“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 Rémy 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.