Pale

by Edward A. Farmer

  Whether by his own plans or those of Jesse and Silva, for two years Fletcher had not spoken a word to the boy, wiped a single tear, or played one iota of a game with him, the house having returned to Floyd’s recollections of that time when young Elizabeth stormed the hallways, yet only by the sound it gave, as laughter sat abound, yet darkness prevailed. The boy referred to Fletcher as “Mista” and knew not a soul who would contradict him otherwise in his understanding that Fletcher was not of his family.

  It was on a quiet morning around the plantation that the two were finally brought together, the lark singing a song just outside my window that woke me and had lasted the length of the morning as I stirred from the servant quarters and made my way inside the house. Fletcher was seated in his usual chair by the open square in his room. Silva had just placed David down for his nap when the boy suddenly stirred, regaining in his young body that energy that never fully retired, no matter how long he rested. In an instant, he was fully awake and wandered about the living room unnoticed, eventually finding that upstairs part of the house that he was never allowed to see or at least not without the watchful eye of Silva to guide him. His feet tapped the hardwood floor with the persistence of a metronome’s count as the boy navigated the hallways by swaying from one side to the other until he’d finally trotted to the very end, just outside of Fletcher’s open door. I spotted him there, the boy’s face peering in curiously at the tall figure that sat by the window unmoving.

  “You stop right there, David,” I called to him.

  Fletcher stared at him with an expression that was uncommitted to any particular emotion, his eyes remaining blind to the reach of my arms extending out to the boy’s thin frame just before he rushed inside the room. Nonetheless, youth was on the boy’s side as he smiled a playful grin then trotted off toward Fletcher, who had not removed his eyes from the boy since he’d spotted him and now watched intently as he came running with unsteady legs and fell directly into Fletcher’s arms. David’s screams became fits of laughter as Fletcher tickled the bottoms of his feet and behind his ears lovingly. I stood in the doorway, my breath lodged inside my chest and my heart pushing it upward. It was terrifying yet only from the uncertainty I felt in not knowing what would happen next. Then I heard it, the sounds that stopped my feet from progressing any farther.

  “So you’re the one been making all that noise,” Fletcher said in a rough voice that seemed quite strained after so many months of inactivity.

  “You’re what, two summers now?” he continued, examining the boy by lifting him in the air and twirling him around as David continued his restless behavior. “Hell must be nothing more than a block of ice by now if they let you up to meet me.”

  He looked down at the boy’s hair, curly and thin, tipped over his forehead like a lob of string having fallen from his dresser.

  “You got no words either, huh?” Fletcher laughed.

  David understood none of Fletcher’s words or intended humor, merely looking up to see a kind face before him and laughing accordingly.

  “Mista!” the boy said.

  Fletcher nodded, settling the boy onto his knee as they both peered outside the window at the collection of leaves between the two trees in that dismal area where Mr. Kern sat.

  “You like it here, huh?” Fletcher sighed with his eyes stayed on that plot of land and its emptiness. “Yeah, children always do. They think this place is someplace special. That’s what they want you to think though. They make you believe you’ve gone someplace magical, then you wake up one day and you’re out there in the fields just like the other niggas.

  “You got a sack and a scarf around your neck like some type of dog tag, a callus that’s exploding, and a bitterness in you that might erupt faster. You got a thought in your head that won’t leave. It won’t leave you alone and it keeps repeating itself over and over until it drives you crazy. It’s the only thought you’ve had in a while, the only thing other than the whip, the only thing that reminds you you’re still a man with thoughts of your own. You don’t know how to fulfill it though, or even if you should.

  “And then the sun, Lord, how the sun beats you every chance it gets, because you’re no friend like those other people who lay out to get color. No, you serve it, it doesn’t serve you. Then one day you can’t hear that voice anymore and that silence seems more maddening than those thoughts ever could. You realize that voice was all you had left. It was all that was left of you, and you somehow let it go. And then you’re nothing.”

