Merrick - Anne Rice [77]
As for me, I had to go back to England several times during that fateful summer. I much resented it. I had come to love the New Orleans Motherhouse, and I did seek every excuse to remain. I wrote long reports to the Elders of the Talamasca, admitting to this weakness, but explaining, well, pleading perhaps, that I needed to become better acquainted with this strange part of America which didn’t seem American at all.
The Elders were indulgent. I had plenty of time to spend with Merrick. However, one letter from them cautioned me not to become overly fond of this “little girl.” This stung me because I misinterpreted it. I made an avowal of my purity. The Elders wrote back: “David, we don’t doubt your purity; children can be fickle; we were thinking of your heart.”
Aaron, meantime, cataloged all Merrick’s possessions and eventually established a full room in one of the outbuildings to contain the statues which had been taken from her shrines.
Not one but several medieval codices made up the legacy of Oncle Vervain. There was no explanation as to how he had acquired these books. But there was evidence that he had used them, and in some we found his notes in pencil along with certain dates.
In one carton from Great Nananne’s attic were a whole cache of printed books on magic, all published in the 1800s, when the “paranormal” had been such the rage in London and on the Continent, what with mediums and séances and such. These had their pencil markings as well.
We found also a great disintegrating scrapbook crammed with brittle yellowed newspaper clippings, all from New Orleans, which told tales of Voodoo attributed to “the local Doctor of much renown, Jerome Mayfair,” whom Merrick identified for us as Oncle Vervain’s grandfather, The Old Man. Indeed, all of New Orleans had known about him and there were many quaint little stories of Voodoo meetings broken up by the local police at which many “white ladies” were arrested, as well as women of color, and blacks.
The most tragic of all discoveries, however, and the one which was of the least use to us as an Order of Psychic Detectives—if that is what we are—was the diary of the colored daguerreotypist who was too far back in the lineage for a direct connection in Merrick’s account. It was a quiet, friendly document, created by one Laurence Mayfair, mentioning, among other things, the daily weather in the city, the number of customers at the studio, and other small local events.
It recorded a happy life, I felt certain, and we took the time to copy it very carefully and send that copy to the local university, where such a document by a man of color before the Civil War would be given its just due.
In time, many similar documents, as well as copies of photographs, were sent on to various Southern universities, but such steps were always taken—for Merrick’s sake—with great care.
Merrick was absent from the accompanying letters. She really did not want the material traced to her personally because she did not want to explain her family to those outside the Order, and I think she feared, and perhaps rightly, that her presence with us might be questioned as well.
“They need to know about our people,” she’d say at table, “but they don’t need to know about me.”
She was greatly relieved that we did what we did, but she was launched now into another world. She would never be that tragic child again who had showed the daguerreotypes to me the first evening.
She was Merrick the student who pored over her books for hours, Merrick the passionate arguer of politics, before, during, and after the television news. She was Merrick who owned seventeen pairs of shoes, and changed them three times a day. She was Merrick, the Catholic, who insisted on going to Mass every Sunday even if a Biblical inundation were falling upon the plantation and the nearby church.
Of course I was pleased to see these things, though I knew