the time, Quinn, just a thing of pleasure, that's all I ever wanted to be. Somebody's jewel, somebody's ornament, somebody's pet, who knows?
"Sometime very late Big Ramona came and roused me and told me to dress for bed. I did what she told me, and when I came out of the bathroom in my long flannel nightshirt, she looked at me and said:
" 'You're too old for me to be sleeping with you.'
" 'That's not true,' I protested at once. 'I don't want that ghost coming back. I don't want that -- what happened. If I need that, I'll take care of that somewhere else. I need you to sleep with me,' I said. 'Come on, let's say our prayers.'
"And we did, and we hugged each other close as we slept, and I slept so deep that there seemed no dreams to it, only deep deep rest until the morning light astonished me coming through the windows and spilling into the room.
"It was early, hours before my usual lazy adolescent time, but I got up quietly, taking great pains not to wake Big Ramona, and I dressed in my jeans and boots and got my heavy garden gloves and my rifle and my hunting knife, and, stopping silently in the kitchen to get a big knife -- the very knife that Patsy had waved at Pops -- I stole out of the house down towards the landing and the pirogue tied there.
"The little cemetery was bleak in the sunshine and overgrown with weeds, and somewhere in the back of my distracted mind I knew that Pops in the natural course of things would never have let it get that way, and that he was not himself anymore; that grief was bringing real harm to Pops, and I had to do something about those weeds. I had to clean up the tombs. I had to take care of more things. I had to take care of Pops too.
"I also knew that Goblin was near me but not showing himself, and I knew that Goblin was afraid.
"I didn't care about Goblin, and I thought perhaps that Goblin knew that too.
"As I look back on it now, I know that he knew it. He knew that once he had been the central mystery of my life and that he was that no longer -- Rebecca had taken his place -- and he was hanging back, weakened by my indifference and full of a panic which perhaps he had learned to feel from me.
"My heart was set on finding Sugar Devil Island, and so, with the pole in hand I pushed away from the bank and set out into the swamp."
Chapter 11
Chapter 11
11
"NOW, I HAD BEEN in the swamp plenty as a youngster. I knew how to fire the rifle. I knew how to fish. And Pops and I had ranged quite far from the banks of the farm. But there was a territory to which we adhered, and it had always seemed spacious enough for us because we caught lots of fish in it, and the swamp itself seemed so unvarying in its morass of cypress, tupelo gum and wild oak, its giant palmetto and endless snags of vine.
"But now, it was my single object to push beyond this territory and, in choosing a direction, I was guided only by my memory of the tree which had the arrow deeply carved into the bark, above its girdle of rusted chain.
"It took me longer to find than I would have liked, and the air was humid and heavy, but the water was at a good level for the pirogue, and so, taking out my compass, I did my best to chart a course in the direction to which the arrow pointed.
"If Pops and I had ever been this far, I wasn't conscious of it. What I was conscious of was that I could get dangerously lost. But I didn't care much about it. I was too sure of my mission, and when I began to experience feelings of dizziness I just pushed on.
"Again I heard voices speaking, just as if these whispers pushed at me and prodded me and broke my sense of balance, and once again a woman was crying, only it wasn't Virginia Lee.
"You can't do this to me, the woman sobbed. You can't do it! And there came a rolling rumble of deeper voices -- Engraved forever! said the woman, and then I lost the thread of it.