  He looked down at the crown of David’s head, a pained expression creeping over his face.

  “Don’t let them do it to you,” he whispered decidedly. “No, it never grows on you, no matter what they say.”

  These words were subsequently met with laughter by the boy, who wiggled free of Fletcher’s grasp as he reached for the curls of Fletcher’s hair that hung down past his ears in tight spirals. Fletcher had never worn his hair so long, an insistence made by Silva when he was younger, most likely to avoid another noticeable difference between Fletcher and the other boys whose hair had not that silken quality. Fletcher held the boy tighter to his chest as David settled into his arms once more and quit his squirming. Fletcher studied him, the young man’s eyes taking note of the boy’s nub of a nose and tiny lips, the boy’s miniature arms like that spectacle one could see at any county fair.

  I steadied myself in the hall, watching them intently.

  “You been the one all this time,” Fletcher ruminated, now returning his sights to those fields that spread before them. “All this time such a small thing making such a loud noise in my ears.”

  Fletcher no longer held a direct conversation with the boy as much as he did with himself, going on to say, “I done heard you from day one.”

  Fletcher trailed off at the sight of David’s eyes peering into his own.

  “You got nothing to worry about though,” Fletcher said. “You’ll never be out there. It ain’t a place for men, not a place at all. No place for children or even beasts, but you know that. Don’t you? Don’t ever grow up, David. Stay this way forever if you can.”

  It was often easy nowadays to forget that Fletcher had such an eloquence about him that he appeared to be too good for this place. To a stranger he’d probably seem to be a saint trapped in a place of sinners and thieves. Yet for us who knew him, he was an uncaring recluse and not some soul ensnared in a world where he didn’t belong. To describe him during his stay inside the house was to tell of a man who had the world on a string, too chickenshit to use it and too afraid to let it go. No, he belonged right where he was and nowhere else, we each knew.

  “You know you were named after a king?” Fletcher continued with the boy, retrieving that bit of kindness he still possessed, even if it remained tucked so far away that no one could ever see its existence.

  His words returned a sense of hope I had in him, somehow reviving, as it always did, that goodness I prayed never truly faded, even if it was nearly impossible to see any goodness in Fletcher nowadays.

  “Floyd will tell you the story one day when you’re older,” Fletcher promised. “Some pretty big shoes to fill.”

  Just then David wiggled free of Fletcher’s grasp and fell to the ground. Fletcher paid no more attention to the boy as David marched around the chair with his arms raised high, pleading for affection once more.

  “David!” I called as I now made myself fully visible.

  Fletcher turned to the door as David rushed to my arms with no more awareness of Fletcher than he had before he’d wandered inside the dark space.

  “He’s faster than all of us now,” I said, an apology tucked in there somewhere.

  Still Fletcher, who never ceased to amaze, allowed us to leave the room without a word or even a smile to the young boy who now waved cheerfully. David possessed that innocence I’d once seen in Fletcher—an unawareness of the world that drew him closer
to our hearts and made everyone swear he would do great things, by that unconditional love he gave and that possibility for God to use those types of people for great purposes. We all thought Fletcher would do the same and walk in the footsteps of greatness, yet we were somehow wrong and, as we often did, expected a great deal of those earthly heroes bound by man’s fall.

  That afternoon, when I delivered the young boy to Silva, I explained of his wanderings and the things I’d seen and heard inside Fletcher’s room, as I’d made a conscientious determination to never gossip but also to keep no further secrets while inside that house after seeing the consequences of such actions. Silva took the boy from my arms territorially, a symbolic removal of the boy from Fletcher’s reach as well. Although she could not so easily ensure Fletcher’s removal from David’s reach, as the boy would seek out that quiet man on the second floor each day and find his intrigue immensely rewarded as Fletcher sat with him while he played, the tall man holding the toy lion above his head or the dump truck steady at the wall. Even if the man rarely spoke after that initial meeting, this silence only heightened the boy’s interest in this mysterious character who did not smother him as the others did and who remained a static presence inside that house.

