Merrick (14 page)

I couldn’t speak. There weren’t any words to express my trust or my wonder.

Merrick set the axe blade to one side, on top of the many bundles, and reached for another with equal care. This was a smaller, longer bundle, and when she unwrapped it, I was again too breathless for words.

It was a tall figure, richly carved, and obviously a god or king, I could not say which. As with the axe blade, the size alone was impressive, not to mention the gloss of the stone.

“Nobody knows,” the child said, speaking to my thoughts very directly. “Only, you see this scepter, it’s magic. If he’s a king, he’s a priest and god too.”

Humbled, I studied the detailed carving. The long narrow figure wore a handsome headdress which came low over his fierce, wide eyes, and down to his shoulders all around. On his naked chest was a disc suspended from the radial collar about his shoulders and neck.

As for the scepter, he seemed about to be striking the open palm of his left hand with it, as though preparing to do violence with it when his enemy or victim approached. It was chilling in its menace and beautiful in its sincerity and intricacy. It was polished and seemed to glow, as did the mask.

“Shall I stand him up or lay him down?” Merrick asked, looking at me. “I don’t play with these creatures. No, I would never do such a thing. I can feel the magic in them. I’ve conjured with them. I don’t play. Let me cover him once more so he can be quiet.”

Having rewrapped the idol, she reached for yet a third bundle. I could not calculate the number that remained in the closely packed case.

I could see that Aaron was speechless. One did not have to be an expert in Mesoamerican antiquities to realize what these artifacts were.

As for Merrick, she began to talk as she unwrapped this third wonder . . .

“We went down there, and followed the map that Oncle Vervain had given us. And Cold Sandra kept praying to Oncle Vervain to tell us where to go. It was Matthew and Cold Sandra and me. Cold Sandra kept saying, ‘Aren’t you happy now, you never went to school? You’re always complaining. Well, you’re getting to go on a great adventure.’ And to tell the truth, that’s what it was.”

The cloth fell away from the long sharp pointed pick in her hands. It was all of a piece of green jade, and its handle bore the distinct feathers of the hummingbird and two small deeply carved eyes. I had seen its type before in museums, but never such a fine example. And now I understood Oncle Vervain’s love of the birds in the yard beyond.

“Yes, sir,” said Merrick. “He said those birds were magic. He was the one to put the feeders out. I told you. Who’s going to fill the feeders when I leave this place behind?”

“We’ll care for the place,” said Aaron in his comforting fashion. But I could see he was greatly concerned about Merrick. She went on talking.

“The Aztecs believed in hummingbirds. They hover in the air like magic. They turn this way and that and make another color. There’s a legend that Aztec warriors became hummingbirds when they died. Oncle Vervain said magicians need to know everything. Oncle Vervain said our kind were all magicians, that we came four thousand years before the Aztecs. He told me about the paintings on the cave wall.”

“And you know where this cave is?” Aaron asked her. He was quick to clarify his meaning. “Darling, you must tell no one. Men lose common sense over secrets such as these.”

“I have Oncle Vervain’s pages,” Merrick answered in the same dreamy voice. She laid the sharp blade of this knife back down on the bed of cotton parcels. Offhandedly, she laid bare a fourth object, a small squat idol as beautifully carved as the one already revealed. Her hand went back to the perforator with its round, hummingbird handle. “They used this to draw blood in their magic. That’s what Oncle Vervain told me I would find, a thing for drawing blood; that’s what Matthew said this was.”

“This suitcase is filled with such objects, isn’t it?” I asked. “These are by no means the most significant of the lot?” I glanced about. “What else is hidden in this attic?”

She shrugged. For the first time she looked hot and uncomfortable under the low roof.

“Come on,” she said politely, “let’s us pack up the suitcase and go down to the kitchen. Tell your people not to open all those boxes, just to move them to where they will be safe. I’ll make you some good coffee. I make the best coffee. I make better coffee than Cold Sandra or Great Nananne. Mr. Talbot, you’re about to faint from the heat, and Mr. Lightner, you’re too worried. No one’s going to break into this house any time ever, and your house has guards all over night and day.”

