The Reticent Storyteller, Barry Rachin [black authors fiction .txt] 📗

Parker Salisbury met Lilly where she worked mucking stalls and caring for the horses over at the Cloverleaf Stables. The riding academy ran equestrian programs for beginners through advanced and boarded a handful of privately-owned horses for local families. Parker and his construction crew were renovating a barn adjacent to the stable. One day in early December he wandered over to the paddocks to look in on the animals before heading home for the night. A young girl he had never seen before was mucking stalls.

The privately boarded horses were generally cleaned up and set right for the night early on, but when Parker entered the barn he could smell the stench of horseshit and rotting, pea-soaked hay. Most stalls were cleaned three times daily and yet this one clearly hadn't been tidied at all. The girl, who paid him absolutely no attention, quickly mucked out the stall. Disposing of the soiled bedding, she swept and washed the floor with a stable disinfectant. Once the surface was dry, she returned the clean bedding to its proper place, adding fresh material to make up for the straw she had removed.

"What happened?"

"No idea," she mumbled without making eye contact.

With all those freckles, the pale-skinned dirty blond reminded him of some adolescent character out of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. "I'm Parker." The lanky girl did not readily volunteer any additional information. "I didn't catch your name."

"Lilly." She nuzzled a brown quarter horse. With her short back and heavily muscled body, the beast was noticeably smaller in stature than the others, standing only sixteen hands high.

The adjacent horse stall proved even dirtier. Worse yet, the water bucket was upended. Before addressing the filthy bedding, Lilly hauled a compact, rubber tire from a neighboring, empty stall and threw it on the floor. Filling the dry bucket with fresh, cool water, she wedged it firmly in the center of the tire. Burying its muzzle in the metal pail, the spotted mare didn't raise her head for a good thirty seconds. Still ignoring the carpenter, Lilly scrounged up some fresh carrots and divided them equally between both horses. While the beasts were still munching their vegetables Arnold, the boss's son, stuck his head in the barn. "Simon quit. No notice. That's why the place is such a shithouse."

"And you didn't think to pitch in and help straighten things out?" When there was no reply, she added, "It is one thing to neglect your own horses, but the private-pay boarders will take their business elsewhere if they think we're understaffed."

"You think I don't know that?" Arnold shot back.

"Got anyone in mind for a replacement?"

"I'm working on it."

Squatting down on her haunches, Lilly began scraping a sticky tangle of yellow bot fly eggs off the mare's lower legs with a folding pocket knife. "I'm holding back on grain until they finish eating their hay so the animals don't bulk up on the high-protein feed."

Arnold grunted something unintelligible. Parker doubted he had even been listening. The boss' son wasn't working on anything productive. He never did. Even among the carpenters, he pranced around like Little Lord Fauntleroy giving orders in a supercilious, autocratic tone.

Arnold glanced at his watch, a purely theatrical gesture, before hurrying off. After he was gone, Lilly checked a Shetland pony that seemed to be favoring his left hind leg. "What's wrong with the horse?"

"Can't say just yet." She picked up the hoof and felt for defects but there were none, then she did the same with the coronary band. There were no dark spots indicating bruising or puncture wounds. She pressed down lightly on each frog with a hoof pick. The tissue was slightly spongy. Then she placed her freckled nose up close to the hoof.

"Is it infected?"

"Probably not. There's no foul odor," Lilly confirmed. She cleaned all four hoofs with the curved metal pick and found no cracks, rings, dishes or flares. The horse was moving about normally now. "Probably just a pebble."

"Yeah probably."


At first Parker thought the fair-haired girl with the wan features was morbidly shy, but after the third visit to the stable the following week he revisited his initial impression. To be sure, Lilly was aloof, disconnected from humanity, but there was nothing overtly pathological about her detachment. She was efficient and professional; she doted on the horses, loving them to distraction. "Would you like to go out some time?" Parker's heart was racing out of control as he blurted the words in a jumbled heap.

"A date?" She glanced at him with a stony expression. "Yeah sure. Why not?"

Parker's eyes brushed over the bony, angular physique. "Give me your telephone number. I'll call later in the week."

She jotted her number on a slip of paper then did something outlandish; even though he was standing there no more than three feet away, she turned her attention elsewhere, effectively blotting him out of existence. Her queer response creeped him out so bad that, reaching home, Parker flung the slip of paper with her phone number in the trash. But in the morning he lugged the plastic rubbish bag outside, dumping the smelly refuse on the lawn. It took him the better part of half an hour to find the raggedy slip of paper stained with coffee grounds.


On their first date, Parker brought Lilly to the company Christmas party at the Marriott Hotel. Pulling up in front of the moss green ranch house, the front door opened, and the young girl came down the brick stairs. Mrs. Truman was peering out the bow window with a muddled, wide-eyed expression as though she were watching her daughter heading off on a first date. "Pretty jacket," Parker noted.

