BLACKWOOD FARM, CHAPTER 37

Hey guys, long time no spork! I lost the book. I found it yesterday under the couch.

In other news, the rodents are all good. Have I mentioned that one of the mice has gotten fatter than the rest? Now she sits on top of them. I call her The Queen and she also loves my thumb. Seriously, she grips my right thumb and gives it hugs!

Ok, so here goes---at last, we get answers as to the origin of both Goblin and why Patsy hates Quinn so much, in...

BLACKWOOD FARM, CHAPTER 37

We're informed that Patsy is in her room with the nurse Cindy. We're also informed that everybody in the house believes Goblin killed Aunt Queen, even Patsy, and no one wants to climb the staircase alone. Everybody moves in groups of two or three.

Merrick and Lestat are waiting for Quinn as promised. Wait, if they were just gonna meet him at his own house, why didn't they just go with him on the ride home? We finally get a description of Merrick, and it's surprisingly brief: She's "a tall, very lean woman with almond-colored skin and full dark hair." I l like this, brief but effective. I do like having a distinct mental picture of characters, I really do, but the paragraphs that Rice and LKH usually spend on them frustrate even me. This? This I like.

As a note, I have never read anything with Merrick in it, but I told someone once she looked like I had always kinda pictured her. The person said that oh no, Merrick didn't look anything like her, that if she recalled right Merrick was blonde and full-lipped and "well-boobed". Seems like she DIDN'T recall right, but apparently I was close! Well, closer than that description, anyway.

Merrick tells Quinn that Goblin is related to Quinn by blood, Quinn thinks that can't be. He says he always thought Goblin was a spirit (remember, in this world that's something that was never alive) because he's seen ghosts his entire life and they have "histories" and "patterns". Okay, I actually like this bit, Quinn draws on his firsthand experience with other ghosts to give a good reason why he never considered why the being that looks just like him might be related to him. And it is a good reason; unlike, say, Rebecca, Goblin has no knowledge of any existence prior being attached to Quinn, as a ghost would.

Merrick says Goblin indeed does have a history and pattern (I admit I don't quite get what the "pattern" part refers to) and asks Quinn "you have no idea?"

Quinn explains that Goblin has just always been with him from the beginning, that Quinn almost feels he created him from the void in his own image, that Quinn knows he's made from "something that obeys natural laws" like "astral particles---some form of matter" and how Mona explained to him about how spirits have a nucleus and all that, that he has a kind of circulatory system and is growing stronger as he takes blood from Quinn, but that Quinn "never had an inkling that he was the ghost of somebody"

This takes a paragraph. Just a paragraph. What he spent FIVE HUNDRED PAGES explaining to Lestat, he's sufficiently given to Merrick in a paragraph, at least all the RELEVANT things.

Merrick says she saw Goblin at the cemetery and that he's Quinn's twin. Quinn is like yes he's my doppelganger, and Merrick says that no, she doesn't mean it like that, Goblin is the GHOST of Quinn's twin. Quinn says that's impossible, that he'd know if he had a twin, someone would have told him, which given the amount of family secrets he's been finding out in this book---Patsy is his mom, Pops had an illegitimate son, etc---is a pretty damn stupid thing to think, and points out that Goblin is right-handed and he's a lefty. Merrick counters that this is common with "mirror twins" and that there's an old legend that every left-handed person has a right-handed twin that died in the womb. Yeah, I remember telling my sister (who is a lefty) that once.

Merrick says, however, that Quinn's twin did not perish in the womb. She says they need to talk to Patsy, that "I think Patsy wants you to know. She's weary of the silence."

Quinn is too shocked to respond.

