Lasher

"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.

  I told my mother all the fiend had told me. She was filled with fear. "It knows our thoughts," she said at once in a whisper.

  "Well, these are not secrets," I said, "but even if they were, let us play music if we want to talk of them."

  "What do you mean?" asked she.

  "Didn't your own mother tell you?"

  No, she confessed, her mother had not. So I did. And she began to laugh as wildly as she had cried the night before, clapping her hands and even sinking down upon the floor and drawing up her knees. At once she sent for the very musicians who had played for her mother.

  And under cover of the wild band, which sounded like drunken gypsies fighting musical war with Cajuns of the Bayou over matters of life and death, I told her everything Marie Claudette had told me.

  Meantime the spirit appeared in the room, behind the band, where his manly form could not be seen by them but only by us, and began to dance madly. Finally the shaky apparition fell to rocking back and forth, and then vanished. But we could still feel its presence in the room, and that it had fallen into the band's repetitive and distinctly African rhythm.

  We spoke under this cover.

  Marguerite had not cared for "ancient history." She had never heard the word Donnelaith. She did not remember much about Suzanne. She was glad I had taken note of this. And there were history books which she would give to me.

  Magic was her passion, she explained, and told me in detail how her mother had never appreciated her talents. Early on she, Marguerite, had befriended the powerful voodooiennes of New Orleans. She'd learned from them, and she would now heal, spellbind, and cast curses with good effect, and in all this Lasher was her slave and devotee and lover.

  There began a conversation between my mother and me which was to last all her life, in which she gave me everything she knew without compromise and I gave to her all that I knew, as well, and I was close to her at last, and in her arms, and she was my mother.

  But it was soon clear to me that my mother was mad; or shall we say she was maniacally focused upon her magical experiments. It seemed a certainty in her mind that Lasher was the Devil; and that anything else he might have said was lies; indeed, the only truth I'd given her was the trick of shutting him out by music. Her real passions lay in hunting the swamps for magical plants, talking to the old black women of bizarre cures, and attempting to transform things through the use of chemicals and telekinetic power.

  Of course we did not use that word then. We didn't know it. She was certain of Lasher's love. She had had the girl child, and would try to have another, stronger girl, if that was what he wanted. But with every passing year, she became less interested in men, more addicted to the fiend's embraces, and altogether less coherent.

  Meantime, I was growing fast, and just as I had been a miracle of a three-year-old, I became a miracle at every age, continuing my reading, and my adventures, and my intercourse with the daemon.

  The slaves knew now that I had it in my power. They came to me for aid; they begged a cure from me when they were ill, and very soon I had supplanted my mother as the object of mystery.

  Now, here, Michael, I face a clear choice. I can tell you all that Marguerite and I learnt and how; or I can go on ahead with those things which are most important. Let me choose a compromise and make a swift summary of our experiments.

  But before I do, let me say that my sister, Katherine, was coming along, utterly lacking in guile, but beautiful as she was innocent, a flower I adored and wished to protect, and knowing it pleased the fiend when I shepherded her about, I did it all the more willingly. But I conceived a great love for her in my own right, and I came to realize that she did in fact see "the man" but that he frightened her. She seemed shy of all that was unwholesome or otherworldly. Of our mother she was terrified, and with reason.

  Marguerite's experiments were becoming ever more reckless. If a baby was born dead on our land, she wanted it. The slaves tried to hide from her their lost children, lest these poor beings end up in jars in Marguerite's study. And one of my keenest memories of those times is of Marguerite dashing into the house with a bundle in her hands, and then flashing at me her eager smile, and throwing back the cloth to reveal a tiny dead black baby form, and then covering it up again in jubilation as she went to lock herself in her study.

  Meantime the spirit was ever attentive. It put gold coins in my pockets every day. It warned me when amongst my cousins I had some petty enemy. It stood guard over my room, and once struck down a thieving runaway who sought to steal the few jewels I possessed.

  And when I was alone, it often came to me and caressed me and gave me a pleasure more keen than any I could achieve with others.

  And this it did too with Marguerite faithfully. And all the while it tried its blandishments on Katherine but seemed to get nowhere with her.

  She had it in her head that such evil pleasures as were offered to her in the dark of night were mortal sin. I think she was perhaps the first of the witches to actually believe this, and how the Catholic conception took root in her so strong and so soon--before the fiend could carry her off into erotic dreams--I can't honestly say. If you believe in God, you might say God was with her. I don't think so.

  Whatever, my mother and I, tiring of my grandmother's awful band, soon hired a piano player and a fiddler to play for us. The spirit seemed at first to delight in this as it had in the cacophonous band. In dazzling male form, it would appear in the room, spellbound and happy to reveal it.

  But it came to realize we whispered to each other under the notes of the song, and it couldn't hear or know what we thought or planned, it became fiercely angry. We needed louder music to shut it out and brought back the others to create their din, and then we saw that what was most effective was melody and rhythm. Noise alone was not sufficient to do it.

  Meantime, as we prospered, as the plantation was flush, and our money seemed to breed upon itself in foreign banks, and our cousins married far and wide, the name Mayfair became greater and greater along the River Coast, and we reigned supreme on our own land. No one could bother us or touch us.

  I was nine years old when I demanded of the fiend:

  "
What is it you really want of us, of my mother and me?"

  "What I want of you all," he said. "That you make me flesh!" and, imitating the band, it began to sing these words over and over, and shake the objects in the room to the rhythm as it were of a drum, until I put my hands over my ears and begged for mercy.

  "Laughter," he said. "Laughter."

  "Which means what?" I asked.

  "I am laughing at you because I too can make music to make you rock."

  I laughed. "You're right," I said. "And you say this word, because you cannot actually laugh."

  "Just so," he said, petulantly. "When I am flesh I shall laugh again."

  "Again?" said I.

  He said nothing.

  Ah, this moment is so clear in my memory. I stood out on the upper gallery of the house, shielded somewhat by the banana leaves that stroked the wooden banisters. And out on the river, ships made their way north to the port through the channels. All the fields lay in warm spring sunlight, and below on the grass my cousins played, some forty or fifty of them, all below the age of twelve, and around them in rocking chairs sat the uncles and aunts, fanning themselves and chatting.

  And here I stood with this thing, my hands on the rail, my face very grave most likely for the age of nine, trying to get to the heart of it.

  "All this I have given you," he said, as if he had read my emotions more clearly than I had myself. "Your family is my family; I will bring blessing upon blessing. You do not know what wealth can give. You are too young. You will come to see that you are a prince in a great kingdom. No crowned head in Europe enjoys such power as you have."

  "I love you," I said mechanically to it, and sought to believe this for an instant, as if I were seducing a mortal adult.

  "I shall continue," he said. "Protect Katherine until she can bear a girl child. Carry on the line; Katherine is weak, strong ones will come, it must happen."

  I pondered.

  "This is all I can do?" I asked.

  "For now," he said. "But you are very strong, Julien. Things will come into your mind, and when you see what is to be done I shall see it."

  Again I pondered. I studied the happy throng on the lawn. My brother was calling for me to come down and play; they would be taking a boat out soon to the Bayou. Did I want to come with them?