When I wasn’t in school, I worked on the family I was living with and did what I could to straighten them out. When a husband raised his hand to his wife I’d set his hand on fire—figuratively, that is. It was like Pavlov’s dog and he soon learned not to strike anyone. I made people think their kids were great so they’d stop abusing them.
One by one, I changed the inner workings of several families in Putnam. However, I was always careful to make them think that someone or something else had changed them so no one would know it was me. Often, I made people think it was a pastor. Sometimes I’d leave a book lying about and it would get read. “That book changed my life,” people would say.
After a few months someone would return me to my mother’s house and I’d live with her for a while before she sent me to another family.
In all my years of living in Putnam only once did I try to use my True Persuasion on my mother. I still remember it vividly, even though I was only about five. She’d told me to come inside but I didn’t want to. I went into the house but as she sat at the table looking at a magazine, I stared at her and tried to make her think she should let me go back out again. My mother looked up from her magazine, looked hard into my eyes, then she slapped me. She didn’t say anything before or afterward. No explanation of the slap, just wham! It was the only time she ever hit me—and I never again gave her a reason to strike me. After that, I obeyed her without defiance. And I never again tried to manipulate my mother’s mind.
After Linc had been driving for a couple of hours, I casually asked a question about my mother. He wasn’t fooled. He gave me such a knowing look that I blushed to my hair roots. When I poked him in the ribs, he acted as though I’d used a weapon on him.
“Okay,” I said,“so I’m curious. Tell me what she’s like.”
“You want me to tell you what your own mother is like?”
“Like you know everything about your mother. Ha! You’d love to find out what her colleagues at work think of her, what she thinks of you, and—”
“How did you form the opinion that you can’t read minds?”
I shrugged. “I can’t read exact thoughts but I can read feelings. You think a great deal about your parents. You seem to want to rebel against them but at the same time you want them to be proud of you.”
“And what about you? You have a mother who’s one of the most beautiful, sexiest women in the world. How’s that make you feel?”
He was pretending to be a therapist and looked down his nose at me as though he was analyzing me. I wanted to reply in kind but what came out of my mouth surprised me. “Did you go to bed with her?”
“Nope,” he said cheerfully. “Tried to, wanted to, but she wouldn’t have me.”
I looked out the window to hide my smile, ridiculously glad that he hadn’t had sex with her.
“Darci,” Linc said, all humor gone from his voice, “I read that book about you and none of it makes sense. In person you’re as unlike that stupid girl as can be. And there was no mention of your…well, your talent anywhere in the book. According to the author, you got everyone into a mess and they all risked their lives to save you.”
I didn’t say anything because there was nothing to say. I was beginning to think Linc was my friend but I wasn’t sure enough yet to confide in him. Besides, if I told him the truth I was sure he’d stop the car and push me out.
“There’s the exit,” I said, pointing. Linc sighed and I could feel his frustration, but I wasn’t yet ready to talk about what had happened inside the witches’ cave.
East Mesopotamia looked to have once been prosperous. The buildings in the center of the tiny town were well built and dripped embellishments that had been the height of fashion around 1910 or so. However, since then, all that had been done to them was to patch them up enough to keep them from falling down. Half of the buildings were empty and the half that had businesses were not upscale. As we slowly drove through town, we did not see a white face.
I looked at Linc to see what he was feeling. I didn’t have to touch him to feel his misery. He earned a lot of money yet here were people like him, perhaps even relatives of his, living in deep poverty.
He was solemn as he rolled down the window and asked a couple of men sitting on a bench if they knew John Aloysius Frazier. The man said “Pappa Al” was at “the old school house,” and pointed east.
We drove east and a few minutes later we saw a hand-lettered sign that said “Frazier School,” and Linc turned down the long driveway.
As soon as I saw the place, I loved it. It was a big, square building with windows all the way around it. Overhanging it were oak trees that had to be a hundred years old. Surrounding the building was a driveway that was covered with crushed shells.
Linc stopped the car, we got out, our shoes crunching the shells in a pleasant way, and we walked toward the front door. We were just a few feet from the car when a bell rang and out the back poured children, all running and screaming, all of them dark-skinned. Since they ran in the opposite direction, they didn’t see Linc and me.
We walked to the back of the school and standing on the doorstep was a tall, older man, majestic-looking with his dark skin and gray hair. His clothes were good quality and beautifully kept, but I could see that they were frayed at the edges.
He didn’t seem surprised when he saw Linc and it was easy to see he knew who Linc was. He didn’t see Linc as a TV star, but as his grandson. The man’s eyes threatened to eat Linc up and the hunger I felt coming from him nearly made me cry.
“And who are you?” he asked, at last turning to me.
“Darci,” Linc said. “Friend of mine. Could we talk to you?”
“My life is yours,” he said, holding the door open wide.
Pappa Al, as he was called, told a young woman to tell the kids to go home for the rest of the day, that he wanted to talk to his grandson. The young woman stood on tiptoe, whispered something to Pappa Al and the man laughed merrily. “Yes, he’s the one on that TV show,” he said, looking at Linc with such pride that Linc began to blush.
