The Wicked: A Love Story
Twelve
The Last
Enchantment
I am above you and in you. My ecstasy is in yours. My joy is to see your joy.
-The Book of the Law
Dan Rawlinson woke to singing so gentle that, if he were not what he was, he would not have heard it, just a whispering, just a murmuring.The wide bed was warm, and he was in Laurie’s arms, one of Laurie’s naked thighs between his, his lovers chest pressed against his back. The covers were half off of them in the warm room, but the place where Loreal had lain was empty, and she sat in a thin black shift on the floor at that unobtrusive altar that he’d managed to miss the night before. The small candles in their brass candlesticks made pale points of light, and the twang of spicy sweet incense burned as she chanted. He did not examine the altar. That was not his business. He wanted to speak, but he did not. What she was doing was her business, at least for now. She had explained magic to him.
“It isn’t like the movies. It isn’t separate from the faith. You must be aligned to the Gods, being in the palm of the Gods’ hands before their palms become your own.”
Dan watched her a while, watched her moving her hands up and down in the early morning shadows. He longed for her until he felt the longing rise in his penis. He longed for the joy of all three of them together again, and then he turned around, not covering the back of him and pressed his body to Laurie’s and Laurie, more than half asleep, pulled him into his arms.
When Dan had become a vampire, the initial silver lining, for their really isn’t much of a silver lining in being taken from normal life and being condemned to drink human blood forever, was that he was already a night person. Laurie got up every day like a normal human being and went to work most of the time. Twelve o’ clock or so was a good compromise for them both, and it was at this time that they drove Loreal over.snowy plains, through trees, through hills, and over rivers and, at last, to a field, stretching out some way to trees, and with only one defining mark, a little stone house where Lewis and Chris were waiting with Marabeth and her brother, her cousin Jim and that strange and dreamy creamy boy, Seth.
“Is this it?”
But at that time, Lewis, in an old brown cardigan, with a cigarette behind his ear, came out.
“It is.”
“And are you sure you don’t want us to come?”
“It isn’t a question of not wanting, so much as a question of how many rooms Grandfather has.”
Dan smiled at this and Loreal got out of the car with only her suitcase. She was wearing a grey dress. She caught Dan’s hand, but it was Laurie who stood with her.
“I don’t want you to go.”
Loreal said, “I don’t exactly want to go myself. But I have to learn. I’ll be back soon enough.”
“Watch after Dan. Watch after each other.”
Laurie kissed her and pressed his rough, unshaven cheek against hers. He squeezed her hand and got back in the car. Dan was looking after her, almost like a child, with his wide chocolate eyes, his chocolate hair falling in front of them before he swept it away.
“Look after him,” Loreal mouthed.
Dan mouthed, “I will.”
Dan Rawlinson was so recently mortal, that whenever Chris Ashby sees him, he remembers what it was to be purely human. Dan is what would be called “Good people.” The night Chris and Lewis arrive for Levy, Dan is right there. This is the night Chris has spoken to Sunny and made his amends.
“Chris, I have to tell you something.”
But Chris can already smell his sister’s blood in Dan. He can already see the moment of the execution, Kruinh’s order, Dan’s insistence on fair combat even though fair combat is not necessary in an execution, even though Evangeline had a good chance of killing him, even though, if she had, Kruinh would have just dispatched her himself. Chris Ashby knows all these things. He steps forward and puts his hands on Dan Rawlinson’s shoulders, kisses him between his eyes. His sister is there. Laurie is there. Chris’s own desire to make love to Dan is there too.
“You have nothing to tell me, Little Brother,” he says, “except for where Levy is.”
Traveling south is like traveling through time, out of the cold winter and into the spring. Chris remembers years living in the south, how he told Laurie once, “We will move down south. In the south the evil is great so the killing is wonderful.”
Laurie was not as he is now. Laurie knew so little of the world. In a way, Chris couldn’t help but think Laurie Malone still knew little of the world. He told him, “Down south they treat Negroes like rabbits or raccoons. They are sport. They work all day and at night white men can chase them, terrorize them, hunt them down, kill them. You don’t understand why they come into Chicago every day until you see what they are leaving in the South.”
“And you want to go down there?” Laurie had asked.
“But it’s like I told you,” Chris said, “the hunting is wonderful. I want the hunter to understand, at last, what it is to be hunted.”
But today, with the sun high on grass that had never grown brown, Chris thinks of the other wonderful things about that southern land, the light, the heat, the mellow winter so unlike the unforgiving Ohio, Indiana, Illinois cold they are fleeing.
Lewis has put in the little cassette, and now the 1970’s crackle and the Saint Louis Jesuits are singing.
“Wood hath hope.
When it's cut, it grows green again,
and its boughs sprout clean again.
Wood hath hope.”
Chris Ashby has heard it before. He is driving. Lewis does not like to drive. Lewis also does not ask many questions, and when Chris and Levy had returned with the great big yellow Volkswagon bus, Lewis had smiled in a sort of hippie happiness and remarked that he wished he had a joint, but he had not asked from where the vehicle had come.
Chris remembers lying next to Lewis in the heat of that apartment and watching Lewis smile as the music plays.
“Root and stock although old and withered up,
and all sunk in earth corrupt, will revive.
Leaves return. Water pure brings life to them,
and the tree lives young again.
Wood hath hope.
