Forever and Always Read online

  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