Mr. Pacifaker’s House
Sarcastic Talking Horse said: “What happened in there?”
“I remember lying on a black bed, in a vermilion room, staring up at the ceiling—a white ceiling, only it was shadowed, so that it really looked gray. Overcast gray. The way the sky looks on a 96 degrees Fahrenheit day, just before a storm, when the wind’s so fierce the clouds rush at you. They rush down at you from the sky, and they tear, and they show the black beneath them.”
“Above them.”
“Inside them.”
“I remember a brass ceiling fan with dark wooden blades. It spun so fast that the blades looked like they were going backwards.”
“I do that sometimes,” said Sarcastic Talking Horse.
“I remember being so hot that I couldn’t even move—so hot that I had to squint, to keep the sweat from pouring into my eyes. And I remember scissors.”
“Scissors?”
“Fingernail scissors. They hung from the ceiling, by fine gray threads. They swayed in the wind from the fan. There were so many of them. Not millions, but surely thousands. I was supposed to count them. Each of them. Each of those thousands of swaying scissors.”
“Did you do it?” asked Sarcastic Talking Horse.
“No.”
“Did you die?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Pacifaker was a fairy. He told her so himself, early on in their acquaintance. Garnet Manon Volentine, then eight years old, was surprised. She’s assumed all fairies were tiny ladies just like Tinkerbell. Mr. Pacifaker was regular grown-up size, and he was a man, and an old man at that. But she had been raised to be polite to all adult creatures, so she didn’t question him. Eventually, she accepted his statement as truth. After all, he didn’t behave like regular adults.
Garnet Manon used to visit Mr. Pacifaker when her mother didn’t know. She would say she was walking down to the library, but instead she’d duck into Mr. Pacifaker’s scrubby yard, where he’d be half-in, half-out of his primer-gray 1952 Ford pickup, talking to his horse, a ribsy chestnut gelding without a name. Mr. Pacifaker’s horse was tethered to the fender, because Mr. Pacifaker didn’t have a fence. He never rode his horse. He never drove his truck.
Mr. Pacifaker seemed constantly poised to climb into the cab, constantly remembering something he’d left in his peeled-paint house that he needed to bring with him. Always teetering on the brink of departure, was Mr. Pacifaker. Always in-between. Garnet Manon would climb into the passenger side of the cab and talk to him there.
“I’m gonna leave you that house when I die,” he’d tell her. “The First Pissbyterian Church wants it, or the lot, rather, so they can expand their fellowship hall. They say my house is full of rats, and my yard is full of manure, and they’re right. I’m gonna leave you the rats and the manure, as well. I’m gonna leave you the horse and the truck and everything I got, Garnet Manon, because you’ve been so nice to this old fairy everybody else hates. But you got to promised me to stay away from them boys.”
“I do stay away from them boys.” She’s rather have said, Them boys stay away from me. Even at eight years, she knew the pain of exclusion. During “boys chase girls” at recess, she found herself running in circles and shouting, unnoticed, unchased, and alone.
“Good. Keep staying away. They’re trouble, that’s all, and I don’t want no trouble in my house, even if I’m too dead to know about it.”
