Blackwood Farm (12 page)

“Because African and Spanish and French and Anglo-Saxon genes were all scrambled in the lineage of Jasmine's people before they came, and down through the years by marriage to other people of all colors, Jasmine's family are all different shades of yellow, red, brown and black.

“Jasmine's dark, as you saw, with the fabulous green eyes. She bleaches that close-cropped Afro of hers and something happens with that yellow hair and those green eyes that's magic.

“Her older sister, Lolly, can pass for Spanish or Italian, and then there's Jasmine's brother, Clem, who has very dark skin and African features. He drives Aunt Queen's car and takes care of all the fleet, including the black Porsche I bought in imitation of you and your adventures in the Vampire Chronicles.

“Little Ida, Jasmine's mother, was very black with exquisitely fine features and tiny black eyes. She married a white man when she was pretty mature, and, after his death from cancer, she came back here with Jasmine and Lolly and Clem. She was my nurse or nanny till she died, Little Ida, sleeping with me till I was thirteen, and then dying in my bed.

“What I'm telling you now, this story of the Blackwood family, is what has come down to me from Jasmine and Lolly and Little Ida and Big Ramona, who is Little Ida's mother, as well as from Aunt Queen, or Pops or Sweetheart. Jasmine has an eye for ghosts, as I've said, and I'm always afraid she's going to realize I'm not really alive, but so far it hasn't happened. And I hang on to my family like a pit bull.

“But to return to my story, if it hadn't been for the fabled Ora Lee and Jerome, little William and Camille might have drowned in the swamp or starved from inattention.

“As to salaries for his hired help, Manfred couldn't be bothered with any such thing, only heaving fistfuls of money into a big bowl in the kitchen. Jerome had to see that the man wasn't robbed, and the keep of William and Camille and all the farmhands was provided for.

“The farm had its own chickens and cows in those days, and horses of course, and a fine carriage or two parked right beside the new automobiles in the back shed.

“But Manfred never bothered with anything but one black gelding, which he sometimes came ashore to ride back and forth across the broad lawns and pastures of Blackwood Farm, shouting and murmuring and cursing to himself, and declaring to his groom (most probably the versatile Jerome) that he was never going to die and join Virginia Lee, not until centuries had passed, that he would roam the earth, shivering from her death and honoring her memory.

“All this I learned by rote as you can tell.

“One spring day several years after Manfred had become a widower, carpenters and lumber were brought to the property, and the slow process of building the mysterious Hermitage on Sugar Devil Island began.

“Nothing but the finest kiln-dried cypress was seen to go off by pirogue into the swamp, in one small load at a time, along with a great quantity of other materials, including an iron stove and a great amount of coal, and only workmen from ‘away' went out there to build, workmen who would go ‘away' when the work was done, which is what those workmen did, solemnly afraid of uttering a word as to the location of the island, or what had been their specific tasks.

“Was there really such an island? Was there really a hermitage upon it? As I was growing up, who was to say that it was anything more than a legend? And why was there no swamp tour to take our tourists out to search for this mysterious Sugar Devil Island, for surely everyone wanted to see it. It was a regular feature of life to see the tourists down at the landing, hankering to wade in the bog. But the swamp, as stated, and it can't be stated enough, is almost impassable.

“The great silent groping cypress is everywhere, along with the wild palmetto and the rankest water. And one can still hear the roar of cougars and bears. It's no joke.

“Of course Pops and I fished in Sugar Devil Swamp and we hunted. And in my boyish ignorance I once killed a deer in the swamp, and lost my taste right there for all hunting as I watched it die.

“But in all our exploits, including trapping crawfish by the pound, we never went deeper in than some twenty feet from the shores. And even at that distance, it's hard to see one's way back.

“As for the legend of the Hermitage on Sugar Devil Island, Pops put no stock in it, reminding the curious tourists that even if such a building had existed, it might have long ago sunk into the muck.

“Then there are the stories of poachers who disappeared without a trace, of their wives gone crying to the local sheriff to please search, but what could the sheriff hope to find in a swamp infested by roaring bears and alligators?