They got to Patsy's bedroom; Cindy and Big Ramona get up to leave (like good servants I guess). Patsy asks "What kind of invasion is this?" and tells Cindy not to leave without giving her another shot, just so we know Patsy is a drug-grubber I guess. She accuses Quinn of not knowing she's alive half the time (a weird complaint, I don't think that was ever her issue with him?) and asks if he'll drag everyone to the cemetery at the stroke of twelve when she dies. Quinn says maybe he'll just strangle her, that he had a dream he did that, that she tasted like cotton candy and candy apples and that he dumped her in the swamp. Patsy responds by laughing, saying he's crazy and should have been drowned at birth and "you don't know how much I hate you"

Cindy says Patsy doesn't know what she's saying, that she'll give her another shot in an hour. Patsy says she's sick now, Big Ramona says that "you're loaded now is what you are" since again we have to be reminded that Patsy is abusing her medication on top of everything else, because we apparently need extra incentive to dislike her. There's something very nasty to me about Rice using this for that purpose, like it's on the same level of emotionally abusing your son.

Lestat asks to talk to her, she says she's glad to talk to friends of Quinn, that it's never happened before. She then talks about how Nash is stuck-up because he just always calls her Miss Blackwood (it's weird to me how the daughter of a rich fancy family, even one as disconnected from them as Patsy, takes this as Nash putting on airs rather than being a normal term of address from someone who works for the family; I guess either Nash does it very sarcastically or this is just meant to show Patsy is Trash regardless of upbringing) and how Jasmine "can't stand the sight of me" and how Jasmine thinks that Patsy doesn't know her "black bastard" son Jerome is Quinn's even though "half the parish knows"

Black bastard? Is Patsy gonna be transparently racist now like Rebecca to show we're not supposed to like her? I gotta tell ya, there's just something that smacks immensely of Rice's specific brand of self-satisfied rich liberal smugness, of her own assurance in her tolerance and open-mindedness, of how she makes the 'trashy' villains be obviously racist, but sees no issue with how the good, rich people have a bunch of UNPAID black staff who don't even get to live in the house where they work and have to sleep in a bungalow with cast-off furniture from the main house instead. You know, like slaves and slave quarters.

Speaking of the "good, rich white people" Patsy makes the very interesting statement that Aunt Queen definitely knew Jerome was Quinn's son too, because if anyone else had been the father "it would have been out with the trash." Really? So Aunt Queen just chucks out any illegitimate children that the staff have?

Quinn says "Come on Patsy, stop it. If anybody hurt that child's feelings, you'd be the first to stick up for him."

That's...also interesting. We've never seen Patsy and Jerome interact, nor been told anything about their relationship, but it seems Patsy's dislike for Quinn doesn't extend to his child, at least not according to Quinn.

Patsy answers Quinn that she's not trying to hurt Jerome, she's trying to hurt Quinn, "'cause I hate you."

Well, that puts it plainly, I guess. But I can see someone at the end of their lives just putting everything as damn bluntly as possible.

Quinn says he'll give her some opportunities to hurt him if she'll just talk to him and his friends. You know, what she already said she was happy to do. Patsy says it will be a pleasure.

Merrick asks if Quinn had a twin. Patsy goes quiet, looks stupefied and then panicky, and she starts screaming for Cindy. She turns around this way and that til Lestat puts a hand on her shoulder and looks in her eyes and it seems as though the "hysteria" is drained out of her. Cindy arrives and gives Patsy a shot.

Still looking in Lestat's eyes, Patsy says, "You understand, it was the most pitifulest, terriblest thing--You can't imagine."

And then she tells Quinn, "I hated you so much. I hate you now. I always hated you. You killed it."

Quinn asks how, and tells us he wants to probe her mind but he'd never used his powers on her (YOU WILL RECALL THIS IS A BIG FAT LIE) and how a "profound inveterate distaste" keeps him from doing so now.

Patsy explains how Quinn was indeed a twin, and that he was born huge while his brother Garwain had been tiny, three pounds to Quinn's ten. The doctors had explained that Garwain was the "donor twin" and that Quinn had, inside the womb, just basically sucked all the blood and nutrition out of him "like a vampire baby". She's hugely upset by it, and begins crying, saying how she wanted to hold Garwain but they took him away and put him in an incubator. She say by him day and night, even though she couldn't touch him. Aunt Queen would call her at the hospital saying that the baby at home needed her, "Like this little baby in the hospital didn't need me! Like this little pitiful creature in the hospital didn't need me! She wanted me to come home and give milk to a ten-pound monster of a baby. I couldn't even look at you! I didn't want to be in the same house as you! That's why I moved back out."

