Merrick Read Online Free PDF Page B

go away. I told them our house was full of spirits. I made the spirits come. No, I didn’t make them come. I called them and they came as I asked. Great Nananne thought it was funny. They said, ‘Make her stop,’ and Great Nananne said, ‘What makes you think I can do that?’ as if I was some wild creature that she couldn’t control.”
    Again there had come that little sigh.
    “Great Nananne’s really dying,” she said looking up at me, her green eyes never wavering. “She says there is no one now, and I have to keep these things—her books, her clippings. See, look here, at these clippings. The old newspaper is so brittle it’s falling apart. Mr. Lightner’s going to help me save these things.” She glanced at Aaron. “Why are you so afraid for me, Mr. Talbot? Aren’t you strong enough? You don’t think it’s so bad to be colored, do you? You’re not from here, you’re from away.”
    Afraid. Was I really feeling it so strongly? She’d spoken with authority, and I’d searched for the truth in it, but come quick to my own defense and perhaps to hers as well.
    “Read my heart, child,” I said. “I think nothing of the sort about being colored, though maybe there were times when I’ve thought that it might have been bad luck in a particular case.” She’d raised her eyebrows slightly, thoughtfully. I’d continued, anxious, perhaps, but not afraid. “I’m sad because you say you have no one, and I’m glad because I know that you have us.”
    “That’s what Great Nananne says, more or less,” she answered. And for the first time, her long full mouth made a true smile.
    My mind had drifted, remembering the incomparable dark-skinned women I’d seen in India, though she was a marvel of different tones, the rich mahogany hair and the pale eyes so visible and so meaningful. I’d thought again that to many she must have looked exotic, this barefoot girl in the flowered shift.
    Then had come a moment of pure feeling, which had made its indelible and irrational impression. I’d perused the many faces laid out upon the table, and it had seemed they were all gazing at me. It was a marked impression. The little pictures had been alive all along.
    It must be the firelight and the oil lamps, I’d thought dreamily, but I’d been unable to shake the feeling; the little people had been laid out to look at Aaron and to look at me. Even their placement seemed deliberate and sly, or wondrously meaningful, I’d conjectured, as I went smoothly from suspicion to a lulled and tranquil feeling that I was in an audience with a host of the dead.
    “They do seem to be looking,” Aaron had murmured, I remember, though I’m sure I hadn’t spoken. The clock had stopped ticking and I’d turned to look at it, uncertain where it was. On the mantle, yes, and its hands had been frozen, and the window-panes had given that muffled rattle that they do when the wind nudges them, and the house had wrapped me securely in its own atmosphere of warmth and secrets, of safety and sanctity, of dreaminess and communal might.
    It seemed a long interval had transpired in which none of us had spoken, and Merrick had stared at me, and then at Aaron, her hands idle, her face glistening in the light.
    I’d awakened sharply to realize nothing had changed in the room. Had I fallen asleep? Unforgivable rudeness. Aaron had been beside me as before. And the pictures had become once more inert and sorrowful, ceremonial testimony to mortality as surely as if she’d laid out a skull for my perusal from a graveyard fallen to ruin. But the uneasiness I’d experienced then stayed with me long after we’d all gone up to our respective rooms.
    Now—after twenty years and many other strange moments—she sat across from me at this café table in the Rue St. Anne, a beauty gazing at a vampire, and we talked over the flickering candle, and the light was too much like the light of that long ago evening at Oak Haven, though tonight the late spring