The girl who mucked stalls for a living wore a camel-colored, wool blend coat with slight pleats under an empire waist. "It's very warm." Lilly glanced at him with a flat affect, rested her hands palms down on her lap and stared straight ahead.

When they reached the third intersection, Parker said, "Did you get the job at the stables after high school?"

"No, I went to college first."

"Which one?"

"Brandeis."

"How many years did you attend?"

"Six."

"So you've got a master's degree." Lilly nodded distractedly but didn't bother to elaborate. "What did you study?"

"Victorian literature."

This tight-lipped girl attended one of the most expensive, Ivy League colleges on the east coast but worked an entry-level job for chump change! Parker felt slightly nauseous. He pictured the slip of paper blackened with coffee grounds and wondered if he might have been better off abandoning the crumpled, sheet where he had tossed it several days earlier.


At the function hall, Lilly stripped off her stylish coat to reveal a black strapless dress with a sweetheart neckline and tiered satin band at the waist. She wore no jewelry. Her hair, though neatly brushed, hung limply about the bare shoulders. With her alabaster complexion and dusting of freckles the effect was stunning.

"Now who's this gorgeous creature?" Thelma Kowalski cornered them in the hotel vestibule. A frumpy blond whose amorphous body was forever expanding in myriad directions, Thelma was married to Rick, a journeyman carpenter. Parker genuinely liked the woman despite a fatal flaw: like a busted spigot, her garrulous mouth ran from morning until night. He introduced the ladies. "God, you're such a skinny Minnie! It would take two of you to make one of me and just barely." Thelma laughed raucously at her own joke. For her part, Lilly seemed modestly pleased. She smiled, only responding in monosyllables. But then, nobody, not even Rick, could hold his own once the chatty wife had a couple of drinks to lubricate the perpetual motion machine that was her tongue. Lilly, who didn't care for liquor, was nursing a Shirley Temple, sipping the bubbly liquid with the cherry, as though it had to last until New Years.

"Lilly, works over at Cloverleaf Stables," Parker noted, "caring for the horses."

"Aw shit! I just love horses beyond all human comprehension," Thelma gushed. "When I was fourteen, my family vacationed at a dude ranch in Tucson, Arizona, and we spent every day from sunup to dusk riding through…"

A half hour later, the cocktail hour was winding down and guests began moving through the buffet line. "Having a good time?"

Lilly spooned a helping of Swedish meatballs onto her plate. "Yes, why shouldn't I?"

Parker reached for a dinner roll. "I don't know. You seem a bit quiet, that's all."
Lifting a chrome cover off a tray, she placed a dollop of butternut squash laced with brown sugar and cinnamon alongside the spicy meat. "It's just my nature. Some people like Rick's wife are more outgoing. I'm reserved, that's all."

Lilly Truman, Parker mused, was one step removed from catatonic - a zombie out of Night of the Living Dead - and the best she could do was lame excuses. They ate in silence, the other people at their table picking up the slack with light conversation. Nobody seemed to care that the wisp of a woman in the strapless evening gown next to Parker contributed nothing - not a feeble word - and showed no interest making friends. "How's your meal?"

"Good. How's yours?" she replied.

A staggering four words, counting the contraction as two!

"Fine, although I think the chef was a bit heavy-handed with the black pepper in the meatball gravy. You haven't touched your salad."

Lilly cut her scalloped potatoes into manageable chunks and speared a portion on the tangs of her fork. "I'm saving it for last."

Six words under the previous rule.

"Did you notice the desert selection?" A separate table decked out with cheesecakes, éclairs, brownies, cherry Danish and assorted chocolates had been set up next to the coffee urn.

She paused, but only momentarily before negotiating the seasoned potatoes between her thin lips. Parker noticed that she wore no makeup - no lipstick, eye shadow or blush. "Everything looks scrumptious!"

A loss of three!

After the meal, Thelma Kowalski took Lilly aside and began bending her ear. The woman was sloshed - sloppy drunk - confiding some teary-eyed story that neither her husband nor Parker were privy to. The men were camped out at the bar.

"Pretty girl," Rick sipped at a Heineken. "She don't talk much, though."

"She doesn't talk at all," Parker replied morosely. It was a relief to have the mute creature temporarily off his hands. Normally Parker might have indulged in a few more drinks, but he wanted to deliver Miss Truman to the family homestead without incident.

"You ain't gonna see her no more?"

"She's not my type," Parker confirmed. "Not a bad girl, just…" Truth be told, he hadn't a clue what she was and didn't much care.


Around eleven, the Christmas party wound down without a glitch. On the ride home, as they reached the outskirts of Brandenberg, Parker said, "You got a master's degree from one of the finest colleges in the country and shovel shit for a living… that makes sense?"

"It's a matter of perspective," Lilly replied obtusely. She didn't seem to find his intrusiveness objectionable, which only riled Parker all the more.

"Why not put your education to practical use?"

"Such as?"

"I