Forever and Always

by Jude Deveraux

  I took the lemonade, two apples, and a dull paring knife outside and sat down by Henry. I peeled the apples and handed him slices, and he chewed while he talked.

  Unlike Delphia and Narcissa, Henry had once been a great reader, and since he’d lived in a small room at the back of the 13 Elms for most of the years he’d worked there, he’d had time to read, as he said, “Everything that had printing on it that was in that house.” He was the one to organize all the old slave bills of sale. Between old diaries, boxes of old letters, a couple of local histories, and Henry’s second sight, he’d been able to piece the story together.

  Edward Barrister, owner of A Hundred Elms, as it was known then, had met the older man, Charles Frazier, at a sporting club in New Orleans.

  “Gambling or girls?” I asked.

  “Gambling,” Henry said. The men became friends and Frazier gave Barrister an introduction to his son’s family in Ohio. He hoped that Edward would marry his granddaughter, Amelia.

  “Did Mr. Frazier know what kind of plantation Barrister had?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m not sure it would have made any difference to him. He knew from his cronies that Edward Barrister was financially secure so he hoped for a match. And of course he wanted his granddaughter to move back to Alabama to be near him.”

  I knew a lot of the rest of the story. Amelia Frazier had married Edward and gone to his slave breeding plantation in Alabama—and been sickened. Lonely, miserable, with her husband spending most of his evenings in the slave cabins, she’d fallen in love with the beautiful slave Martin and borne him a child.

  What had happened to that child hit me. “Edward Barrister sold the child to his own grandfather,” I said, aghast.

  “Yes,” Henry answered. “Barrister was angry that Charles Frazier had introduced him to a woman who’d go to bed with a darkie, so—”

  “But Barrister was impregnating all of the slave women!”

  Henry smiled. “The ultimate double standard.”

  I was quiet for a moment, cutting apple slices for Henry. “Do you know what happened to the child Jedediah?”

  Henry smiled. “The plan backfired on Barrister because Charles Frazier, for all that he, too, bought and sold humans, wasn’t full of hatred. He soon saw the child’s intelligence and took him into the house. Frazier’s youngest grandchild lived with him, a boy about Jed’s age, so he had the children tutored together, a not uncommon practice in those days. When Jed grew to be a man he ran all the Frazier properties—and continued to run them after he was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Because of Jed’s excellent management through very hard times, the Fraziers owned that land until they sold it in the 1920s.”

  “Jedediah should have inherited all of it,” I said. “He was Charles Frazier’s grandson.” I looked at Henry. “Did Frazier ever find out what happened to his granddaughter?”

  “I’m sure he must have known. Gossip about a woman locked away in a room would have reached him. Between you and me, I think Frazier well knew who Jedediah was and bought him on purpose. He couldn’t save his granddaughter because back then no one interfered between a husband and wife. Frazier must have known what a devil of a man he’d introduced his granddaughter to by then, so maybe Frazier allowed Barrister to think he was tricking him into buying his own half-white grandson.

  “I like to think there was kindness behind Frazier educating the child and allowing him to manage the place.”

  I, too, liked to think the child born into such horror was, in the end, treated well.

  “What do you think this child of Linc’s has inherited?” I asked.

  “Intelligence and his grandmother’s power to heal.”

  Henry answered so quickly that I looked at him hard. I did my best to send him the message that he was to tell me everything he knew.

  “You do have some power, don’t you, child? Now stop that or you’ll make my head ache. If you want to know what I know, all you have to do is ask.”

  “Sorry,” I said, blinking, surprised but pleased that he knew what I could do, what I was doing. I decided there was a great deal more to this man than I originally thought. He was more than just a fortune-teller with a magnificent aura. “Would you please tell me what you know? Everything about everything?”

  Henry talked; he loved to talk, but he told me little. As gently as I could, I tried to True Persuade him into talking about what I wanted to hear, but twice he told me to stop, and I marveled at his perception. He told me about his life at 13 Elms, and just when I was suppressing yawns, he started telling me about his second sight, so I perked up. I was always interested in hearing of other people’s “special abilities.” Since my own childhood had been so lonely, I thought maybe I should start a club, or at the very least a website. Was “weirdpeople.com” taken?

  Henry could tell people’s fortunes, which was something I couldn’t do. Sometimes I could see the future of a person, but it mainly had to do with auras that were absent, weak, or missing pieces. I couldn’t do what Henry could and look at someone and tell them they were going to meet a man and find riches or some such.

  “…together,” Henry said, then waited for my reply.

  I hadn’t been listening carefully. “I, uh…”

  Henry smiled. “I was saying that you and I have very different powers and wouldn’t it be nice to be able to merge them.”

  “Would it help me find my husband?”

  “It would help you rule the world.”

  “That is not something I want to do,” I said emphatically. “Who is Devlin?”

  Henry didn’t answer right away and his aura began to change shade; it began to darken. I had no idea what that meant. People’s auras change all the time, but it’s always a superficial change. An angry person with a red aura can take pills and relax and a lot of blue comes into their aura, but the foundation of it is still red. But I’d never seen an aura darken as Henry’s was doing.

