Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [52]
“It’s more than fair to say that when he wasn’t making faces and cavorting he impressed me with an engulfing love. It was stronger perhaps when he wasn’t visible, but if he didn’t appear to me at short intervals over the day and into the night, I began to cry for him and become severely distressed.
“Sometimes when I was running on the grass or climbing the oak tree outside, down by the cemetery, I could feel him clinging to me, piggybacking onto me, and I would all the time talk to him, whether he was visible or not.
“One very bright day, when I was in the kitchen, Sweetheart taught me to write some words—‘good’ and ‘bad’ and ‘happy’ and ‘sad,’ and I taught Goblin, with his hand on mine, to write these words as well. Of course nobody understood that Goblin was doing the writing some of the time, and when I tried to tell them they just laughed, except for Pops, who never liked Goblin and was always worried ‘where all this talk of Goblin would lead.’
“No doubt Patsy had always been around, but I don’t remember her distinctly until I was four or five. And even then I don’t think I knew she was my mother. She certainly never came up here to my room, and when I did see her in the kitchen I was already afraid that a screaming fight between her and Pops was going to break out.
“I loved Pops, and with reason, because he loved me. He was a tall gaunt man with gray hair all the time I knew him, and always working, and most of the time with his hands. He was educated and he spoke very well, as did Sweetheart, but he wanted to be a country man. And just the way the kitchen had swallowed up Sweetheart, who had once been a debutante in New Orleans, so the farm swallowed Pops.
“Pops kept the books for the Blackwood Manor Bed-and-Breakfast on a computer in his room. And though he did put on a white shirt and suit to conduct the tours of the place now and then, he didn’t like that part of things. He preferred to be riding the lawns on his beloved tractor lawn mower or doing any other kind of work outdoors.
“He was happiest when he had a ‘project’ and could work side by side with the Shed Men—Jasmine’s great-uncles, brothers and so forth—until the sun went down, and I never saw him in any vehicle except a pickup truck until Sweetheart died, at which time he rode into town in a limousine like all the rest of us did.
“But I don’t think, and it’s hurtful to say it, that Pops loved his daughter, Patsy. I think he loved her as little as Patsy loves me.
“Patsy was a late child, I know that now, though I didn’t then. And when I look back on it as I tell you this story, I realize there was no natural place for her. Had she gone debutante like Sweetheart, well, maybe it would have been a different story. But Patsy had gone country and wild at the same time, and this mixture Pops, for all his country ways, couldn’t abide.
“Pops disapproved of everything about Patsy, from the way she teased her hair and curled it down her back and over her shoulders to the tiny short skirts that she wore. He hated her white cowboy boots and told her so, and said her singing was a bunch of foolishness, she’d never ‘make it’ with her band. He made her shut the garage doors when she practiced so her ‘racket’ wouldn’t disturb the bed-and-breakfast guests. He couldn’t endure her flashy makeup and her fringed leather jackets, and he told her she looked like common trash.
“She shot right back at him, saying she’d earn the money to get the hell out of here, and she broke a cookie jar once in a fight with him—a cookie jar full of Sweetheart’s chocolate fudge, I might add—and whenever she left the kitchen, she never forgot to slam the screen door.
“Patsy was a good singer,