  CHAPTER 29

  As winter approached, Fletcher sat for longer periods of time downstairs following his breakfast, not seated anyplace where Silva or the boy could find him, but rather locked inside Mr. Kern’s parlor, where we had not placed the old man for several months. Fletcher found that parlor room wrecked when he’d first come upon it. On the floor sat piles of cracked and peeled paint. Strips of wallpaper had bulged then finally fallen following years of the Mister’s neglect and the constant temperature change inside the room from those opened windows, which would have surely been prevented had Mr. Kern allowed Jesse to perform work. The air was raw, the mess of objects crunching loudly beneath Fletcher’s feet as he walked.

  Dust clouded his sight, thick upon the Mister’s books left scattered over the floor, while the Mister’s chair sat covered by a dingy sheet of plastic that Silva and I had placed over that wooden rocker in order to preserve it. The mix of dust and soot fell to the floor as Fletcher lifted the plastic, tossing it aside in one swift motion, in likeness to a matador with his muleta, which kept any dust from ever reaching Fletcher and brought a certain peace to his face. His smile revealed a gentleness that eclipsed any hint of bitterness and vengefulness he’d held before.

  For weeks, Fletcher removed wallpaper and replaced it with fresh coats of paint. He dusted the books and returned them to their shelves as neatly as if placed there by the Mister’s own hand. He scrubbed the floor of all paint and laid down an extra coat of lacquer that caused that wood to shine as if it were some fabrication made by man, the smell of lacquer diminishing faster than any application I’d witnessed, given those large windows that never closed. The walls he painted a gentle blue while that outside world sat as a bursting of green tucked within white trim. In the corner of the wall was left a patch of the old wallpaper, kept as a testament to that room’s former glory, a square of soft white and blue that showed a white Maltese at play with glasses and shoes and strings and pipes from its mouth and a ribbon tied around its neck that looked like a bow on a present.

  Fletcher sat there proudly once this work was done, no more shuffling of bags or broken and unwanted items outside for pickup, no more cleaning and clearing and repositioning furniture inside the room. No, the room now sat as a reminder of what it had been under Mr. Kern’s possession but also proof of what it could be under the ownership of younger eyes. With that room complete, there was a sense of resolution to the downstairs area, a finality that the Missus had always wanted to achieve in making that place feel like home. Fletcher seemingly walked with her hand at his shoulder in each detail of his renovation, as if she called the shots while he merely did her will, just as Jesse had done years before. I swear I saw her smile once it was completed, one of the last times I ever viewed her ghost inside the house, walking as if floating on air.

  The length of time Fletcher spent inside that room varied each day depending on his mood, not a mere assessment of happiness or sadness, as he never showed either, but rather a determination he made as to whether others were around. For in times when there was silence, he sat for longer periods of time, and when there was noise, he left relatively quickly and without a word. It was during times of Fletcher’s presence in that room that Silva kept a greater watch of David and insisted the boy remain completely quiet even though his playfulness was as hard to contain as a yawn around a fellow yawner. That room was the one space inside the house he’d never ventured, only hearing the noise for weeks behind closed doors and being told by Silva to stay away after receiving a few taps on his bottom if he ever ventured too close. And so it occurred naturally that as soon as he got free of her care, the young boy once again faked a nap and hurried inside when no one was looking, his eyes wild and his hands a reflection of that reckless spirit as he tore feverishly at the room’s window crank.

  “David, no!” I shouted as soon as I’d caught sight of him with one hand tight on the crank and the other pressed against the windowsill for leverage. There was no telling how long he’d been there.

  He turned to me then made a run for the bookshelf along the opposing wall, his size a perfect fit between the tall shelf and window as he pressed himself even farther into the gap while I attempted to pull him out.

  “David, this is no place for children!” I scolded.

