Forever and Always Read online

  When I wasn’t in school, I worked on the family I was living with and did what I could to straighten them out. When a husband raised his hand to his wife I’d set his hand on fire—figuratively, that is. It was like Pavlov’s dog and he soon learned not to strike anyone. I made people think their kids were great so they’d stop abusing them.

  One by one, I changed the inner workings of several families in Putnam. However, I was always careful to make them think that someone or something else had changed them so no one would know it was me. Often, I made people think it was a pastor. Sometimes I’d leave a book lying about and it would get read. “That book changed my life,” people would say.

  After a few months someone would return me to my mother’s house and I’d live with her for a while before she sent me to another family.

  In all my years of living in Putnam only once did I try to use my True Persuasion on my mother. I still remember it vividly, even though I was only about five. She’d told me to come inside but I didn’t want to. I went into the house but as she sat at the table looking at a magazine, I stared at her and tried to make her think she should let me go back out again. My mother looked up from her magazine, looked hard into my eyes, then she slapped me. She didn’t say anything before or afterward. No explanation of the slap, just wham! It was the only time she ever hit me—and I never again gave her a reason to strike me. After that, I obeyed her without defiance. And I never again tried to manipulate my mother’s mind.

  After Linc had been driving for a couple of hours, I casually asked a question about my mother. He wasn’t fooled. He gave me such a knowing look that I blushed to my hair roots. When I poked him in the ribs, he acted as though I’d used a weapon on him.

  “Okay,” I said,“so I’m curious. Tell me what she’s like.”

  “You want me to tell you what your own mother is like?”

  “Like you know everything about your mother. Ha! You’d love to find out what her colleagues at work think of her, what she thinks of you, and—”

  “How did you form the opinion that you can’t read minds?”

  I shrugged. “I can’t read exact thoughts but I can read feelings. You think a great deal about your parents. You seem to want to rebel against them but at the same time you want them to be proud of you.”

  “And what about you? You have a mother who’s one of the most beautiful, sexiest women in the world. How’s that make you feel?”

  He was pretending to be a therapist and looked down his nose at me as though he was analyzing me. I wanted to reply in kind but what came out of my mouth surprised me. “Did you go to bed with her?”

  “Nope,” he said cheerfully. “Tried to, wanted to, but she wouldn’t have me.”

  I looked out the window to hide my smile, ridiculously glad that he hadn’t had sex with her.

  “Darci,” Linc said, all humor gone from his voice, “I read that book about you and none of it makes sense. In person you’re as unlike that stupid girl as can be. And there was no mention of your…well, your talent anywhere in the book. According to the author, you got everyone into a mess and they all risked their lives to save you.”

  I didn’t say anything because there was nothing to say. I was beginning to think Linc was my friend but I wasn’t sure enough yet to confide in him. Besides, if I told him the truth I was sure he’d stop the car and push me out.

  “There’s the exit,” I said, pointing. Linc sighed and I could feel his frustration, but I wasn’t yet ready to talk about what had happened inside the witches’ cave.

  East Mesopotamia looked to have once been prosperous. The buildings in the center of the tiny town were well built and dripped embellishments that had been the height of fashion around 1910 or so. However, since then, all that had been done to them was to patch them up enough to keep them from falling down. Half of the buildings were empty and the half that had businesses were not upscale. As we slowly drove through town, we did not see a white face.

  I looked at Linc to see what he was feeling. I didn’t have to touch him to feel his misery. He earned a lot of money yet here were people like him, perhaps even relatives of his, living in deep poverty.

  He was solemn as he rolled down the window and asked a couple of men sitting on a bench if they knew John Aloysius Frazier. The man said “Pappa Al” was at “the old school house,” and pointed east.

  We drove east and a few minutes later we saw a hand-lettered sign that said “Frazier School,” and Linc turned down the long driveway.

  As soon as I saw the place, I loved it. It was a big, square building with windows all the way around it. Overhanging it were oak trees that had to be a hundred years old. Surrounding the building was a driveway that was covered with crushed shells.

  Linc stopped the car, we got out, our shoes crunching the shells in a pleasant way, and we walked toward the front door. We were just a few feet from the car when a bell rang and out the back poured children, all running and screaming, all of them dark-skinned. Since they ran in the opposite direction, they didn’t see Linc and me.

  We walked to the back of the school and standing on the doorstep was a tall, older man, majestic-looking with his dark skin and gray hair. His clothes were good quality and beautifully kept, but I could see that they were frayed at the edges.

  He didn’t seem surprised when he saw Linc and it was easy to see he knew who Linc was. He didn’t see Linc as a TV star, but as his grandson. The man’s eyes threatened to eat Linc up and the hunger I felt coming from him nearly made me cry.

  “And who are you?” he asked, at last turning to me.

  “Darci,” Linc said. “Friend of mine. Could we talk to you?”

  “My life is yours,” he said, holding the door open wide.

  Pappa Al, as he was called, told a young woman to tell the kids to go home for the rest of the day, that he wanted to talk to his grandson. The young woman stood on tiptoe, whispered something to Pappa Al and the man laughed merrily. “Yes, he’s the one on that TV show,” he said, looking at Linc with such pride that Linc began to blush.

  Ten minutes later the three of us were sitting inside a screened porch, drinking cold lemonade, eating molasses cookies, and looking out at the beautiful scenery. At least I was looking at the scenery. Linc and his grandfather couldn’t take their eyes off each other.

  I kept my seat slightly apart from them and tried to calm them down so they could talk about the subject at hand. I was afraid they’d start dragging out photo albums and lose sight of what we’d come to find out.

  Pappa Al’s voice was beautiful and I could well imagine that he could heal people with it. But he told Linc that it had been his wife, Linc’s grandmother, Lily, who had been the healer. But she had been a shy woman, so she and her husband had been a team. He made people believe his hands healed, while his wife was just his assistant.

  When Linc told the story of how he’d come to have a son, I feared that his grandfather would be judgmental, but he wasn’t. He was so pleased to have a great-grandson that he didn’t care how he got the child. Linc didn’t say that we had reason to believe the child had perhaps inherited some supernatural ability.

  I leaned back in my chair and quietly listened as Pappa Al told of his son, Linc’s father. “He was always embarrassed by us, by the tents and the revival meetings,” Pappa Al said. “He disassociated himself from all of it from the time he was a kid. But the money we made allowed your grandmother and me to open this school.”

  My ears perked up at Pappa Al’s tone and I wondered if Linc’s did, too. I said nothing as Pappa Al gave us a tour of the school. It had once been the town school, all twelve grades in the six classrooms, but in 1972, the county had declared the school inadequate and started busing the children fifty miles away “to a school where nobody knows them.”

  Linc and Pappa Al walked ahead of me and I couldn’t resist a smile. I knew a sales pitch when I heard one.

  Pappa Al and his wife had traveled for years, dragging their angry son w