  After what seemed like a lot of time, he said, “Devlin came to earth to accomplish a task.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was lying or just leaving out masses of information. I decided that he was leaving out nearly everything, and he didn’t want me to know what or why. I remembered that Devlin said he’d been around my daughter and my niece.

  “What does Devlin have to do with me and how do I get the power to hold him in a room and how do I break into that crystal ball and remove what’s in it and what and where is the Touch of God?”

  All that made Henry laugh and when he did, his aura went back to that heavenly blue, and I must have pleased him because the size of his aura increased. By nature I wasn’t an envious person but I envied Henry that big, beautiful aura.

  “Ah,” he said at last, “wouldn’t it be wonderful if the little power I have could merge with what you have? I can see people’s past and future, but you could change what I see.”

  I thought about that. What an interesting concept. “I could foresee that someone was about to get into a car and the car would crash, so I’d make the person stay home.”

  “Then they’d slip in the bathtub and die. No, I mean on a larger scale. Think big.”

  “The twin towers?” I asked, looking out at the garden and remembering that dreadful day.

  “If you’d been able to see that that was going to happen, then you’d have been able to see what has come out of it and what will come out of it. You would have had to decide if you should stop it or not.”

  I wasn’t sure, but I think he was telling me that he’d foreseen all of it. He’d foreseen what would happen and the results of all those deaths—and he’d decided to do nothing about it.

  “No,” I said. “I wouldn’t want that much power. To have to make a decision like that…No, thank you.”

  Henry didn’t answer and I wondered what he was seeing. Was he seeing that I was lying? Recently I’d thought that I’d do something for the devil if it would get my husband and sister-in-law back. But here I was saying I didn’t want
the ability to see the future and be able to change it.

  I put my hand in his. “Will I find my husband?”

  “You do know that this is all about you, don’t you? It’s not about your husband, but you.”

  I took my hand away and leaned back against the swing, no longer touching his aura. “Please tell me that the witch in Connecticut isn’t still alive and that she’s the one who’s taken my husband. Tell me her spirit isn’t still out there and she’s still trying to get me so she can gain immortality.”

  Henry smiled. “Oh no, she’s dead. She was of no importance, except to bring your powers to the surface. You couldn’t very well have stayed in that little town in Kentucky forever and just worked on patching rocky marriages, now could you? You have bigger things to do.”

  I wasn’t even startled that he knew so much about me when I’d told him little. Part of me wanted to say, “All I want is to take care of my husband and children,” then flounce away dramatically, but I couldn’t. If Adam hadn’t been taken from me I would have been content to spend the rest of my life helping the FBI and traveling here and there to exorcize a few mean spirits. Was someone somewhere demanding more of me?

  I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around my legs. I did what I could to pull my aura in so it wasn’t touching Henry’s. “If all that with the witch was about me, is the search for Linc’s child about me, too?”

  “Yes,” he said softly.

  “Test,” I said, hating the word. I didn’t want to be the cause of bad things happening to nice people. If someone wanted my power I’d give it to them, I thought. Just let me put my family back together.

  Henry removed his dark glasses and turned to look at me. His eyes were sightless, but at the same time I felt that they saw everything. “Darci, we do not choose what we’re given. No one would choose to have a birth defect, choose to lose a limb. All of these things are chosen for us and they’re given to us for a reason.”

  As I looked into his old eyes, chills ran up my spine. My entire body broke into goose bumps. What he was saying was nothing I hadn’t heard before and thought about many times. What was upsetting me was that I knew he’d voluntarily given up his sight. His blindness had not been caused by an illness or an accident. He had chosen to become blind.

  “Why?” I whispered, knowing he’d understand my meaning.

  “We all do what we need to,” he said, giving me one of those nonanswers.

  He turned away, put his dark glasses back on, and was silent.

  What was I willing to sacrifice? he seemed to be asking me. I wanted to scream that I didn’t want to give up anything. I wanted it all. I wanted my husband, my father, my sister-in-law, the two children. I wanted my beautiful house in Virginia. I wanted my beautiful life.

  “We cannot choose,” Henry said.

  His words were a key that unlocked something inside me. I began to tell him how horrible my life had been since Adam had disappeared.

  “There’s something eating at you,” he said, “gnawing away at your soul. You want to hide from it. Why?”

  “That’s because…” I didn’t want to think about the injustice in my life, of what I’d been accused. “Have you heard of the Hillbilly Honey?” I whispered, nearly choking on the name.

  “I want you to tell me.”

  I did. It was difficult at first but, gradually, I began to tell all of it. I told how I’d been laughed at all over the world, then it had been hinted that I’d had something to do with my husband’s disappearance. I told him that I was a prisoner in my own house and even my children had needed to be sent away. At 13 Elms I’d had to work on the guests to keep them from recognizing me.

  “Why do you want to find your husband?” he asked.

  I wanted to say something sarcastic to that, but I realized Henry was asking me something besides the obvious. “Oh, you mean, do I want him back so I can hide behind him?”

