Home > Pale(8)

Pale(8)
Author: Edward A. Farmer

   “Thank you, Silva,” he praised as if the meal was prepared in a more extravagant manner than it was every other night. “This sure is good,” he commented. “Got any more of them rolls?”

   Miss Lula dropped her glass to the table, sighing a strained breath as she watched him fiercely. Her stare was capable of chopping off his head if he met her eyes even once. Silva returned with more sweet tea and lemonade, which Mr. Kern accepted, swearing it was the tastiest drink he’d ever had, insisting it must have taken hours to prepare, and proclaiming how lucky they were to have a servant like Silva in the house. They couldn’t pay her enough, he insisted. Silva, however, showed no extra care toward his benevolence, merely bowing courteously before gathering their empty plates and returning with slices of pound cake for dessert, which Miss Lula only nibbled at, turning up her nose and frowning distastefully. As Silva left the room with their glasses, one empty and the other not, Mr. Kern cleared his throat, an act that gathered the attention of everyone seemingly in a mile’s radius and indeed Silva as well who returned to the dining room to see what was the matter.

   “I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Mr. Kern said to Silva, “I think we’ll have your older boy stay on and help out throughout the winter if he wants.”

   “Thank you, sir!” Silva replied graciously.

   “He’s a good worker,” Mr. Kern said. “And Floyd likes him.”

   Surprisingly, this bit of news saw not one sad expression as I looked around to find smiles on everyone’s faces including that of Miss Lula, who was never one to smile simply because of a happy ending.

   “I know Fletcher was hoping to come by after school and maybe help out as well,” Silva soon added.

   Yet before Mr. Kern could reply, Miss Lula had already quit that bit of joy and protested quite fervently, saying, “It’s already too much noise around the house as it is! Now, two servants is enough. This place ain’t no schoolyard, everybody’s children and brothers and sisters coming whenever they please!”

   Mr. Kern acquiesced. “Lula’s right. Should be enough work for the one but maybe not the other. But if he wants to stop by sometime, he can.”

   Mr. Kern watched the smile return to Silva’s face. They both watched each other, their eyes indulgent and irrevocably joined. I looked to Miss Lula’s eyes, which were quite different.

   “No, George,” she said. “You make your exceptions all you want, but this is not one.”

   The young woman had never appeared so grown up in my presence, staring without blinking, folding her arms across her chest while waiting for any sound to slip past his lips that she might pounce on it.

   “What do you know of my exceptions?” he said meanly. “I’m not a man of even one.”

   She steadied her eyes. Her body was stiff, and her voice lowered to a snarl.

   “I can sure think of one,” she said. “And what I remember, it’s the only thing you love.”

   The room fell quieter than any disagreement or typical reversal of mood, the Mister’s fork tapping his plate in the same vibration as his trembling body, which made for the only movement in the space around us. Seated there, he appeared to inflate like a growing balloon made taut with venomous air, possessing a mass that could crush any person, place, or thing if it got in his way. Silva left the dining room without a further peep in the Missus’s direction, gathering her hat and purse and meeting the boys at the fields instead of the kitchen door as usual, leaving the tension inside the house to persist like a surging wave that built in size as it traveled.

   “What’s the darn meanin’ a this?” Floyd argued when she arrived, knowing he had at least another hour with the boys before their work was done.

   “Boys!” she shouted, taking Fletcher by the hand and leaving Jesse to apologize to Floyd.

   Floyd’s explanation of these events was simple as we sat in the backhouse with a cup of coffee between us and the remnants of our meal scattered about the table.

   “A house of cards,” he began, “they bound ta fall down eventually. Ya see, the Missus was promised ta Mista Kern. Although she loved him, problem was he didn’t love her. Married her at seventeen when she was still a child. Both her an’ Silva pregnant at the same time. Gave birth almost together, Silva wit’ Fletcher an’ Missus with Elizabeth. Practically raised the boy in the house till the girl fell ill, ’bout age three. Then Missus never wanna see Fletcha agin. Can’t stand the sight a him. Buried Elizabeth up at the church. Missus was never the same agin.”

   Floyd’s words lingered in the space as he and I sat a while longer with the smell of coffee and sweet rolls thick upon our breaths, his mind lost mostly in memories of the house when the Missus and her daughter filled that place with laughter and a curtain never sat unparted in a single room.

 

 

CHAPTER 7


   For days no one did speak or listen to a single thought outside of their own. Each moment fell into another, and for weeks I could not answer surely what time or day of the week it truly was. Jesse had remained on at the house as planned, working with Floyd in the fields, while Fletcher did not show his face nor have any mention of his name after that heated dinner. I thought of him often, any joy I felt clouded by his troubled face, which would come to me like a bad dream and persist despite my attempts to wake up. Silva went about her duties with no extra spark of kindness, retracting from me even that slight warmth she’d started to show. Indeed, she served me pancakes with cold syrup. She gave me butter for toast that was not softened enough to spread. She made me lunches that were not concluded with a slice of her warm 7 Up cake.

   Still, some things did continue as usual. Most days following that evening and its dinner, the Missus took her needlework and a slice of pie out to the front porch as she sat for hours in view of those languished trees and fallowed fields that surrounded their home this time of year. For the Southern winter was indeed a cruel monster, we all knew, not necessarily colder than most but just as punishing with its lack of color—the once-green grass now a pale yellow, the leaf-covered trees that made tolerable the torrential rain now stripped of all life, the iced-over ground a pathetic reminder of the sleet that never turned to snow. It was heart wrenching, the loss we felt, the voids that reached so deep into those dark places that existed when nighttime came, and we were alone with our thoughts and our God. Still, the world continued in all directions, and the Missus sat in full view of it all despite its insipidness, her thoughts known only to herself, although her eyes did hint at their meaning.

   It was during these times that the plantation could seem so lonely, when we were left to our inhabited minds, until a passing car or truck on the road reminded us we were not so isolated and that others did exist, even if we knew not a single one on a level deeper than the absence left by their passing. Nonetheless, during this time of sadness, the Missus showed signs of life. As the months dragged on, she’d glance up every so often to see Floyd or Jesse pass with a load of mulch or new planks for the fence, and she’d smile and wave. She’d bite her bottom lip, tucking it under the top, and exhale loudly, blissfully. For weeks it remained this way until the cold finally came and the Missus fell terribly ill under the weight of her own insolence.

Hot Books
» House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1)
» A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire
» From Blood and Ash (Blood And Ash #1)
» A Million Kisses in Your Lifetime
» Deviant King (Royal Elite #1)
» Den of Vipers
» House of Sky and Breath (Crescent City #2)
» Sweet Temptation
» The Sweetest Oblivion (Made #1)
» Chasing Cassandra (The Ravenels #6)
» Wreck & Ruin
» Steel Princess (Royal Elite #2)
» Twisted Hate (Twisted #3)
» The Play (Briar U Book 3)
» The War of Two Queens (Blood and Ash #4)