“It’s more than fair to say that when he wasn’t making faces and cavorting he impressed me with an engulfing love. It was stronger perhaps when he wasn’t visible, but if he didn’t appear to me at short intervals over the day and into the night, I began to cry for him and become severely distressed.

“Sometimes when I was running on the grass or climbing the oak tree outside, down by the cemetery, I could feel him clinging to me, piggybacking onto me, and I would all the time talk to him, whether he was visible or not.

“One very bright day, when I was in the kitchen, Sweetheart taught me to write some words—‘good’ and ‘bad’ and ‘happy’ and ‘sad,’ and I taught Goblin, with his hand on mine, to write these words as well. Of course nobody understood that Goblin was doing the writing some of the time, and when I tried to tell them they just laughed, except for Pops, who never liked Goblin and was always worried ‘where all this talk of Goblin would lead.’

“No doubt Patsy had always been around, but I don’t remember her distinctly until I was four or five. And even then I don’t think I knew she was my mother. She certainly never came up here to my room, and when I did see her in the kitchen I was already afraid that a screaming fight between her and Pops was going to break out.

“I loved Pops, and with reason, because he loved me. He was a tall gaunt man with gray hair all the time I knew him, and always working, and most of the time with his hands. He was educated and he spoke very well, as did Sweetheart, but he wanted to be a country man. And just the way the kitchen had swallowed up Sweetheart, who had once been a debutante in New Orleans, so the farm swallowed Pops.

“Pops kept the books for the Blackwood Manor Bed-and-Breakfast on a computer in his room. And though he did put on a white shirt and suit to conduct the tours of the place now and then, he didn’t like that part of things. He preferred to be riding the lawns on his beloved tractor lawn mower or doing any other kind of work outdoors.

“He was happiest when he had a ‘project’ and could work side by side with the Shed Men—Jasmine’s great-uncles, brothers and so forth—until the sun went down, and I never saw him in any vehicle except a pickup truck until Sweetheart died, at which time he rode into town in a limousine like all the rest of us did.

“But I don’t think, and it’s hurtful to say it, that Pops loved his daughter, Patsy. I think he loved her as little as Patsy loves me.