To Make Death Love Us (6 page)

Enoch cried out and
stumbled toward the black girl, his arms outstretched to take her to his breast.

"Lord," he cried.
"Don't talk like that to your master, Mandy. I'll save you!"

The girl slapped
out at him as his hands touched her. She shoved him back, more embarrassed than frightened. "Get
away from me. Crazy-ass Honky!" she screamed at him, figuring if the shove didn't keep him away
the shout would.

A well-dressed
black man, sitting in his flashy Cadillac, a stranger to this neighborhood, slammed his car door
open and strode out into the street. Say, who that bastard think he is, anyway?

"Hey! Hey! What you
doing, you white bastard? Raping this sweet girl, now?" said the well-dressed black
dude.

Enoch whirled
around to face the deep voice, the threat at his back. "I will save her from the mistake of
freedom!" he cried. "She'll go home or know the taste of the overseer's whip!"

The dude punched
him in the mouth, busting out Enoch's front teeth, smashing him to the pavement. He hadn't meant
to hit him so hard. It was that edge of madness in Enoch's voice that had thrown him, scared him
even, made him swing so hard at what frightened him.

Serena jerked in
her sleep. Enoch's madness whirled through her own mind, the pain and rage and terrible loss.
Mixed in with these things was something deeper, a drive more demanding. Guilt. Shame. Enoch had
sinned, sinned in a way only death could cleanse. I must die. I must be punished. I want to die.
Yes, those were the inner­most thoughts tumbling in his mad brain.

These thoughts were
as clear in Serena's dream as if they were printed on a page for her fingers to read.

"Good Christ, stop
that, mister," the girl yelled at the top of her voice, angry because things were getting out of
hand. "You had no call to hit him like that."

Her little sister
hid her face in her skirt, hiding the sight of bloodied Enoch on the ground.

"Man trying to rape
you or something," said the black man defensively.

The older sister
said, with some heat, "You get along now. He ain't trying to rape nobody!"

Rape?

The word seemed to
act as a magnet. The word went flying around the crowd on the street, triggering hard feelings.
The blacks gathered, sensitive to the word and the meaning.

There was blood all
over Enoch's face and his ruffled shirt. His ruined mouth opened and closed spasmodically. The
girl stepped between the fallen man and the man from the Cadillac who had knocked him
down.

She roughly
shouldered the man aside. "You quit, now. I know this man. He done suffered enough. Didn't have
no harm in him. He just a little weird in the head, is all. He been hurt enough. You leave him
be."

The black man still
had his fists clenched. The faces in the crowd all around were still hostile.

The older sister
bent down and helped Enoch to his feet. He seemed dazed, the shock of the blow rendering him
senseless. He staggered, almost fell. His eyes saw, not this world but into another—Poe's dead
world—and it was his own grave his wild eyes sought.

The black girl's
hand on his arm steadied him. This act of helping him to his feet eased the tension in the
watch­ing crowd. The anger began to recede like a storm with spent force.

But this was not as
Enoch wished it.

Serena in her
dream, saw it all. Her father, that poor, mad, frightened creature, with pains and hates too
large for this world. This man, so unlike her father, with a horri­fying need that only death
could cure, stood before her, as if begging her for mercy, for that release from this life he so
desperately wanted.

Serena then
understood it was more than a dream. The dream grew, pulsing with energy and sudden force, until
it became a torrent in her head, a giddy rush to power, awesome, limitless power. She saw the
grave Enoch so desperately sought, the violent punishment his mind and body shrieked to
have.

And to that end,
she moved what did not have the strength to move.

Serena nearly
screamed in her sleep, a smile of secret knowledge on her delicate lips. She went back inside her
brain, deep into the hidden places, until, in that secret, terrible place, she at last understood
what she must do. There had to be an end to Enoch's shame, to a lifetime of hurt, and anguish
that would not stop.

It was like
sticking a knife into a living creature, but she did it. She reached into a wish in Enoch's mind
and made death love him.

Enoch's eyes
glazed, his unsteady legs stiffened with a surge of adrenaline. His face was suffused with his
own

madness. His hands
clenched and unclenched, now fists, now like the claws of some great, predatory bird.

The people in the
hostile crowd were beginning to move off, their anger vented, the crisis over.

His eyes focused
and he looked all about him, a quick, all-inclusive glance, and saw for the first time, a world
he had pretended against all his life. He saw the ugliness of the city ghetto, the squalid,
sordid hustle of the age in which he really lived. With this sudden clarity of mind, came,
unbidden, an act—unthinkable, unspeakable— against everything Enoch had ever known or
thought.

His hands went up,
reaching for the girl. It happened very quickly. His fingers found the neck of her thin cotton
dress and, adrenaline strong, he ripped it down to her waist, exposing her white bra.

The crowd fell on
him like lions. Had they not seen some crazy white man laying hands on one of their sisters? They
stamped him into the pavement. Yes, yes, Enoch's mind cried, my just punishment. The weight of
the angry crowd, hard shoes and fists, raining down on him, turned him from a human being into a
bloodied pulp. They killed him, there in the street, pounding him into an almost unrecognizable
lump of human meat, just two blocks away from the house with the lace curtains and the gentle
moon-child dreaming his death in the window.

It was, in Serena's
heart, in Enoch's mind, an act of kindness.