She rewrapped the axe blade, the idol, and the perforator carefully, then closed the suitcase and snapped its two rusted locks. Now, and only now, did I see the withered old cardboard tag on it listing an airport in Mexico, and the stamps that indicated the suitcase had traveled many miles beyond that.

I held my questions until we had come down into the cooler air of the kitchen. I realized that what she’d said about my failing in the heat above had been perfectly true. I was almost ill.

She set the suitcase down, took off her white pantyhose and her shoes, and turned on a rusted round fan above the refrigerator, which oscillated drowsily, and set to work to make the coffee, as she had said.

Aaron rummaged for sugar, and in the old “ice box,” as she called it, found the pitcher of cream still fresh and quite cold. That didn’t much matter to Merrick, however, because it was milk she wanted for coffee and she heated it to just below a boil.

“This is the way to do it,” she told us both.

At last we were settled at a round oak table, whose white painted surface had been wiped quite clean.

The café au lait was strong and delicious. Five years among the Undead can’t kill the memory. Nothing ever will. I piled the sugar into it, just as she did, and I drank it in deep gulps, believing thoroughly that it was a restorative, and then I sat back in the creaky wooden chair.

All around me, the kitchen was in good order, though a relic of former times. Even the refrigerator was some sort of antique with a humming motor on top of it, beneath the creaking fan. The shelves over the stove and along the walls were covered by glass doors, and I could see all the accouterments of a place where people regularly take their meals. The floor was old linoleum and very clean.

Suddenly, I remembered the suitcase. I jumped and looked about. It was right beside Merrick on the empty chair.

When I looked at Merrick I saw tears in her eyes.

“What is it, darling?” I asked. “Tell me and I’ll do my level best to make it right.”

“It’s just the house and everything that ever happened, Mr. Talbot,” she answered. “Matthew died in this house.”

This was the answer to a rather momentous question, and one which I had not dared to voice. I can’t say I was relieved to hear it, but I couldn’t help but wonder who might lay claim to the treasures which Merrick regarded as her own.

“Don’t you worry about Cold Sandra,” said Merrick, directly to me. “If she was going to come back for these things, she would have come back a long time ago. There was never enough money in the world for Cold Sandra. Matthew really loved her, but he had plenty of money, and that made all the difference in the world.”

“How did he die, darling?” I asked.

“Of a fever from those jungle places. And he’d made us all get all our shots too. I don’t like needles. We got shots for every disease you can imagine. Yet still he came back sick. Some time afterwards, when Cold Sandra was screaming and hollering and throwing things, she said that the Indians down there in the jungles had put a curse on him, that he never should have gone up the waterfall to the cave. But Great Nananne said it was too strong a fever. He died over there, in the back room.”

She pointed to the hallway that separated us from the room in which Aaron and I had spent our uncomfortable night.

“After he was gone and she went away, I took out the furniture. It’s in the front bedroom next to Great Nananne’s. That’s where I’ve slept ever since.”

“I can imagine why,” said Aaron comfortingly. “It must have been dreadful for you to lose them both.”

“Now Matthew was always good to us all,” she continued, “I wish he had been my father, lot of good it would do me now. He was in the hospital and out of it, and then the doctors stopped coming because he was drunk all the time and shouted at them, and then he just choked out his last.”

“And had Cold Sandra already gone?” Aaron asked gently. He had laid his hand on the table beside her own.

“She was out all the time at the barroom down on the corner, and after they threw her out of that one, she went to the one on the big street. The night he started to go, I ran down two blocks and over there to get her, and banged on the back screen door for her to come out. She was too drunk to walk.

“She was sitting there with this handsome white man, and he was just in love with her, you know, adoring her. I could see it. And she was so drunk she couldn’t stand up. And then it hit me. She didn’t want to see Matthew go. She was afraid to be at his side when it happened. She wasn’t being hard-hearted. She was just really scared. So I came running back.

“Great Nananne was washing his face and giving him his Scotch, that’s what he drank all the time, he wouldn’t have any other kind of drink, and he was choking and choking, and we just sat by him till sometime about dawn, the choking stopped, and his breathing got very steady, so steady you could have set a clock by it, just up and down, up and down.

