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"Lynelle asked me if Goblin put me up to evil. I said no. 'Then you don't have to tell a priest about him,' she explained. 'He has no connection with sin. Use your brain and your conscience. A priest is no more likely to understand Goblin than anyone else. ¡¯

"That might sound ambiguous now, but it didn't then.

"I think, all in all, the six years I had with Lynelle were some of the happiest in my life.

"Naturally, I was drawn away from Pops and Sweetheart, but they were proud and relieved to see me learning things and didn't mind a bit. Besides, I still spent time with Pops, playing the harmonica after lunch and talking about 'old times,' though Pops was hardly an old man. He liked Lynelle.

"Even Patsy was drawn to Lynelle and joined us for some of our adventures, at which time I had to squeeze into the tiny backseat of the sports car while the two women chatted away up front. My most poignant memory of Patsy's joining us has to do with Goblin, to whom I talked all the time, and the shock of Lynelle when Patsy cursed at me to stop talking to that disgusting ghost.

"Lynelle softened and intimidated Patsy, and something else happened which I think I only understand now as I look back on those years. It is simply this: that Lynelle's respect for me, not only as Goblin's friend but as little Tarquin Blackwood, had the effect of causing Patsy to respect me and to talk to me more sincerely and often than she had in the past.

"It was as if my mother never 'saw' the person I was until Lynelle really drew her attention to me, and then a vague interest substituted for the condescending and arrogant pity -- 'You poor sweet darlin' ' -- that Patsy had felt before.

"Lynelle was a great watcher also of popular movies, particularly those which were 'gothic' or 'romantic,' as she called it, and she brought tapes of everything, from Robocop to Ivanhoe, to watch with me in the evenings, and sometimes this brought Patsy into the room. Patsy enjoyed Dark Man and The Crow, and even Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast.

"More than once we all watched Coal Miner's Daughter, all about Loretta Lynn, the wonderful country-western star whom Patsy so admired. And I observed that Lynelle could talk 'country' pretty easily with Patsy. It made me jealous. I wanted my romantic and mysterious Lynelle to myself.

"However, I learned something about Patsy during these years, which I should have foreseen. Patsy felt stupid around Lynelle, and for that reason the connection petered away and at one point threatened to break. Patsy wouldn't stay around anyone who made her feel stupid, and she didn't have an open mind with which to learn.

"This turning away of Patsy didn't surprise me and didn't matter to me. (I think it was Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal that proved the death knell of our little movie-watching triangle. ) But something else good happened as regards to Patsy, and that was that Lynelle liked Patsy's music and asked if we could come in to listen, and then praised Patsy a lot for what she was doing with her one-man band, a 'friend' by the name of Seymour, who played harmonica and drums.

"(Seymour was an opportunistic jerk, or so I thought at the time. Fate had punishment in store for Seymour. )

"Patsy was obviously astonished by this, and jubilant, and we sat through quite a few concerts in the garage, which Lynelle enjoyed more than me. Naturally enough Goblin loved them and danced and danced until he flat-out dissolved.

"As I tell you this, I realize that Lynelle was quite deliberate in this design. She sensed that Patsy was afraid of her and backing off from us -- 'You're a couple of eggheads' -- and so she took me out there to Patsy quite cleverly to forge a new link.

"In fact, she pushed the matter further. She took me to see Patsy perform at a county jamboree. It was in Mississippi somewhere, right across the border from where we lived, and part of the county fair. I had never seen my mother on the stage, and people hollering for her and clapping for her, and it opened my eyes.

"With her teased yellow hair and heavy face makeup Patsy looked plastic pretty, and her singing was strong and good. Her songs had a dark bluegrass tone to them, and she herself was playing the banjo, and another guy, whom I didn't know very well, was sawing away on a rapid, mournful violin. Seymour was a pretty stiff backup with the harmonica and drums.

"That was all very sweet and made a huge impression on me, but when Patsy launched into her next number, a real hard-edged 'You've been mean to me, you bastard!' type of song, the crowd went nuts. They couldn't get enough of my little mother, and people were flocking towards the stage from all over the fair. Patsy upped the ante with the next one, her priceless 'You Poisoned My Well, I'll Poison Yours. ' I don't remember much else except thinking she was a hit, and her life wasn't in vain.

"But I didn't need Patsy. I'm not sure I've ever needed Patsy. Sure Patsy was a hit with the yokels, but I had Beethoven's Ninth.

"And I had Lynelle. It was when Lynelle and I drove into New Orleans alone together with Goblin that I was most overjoyed.

"I have never known a human being who drove faster than Lynelle, but she seemed to possess an instinct for avoiding policemen, and the one time we were stopped she told a tall story about us rushing to the bedside of a woman in labor, and not only did she not get the ticket, the policeman had to be discouraged from giving us a full escort to the fictitious hospital in town.

"Lynelle was beautiful. There is no more perfect way to say it. She had arrived here at Blackwood Manor to find me a country boy who couldn't write a sentence and left me some six years later, a dramatically well-educated young man.

"At sixteen I completed all the examinations for high school graduation, and ranked in the top percentile on the college entrance exams as well.

"In that last year that we would be together, Lynelle also taught me how to drive. Pops fully approved, and I was soon roving with the pickup truck on our land and on the backcountry roads all around. Lynelle took me to get my license, and Pops gave me an old pickup to call my own.

"I think Lynelle would have left me a real reader of books too if Goblin hadn't been so jealous of my reading, so intent upon being included, so intent upon me sounding every word to him out loud or listening to him sound it to me. But that skill -- the skill of sinking into books -- was to come to me with my second great teacher, Nash.

"Meanwhile, Goblin seemed to feed off Lynelle, even as he fed off me, though at the time I wouldn't have described it that way, and Goblin was getting physically stronger all the time.

"Big shocker. A Sunday. It was pouring down rain. I must have been twelve years old. I was working on the computer and Goblin cursed at me and the machine went dead. I checked all the connections, booted my program again, and there came Goblin, switching it off.

" 'You did that, didn't you?' I said, looking around for him, and there he was near the door, my perfect doppelg?nger in jeans and a red-and-white checkered shirt, except that he had his arms folded and a smug smile on his face.

"He had my full attention. But I turned the computer back on without taking my eyes off him, and then he pointed to the gasolier. He made it blink.

" 'All right, that's excellent,' I said. (It was his favorite compliment and had been for years. ) 'But don't you dare turn off the power in this house. Tell me what you want. ' He made the motions to 'Let's go' and of the rain coming down.

" 'No, I'm too old for that,' I said. 'You come here and work with me. ' At once I got a chair for him, and when he sat down besi