  When finally freed of that corner, he still managed to keep an agreeable grip that allowed him to hold on to the sides of the bookshelf tightly, as if letting go were leaving this world completely, along with all of the wonders it held for children his age. He struggled until there was nothing left to grab, and when he felt that corner slip from his grasp he screamed a tiresome screech, kicked at my shin, then let go and ran from the room howling. The world was a daze of sights and sounds as I took refuge in the Mister’s chair, falling into it unabashedly while I nursed that bruise that would surely plague me for weeks, if not months. It was as I sat there in my waning anger and pain, and plotted punishment against the boy who would surely get it once I saw him again, that I took notice of the detail of Fletcher’s work. There were little things that no passing eye would ever notice in one swift journey past the open door, like the molding on the top wall that was only a shade different than the room’s actual color and added a softness to the space; the attention Fletcher took to unscrew the coat hook from the wall and not just paint around it like others would have; the repositioning of the lamp on the table so that it now sat in arm’s reach of the rocker and one no longer needed to stand in order to turn it on or off; the arrangement of books on the shelves in alphabetical order where there must have been hundreds if not thousands to comb through. These considerations were of an oddly methodical nature, requiring patience for days to consider and arrange, hours of mulling over details that now left that area as trimmed as a lamb’s tail, docked and cleaned with that bit of pine tar. And so, once my shin felt of better health that I could use it once more, I stood and reordered the books dislodged during David’s struggle and exited the room as quickly as I’d entered to find the boy.

  Fletcher made no mention of my presence in his parlor that evening, although I knew he was aware of it. I could see it in his eyes, the way they lingered on me as he sat for dinner, that stare a sleight of hand that stole from the room the secrets I kept. He chewed his food carefully then looked around with a sense of amusement as that smirk returned to his face with each bite he took. He seemed of some new spirit, utterly pleased by the rigidity he’d created, watching all of us scrambling inside our heads to ensure we met not one of his pet peeves head-on. Mr. Kern was a laughing mess that night, his inability to talk having led him from frustration to disobedience to anger to now pure madness, although I would later wonder which was actually worse. For the old man found himself one
day complacent to all that befell him and accepting of his lot in silence, his eyes a heartbreaking tale of all he’d seen and all that he still wanted to say, yet his mouth sat too afraid to attempt and fail once more, and he sat silently waiting to die.

  Fletcher remained quiet at the table even with Mr. Kern’s hysterics, the differences between them growing stronger each day as Fletcher sat well-mannered and decent before his meal, eating slowly and meticulously while Mr. Kern waved his spoon wildly in the air like a brute and dropped items over the length of the table, and Silva struggled to guide him while attempting to clean the old man’s spills and dribbles down his chin. Still, there was a madness to the house that extended well beyond Mr. Kern’s antics, an indecency that existed in the loathing we each had for one another and the ways we showed it. In Fletcher’s case, he was a quiet observer to the frustrations of others—although he did not add to them directly, he still offered no help and showed his hatred in these indirect ways that grew from his apathy. Silva, on the other hand, was a weakened player in the game. No longer a woman capable of inflicting swift justice on her targets, she now exhibited a passive role as she focused her love and attention on one child and not the other, removing all ties she had with Fletcher, completely unapologetic in her desire to see no joy come his way. Then there was Mr. Kern who, if he could speak a single thought coherently, would surely wish bad fortunes upon Jesse and that boy of his. Mr. Kern would find some way to tear that boy down and render him useless to a father of such profound strength, for to have borne a son so weak would be a disgrace before God Himself.

  Yes, love came from no one inside that home. It didn’t pour from the souls of hurt people, spring up from the rafters like Sundays in Clinton, when the Holy Ghost spread like fire, a cascade like the mighty flowing Mississippi River and drowned us all in its glory. It did not take hold like the Gospel and fill us each with its spirit. It did not breathe a stinging yet warm sensation that caused the loins of men to pulsate and become moist with seed to fulfill some divine purpose that was in and of itself love. It instead stood lame, that limp a tiresome trudge up an impossible hill that at the top saw us all standing, separately, waiting and hoping for some light to come our way.