Ten minutes later the three of us were sitting inside a screened porch, drinking cold lemonade, eating molasses cookies, and looking out at the beautiful scenery. At least I was looking at the scenery. Linc and his grandfather couldn’t take their eyes off each other.
I kept my seat slightly apart from them and tried to calm them down so they could talk about the subject at hand. I was afraid they’d start dragging out photo albums and lose sight of what we’d come to find out.
Pappa Al’s voice was beautiful and I could well imagine that he could heal people with it. But he told Linc that it had been his wife, Linc’s grandmother, Lily, who had been the healer. But she had been a shy woman, so she and her husband had been a team. He made people believe his hands healed, while his wife was just his assistant.
When Linc told the story of how he’d come to have a son, I feared that his grandfather would be judgmental, but he wasn’t. He was so pleased to have a great-grandson that he didn’t care how he got the child. Linc didn’t say that we had reason to believe the child had perhaps inherited some supernatural ability.
I leaned back in my chair and quietly listened as Pappa Al told of his son, Linc’s father. “He was always embarrassed by us, by the tents and the revival meetings,” Pappa Al said. “He disassociated himself from all of it from the time he was a kid. But the money we made allowed your grandmother and me to open this school.”
My ears perked up at Pappa Al’s tone and I wondered if Linc’s did, too. I said nothing as Pappa Al gave us a tour of the school. It had once been the town school, all twelve grades in the six classrooms, but in 1972, the county had declared the school inadequate and started busing the children fifty miles away “to a school where nobody knows them.”
Linc and Pappa Al walked ahead of me and I couldn’t resist a smile. I knew a sales pitch when I heard one.
Pappa Al and his wife had traveled for years, dragging their angry son w
ith them, as they put on one faith healing tent revival after another. In 1980, Linc’s grandmother had a stroke, so they returned to their hometown of East Mesopotamia, Georgia, where she died. A year after his wife’s death, Pappa Al bought the old school, abandoned, falling down, and rebuilt it. After two years of fighting with the state school board, he received accreditation for a school for “special” kids. “The smart ones,” Pappa Al said. “The ones who have a chance to make it to college. The ones who have ambition and drive.” Proudly, he told Linc that eighty-six percent of his students went on to college. He and his staff helped the students with loans and scholarships. “If they want to go to college, I help them do it.”
By the time Pappa Al had finished his long speech it was late afternoon and when he asked if we were hungry, I practically yelled,“Yes!”
We got into the car, me in back, the two men in front, and drove to a nearby restaurant. It was an old, worn-out place but it smelled heavenly. “Bring everything you have for my grandson,” Pappa Al said, then glanced down at me. “And for his lady friend.”
Before I thought, I said,“His lady friends are dead.”
Most people would have assumed that I meant someone had died, but I guess Pappa Al had been around faith healers and other such people for too long to be fooled.
“How long dead?” he asked as we sat down at a table covered with red-and-white-checked oilcloth. I was the only white person in the place.
“Before the Civil War,” Linc said before I could stop him.
All my life, secrecy had been paramount. I’d learned to dissemble, to twist the truth, and to flat-out lie in order to hide what I’d found out that people didn’t want to know. Since people liked to believe that ghosts didn’t exist, they were happier not hearing that someone often talked with them.
Linc had no such background and it was easy to see that he was as gregarious as his grandfather. Within seconds, Linc was telling his grandfather much too much. When I sent a message to him to stop talking, he just rubbed his neck and kept on going.
I was distracted by huge bowls of food that were put on the table. There was fried chicken, chicken and dumplings, beef cooked until it was falling off the bone, half a dozen vegetables, and what looked to be six pounds of mashed potatoes and a quart of gravy. I forgot about trying to rein Linc in and dove into the food.
“That’s an evil place,” Pappa Al said, his plate loaded with half the food I had on mine. “Did you know that there was a slave uprising there? It was led by your ancestor, a slave named Martin.”
“My—” Linc said, so stunned he paused with his fork halfway to his mouth.
“It’s my guess that’s why your son stayed there. My wife, God rest her soul, could heal people sometimes, but all the time she felt things.” Pappa Al looked at me. “You know what I mean? She felt things others couldn’t feel. Honey, can you eat all that?”
“Don’t worry. She’ll clear the table,” Linc said. “What do you mean that my son stayed there?”
“If the child is anything like his great-grandmother, he can feel things other than people’s pain. My guess is that someone was using him to make money. You can’t imagine the offers your grandmother and I got to make money off people’s illnesses. A couple of times we had men tell us they’d give us a big house to live in and they’d bring sick people to us. They made it sound really good, but what we figured out was that they meant they’d bring rich people to us, people who’d paid hundreds of thousands, even millions, to be cured. The poor people who couldn’t pay could die in the street for all they cared.”
I looked at Linc and we both knew that what Pappa Al was saying had something to do with the missing child. I reached across the table to touch Linc’s arm. I saw visions of the rich women at 13 Elms and, like me, Linc was trying to figure out why they went there. Obviously, those women didn’t go to the 13 Elms for a fake séance. So why did they go? To be cured of some illness? But I hadn’t felt that any of them were ill.
