you think about that, besides, you see a ghost, you make the Sign of the Cross, nothing to it, now you sing that song again, I’ll sing it with you.…”
“You play the song again, Tommy,” I said. “You keep playing it and you keep singing it. If her spirit’s wandering, she’ll hear it and it will comfort her.”
I went out the unlocked front door into the warm humid air, down the steps and away from the light, and I walked back behind the house and over to the far right where the bungalow stood in which Jasmine and Big Ramona and Clem lived.
It was lighted cheerily. And only Clem was there, sitting on the front porch, rocking and smoking a very aromatic cigar. I gestured for him not to get up on my account, and I walked back behind the house and along the treacherous soft bank of the swamp.
I could hear Tommy singing. I sang the words along with him, soft, in no more than a whisper. I tried to picture Patsy as she had been in her heyday—country-western star, in her leather jackets with fringe and skirts and boots, with teased and bouffant hair, belting her original songs. It was the image that Quinn had given to me. Grudgingly he had said she could truly sing. Even Aunt Queen had mentioned to me with some reserve that Patsy could really sing. Ah, there hadn’t been a single soul in the world of Blackwood Farm who had felt love for Patsy.
And all I’d glimpsed was the sick Patsy, bitter and full of hate, sitting on the couch in her white nightgown, knowing she’d never be well enough to perform anymore, hollering for Cyndy, the Nurse, to give her another shot, hating Quinn out loud and with her soul, her pinched and twisted soul, Patsy, who’d caught the plague from drug needles and didn’t care how many times she’d passed it on.
And Quinn had done her in just exactly as he’d described it to the sheriff.
I walked on, with the swamp beside me. I let my vampiric hearing rove. Nash had begun to play Patsy’s song, with more notes and a bolder expression. He and Tommy were singing it together. Sadness. Jasmine cried. Jasmine whispered, “Ah, the pure pitifulness of it.”
The rural dark fell down around me. I let go of the music.
The swamp seemed the most savage and devouring place, with no pastoral symmetry or harmony to it. What thrived there was ravenous and battling to the death, and would never find a safe haven for itself—a landscape eating itself alive. Quinn had told me it was like that. But how could I not have known it?
Centuries ago, I’d been dumped for dead in the swamp by my fledglings, Claudia, the murderer, Louis, the coward; and I, a hideous and grasping thing, had survived in those stagnant, polluted waters, survived to come back and take my battered and shapeless revenge, sharpened to a fatal point by others.
I don’t care about that.
I don’t know how long I walked.
I took my time.
Patsy. Patsy.
The night sounds were at once particular and at the same time a deep hum on the warm breeze, and the moon was high, sometimes penetrating a break in the swamp that only revealed its jagged hateful chaos more harshly.
Now and then I stopped.
I looked at the scattered stars—so cunningly bright in the country night. And I hated them, as usual. What comfort was it to be lost in the endless universe, a simpleton on a tiny speck of revolving dust, whose forefathers had read patterns and meanings into these countless unknowable points of cold white fire, which only mocked us by their unchanging indifference?
So let them shine over the vast pastureland to my right, over the distant clusters of oaks, over the warmly lighted houses now far behind me.
My soul was with the swamp tonight. My soul was with Patsy.
I walked on.
I hadn’t known so much of Blackwood Farm bordered on the swamp. But I wanted to know. And I kept as close as possible to the water without slipping right into it.
Soon I knew Mona was somewhere near me. She was doing her best to conceal herself, but I heard the little sounds that she made, and I could smell a faint perfume from her that had clung to Aunt Queen’s dresses, a scent I hadn’t noticed before.
After a little while, I knew Quinn was with us, too, staying behind me with Mona. Why they so faithfully followed I didn’t know.
I used my strongest vision to penetrate the reeking darkness to my left.
A strong chill came over me, moving down my back, a chill such as I’d felt when Rowan Mayfair and I had first met, and she had used her power to study me, a chill that was from a source outside of me.
I stopped, and I faced the swamp, and at once I perceived that a female figure was right before me. It was so close that I could have touched it without extending my hand more than a few inches.
It was tangled in the moss and creeper vine, still and lifeless as the cypress tree which appeared to support it, and it was soaked through and through, its hair in dank rivulets on its filthy white gown, and gleaming faintly in a light mortal eyes could not have seen, and it was staring at me.
It was Patsy Blackwood.
Weak, silent, suffering.
“Where is she!” Quinn whispered. He was at my left shoulder. “Where? Patsy, where are you?”
“Be quiet,” I said. I kept my gaze on her, on her large miserable eyes, and the streaks of hair that ran down her face, and her parted lips. Such yearning, such agony.
“Patsy,” I said. “Darling girl, all your tribulation in this place is finished.”
I saw her eyebrows close in a slow listless frown. It seemed I heard a deep long sigh from her.
“You best go on, beautiful girl,” I said. “Go on to glory. Don’t roam this dismal realm, Patsy. Don’t make this darkne
ss your home when you can turn to the Light. Don’t you wander here searching and moaning. You go on. Turn your back on this time and place and beg for the gates to open.”
Something quickened in her face. Her eyebrows went smooth, and it seemed that she shuddered.
“Go on, honey,” I said. “The Light wants you. And here in this world, Quinn will gather all your songs, every song you ever recorded, Patsy, and put them all together, and they’ll go out far and wide, Patsy, every single one, old and new, for always. Isn’t that a splendid thing to leave behind, all those wonderful songs that people love, that’s your gift, Patsy.”
Her mouth opened, but she didn’t speak. Her white cheeks were slick with the water of the swamp, her nightgown torn, her arms scratched and streaked with filth, her fingers struggling to close but unable to do it.
I heard Mona cry out. I felt a force move the damp air around me. Quinn was vowing in a low-running whisper that, having sinned in taking her life, he would give her songs life forever.
But nothing changed for me in the agonized and straining apparition, except that Patsy raised her right hand just a little, and her parted lips made just a small bit of a word. I couldn’t hear it. It seemed she inclined towards me. And I inclined towards her—
—love me, love the way love must be, unsparing love, love Patsy!—
—across the perilous void I moved, as if stepping off the very world itself, and I kissed her lips, wet and reeking of the foul water, and I felt a great current come from inside me, a wind out of the deepest root in me that swept inexorably into her and carried her far, far away, up and out, her form growing faint and immense and brilliant—.
“Into the Light, Patsy!” Mona wailed, her words borne on the wind and swallowed by it—.
—teenaged cowgirl strumming her guitar, belting it: Gloria! stomping her foot, crowd screaming, searing flash of angels, numberless monsters of the unseen, those wings, no, I didn’t see, yes, I did, get away! Gloria! I didn’t see—Gloria! I’m clawing the grass trying to get into the Earth—Oncle Julien smiling, beckoning. Gloria! This is the most dangerous game. You’re no Saint Juan Diego, you know. I will not, I will not, I will not go with you! Patsy in pink leather, arms raised, blinding light, belting Gloria in Excelsis Deo!