But ah, strange thought: if we could rise again,
called home to a loving land,
we would have hope.”
“That was my childhood. This song. This album,” Lewis says. “Son of David have pity on me. Mighty Lord…
“My mother grew up Methodist. My father was Baptist. But my mother was brought up by Uncle Owen, and she always went to Saint Jerome’s with him. Back then, her not taking Communion was no big deal. Lots of people didn’t. But by the time I was born, she wanted to be Communioned and Confirmed. That was my childhood. Not some old religion that came from Irish great grandparents burdened with white peoples’ guilt and superstition. My parents were young and gung ho and the Church seemed young. Everything was so fresh, and I knew God loved me. I knew that I loved God. Heaven was so close.”
“We would have hope.
Like a tree we'd grow green again,
and our boughs sprout clean again;
we would have hope.”
“The first three years of Catholic school are all you need,” Lewis said. “They teach you everything about love and God you need to know. That and a Glory and Praise hymnal. Everything else just sort of ruins it.”
Not that it would have mattered to Lewis if they had minded, but Kristian, Marabeth and Jim had grown up more or less the same and all knew, at first reluctantly, and then with greater enthusiasm, the lyrics to all the songs by the Saint Louis Jesuits. Seth, Jim and Kris shared the seats behind Lewis and Chris, and in the third row, Marabeth stretched out, waving a finger about and feeling more girl like than she had in some time while she sang:
“For he is might—ee Lord!”
Behind her, in a space large enough for a bed, Levy Berringer was reading a book and ignoring them all, and Marabeth leaning over the seat to look at him, thought he was the smartest person in this van, or at least smarter than any Strauss in this van. After all, she had reading to do, regardless if she wished to or not, and she realized that she did. Jim had stopped. Who could blame him? The information was dense and largely unpleasant. But, despite her joy in songs from the 1970’s about the love of Jesus, often darker things called to her, and those thrills were found within the pages of the Book of Pamela Strauss.
THE BOOK OF PAMELA STRAUSS
BY THEN, MARIS AND CLAIRE had already settled into married life, and Friederich was a grandfather, if not a proud one. It was Katherine who cooed over the grandchildren and held them to her, baked the sweets and made the cakes and would, in time, attend every function. By the time Jimmy married Natalie, Claire had already had Edward and Dillard, and if Friederich was not watching them, wondering what might happen when they hit puberty, I was. Claire only had one child so far, Richard. He, like his cousins, was dark haired and not blond, and though Claire would, for several years, try to have other children, Richard would be the only one who survived. The rest were stillbirths or miscarriages and, at last, it seems she stopped trying. I had never cared for Claire, but in those later years, a sadder Claire, a sister resolved to what her life was, was someone I came to respect rather than pity for, in time, Claire revealed a strength that would not bear pity.
Jimmy and Steiger were barely married when there was a new war, and though most of us shook our heads and thought, another war, do people never grow tired of wars? Jimmy and Steiger, like boys, signed up. They said it was their patriotic duty, but they also said they just wanted to get a taste of war.
“We missed the last one!” Steiger said. Jimmy nodded in agreement, and in anger I hit them both on their heads hard.
“You’re fools,” I said, and headed upstairs, slamming the door behind me.
“It is our American duty,” Jimmy declared, but even old Friederich pronounced:
“You are idiots. It is your duty to be husbands to your wives. Not run off to a war.”
But it was too late, Jimmy and Steiger had already signed up, and by the end of the summer, they were on their way to Korea.
Jimmy and Steiger were gone for a year. In that time Caroline remained in the house with us and Natalie lived here though, looking back, she could have just as well stayed with her parents. She was pregnant with Jimmy’s first baby, something she hadn’t known when he left, and now she grew bigger and bigger, and while Katherine rejoiced for another grandchild, Friederich became more and more cross, constantly unpleasant.
One day I asked him, “What has happened to you? Why are you so cruel? Why are you so mean?”
“You shut up, you bitch,” he told me. “You shut up, you who were supposed to be a wife to me, you who once loved me, but now have no room for me? Am I too old for you? Do you see an old and helpless man? But I am a big man. I am a strong man!”
Friederich was an old man by now. I was never exactly sure how old he was when I was born, but surely by now he was seventy. No, more, all white, face grizzled. And yet even in those suits he wore, he was still a powerful man.
“What do you want from me?” I demanded as he gripped my shoulders.
“What do you want?”
He slapped me. My eyes stung.
Suddenly, sharply, with rhe back of my hand, I slapped him back, my ring finger making his face bleed.
“If you want it, take it you old bastard. Take it if you can.”
My father ripped down the front of my dress and put me on the table while we both jerked down his trousers. So, suddenly, as if he were young, he was on me, the candelabra knocked aside as he crushed me to the surface of the table, its stout wooden legs jouncing while he planted himself between my thighs. I watched the chandelier shaking over us as he fucked me.
“You…” Friederich grunted, “slut…” he fucked me. “You,…” with each thrust a word growled from his mouth, “horrid…. Wicked… slut.”
The table creaked, and now the doors to the dining room flew open, I could see over Friederich’s back the face of Katherine. The old woman looked horrified.
Without looking back, Friederich kept fucking me and shouted, “Close the door!”
Silently, obedient, Katherine did so, and as the glass doors, covered in lace closed behind Friederich, I heard her walking away.
He did not stop fucking me until he came.