“Yes,” I said to Linc, then pulled my hand away. He had the same thoughts as I did.
“What was that all about?” Pappa Al asked, nodding toward our arms.
“She can—” Linc began, then shrugged. “Tell me everything you know about 13 Elms.”
I continued eating while Pappa Al talked. The place was more evil than even I had imagined. Yes, it had been a breeding farm before the Civil War. Narcissa and Delphia’s ancestors had been too lazy to farm. The story was that around 1810 the wife of the owner got sick of her husband doing nothing but spending his days and nights in the slave quarters. The house’s roof was falling down, the crops were rotting in the fields, but all the man did was fornicate with the slave women.
One day the woman’s husband announced he was going to New Orleans for a couple of weeks. The minute he left, she called a slave broker.
“She sold every one of the little light-skinned children running around the place,” Pappa Al said. “I was told that she expected her husband to kill her when he returned, but when—”
“When he saw how much money she’d made he was pleased,” I said.
“Yes,” Pappa Al said. “There’s a legend that every bill of sale for every slave is somewhere in that house.”
“Not anymore,” Linc mumbled. “They’ve been liberated.”
I knew his grandfather thought Linc meant the bills of sale, but I knew he meant the people.
“Slave breeding grew into a business after that, passed from father to son.”
I pushed my empty plate away, sickened by the images in my head. No wonder I’d felt so much tragedy in that place.
“What about the uprising and my ancestor?” Linc asked.
“Your grandmother felt it. We were asked by…What’s that woman’s name? It was some city.”
“Delphia,” Linc and I said in unison.
“She sent a servant to us to ask us to come to her house. We thought it was an invitation for dinner, but it was an invitation to put on a show for their rich clients. My wife said Delphia was charging the guests plenty but planned to pay us only with a meal.”
“Slavery is alive and well at 13 Elms,” Linc said.
“It was at dinner that one of the women, the fat one—”
“Narcissa.”
“Yes. Her. She was talking about the glorious history of 13 Elms when my wife asked her about something that had happened there before the war. I knew Lily sensed something but I didn’t know what. Lily had to ask several questions before Narcissa reluctantly said that she’d heard of a slave uprising at 13 Elms, but it had been taken care of.
“‘How?’ Lily asked.
“The skinny one said,‘They hanged him.’ That was the end of that. The subject was changed.
“After dinner Lily told me she was going to do the healing alone, something she never did. She said she wanted me to sneak into the library and see if I could find any books on the family’s history. She wanted to know who it was that had been hanged and why they’d done it.”
“Did you find anything?” I asked.
“Oh yes. Lily told them I had a stomachache so I was allowed to lie down in a bedroom. As soon as I heard them lock the door I was out of there.”
“They locked you in? A dinner guest?” I asked.
“How did you get out?” Linc asked.
Pappa Al smiled. “Let’s just say that before I married your grandmother I learned a few things that caused me some problems with the law. Picking locks was one of the things I learned. I let myself out of the room and went snooping. There was a locked case in the library and I found a book in there, an old diary, and the dates were right. I flipped through the book and toward the back it said, ‘They hanged Martin today. How will I live without him?’”
“Where is the book?” I asked.
“Back at the school.”
Immediately, I stood up, ready to go get the diary, but then the waitress put a banana pudding, a coconut cream pie, and a chocolate layer cake on the table. I s
at back down.
“A little thing like you can’t possibly—” Pappa Al began, but Linc silenced him. I didn’t bother to answer. The whole United States, the whole world, had laughed at my eating habits. Some people had said it was a physical impossibility for me to eat a lot and not gain weight. I never answered anyone’s questions about the subject.
“Haven’t I seen you before?” Pappa Al asked, squinting at me.
I ducked my head lower over a huge piece of pie. Perfectly toasted coconut was across the top of the meringue.
“She looks like a lot of people,” Linc said quickly.
“Could we see the diary? Maybe there’s something in it we can use. And, by the way, why didn’t they prosecute you for thievery?”
“From the dust on those books, it’s my guess nobody’d read them for years, so who knows when, or even if, they found out the book was gone. Besides, it couldn’t have been me. I was locked in a bedroom.”
At that Linc and his grandfather shared identical laughs. Whatever else happened, I thought, Linc had gained a grandfather.
Before we left, Pappa Al suggested that if we thought the boy was being hidden somewhere, we should check the old church. The instant he said it, I knew there was something or someone there. It was the church that had supposedly taken up a collection for a gravestone for a woman who wasn’t who they said she was.
As the sun began to set, we knew we needed to leave, but it was a sad parting. I could feel Linc’s sadness at leaving, but also feel his elation at having found his grandfather. Like me, he’d always felt he was different. His parents had been as strange to him as the rest of the world was strange to me. When he hugged his grandfather good-bye, there were tears in both their eyes.
“If I find my son, can I send him to you?” Linc asked his grandfather. “My life in California isn’t for a kid. I’ll—”