Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 117
The Meadow
“How’s Pa seem today?”
Felecia had to step out of the house and away from Phillip and the reminder of old milky eyes full of fear and desperation. She made an excuse about gathering firewood even though the stack by the hearth was four logs high.
The front porch of the hovel stood at is always had, built from leftover boards from old boats and other reclaimed village hovels, uneven and bowing near toward the middle to the doorway of the hovel. There was still a notch in the nearest rail board where Taryn had planted Phillip’s wartime rifle down in defense of them all. Felecia found herself running her hand over the notch and letting her mind wander until Taryn walked over and asked his inane question.
“The old man was with me for a while, like he knew who I am now. Then I lost him.”
Taryn leaned against a post and Felecia listened to it creak under his weight. Out came the now familiar pouch of loose tobacco and a rolling paper. Taryn had become deft with rolling stout, brown, butcher paper cigarillos since Felecia returned to the village in her own way. Most of the men in the village smoked those cigarillos and they all smelled the worse for it.
Felecia waited while Taryn rolled the smoke and got it started using a match from a box he always kept in his vest. She watched while he took his first drag and blew the yellow smoke away from them into the wind hitting from the east before he spoke.
“Least you got his attention. Pa’s spent all week calling me by my brother’s name.”
Felecia considered the situation and her place just beyond the reach of the village and the big house before she started to respond. “That’s because…”
Felecia caught herself in midsentence and shrugged, holding out her hand to take the cigarillo from between Taryn’s fingers. She didn’t like the taste or the sensation of inhaling smoke, and she certainly didn’t love the smell the smoke left on her fingers or her clothes but there was no arguing the buzz the tobacco gave to the senses.
Felecia used the moment and was careful to hand the cigarillo back to Taryn before she rephrased her response. “Even if he’s just revisiting yesterdays, it’s better than being angry or bitter about the present.”
Taryn took a drag and spit into the yard. “Yeah, wouldn’t want to remind of Pa of who he’s stuck with.”
“You mean the son he needed you to be, the one he still needs?”
Taryn smiled and looked coyly at Felecia before he shook his head dismissively and took another drag.
“That’s nice…but it’s horseshit. Pa’s never really needed me. Even now, I’m not allowed to help him to the outhouse, so he shits his pants. I can’t help him to bed, so he sleeps on that old chair. I can’t help him eat, because he throws anything I cook into the fire, so he starves.”
Felecia motioned out to the grounds beyond the house, the carefully placed fences, the herb and vegetable gardens, the places for nonexistent chickens to lay imaginary eggs, the pen for goats that no longer live there, even the field left for wild flowers and other clippings Felecia brought from the meadow over the years. “Do you need me to tell you how you’re the only reason he’s still alive despite all that? I mean, I will if you need me to but it seems awfully infantile, doesn’t it?”
Taryn nearly pushed the cigarillo into Felecia’s hand before he scraped his boots along the first step of the porch and picked at the gap between his molars. “I don’t need you to babysit us. I don’t need your presents of meat or eggs or vegetables. What I need is for you to move in already. Quit living in that ramshackle out in those haunted woods. This place needs a woman’s touch.”
Felecia didn’t want to hear yet another version of the same speech, not again. Taryn had said his piece the last two times they met for any length of time and each time it wasn’t the intensity or the merit of the proposal that left Felecia wanting…it was the nature of the situation she found herself in, still, the conditions of her life, such as it was.
What would they all think?
What would who think? What would the villagers think? Moreover, who should ever care what any of them thought, individually or collectively. No. It shouldn’t be up to them or anyone else. It…the reason she said no the first time and meant it was because of the monster waiting out in the waves.
Someone, somewhere would consider the whole thing odd no matter where Taryn and Felecia decided to land, it wasn’t the neighbors expectations or the jaundiced looks from the servants still lucky enough to live fat working in the remains of the big house that kept Felecia from staying.
Felecia shook her head and looked away from Taryn as she smoked. She knew that silence was the one thing he wouldn’t tolerate so she spoke as much as she could, as much as she dared to. “I can’t and you know it. Not until…”