Enoch was gone but,
somehow, nothing much seemed changed. There were all sorts of things to take care of, people to
see, arrangements to make, deliveries to be made, checks filled out, that sort of thing. Mary
Pratt was frail, however, and so a nurse was brought in—at first, to help in the taking care of
Serena, and, later, taking care of Mary, who took to her bed soon after her husband's death,
obsessed with the idea that she was pregnant again with Serena, her first born.

The power that
gentle Serena invoked, subsided. Like the dream from which it sprang, it returned into that deep
and secret place in her mind, to await another time and place suitable for its
invoking.

Serena felt no
guilt, no great remorse. She mourned Enoch's death in the spirit of one who has lost someone
beloved, but her grief was tempered by a feeling of justice rendered, of mercy
tendered.

Her father could
not love life as it was.

So she had made
death love him, where life could not.

In her own way,
too, Serena understood her mother's madness.

It was a madness
without pain. She saw it very clearly on the days she sat in her window, carefully sifting
through the world about her in dreams.

Mary Pratt's
madness was a joyful one, the expectant mother of an imaginary fetus.

Serena sensed no
need for death, no great longing for it as her father had experienced. And so Serena's dreams
were more like caresses than inquiries, as she sometimes probed the gentle madness in her
mother.

Serena often sat
beside her mother's bed for long hours, listening to her talk of the child yet to
come.

"I shall call her
Serena. It will be a girl, I am sure. A woman knows these things," said Mary Pratt, touching her
empty belly, trying to sense the unmistakable stir­rings of new life inside her. "Did you feel
that? She kicked me! I felt it." Mary's face was rapturous.

"Yes, Mother."
Serena stroked her face. They spent many long hours in just this way.

Sometimes Serena
read fairy stories to her mother from a big, colored book that only her fingers could see. Mary
Pratt listened with obvious delight, thinking to herself that some day she would read those very
same stories to her child when it came.

Serena was
twenty-two when Will Carney came calling. He'd gone to buy an ice-cream suit and some
frilled-front shirts from the very same tailor to whom Enoch Pratt had once given his
custom.

The salesman was
something of a gossip and something of a historian of the bizarre. He had too little to think
about and too much to say. The tailor mentioned Enoch Pratt, who had lived, almost, in another
century. He
talked about the strange
house with drawn curtains. He spoke of the enigmatic, reclusive moon child, Serena. While he
talked, the tailor glanced often at Will's crip­pled, scar-laced hand as though suggesting that
Will, him­self maimed in some small way, might appreciate a story of someone really put upon by
fate.

"You say her hair
is pure white?" Will Carney asked, his mind spinning with the notion.

"Like a winter full
of snow, like milkweed. Didn't I just say it? I've seen her myself, sitting in the window of
their house on Rain Street," said the tailor.

"And her eyes are
pink?"

"They seem so when
the sun strikes them."

"Can't walk? Just
sits in that chair all day?"

"Oh, she can walk.
But her legs are like toothpicks and about as long. How she's able to walk on them at all is a
miracle in itself."

Will Carney thought
about this, becoming more and more intrigued.

"But the rest of
it—her being blind, yet able to read regular print with the tips of her fingers—is just so much
gossip?" asked Will, his eyes bright as new copper coins.

"No. It's God's
truth. So I been told by people have actually seen her about it, and, mind you, there'd be no
cause for them to lie. It's an ungodly thing and not well thought of by some I could mention."
The salesman bent forward over the counter and said in a confidential tone, "Of course, there's
folks always against something they can't figure out. I've heard some mighty strange things about
the Pratts. Unnatural things. Wicked things."

"No doubt," said
Will Carney.

"I'm not one to
tell tales," said the tailor, preparing to do just that.

"Save it," said
Will, who had heard enough and more.

Will bought a
polka-dot tie to go with his off-the-rack
suit and frilled-front shirt. He bought a straw skimmer as well, hanging it on his head
at a rakish angle.

Will went to Rain
Street and found the house. He just had to see that wonder he'd been told about and there she
was, sitting in the window as advertised. Good God, but she was beautiful. The tailor hadn't
mentioned that. She was goddamned, unbelievably beautiful. It was a face like no other he had
ever seen.

He just stood there
and marveled over the sight for a long time. Serena smiled, deep in her dreams. Will looked on in
unrestrained wonder. To find such a thing as this, this delicate snow-white creature in the
window, was something for which Will had longed for all his life.

There had to be
some way to possess this wonder, to use it for his own ends.

He turned it over
in his mind for a long time.

When Will Carney
came calling, he'd found out all he could about Enoch Pratt and his madness. He found out about
the yearly visits to the grave of Edgar Allan Poe. He even went so far as to read the books Poe
had written, although it had given him somewhat of a headache and left him as much at a loss as
when he started reading them. Still, he wanted something to talk about to get him inside that
house, and it was the best thing that came to mind. He rang the antique doorknocker and after
quite some
time, the nurse opened the
door. The nurse frowned at his cheerful way of saying hello.

Will asked to see
Mr. Enoch Pratt.

"Been dead for
years," the woman said and started to close the heavy oaken door.

"See here," said
Will. "I'm that shocked!"

The woman refrained
from closing the door, staring at Will warily, wondering what he was about. In truth, she did not
like the slick look of him.

Will Carney frowned
and pursed his lips. (He'd been told he was no mean actor.) He removed his hat and scratched his
head with his bad hand.

"It's a marvel I
never heard about it. Of course, I've been in Europe on my studies and that great man may well
have passed on while I was gone."

"Great man?" the
woman echoed in doubt and suspi­cion. She had heard him described as crazy often enough, but a
great man?