  Henry nodded and I thought about what he meant. For the year after my husband’s disappearance I’d hidden myself away completely. Adam’s friend from the FBI had brought unsolved cases to me, but I’d expended little energy on them. My father had encouraged me to seek out some haunted houses, but I could never work up the energy to fight the reporters and the people who wanted to spit on me, so I’d stayed at home and hidden.

  “You’ll never accomplish anything with so much hate in your heart,” Henry said.

  I wanted to protest that I didn’t have a heart full of hate, but I knew I did. When I looked into a mirror I could see my own aura and I could see little black flecks in it—and they were increasing. It was as though someone had used a shotgun on my aura and there were poisonous lead pellets in it.

  I took a deep breath and pulled my legs tighter to my chest. “Henry, I want you to tell me my future.”

  He took a long time to answer. “Most people come to me, give me five dollars, and I tell them what they want to hear. She doesn’t want to know her husband is cheating on her and that in eighteen months she’ll be working two jobs and raising three kids by herself, while he’s in another state having a great time. He doesn’t want to know that two of their kids aren’t his.”

  “Sex,” I muttered. “It seems like the whole world has been reduced to sex.”

  “Darci, honey,” Henry said in a slow drawl, “far as I can tell, except for you and me, everybody’s gettin’ some.”

  He made me laugh so hard I forgot about my morbid thoughts—and I realized he was going to tell me nothing. I also realized that I wasn’t sure he could see my future. I’d always been weird to so-called normal people, so I guess I was even weird to a fortune-teller.

  When I saw Henry’s aura begin to fade, I knew he was tired. It was time for me to leave. I stood up. “Could you at least tell me the time and place that Amelia and Martin used to meet?”

  When he smiled at that, he knew I was acknowledging that he hadn’t answered any of my questions.

  “Twilight,” he said. “Every night at twilight for over a hundred years, Amelia’s spirit has gone to the big double-trunked elm by the river and waited for Martin. It’s the tree where Martin was hanged and where his body is buried.”

  “Does his spirit meet hers?”

  “No. Never. After his death, Martin stayed with their son. When he saw that the boy would be protected by his white grandfather, Martin’s spirit left the earth.”

  “Poor woman,” I said. “All those years of waiting for a man she’ll never see again.”

  “Yes. Circumstances made Amelia a prisoner, but her death released her. She should have been free, but she chose to continue to be a prisoner.”

  “Subtlety is not your strong point, Just Henry,” I said. He’d been comparing me to Amelia. I was choosing to imprison myself and maybe I was waiting for a man who’d never return.

  Henry smiled but said nothing.

  “May I kiss you?” I asked.

  “Could I choose the body part?” he shot back.

  “You dirty old man,” I said, then kissed his forehead.

  He put his hands on my cheeks and held my face in his palms. “Darci, you have been given a great gift, but you’re not using it. The hate and anger inside you is becoming stronger than your gift. I’ve seen that you can use your mind to kill people. Now you’re turning your powers inward. You’re killing yourself.”

  I knew that what he was saying was true, and, in milder forms, I’d even thought what he was saying—but I didn’t want to hear it out loud. I didn’t know how to change my longing for my husband, and didn’t know how to vanquish the hatred I felt at what had been done to me. If the media hadn’t accused me of such horrible—and untrue—things I would have had the comfort of my daughter and niece even if my husband was missing.

  Henry removed his hands from my face. “Hate is eating you up. I pity any witch or demon that gets near you now.”

  “I’d like to put that Devlin in a cage and make him answer my questions.”

  “Would I
get a separate cage or the same one?”

  “Separate,” I shot back, wishing I could make him tell me what he knew. But I knew it was hopeless to try, so I said good-bye and walked back to the church. The spirits were there in force and they were calling to me to come and talk to them, but I kept walking. The pastor was nowhere in sight as I got into the rental car and pulled back onto the main road.

  I was hungry so I stopped at a country restaurant. I loved the sound of the slam of the old screen door when I entered. It was a house that looked like most of the downstairs had been converted into a dining room. There was a swinging door that led into a kitchen but I could feel that a lot of the cooking was done outside on an old grill. I knew that upstairs were bedrooms and the living quarters of the woman who owned the place. There was a window into the kitchen and I could see a tall, stately black woman busy over her pots and pans. I could feel that she loved to cook but worried that she was going to have to close her little restaurant because she didn’t have enough business. Had this been the woman Henry mentioned? The one who ended up having to support three kids alone? If so, had Henry directed me here? Had he concealed power as well as answers from me?

  The young waitress (the owner’s oldest daughter) came and I ordered chicken and dumplings, collards and glazed carrots. The order came minutes later and included two thick, fluffy biscuits and homemade apple-sauce.

  As I ate, I looked about the place, at the other diners, all African-Americans, and I thought about Henry’s nearly empty refrigerator. After I’d had some pecan pie, I paid, went outside, and walked around to the back of the house. As I’d willed her to be, the owner of the restaurant was sitting quietly and breaking green beans.

  Quickly, I told her that I wanted to arrange for her to deliver three hot meals a day to Henry. As I’d assumed, she knew who I meant when I gave the single name “Henry.”

  To my surprise, she hesitated. I could see her aura (a nice green) leap up in flames so I knew she wanted the business. So why wasn’t she talking money? Making a deal?