Pale

by Edward A. Farmer

  “Fletcher,” Silva soothed.

  “No, I give up,” he said. “Sometimes you do the wrong thing and just hope it’ll work itself out, but it never does. Does it, Silva?”

  “No,” Silva replied. “It doesn’t, Fletcher.”

  “Seems we do this every year,” he laughed. “We choose our lot in life only once, you told me. Seems you took my chance away yet again. And you gave it to Jesse once more.”

  “Fletcher,” Silva tried.

  “No, Mama, take him to Jesse where he belongs.” The boy looked to Fletcher, yet Fletcher turned away. Fletcher’s breath purged from his body, crying, “I don’t want to see him again. I done hurt too much for all of you so that your wishes might come true. Well, I promise he will never know his father just like I never knew mine. Seems only right, like father like son.”

  Silva took the boy from the dining room as instructed, David’s eyes following Fletcher as he left. Then, in the low, slow trudge of silence that passed, with the heat sweltering both inside and out of our flesh, Mr. Kern leaned forward in his chair with eyes nearly extinguished from all those years of fire and spite. For the first time I’d ever seen, he was crying. And I thought to myself, Floyd was wrong: the old man could cry. I watched him and knew he’d reached the end, his body crippled and meek, his journey a savage passage on this earth toward the grave. He drew open his mouth yet could produce no sound then saw it close once more. His eyes fell to the floor. His body seemed to rest there beside them, trembling as if it shuddered to an end. He slouched like this for several seconds then looked up to see his son before him. He pulled his body as high as it could go and in that slurred speech summoned what was left of him, saying weakly, “All these years … you been mine … and I … let you go. Don’t … do … the same.”

  He fell back into his chair as Fletcher turned to him innocently. Fletcher looked directly into the old man’s eyes and for a moment returned to that young boy Mr. Kern had seen in the kitchen crying over spilled eggs. Fletcher breathed deeply, appearing to take in these words with every breath he took. His body raised and lowered, inflated then fell flat again, repeating this motion several times. Then he dispelled those words just as quickly as he’d accepted them. He released a heavy sigh, turning away from the old man as he stood from the table. Yet he did not walk away, his feet armed to move though his body remained stock-still. He focused his eyes and slowly turned back to Mr. Kern.

  “I belong to no one,” Fletcher replied. “Not you. Or Mama. Or any man.”

  Mr. Kern watched him feebly, his eyes a fading streetlight when morning finally came, his mouth a tragic ring box of unrequited love. He forced the words out as best he could.

  “I don’t … lay … claim … to any-thing … or any-one … any-more … but I do … try … to do what’s right … and love you … ’cause you were my own.”

  These words emerged as slowly as if he’d taken two breaths between each one he delivered. He closed his eyes and winced in pain.

  “You … do … the same … son.”

  Fletcher stood before him like a boy having returned home from war as a man. Fletcher did not reply, merely returning to that parlor without another glance in Mr. Kern’s direction. He remained there throughout the night and into the early morning hours with only a bottle of scotch beside him, which he sipped every so often, yet never enough to become intoxicated. Silva had suspected it from the child’s birth, the lighter skin, the dark wavy hair, those eyes that only Fletcher and Mr. Kern possessed and Elizabeth before she passed.

  Fletcher stayed awake for days, a ghostly presence around the house that did not eat or drink or speak a word. Yet still he knew wisdom, that hungry child who had eaten what little the kitchen held, who’d prepared dinner upon decrepit stoves for his mother and brother, whom work kept, who’d wrapped the lukewarm half of his meal in aluminum foil and left it there for whenever they returned, who’d stayed awake until he’d heard that latch from the door turn and safely close. He was the same boy now as he was then, robbed by everyone around him, defined by what others told him he would be, left empty and ashamed and unknowing of himself like an infant, his identity no more known to him now than it was when he was first aware of himself, a pale color shaded by all that was around. He lay awake for days with these thoughts until that summer came to a definitive end with that last warm day that touched the water and settled between the rows of cotton, before the lasting light became gravely shorter and we lost the sun for weeks.

  In those last days of summer, I walked Mr. Kern nearly every day out amongst the cotton, where the bloom still sat high. The sun was a pestering friend but we took it in stride as we continued on through the jacarandas and their purple court, the bull bays and that white procession of tumbling leaves out amongst the fescues and rye. And all that was beautiful and all that was seen did not matter anymore, for in an instant he had passed, right there in his chair, out amongst the rows of cotton. We buried him that summer by the large oak tree at the end of the road, where his father also lay, clearing the green pecan shells just enough to place a stone and photo, one of the few pictures where the old man actually agreed to wear a shirt and tie, had actually smiled, although it wasn’t a large one and had to be captured fairly quickly before it disappeared. No family came and no one said much other than Floyd, who sighed a deep sigh then wiped his brow of the sweat that collected.

  I took leave of the plantation following Mr. Kern’s death, returning so far south only when there was a wedding or funeral that required my attendance, but at no other time did I come to that house or venture toward Mississippi. Just as I’d lost Henry, I released Greenwood too, and I was content. Henry’s hand seemed to lead me to the door and onto that bus that grumbled toward its final stop in Virginia. For the first time, I knew how he felt to leave, and it felt of heaven.

  David indeed grew up in his father’s image, although Fletcher would never see the boy grow. Fletcher having said it best when he insisted there was a special bond between father and son that should never be broken, yet some things were too ingrained to change and some too minute to save, and so he gave them all away for he left the plantation that autumn as well, leaving some three weeks after my own exodus, when the house lay asleep and there was no one around to see his departure other than the cows that stood witness to the few bags he carried from the side door at that modicum of dawn, Floyd finally waking that morning to find him gone and never seeing him again—nor did the rest of us.

  And so it came to pass that after Fletcher had rejected the land, Mr. Kern had left the plantation to Floyd that he might never work for another man in his lifetime, and Floyd then to his son Arnold, who in his short life had borne no children that did survive, that with his last breaths he then left the land to Jesse, and Jesse to his son David, and David to all his generations that followed, and they were a blessed people who went on to accomplish great things, passing down that locket of the Kern family that Fletcher so cunningly passed to David one day in secret out amongst the wide bloom of the cotton just before Fletcher disappeared from that plantation forever. And so it was that the house remained with the Kern family for generations to come and would be that way for as long as I knew it to exist.

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank my agent, Annie Bomke, who saw something special in my work and took a chance on me. You worked tirelessly on my behalf, and I’m forever indebted to you. I also want to thank Blackstone Publishing and their amazing team, including my editor, Peggy Hageman. I am truly the luckiest author ever. After God, I have to thank my ever-supportive mother and brother who believed a book would come even when there were no signs that it would. A big thank-you to my friends Jen Brown, Julian Fray (JT), Laura Schuyler, Michael Hibler, Edgar Martinez, Dalia Guillen, Jamie Biggs, Francisco Tellez, Tonatiuh Juarez, Kai Love, and many more. I am a writer because of you all, although there’s one person I owe it all to: May-lee Chai. You are my bigges
t supporter and the person who taught me to write, query, and never give up. God placed you in my path, and I’m glad for it. I’m forever inspired by you. Finally, thank you to the Amherst College Library staff for pushing me toward writing many years ago. You gave me a coat during the Massachusetts winter, food when I was starving, and an open ear during my toughest times. You listened to all of my ideas and made me promise to never stop my pursuit. Judith, Tracy, and Janet, I am humbled by your friendship.