“However, the most evil omen that hung over this odd, private jungle was the disappearance into the swamp of Mad Manfred himself in the year 1924, as Aunt Queen has already described to us, to which our tour guides would invariably add that the Old Man dressed in his tailcoat and white tie and boiled shirt and fine leather shoes before that last excursion, and ranted and raved at himself in the mirror for an hour before bolting out the door.

“Yes, people searched, as the Old Man had been convalescent for two years before this bizarre and desperate flight, but they never found any island, and they had to shoot many a gator just to survive, and came back with the gators to sell for their hides, but not with Manfred.

“And so it was that the idea took hold that there was no real island. And that the Old Man had simply drowned to put an end to his wheezing and choking misery, for he was surely at death's door when he bolted for the pirogue and headed out as if to cross the River Styx.

“Then, some seven years later, when his will was finally opened, there was found contained within the strong exhortation that no Blackwood or anyone belonging to the Blackwood household was ever to fish or hunt beyond the mud banks of Sugar Devil Swamp, and the admonition, in Manfred's own hand, that Sugar Devil Island was a danger not only to flesh and blood but to a being's immortal soul.

“A very good copy of these pages of Manfred's Last Will and Testament, all notarized in the year 1900, is framed and mounted on the living room wall. Guests adored it. I remember my teachers, Nash in particular, just howling with laughter when they read it. And it did certainly seem to me, as I was growing up, that the lawyer, the notary and Mad Manfred were all poets in Byronic cahoots with one another when they wrote this.

“But it doesn't seem that way to me now.

“Let me continue. Of William, Manfred's only surviving son, and Camille, his only surviving daughter, there are huge portraits in the parlor, very handsome paintings if nothing else, and the current tale that William has often appeared to family and guests, rummaging through a desk in the living room, is true.

“The desk is a beautiful piece, Louis XV, I believe, with inlaid wood, cabriole legs and ormolu—you know, the works—and I have myself glimpsed him once hovering near it.

“I have no doubt of what I've seen with my own eyes, but I will get to that when I return to the account of me and Goblin. It's enough to say right now that I never found anything in the desk. There are no secret compartments or documents.

“Camille's ghost is almost always seen on the attic stairs, a woman with tastefully coiffed gray hair, and in an old-lady black dress and old-lady thick-heeled shoes, with a double strand of pearls around her neck, ignoring those to whom she appears and vanishing at the attic doorway.

“And then there are the rushing feet of little children in the upstairs hall, these ascribed to Manfred's little daughter Isabel, who died when she was three, and his son Philip, who didn't live even that long.

“When it came to the rest of the family, it was simply a matter of elegantly painted portraits—Gravier's is especially fine, but then I did see Gravier, didn't I? But his wife, Blessed Alice, a lovely portrait subject, and Pops and Sweetheart, who reluctantly posed for their portraits, though it wasn't their nature, have never appeared to anyone. So far . . .

“Then there's the living legend of Aunt Queen—Miss Queen to all those of this parish—and of her heroic travels crisscrossing the globe. The guests were delighted to hear that she was ‘presently in Bombay' or ‘celebrating New Year's Eve in Rio' or ‘resting in her villa on Santorini' or ‘engaged in a major shopping spree in Rome.' It proved as exciting to them as any ghost story.

“That Aunt Queen was a great collector of cameos was also well known, and in those days, the public days, there was a dainty glass case in the parlor, perched on spindly legs in the corner, which held a display of her finest pieces.

“Bed-and-breakfast guests at Blackwood Manor never stole things, I'm relieved to report—I think they're far more interested in homemade biscuits, jam and architecture—and I was the one who periodically changed the display of Aunt Queen's cameos. I grew to like them. I could see the variations. Sweetheart had no real interest in them. And Pops was the outdoor man.

“Aunt Queen can be said to have been a living haunt, or a protective spirit, which was a remarkable thing to me when I was a child, because I felt safe merely thinking about her, and her visits were like the apparitions of a saint.

“Others died in this house. An infant born to Gravier and Blessed Alice; there are times when I swear I can hear a baby crying. Guests used to hear it too, and sometimes they would remark on it rather innocently.

