by Barry Rachin
The Reticent Storyteller
by
Barry Rachin
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Published by:
The Reticent Storyteller
Copyright © 2012 by Barry Rachin
This short story represents a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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The Reticent Storyteller
Parker Salisbury met Lilly tending horses at the Cloverleaf Stables. The riding academy ran equestrian programs for beginners through advanced and boarded a handful of 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.
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, pee-soaked hay. A young girl he had never seen before was mucking stalls. The girl, who paid him absolutely no attention, quickly shoveled the mix of dung, fodder and woodchips into a wheelbarrow. Disposing of the soiled bedding, she swept and washed the floor with a stable disinfectant.
"What happened?"
"No idea," she mumbled without making eye contact.
With all those freckles, the pale-skinned dirty blond reminded him of an adolescent character out of Tom Sawyer. "I'm Parker." The lanky girl did not readily volunteer any additional information. "I didn't catch your name."
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. "Lilly,... Lilly Truman."
The adjacent horse stall proved even dirtier. Worse yet, the water bucket lay upended. Before addressing the animal waste, 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 fresh carrots, dividing them equally between both horses.
Arnold, the boss's son, stuck his head in the barn. "Simon quit. No notice. That's why the barn is such a shithouse."
"You didn't think to pitch in and help straighten things out?" When there was no reply, she added, "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'll hold back on grain until they finish eating their hay so the animals don't bulk up on the high-protein feed."
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?" Parker asked.
"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?"
"There’s no foul odor," Lilly confirmed. She cleaned all four hoofs with the curved metal pick, finding no cracks, rings, dishes or flares. The horse was moving about normally now. "Probably just a pebble."
Initially, Parker thought the fair-haired girl with the wan features morbidly shy, but by the third visit to the stable revisited his initial impression. To be sure, Lilly was aloof, disconnected from humanity, but there was nothing overtly pathological about her detachment. 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 Parker was standing 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 garbage. 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 construction firm’s annual 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. "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 attended college."
"Which one?"
"Brandeis."
"How many years?"
"Six."
"So you've got a master's degree." Lilly nodded distractedly but didn't bother to elaborate. "What was your major?"
"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 Parker 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! Two of you would make one of me and just barely." Thelma laughed raucously at her own joke. For her part, Lilly seemed modestly pleased. She smiled, responding in monosyllables. But then, nobody, not even Rick, could hold their own once the chatty spouse 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…"
A half hour later,
as the cocktail hour wound down, 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. "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 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 tines 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. "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, since 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?"
"Lilly’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. On the ride home, as they reached the outskirts of Brandenburg, Parker observed, "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 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 hardly know you."
Lilly was sitting like a mannequin, her hands folded in her lap. "I read a short story the other night. I'll tell you that instead."
"I don't want creative fiction," Parker 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 gambler, 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 tale about an elderly Russian couple, who hired a local official to write a letter to their married daughter several years after she moved to a distant province. The educated bureaucrat included nothing that the illiterate peasants told him to put in the letter. 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.
The story having wound to an end, Lilly breathed out heavily and her hazel-flecked eyes were suffused with an inner radiance. "You see, in Chekhov's tale the local official had written utter foolishness, a jumble of unintelligible drivel, but the daughter only took in what her heart could grasp and, in the end was overcome with feelings of gratitude for parents too poor and sickly to make the trip."
The pale cloth curtain covering the bow window fluttered several times as Mrs. Truman surreptitiously glanced out. 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, throwing 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 separated. Following a horrendous blowout the second week in January, 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 you been, Lilly?"
"Good. And you?"
"Just fine."
"How is it that you can spend the better part of an hour telling me an elaborate, make believe story about Russians who lived 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 private 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 headed back through the field toward the parking lot, Lilly knelt down and began tugging at a patch of star thistle. "This stuff’s poisonous... brings on colic. Horses foraging might accidenta
lly 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?" Parker 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." Parker was lying naked on his back calculating how many pounds of anodized nails to buy over the weekend for a roofing job on Monday.
"A middle-aged man discovers that, years earlier, his wife gave birth to a child by another man …"
