Part 13 (1/2)
”For a long moment he read this message and then I said it out loud to him, but I received no response.
” 'Come on, Goblin, think. She's dead.' I said. 'You're a spirit and now she's a spirit.'
”But there was no response.
”Suddenly I felt the old pressure on my left hand, with the tight sensation of fingers curling around it, and then he tapped out: ” 'Lynelle. Lynelle is gone?'
”I nodded. I was crying and I wanted now to be left alone. I told him aloud that she was dead. But Goblin took my left hand again and I watched it claw the keyboard: ” 'What is dead?'”
”In a fit of annoyance and heightened grief, I hammered out: ” 'No longer here. Gone. Dead. Body has no Life. No Spirit in her body. Body left over. Body buried in the ground. Her Spirit is gone.'
”But he simply couldn't understand. He grabbed my hand again and tapped out, 'Where is Lynelle dead?' and 'Where is Lynelle gone?' and then finally, 'Why are you crying for Lynelle?'
”A cold apprehension came over me, a cold form of concentration.
”I typed in 'Sad. No more Lynelle. Sad. Crying. Yes.' But other thoughts were brewing in my mind.
”He s.n.a.t.c.hed for my hand again, but he was weaker on account of his earlier efforts, and all he could type was her name.
”At that moment, as I stared at the black monitor and the green letters, I saw what looked like the reflection of a pinpoint of light in the monitor, and, wondering what it could be, I moved my head from side to side to block the light or get a clearer look at it. For one second it became distinctly the light of a candle. I saw the wick as well as the flame.
”At once I turned around and looked behind me. I saw nothing in my room that could have produced this reflection. Absolutely nothing. Needless to say, I had no candles. The only candles were 77.on a hallway altar downstairs.
”I turned back to the monitor. There was no pinpoint of light. There was no candle flame. Again I moved my head from side to side and turned my eyes at every possible angle. No light. No reflected candle flame.
”I was astonished. I sat quiet for a long time, distrusting my senses, and then, unable to deny what I saw, I tapped out to Goblin the question, 'Did you see the candle flame?' Again there came his monotonous and panicky answers: 'Where Lynelle?' 'Lynelle gone.' 'What is gone?'
”I went back to my chair. Goblin appeared for a moment, in a vague flash, and there came the pinches and the hair pulling, but I lay indifferent to him thinking only, praying only in a bizarre way of praying backwards, that Lynelle had never really known how badly she was injured, that she hadn't suffered in her coma, that she hadn't known pain. What if she had seen the car careening into the truck?
What if she had heard some insensitive person at her bedside saying that her face, her beautiful face, had been crushed?
”She never suffered. That was the story.
”She never suffered. Or so they said.
”I knew I had seen the light of that candle! I had seen it plainly in the monitor.
”I murmured to Goblin, 'You tell me where she is, Goblin. Tell me if her spirit went into the light.' There came no answer. He couldn't grasp it. He didn't know.
”I hammered at him. 'You're a spirit. You ought to know. We are made of bodies and souls. I am body and soul. Lynelle was body and soul. Soul is spirit. Where did Lynelle's spirit go?'
”He gave nothing back but his infantile answers. It was all he could do.
”Finally, I went to the computer. I wrote it out: 'I am body and soul. The body is what you pinch. The soul is what speaks to you, what thinks, what looks at you through my eyes.'
”Silence. Then came the vague formation of the apparition again, translucent, face without detail; then it dissolved.
”I went on typing on the computer keyboard: 'The soul --that part of me which speaks to you and loves you and knows you --that part is sometimes called spirit. And when my body dies my spirit or my soul will leave my body. Do you understand?'
”I felt his hand clamp onto my left hand.
” 'Don't leave your body,' he wrote. 'Don't die. I will cry.'
”For a long moment I pondered. He had made the connection. Yes. But I wanted more from him, and a terrifying urgency gripped me, a feeling very near panic.
” 'You are a spirit,' I wrote. 'You have no body. You are pure spirit. Don't you know where Lynelle's spirit has gone? You must know. You should know. There must be a place where spirits live. A place where spirits are. You do do know.' know.'
”There was a long silence, but I knew he was right beside me.
”I felt him grip my hand. 'Don't leave your body,' he wrote again. 'I will cry and cry.'
” 'But where is the home of the spirits?' I wrote. 'Where is the place where spirits live, like I live in this house?'
”It was useless. I typed it out in two dozen different ways. He couldn't grasp it. And it was not long before he began to ask, 'Why did Lynelle's spirit leave her body?'
”I wrote out the description of the accident. Silence. And finally, his store of energy being exhausted and there being no rainfall to help him, he was absent.
”And alone, cold and frightened, I curled up in my chair and went to sleep.
”A great gulf had opened between me and Goblin.
”It had been widening for all the years that I knew Lynelle, and it was now immeasurable. My doppelganger loved me and was as ever fastened to me but no longer knew my soul. And what was all the more ghastly to me was that he didn't know what he was himself. He couldn't speak of himself as a 78.spirit. He would have done so if he could. He could not.
”As the days dragged on, Aunt Queen made plans to go off again to St. Petersburg, Russia, to rejoin two cousins she had left waiting there at the Grand Hotel. She prevailed upon me to go with her.
”I was amazed. St. Petersburg, Russia.
”She said in a very sweet and winning way that it was either go to college or see the world.
”I told her plainly I wasn't ready for either. I was still hurt by Lynelle's death.
”I said that I wanted to go, and in the future I would go with her if she called me, but for now I couldn't leave home. I needed a year off. I needed to read and absorb more fully many of the lessons that Lynelle had taught me (that really won the day for me!), and to hang around the house. I wanted to help Pops and Sweetheart with the guests. Mardi Gras was coming. I'd go with Sweetheart into New Orleans to see the parades from the house of her sister. And we always had a crowd at Blackwood Farm after that. And then there was the Azalea Festival, and the Easter crowd. And I needed to be home for the Christmas banquet. I couldn't think of seeing the world.
”When I look back on that time I realize now that I had slipped into a state of profound anxiety in which the simplest comforts seemed beyond reach. The gaiety of the guests seemed foreign. I felt afraid at twilight. Large vases of flowers frightened me. Goblin seemed accidental and unmysterious, an ignoramus of a spirit who could deliver me nothing of consolation or companions.h.i.+p. I was apprehensive on those inevitable gray days when there was no sun to be seen.
”Perhaps I had a premonition that there were terrible times to come.”
9.
”NOT SIX MONTHS had pa.s.sed before Little Ida died in my bed one night, and it was Jasmine who found her when she came to wake me for breakfast, wondering why her mother had not come down. I was hustled away from the bed with crazy gestures and summonses and blank looks from Goblin and finally Pops dragging me out of the bedroom. And I, a spoilt brat who had just woken up, was furious.
”Only an hour later, when the doctor and the funeral director came, did they tell me what had gone down. Little Ida was the angel of my youth as surely as Sweetheart was, and she had died so quiet, just like that.
”She looked tiny in the coffin, like a wizened child.
”The funeral was in New Orleans, where Little Ida was buried in a tomb in St. Louis NO. I, which her family had had for well over a hundred and fifty years. A host of colored and black relations were in attendance, and I was thankful that it was all right to cry, if not even wail out loud.
”Of course all the white people --and there were plenty from out our way --were a little more subdued than the black people, but a good commingling shed tears.