A lot of classic music is about guys wanting to fuck teenagers. People must have thought that was okay in classic times. In 1954 when he first went to Crombey Farms Chubby was 29. His future wife Joanne was 16. He had been to war in the South Pacific. She had never left the farm.
When I got to the nursing home Joanne didn’t ask who I was or why I was asking to know about Chubby, she just started talking. The staff must assume that she’s senile when she talks about magic.
She told me that her entire family had magical talent. Some more than others. Her mother was the only one with “real” power as she told it, she and her father and her brothers and sisters were ritual casters that supported her spells. Her parents operated the farm was a place where magic people could come together to learn and rest and recuperate.
Magic people “cut from the same cloth” as she put it. I’d figure out what she meant by that later.
She said that Chubby had been brought to the farm after he had an experience with an insect shaman. Joanne’s parents and oldest brother taught Chubby how to recognize them and how to deal with them. It seemed like she knew what he was doing so I asked her to make sure.
She almost spit at me “Of course I knew, who do you think helped him?”
“You helped him murder people?”
She sneered at me “Magic is in the blood, if it’s not in your blood it has to come from someone else’s. Small price to pay.”
That’s when the racial stuff came out. I won’t go into details but the bottom line is that Joanne had no problem with killing people of color to stop the bugs. She said that once Chubby “crossed the line” and started using white girls to power his magic that’s when she put a stop to it. She said that she killed Chubby and made it look like suicide.
I was speechless. Racist old people is a thing but I didn’t expect to be sitting across from an evil old lady in a nursing home.
I asked her if she could teach me to do the same magic that Chubby had, only without the murder part. She said that she hadn’t done any magic in more than thirty years. I asked her if another member of her family could teach me. She said they all died in the massacre. Like she would have if she hadn’t left the farm to live with Chubby.
She said that she had it written down though. She’d give me the notes if I did something for her.
“Kill the man who killed my family.”