“It was a real relief that he wasn’t choking. But Great Nananne shook her head to mean no good. Then his breathing got so low you couldn’t see or hear it. His chest stopped moving. And Great Nananne told me he was dead.”

She paused long enough to drink the rest of her coffee, then she stood up, pushing the chair back carelessly, and took the pot from the stove and gave us all some more of the heavy brew to drink.

She sat down again and ran her tongue along her lip, a habit with her. She seemed a child in all these gestures, perhaps because of the convent-school way in which she sat up straight in her chair and folded her arms.

“You know, it’s nice having you listen to this,” she said looking from me to Aaron. “I never told anyone all about it. Just the little things. He left Cold Sandra plenty of money.

“She came home around noon the next day and demanded to know where they’d taken him, and started screaming and throwing things and saying we never should have called for the morgue to take him away.

“ ‘And what did you think we were going to do with him?’ Great Nananne asked. ‘You don’t think they have a law in this town about dead bodies? You think we can just take him out and bury him in the backyard?’ Turned out his people in Boston came and got him, and soon as Cold Sandra saw that check, you know, the money he’d left her, she was out of this house and gone.

“Of course I didn’t know it was going to be the last time I ever saw her. All I knew was that she had packed up some of her clothes in a new red leather suitcase, and she was dressed like a model from a magazine, in a white silk suit. Her hair was pulled back to a bun on the back of her head. She was so beautiful she didn’t need any makeup, but she had put some dark-violet eye shadow above her eyelashes and a dark color, like violet, too, I think, on her lips. I knew that dark violet meant trouble. She looked so beautiful.

“She kissed me and she gave me a bottle of Chanel No. 22 perfume. She said that was for me. She told me she’d be coming back for me. She told me she was going out to buy a car, she was driving out of here. She said, ‘If I can just get across that spillway without drowning, I can get out of this town.’ ”

Merrick broke off for a moment, her eyebrows knitted, her mouth slightly open. Then she began again.

“ ‘The hell you’ll come back for her.’ That’s what Great Nananne told her. ‘You’ve never done anything except run wild and let that child run wild, well, she’s staying here with me, and you go to Hell.’ ”

Once again, she stopped. Her girlish face grew quiet. I was afraid she was going to cry. I think that she swallowed the tears very deliberately. Then she spoke again, clearing her throat a little. I could hardly make out the words.

“Think she went to Chicago,” she said.

Aaron waited respectfully while the silence filled the old kitchen. I picked up my coffee and drank deeply again, savoring the taste of it, as much out of respect for her as for the pleasure.

“You’re ours, darling,” I said.

“Oh, I know, Mr. Talbot,” she answered in a small voice, and, without moving the focus of her eyes from some distant point, she lifted her right hand and laid it on mine. I never forgot the gesture. It was as if she was comforting me.

Then she spoke. “Well, Great Nananne knows now. She knows whether my mother is alive or dead.”

“Yes, she knows,” I answered, avowing my belief before I could think the better of it. “And whatever she knows, she’s at peace.”

There was a quiet interval in which I became painfully conscious of Merrick’s suffering, and of the noises of the Talamasca acolytes who were moving every object in the place. I heard the grinding noise of the large statues being dragged or pushed. I heard the sound of packing tape being stretched and torn.

“I loved that man, Matthew,” said Merrick softly. “I really loved him. He taught me how to read the Book of Magic. He taught me how to read all the books that Oncle Vervain had left. He liked to look at the pictures I showed you. He was an interesting man.”

There was another long pause. Something in the atmosphere of the house disturbed me. I was confused by what I was feeling. It had nothing to do with normal noises or activity. And it seemed imperative suddenly that I conceal this disturbance from Merrick, that such a thing, whatever it was, not trouble her at this time.

It was as if someone altogether new and different had entered the house, and one could hear that person’s stealthy movements. It was the sense of a coherent presence. I wiped it from my mind, never for a moment fearing it, and keeping my eyes on Merrick, when, in a daze of sorts, she began to speak rather rapidly and tonelessly again.