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

don't know - teach college, take a job in publishing… write the great American novel." The silence that ensued suggested none of the choices represented viable options. "Okay then," he continued, shifting gears, "tell me something about yourself."

”I'm not much of a talker."

"We've just spent the evening together, and I feel like I don't know you much better than before I pulled up in front of your house."

She was sitting like a mannequin, her hands folded in her lap. "I read an interesting short story the other night. I'll tell you that instead."

"I don't want creative fiction," he fumed. "I want to learn about your family, friends, hobbies, interests away from the stables..." Now he was really getting upset. "Do you have any vices? Maybe you're a compulsive germ freak or bulimic who goes on eating binges then sticks a finger down your throat to vomit." He shouldn't have said that, but they were only a few blocks away from the Truman residence. "That's what I want to hear."

"No," she replied evenly, not the least bit ruffled by his burgeoning hysteria, "we will do it my way." Sitting there in the car with the motor running in the driveway, Lilly told a silly story about an elderly Russian couple, who hired a local official to write a letter to their married daughter, who had moved to a distant province the previous year. The educated bureaucrat included nothing that the illiterate peasants told him to put in the letter that ultimately degenerated into a jumble of unintelligible drivel. But in the end, the daughter was so overjoyed to receive news of her parents that her heart comprehended every heartfelt sentiment and bit of newsworthy gossip intentionally omitted.

Lilly sat with her hands folded in her lap, the heater purring a soothing accompaniment to her passionate monologue. "You see, in Chekhov's tale the local official had written utter foolishness, but the daughter only took in what her heart could grasp and, in the end she was overcome with feelings of gratitude and devotion for parents too poor and sickly to make the trip." The story having wound to an end, Lilly breathed out heavily and her hazel-flecked eyes went dead.

The pale cloth curtain covering the bow window fluttered several times as Mrs. Truman surreptitiously glanced out. Only the mother's eyes were visible. Once finished, Lilly let herself out of the car and remarked, "I had a swell time, Parker." Hurrying up the slushy walkway, she disappeared into the house.

"Good riddance!" he muttered as he threw the shift in reverse.


New Years came and went. Thelma Kowalski asked, "Where's that kind-hearted Lilly? I so enjoyed our little chat at the Christmas party."

"What exactly did the two of you talk about?"

Thelma tapped the side of her cheek with a stubby index finger. "Funny thing is, I don't remember. She's a great listener, though."

"Yeah, that seems to be her strong point," Parker noted sourly.

Once rid of her, Parker had no intention of ever laying eyes on the dirty blond with the freckle-dappled skin. But a week passed, then another. They finished up the Cloverleaf Stable job and moved on to a condo project, part of the mayor's inner-city, gentrification program. At the time, Parker was too embittered to give the Russian tale much thought, but he wasn't so cocksure anymore. Rick and Thelma were separated. They suffered a horrendous blowout the second week in January and the husband moved into a studio apartment. "I can't live with that loudmouth bitch!" he confided. "She sucks all the oxygen out of the air."

Five weeks passed. Parker returned to the Cloverleaf Stables. "How have you been, Lilly?"

"Good. And you?"

"Just fine."

"How is it that you can spend the better part of half an hour telling me an elaborate, make believe story about Russians who live a hundred years ago but can't string two sentences back-to-back about current events?"

Lilly shrugged. "I don't know."

"Do you ever feel an urge to unburden yourself… to spill your guts?"

She stared at him wistfully before running her tongue over her lips "Hardly ever."

"Well, that's an honest answer." The barn smelled sweetly of fresh hay. The horses were fed and settled in for the night. "That's a pretty horse," Parker gestured in the direction of a dappled animal with a cream-colored hind quarter.

"It's an Appaloosa. They were originally bred by the Nez Perce Indians near the Palouse River. The breed has four, distinct patterns: the spotted blanket, leopard, snowflakes and frost."
"I gather this one would be named Snowflake."

"You’re a quick study."Lilly grinned. "They make excellent trail horses."

Okay so Lilly could talk expansively about two topics: Russian literature and horses. A weird anomaly! Parker pointed at a lone horse off by itself in a separate paddock. "Why is that one separated from the others?"

"Parasites… bloodworms." They crossed the crushed stone path to get a better look. "The gelding was losing weight, its coat turning dull and rough. He was also rubbing his tale with hair loss. Arnold didn't want to call the vet,… claimed it was an unnecessary expense, but when I explained that a single parasite could lay two hundred thousand eggs a day and infest the whole stable, the jerk reluctantly placed the call."

As they were heading back through the field toward the parking lot, Lilly pulled up, knelt down and began tugging at a patch of star thistle. "This stuff is poisonous,...brings on colic. Any horse foraging might accidentally eat the weed along with clean feed and get sick." Parker also began tugging at the noxious plants. Ten minutes later all the weeds had been ripped up and hauled away.

