Blood Canticle - Anne Rice [100]
And I am all alone.
And I’ll be gone before the leaves
Begin to fall again.
They’re rushing up and down the stairs
The bed is wide and soft.
But I lie still and oh, so cold.
Because my mother’s gone.
Will I soon see her simple face?
I have no dreams or faith.
I wish that I could make a song
That tells how good it’s been.
I had the stage, I had the light.
The music was the tale.
But things are tinged with purple now
And these sad notes I play.
I wait until the autumn comes
And I will be no more.
We stood together, bound by the sorrow of it, as if we were in a deep enchantment.
Quinn leant down to kiss Tommy on the cheek. Tommy just stared at the printed music before him. Jasmine had her arm around his shoulder.
“Now that was beautiful,” she said. “And Patsy wrote that, now, she knew what was coming, she knew.”
Then Quinn drew Nash off with him into the dining room. Mona and I went with him, but there was no real need for us.
I saw this as they sat down to talk.
I saw that Nash understood from the first words, and was completely desirous of this position that Quinn was describing to him. I saw that it had been Nash’s secret dream. Nash had only been waiting for the time to present such a proposal to Quinn.
Meanwhile, in the parlor Jasmine was asking Tommy to play the song again.
“But you didn’t really see that awful ghost of Patsy, did you?” Tommy was asking.
“No, no,” said Jasmine, trying to comfort Tommy, “I was just carrying on, I don’t know what got into me, don’t you be afraid of Patsy’s ghost, don’t you think about that, besides, you see a ghost, you make the Sign of the Cross, nothing to it, now you sing that song again, I’ll sing it with you. . . .”
“You play the song again, Tommy,” I said. “You keep playing it and you keep singing it. If her spirit’s wandering, she’ll hear it and it will comfort her.”
I went out the unlocked front door into the warm humid air, down the steps and away from the light, and I walked back behind the house and over to the far right where the bungalow stood in which Jasmine and Big Ramona and Clem lived.
It was lighted cheerily. And only Clem was there, sitting on the front porch, rocking and smoking a very aromatic cigar. I gestured for him not to get up on my account, and I walked back behind the house and along the treacherous soft bank of the swamp.
I could hear Tommy singing. I sang the words along with him, soft, in no more than a whisper. I tried to picture Patsy as she had been in her heyday—country-western star, in her leather jackets with fringe and skirts and boots, with teased and bouffant hair, belting her original songs. It was the image that Quinn had given to me. Grudgingly he had said she could truly sing. Even Aunt Queen had mentioned to me with some reserve that Patsy could really sing. Ah, there hadn’t been a single soul in the world of Blackwood Farm who had felt love for Patsy.
And all I’d glimpsed was the sick Patsy, bitter and full of hate, sitting on the couch in her white nightgown, knowing she’d never be well enough to perform anymore, hollering for Cyndy, the Nurse, to give her another shot, hating Quinn out loud and with her soul, her pinched and twisted soul, Patsy, who’d caught the plague from drug needles and didn’t care how many times she’d passed it on.
And Quinn had done her in just exactly as he’d described it to the sheriff.
I walked on, with the swamp beside me. I let my vampiric hearing rove. Nash had begun to play Patsy’s song, with more notes and a bolder expression. He and Tommy were singing it together. Sadness. Jasmine cried. Jasmine whispered, “Ah, the pure pitifulness of it.”
The rural dark fell down around me. I let go of the music.
The swamp seemed the most savage and devouring place, with no pastoral symmetry or harmony to it. What thrived there was ravenous and battling to the death, and would never find a safe haven for itself—a landscape eating itself alive. Quinn had told me it was like that. But how could I not have known it?