her away. Carlotta would be with them, just to make sure the girl was safe.
Now this son of mine was my pride and joy, as I’ve said, my eldest, my brightest, and all these years I had tried to protect him from what I knew. But he was too shrewd to be protected entirely, and now for me he had fallen off his pedestal and I was too angry not to judge him for what had become of this girl.
“Father, I didn’t know, I swear it. And even now I don’t believe it. It would take me hours to tell you the story of that night. I could swear that Barbara Ann put something in my drink to make me mad. She dragged me out into the swamp with her. We were in the boat together; that is all I remember, and that she was devilish and strange. I swear this, Father. When I woke I was in the boat. I went up to Fontevrault and they locked me out. Tobias had his shotgun. He said he’d kill me. I walked into St. Martinville to call home. I swear this. That’s all I remember. If she is my child, I’m sorry. But they never told me. Seems they never wanted me to know. I’ll look out for her from now on.”
“That’s all well and good for the fifth circuit court of appeals,” said I. “You knew when she was born. You heard the rumors. Make sure this child is never a prisoner again, you understand? That she has everything she requires, that she goes to school away from here if she wants to, that she has money of her own!”
I turned my back on them. I turned my back on my world. I did not answer when he spoke to me. I thought of Evelyn and how she described her silence, and it seemed an amusing power, to lie there and not to answer, to let them think that I could not.
They came and they went. Evelyn was taken back, with Carlotta and Cortland to speak for her. Or so I was told.
Only Richard’s crying broke my heart. I went away from it, deep into myself where I could hear the poem and say the phrases, trying vainly to figure them out.
Let the devil speak his story,
Let him rouse the angel’s might.
But what did it mean to me? Finally I clung to the last verse of it: “Else shall Eden have no Springtime.”
We were the Springtime, we Mayfairs, I knew it. Eden was our world. We were the Springtime, and the simple word Else meant there was hope. We could be saved somehow. Something could stop the vale of those who mourn!
Pain and suffering as they stumble
Blood and fear before they learn…
Yes, there was hope in the poem, a purpose to it, a purpose in its telling! But would I ever live to see the words fulfilled? And nothing struck such horror in me as that sentence: “Slay the flesh that is not human!” for if this thing was not human, what would its powers be? If it was merely St. Ashlar—but that did not seem so! Would it become a man when it was born again? Or something worse?
“Slay the flesh that is not human!”
Ah, how I troubled over it. How it obsessed my mind. Sometimes there was nothing in my mind but the words of the poem and feverish images!
I was senseless finally. Days passed. The doctor came. At last I sat up and began to talk so the nincompoop would leave me alone. Science had made great strides since my boyhood, but that didn’t prevent this knucklehead from standing over me and telling my loved ones that I was suffering from “hardening of the arteries” and “senile dementia” and couldn’t understand anything they said.
It was an absolute delight to rise up and order him out of the room.
Also I wanted to walk around again. I was never one for simply lying there, and this had been my worst hour, and it had ended and I was living still.
Richard helped me dress and I went down all the way to the first floor for supper with my family. I sat at the head of the table and made a great show of polishing off gumbo, roast chicken, and a boeuf daube or some other foolishness, just so they would leave me alone. I refused to look at Cortland, who tried again and again to speak to me. I