“Gravier had a younger brother, Patrick, who fell from a horse and died of the concussion in the middle upstairs bedroom. His portrait hangs in there over the fireplace. His wife, Regina, lived out her life here, much beloved by the Kitchen Gang, of which she was a baking, frying, slicing, dicing bonafide member. Their only daughter, Nanette, moved away long years ago to New Orleans.

“There, in a cheap French Quarter boardinghouse, Nanette drank a whole bottle of bourbon and ate a whole bottle of aspirin and died of the result. I don't know any more of it than that. If her ghost walks, it doesn't do so at Blackwood Manor. Patrick too seems to be resting well in the family crypt. So is his wife, Regina.

“Professional ghost hunters came once and found evidence of multiple hauntings, and made a tantalizing presentation to the guests who had gathered for the Halloween weekend, and so the tradition of the Halloween Weekend came to be.

“The Halloween Weekend was always marvelous fun, with huge white tents on the terraces and on the far lawns, with chilled champagne and Bloody Marys. Tarot-card readers and palm readers, fortune-tellers and psychics were hired for the event, and the climax was a costume ball to which people came from all the parish around.

“If Aunt Queen happened to be at home, which was seldom, a great number of old friends of hers joined the festivities, and the costumes were wonderfully lavish, the place being full of princes and princesses of all description, elegant vampires, stereotypical black-hatted witches, sorceresses, Egyptian queens, moon goddesses and the occasional ambitious mummy, dripping with white gauze.

“I loved all of the Halloween Weekend, you can tell by the way I dote on it. And it won't surprise you to learn that the expert ghost hunters never once took notice of Goblin, even when Goblin danced around them in a circle and did the abominable trick of stretching his mouth.

“Of course Goblin isn't the ghost of a living person, but these experts were very good at declaring that poltergeists were working their subtle activities in the kitchen and pantry, accounting for pings and pongs of noise that one could scarce hear, or the sound of a radio devolving from music into static; and poltergeists are pure spirits as far as I know.

“This was my life growing up—this and the Christmas banquet of which I've already told you, with the caroling and the singing on the staircase and of course the huge dinner of roast turkey, goose and ham along with all the usual trimmings, and the weather outside being sometimes cold enough for the women to wear their old fur coats that smelled of moth balls, and the gentlemen joining in the singing with full hearts.

“It seemed at times that the men singing the Christmas carols made me cry. I expected the women to sing, it seemed natural, but for the men to join in, men of all ages, and to do it with such stout hearts, that seemed especially reassuring and wonderful. I cried every year. It was that and the purity of the soprano who sang ‘O Holy Night,' and ‘What Child Is This?' Of course I joined in the singing myself.

“And lest I overlook it, there was the Spring Festival, when the azaleas planted all around Blackwood Manor were blooming, in pink and white and red, and we would have a huge buffet, almost like that of a wedding, outside on the lawn. There was always an Easter Buffet as well.

“Then I suppose I should throw in all the weddings again and the commotion they brought, and the fascinating waiters I would meet in the kitchen, who to a one felt the ‘vibrations' of spirits, and the brides becoming hysterical because their hair was not done right and the hairdresser had already gone, and Sweetheart, my darling Sweetheart, portly and ever solicitous, huffing and puffing up the stairs to the rescue and snatching up her electric curling iron and doing a few excellent tricks she knew to make everything right.

“There was Mardi Gras too, when, even though we're an hour and a half from New Orleans, we were booked solid, and we decorated in the traditional colors of purple, green and gold.

“Sometimes, a very few times, I went into the city to see some of the Mardi Gras parades. Sweetheart's sister, Aunt Ruthie, lived on St. Charles Avenue, which you know is the main parade route. But she wasn't a Blackwood, and her sons, though probably normal, appeared to me to be monsters with too much body hair and overly deep voices, and I felt uncomfortable there.

“So Mardi Gras didn't penetrate to me very much except for all the gaiety out here at the house, and the inevitable costume ball we held on the night of Fat Tuesday itself. It was amazing how many revelers came back at sunset from New Orleans, after hours of watching Zulu, Rex and the interminable truck parades, to drink themselves sick at our festive bar.