They were back in the parking lot. The sun was fading, bleaching the landscape into various shades of gray and murky greens. Lilly was following a hawk circling the pines on the far side of the highway. "How do horses breathe?"

"How do horses breathe?" he repeated the question word-for-word in a deadpan voice. "I don't know... like humans I suppose."

"Horses can't breathe through their mouth," Lilly clarified. "That's why God gave them such huge nostrils. Also, their pricked ears can rotate a full hundred and eighty degrees, allowing the animals to listen to sounds all around them."

Parker's features relaxed in a tepid smile. "And why exactly are you telling me this?"

The hawk resurfaced, hovering lower now over a grassy meadow rimmed with maples and pine that bordered the Cloverleaf Stables. Maybe it had spotted a field mouse or plump rabbit. At any rate, the predator was minding its own business, fulfilling its intrinsic destiny. "I don't know. You don't like it when I'm quiet. I'm trying to be sociable the only way I know how."

Parker was engulfed by a wave of self-loathing. "There's no need to change things. I prefer you just fine the way you are, and wouldn't have it any other way." He stepped closer and grabbed her forearm. "Would you like to go out again?"

"Yes."

"How's this Friday. We could grab something to eat and catch a movie afterwards."
"What time can I expect you?"

"Around seven."


On the fourth date Parker brought her by his apartment and they made love. In her phlegmatic way, Lilly took as good as she gave. "I read a wonderful story by Frank O'Connor, the Irish author."

"Really." He was lying naked on his back calculating how many pounds of anodized nails he had to buy over the weekend for a roofing job on Monday.

"This middle-aged man discovers that, years earlier, his wife gave birth to a child by another man …"

Yes, there it was again! Lilly was slipping into that throaty storyteller's mode. The gabled roof under construction runs sixty by forty feet so, figuring five pounds of nails per square foot…

"Are you listening?" Lilly tapped him gently on the shoulder.

"Yes, of course."

"But you were snoring."

"No, I'm awake now."

"Anyway," Lilly had shifted on her side, a forearm draped across his chest. "The husband decides to travel back to County Cork, to find his wife's missing child and…"


On Wednesday when the crew broke for lunch after installing the fascia trim on the new construction, Rick, asked, "How come you never say shit about Lilly?"

"What exactly did you want to hear?"

"I don't know… does she make you happy?"

"Yeah, she's good," Parker offered guardedly.

"Sometimes she acts like a deaf mute."

"Yes, that's true."

Rick gave him a tortured look. "Thelma's a freakin' talkaholic. She never shuts up. That's why I left… cause of her god-awful motor mouth. She don't never hardly give it a rest. Twenty-four-seven….blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like Chinese water torture." He inched closer. "I told Thelma she gotta put a rag in it or I'm gonna file papers… put an end to this farce-of-a-marriage once and for all."

Parker took a swig of ice tea and bit into a roast beef sandwich. He didn't hold out much hope that Rick's wife would 'put a sock in it' or much of anything else. Their marriage was doomed. But then, more people than Parker cared to admit confabulated, spewing their noxious, verbal diarrhea in a dozen different directions. They bullshitted you half to death - offered you up a potpourri of half-truths, verisimilitude and misinformation - wasting time and grey matter.

"In the bedroom my wife's a goddamn prude." the carpenter was thinking out loud. "Thelma don't like to experiment - take liberties, if you know what I mean." Parker nodded and took another bite from the sandwich. "Nothing kinky… won't watch skin flicks. No nothing."

"That's too bad." Parker rose to his feet rather abruptly even though a slightly overripe banana was nestled under a paper towel in his lunch box. "Gotta get back."

"One more question." Rick sounded like a frantic tourist, who had fallen overboard on a cruise ship and was watching the vessel laze off into the sunset. "Do you love Lilly?"

Parker grunted something unintelligible and shook his head up and down.

"Can you picture yourself living apart?"

"No, not hardly."He grabbed his steel-shank Estwing framing hammer off the ground.

Rick flashed him a tortured look. "Lucky you!"


A year passed. Parker Salisbury slid a felt ring box from his pants pocket, held the silver cube chest high, but didn't bother to show his future mother-in-law the modest stone. "I'm asking Lilly to marry me."

Edith Truman didn’t rush forward to embrace him; neither did the fair-skinned woman with the curly brown hair streaked with gray suggest it would be an honor welcoming him into the family. Rather, she cleared her throat and observed, "Lilly isn't like other girls. You'll have to accept your new wife on her own peculiar terms… just as her father and I have over the past twenty-six years." Mr. Truman had passed away a year earlier.

“I’ve dated my share of women since high school," Parker replied, "and Lilly doesn't resemble anyone in the universe."

Most parents might have taken such a crude remark as a rebuff - a back-handed compliment if not flagrant affront - but Mrs. Truman stared at him with genuine sympathy. Only now did her normally stoic features ease into a pleased expression. "And when were you planning to ask her?"

"Tonight, at dinner." They had been dating a year now. Parker was