Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [60]
“Aunt Queen soon took her leave, but not before hiring a young lady to ‘homeschool’ me, which she did, coming up to Blackwood Manor every day.
“This teacher wasn’t really a very effective person, and my conversations with Goblin scared her, and she was soon gone.
“The next and the next weren’t much good either.
“Goblin hated these teachers as much as I did. They wanted me to color pictures that were boring and to paste strips of paper from magazines onto cardboard. And for the most part they had a dishonest manner of speaking which seems, I think in retrospect, to assume that a child’s mind is different from that of adults. I couldn’t bear it. I learned quickly how to horrify and frighten them. I did it lustily to break their power. I wanted them gone. With the fury of an only child with a spirit of his own, I wanted them gone.
“No matter how many came, I was soon alone with Goblin again.
“We had the run of the farm as always, and we hung out sometimes with the Shed Men, watching boxing on television, a sport I’ve always loved—in fact, the only sport that I love to watch and still do watch—and we saw the ghosts in the old cemetery several times.
“As for the ghost of William, Manfred’s son, I saw him at least three times by the desk in the living room, and he seemed as oblivious to me as Aunt Camille on the attic stairs.
“Meanwhile Little Ida read lavishly illustrated children’s books to me, not minding one bit that Goblin too was listening and looking, all of us crowded on the bed together against the headboard, and I learned to read a little with her, and Goblin could actually read a book to me if I had the patience to listen to him, to tune in to his silent voice inside my head. On rainy days, as I’ve mentioned, he was really strong. He could read a whole poem to me from an adult book. If we were running in the summer rain, he could stay perfectly solid for an hour.
“Sometime in these early years I realized that I had a treasure in Goblin, that his knack for understanding and spelling words was superior to mine, and I liked it, and I also trusted his opinion of the teachers, of course. Goblin was learning faster than I was. And then the inevitable happened.
“I must have been nine years old. Goblin, taking my left hand, began to write more sophisticated messages than I could have ever written. In the kitchen, where I sat at the big white-enameled table now with the adults, Goblin scrawled out in crayon on paper something like ‘Quinn and I want to go riding in Pops’ truck. We’d like to go to the cock fights again. We like to see the roosters go at it. We want to place bets.’
“Little Ida witnessed this and so did Jasmine, both of whom said nothing, and Sweetheart just shook her head, and Pops was silent too. Then Pops did a clever thing.
“ ‘Now, Quinn,’ he said, ‘you’re telling us Goblin wrote this, but all I see is your left hand moving. Just to get this straight, you copy those words for us. Tell Goblin just to let you copy. I want to see how your hand is different from his.’
“Of course I had a difficult time copying, and the printing was much neater and squared off when I did it, the way Little Ida had taught me to print, and Pops drew back and was amazed.
“Then Goblin grabbed my left hand again and guided it as he wrote in his characteristic spidery scrawl, ‘Don’t be afraid of me. I love Quinn.’
“I became elated with these developments and I remember saying to all assembled that Goblin was the best teacher I had. But nobody was as happy about this as I was, and then Goblin grabbed my hand again, very tight, and scrawled out, nearly breaking the crayon, ‘You don’t believe in me. Quinn believes in me.’
“It seemed utterly plain to me that Goblin was a separate creature and everybody ought to know it, but no one was ready to say it in words.
“However, Pops and I went to the cock fights the very next weekend, and as we were