Garwain died in the hospital inside that incubator, and it was only then that Patsy was finally allowed to hold him.

Quinn reflects that he has never seen Patsy like this, in such "abject sadness"

They buried him in the family cemetery, and Patsy hated that Aunt Queen brought Quinn the funeral, because Quinn kept crying and screaming the whole time, and Aunt Queen said it was because Quinn knew his twin had died and how Patsy should hold him. Patsy says this is why she's never gone back to the family crypt til now, why she didn't go for Sweetheart or Pops, that she had never gone til tonight because Aunt Queen had put it in the family lawyer's hands that Patsy would get a bonus check if she attended her "stupid funeral" even though "she knew how I felt about the place"

It was also Aunt Queen, she reveals, who paid Patsy off to never breath a word of any of this to Quinn, "like you were the one who had to be protected."

And “like it was your story” and “you were the one they cared about.” Lestat and Merrick ask if Patsy or anyone else ever thought that Goblin was the ghost of Garwain. Patsy says no, because if it had been Garwain then he would have come to her because she loved him, whereas Quinn is the one that killed him. She thinks that Quinn “used all his crazy” to make up Goblin because he didn't have a twin and knew he should.

At this point you may be saying “What? No one thought Goblin was Garwain? That's completely stupid!” because that's sure what I saying, but we learn in the next chapter that Patsy is incorrect, the other people in the house did think that Goblin was Garwain. But I can see why Patsy would refuse to see the obvious there; of course she wouldn't want Garwain to come to Quinn and not to her, so of course she'd come up with some other explanation.

“So there you have it. And I guess you know now. You know now why I've hated you all these years.”

Quinn does indeed now know, and he hates Patsy. He hates her as much as much as she hates him. And you know what? I don't blame him. I completely understand Patsy's feelings here (note: she's wrong, I'm just saying I get it) but Quinn has every right to hate her. As much as I have sympathized with Patsy and disliked Quinn throughout the whole book, Quinn has every right to be angry and to hate her back for how she took out her grief on an innocent baby. So I don't blame him here or think he's bad for hating her now.

As Quinn starts to leave, Patsy asks “Don't you have something to say to me?” Quinn asks what, Patsy says “Can't you imagine what I've been through. I was sixteen years old when that happened.”

Quinn replies that she's not sixteen now. Patsy says no one has ever loved her the way they do Quinn (and personally, I think that might be part of why she hates him too) Quinn says that's true, but he hates her the way she hates him.

Patsy tells him to get away from her, and the chapter ends with Quinn saying that's what he was doing.

So, I'm hoping this gives Quinn some kind of closure. However shitty he may be, however much everyone else loved him, never knowing why his birth mother despised him so much can't have been easy on any kid. Knowing why, and knowing it wasn't his fault, horrific though the situation was, should probably help him in the long run (even if I imagine a lot of people might then go through a lot of guilt over “killing” their twin, even if that was outside their control, because people aren't logical)

And on the subject of people not being logical...I get Patsy here. She is in no way excusable here, she's not even that sympathetic once you get past the “dead baby” and into the “hates her living child” bit. But she's very...human to me? I don't expect everyone to agree with me on this, but for me personally, this just seems like such a human reaction---all emotions, no logic---to this tragedy, especially for someone who was a child herself when it happened. And I will say this for her---at least she did try her best to distance herself from Quinn. Keeping him and trying to be his mother when she resented and despised him would have been far worse for him. Of course, I have no illusions about her reasons for not raising him; it certainly wasn't for Quinn's sake at all.

So, I think Rice, in the end, did try to give Patsy some depth. She still comes off as just a bit too “hate this person!” to me, and in unnecessary ways, but her grief over her child is believable, as is her horrible way of handling it. She feels more like an actual person to me with this, certainly a lot more than she probably would have come out as in an Anita Blake novel, while still nonetheless being unquestionably in the wrong. She's humanized, but in no way excused.

And with the mystery of Goblin finally solved, next step is doing something about him!

...nah I'm kidding, next chapter is gonna be more talking!