PROMPT 1: The Hind, Revisited

[Agnes Ogden]

The Hind was only a slip of a pub--a pub because the people of the town willed it to be, poured their bodies and their small coin into it with the expectation that libations would, in turn, pour out for them.  At some point along the line, it had worked; space taken and money invested had transformed alchemically into liquor and so too had the house turned into not a house but The Hind and a slip of a pub it was, but that had been long before the girl’s time, certainly on this soil but on any other soil as well.

It was also where the girl--the real girl, the corporeal one, who had no capitals other than the a and the m and the o of Agnes Marie Ogden--worked, the soil where today her feet rooted, or at least for the next five minutes until the clock struck seven and her shift was over.

“Head’s up, Harold,” she said, sliding past him--a slip of the girl not unlike The Hind was a slip of a pub, especially in comparison to Harold who was as wide and as billowing as a steam engine.  In her hands, she held a clutch of cups (and none of them seemed to match, not identically, as if they were all distant cousins and married-in aunt instead of the sort of central family one expected from glasses at bars) ready for the wash, and with those hands she plunged them into the wash basin--the sort of instillation every pub, slip or not, seemed to have, full of warm water and suds and glasses piling up and waiting to be washed.

There was nothing at all--not the steady and practiced and patient movement of her hands over cut glass in the wash basin, not the clatter of Harold coming to life to pull an order out for Old Orel in the corner nor the steam-like sigh he exhaled for having to do it, not even the sleepy, stretching-out Hind itself with its comfortable grays and warm, stale air--that hinted that the next five minutes might be anything other than ordinary.

[Arlo Mason]

The Hind was only a slip of a pub--a pub only because it was the early afternoon and they were already serving, so the folk of the town showed up and he turned up along with them.  In reality, it was less the building that made the Hind a pub--though the brick and mortar certainly did, gloomy gray stone walls hung with gloomy grayscale paintings of a gloomy gray-streaked town--and more the people in it.  At present there were three--an old man, long gone; a rotund barkeeper with busy, useless hands; a man, angel-headed and bleary-eyed at the bar, alone.  It was hardly past lunch time, but the three men held the place up, giving a reason for the desperate, strangled sort of feeling that hung heavily around the place, pressing down as if to turn the three of them into diamonds or ash.

It was where Arlo Mason (at the bar, alone, as usual) sat--and where he had been sitting for several hours straight, which was long enough to learn the owner’s first name.

“Thank you, Harold,” he said to the barkeeper as slid a glass across the oak to him, expertly lifting it in a toast to the round, bored man and then draining it in one before returning to the book he wasn’t reading.  Somewhere to the side, he heard the ruddy-cheeked man return to his work, worrying the same glass he had been polishing for hours.  Over this work, Arlo tried to superimpose the hands of his mother--it has been her work, too, keeping bar.

But his mother’s hands had never been idle.  They were strong, not soft, but tender all the same, and there was nothing of their ease in the hands of Harold no matter how hard he tried to see it.  Her fingers had moved always with dedication, whatever task feel beneath them occupying her attention wholly and holy, be it braiding a pie crust when he had been twenty-three or plaiting his daughter’s blonde curls when she had been four.  It never would have been her task, polishing the same glass, but if she had, she could have turned cut glass to crystal.

Sophia’s hands had always held purpose.

Arlo’s hands shifted, adjusting the spine of the book he read to rest in one while the other raised a lone finger across the bar and towards a young waitress.

“I’ll take a whiskey, neat.”

[Agnes Ogden]

Agnes was washing her hands when she saw him, her hands wringing neatly together in the hot suds of the wash basin, sore slightly in the tips of their fingers from the scrubbing of the distant-relation glasses, now stacked together beneath the counter as neatly as she wrung her hands.  Her hands were thin little things but they were strong, as equally suited to books and letters as to soil and spirits, and it was a lucky thing, too, the way things were, and--well, she was washing her hands when she saw him, her hands that were thin as they were strong, and if it hadn’t been for Harold rolling through and her turning out of the way she would have missed him entirely.

So she had turned to the right, out of the way of Harold and his tray for Old Orel, and she saw it before she saw him--the title, just some words, stark and black on gentle cream canvas: The Sound and the Fury.  Like she might frighten the binding away, Agnes went very still, deer-like, her hands still too and still plunged into the wash basin’s warm suds.  Her gaze shifted slowly, skillfully up, brown eyes working over the arm that held it--wiry in musculature, salt peppered in with the pepper-colored hair that wove across it.  They skipped on, her eyes on his arm, to a blue sky button-front rolled to the sleeves, torn once and small at the elbow, on up to a shoulder that might have been broad in youth but was now somewhat hollow, a neck also woven with salt-and-pepper scruff, attached to a head with the usual mouth and nose and brown eyes that were, like her stillness, deer-like, all of it surrounded in brown curls.

Well.

She hadn’t heard the order because orders to her were background noise, especially in the presence of one such as William in a place such as, of all places, Bantry.  She moved again, also deer-like, which is to say in an unexpected and sudden burst: hands, dripping with now rapidly cooling suds, stopped wringing themselves in the wash basin and started to wring themselves once, twice, three times and fast on the bottom of her apron, and then legs lept also into motion, springing her forward until the middle of her rested against the bar just in front of and to the side of the book and the man to which it was attached.

“You know he got it from that Shakespeare play,” her mouth said before she meant for it to--an unusual occurrence, but she was overcome in the moment.  “The title, that is.”

[Arlo Mason]

Arlo was flipping a page when he saw her, his hand (no longer as calloused as it once was) drawing the corner of the page up so his fingers could slip beneath it, then the same hand passing over the center binding to turn it.  He hadn’t read a word of it for he had been imagining shades of his mother into the bar keep’s work, but it hardly mattered; he had been focused on the wrong one entirely but once he saw her he couldn’t have missed her if he tried.

So he had raised his finger across the bar, and had just turned the page with the same one, then presently came to rest left-tilted and with an elbow on the bar, easy.  It was her eyes that his caught first, and he watched as hers went still; he could almost read the title, watching her reading it.  Arlo knew from her eyes that she was a writer, for they were the sort of brown eyes that writers always seemed to be possessed of--as if some far-off and largely absent god made all writers’ eyes brown for their universality but also for their poetically defiant plainness.

Oh.

He didn’t hear her words--not entirely, for he didn’t need to.  Of course he knew it was from Hamlet; years ago now he had taught as much at Emerson when, one semester, he had been stuck with a section of Southern Literature instead of simply his favored Poetry.  He had been horrible at teaching it--either of them, suited only for the reading and writing of both at once; Southern (for he was) Poetry (for he was one of those as well).  In that way, he supposed, he was like his mother--his hands were, like hers, much better suited to the doing of things.

Deer-like, he raised his eyes to the girls--so many like hers he had seen, young and eager and full of the belief that words and the writing of them mattered still.  Hers, he could tell, was still a head full of promise, and her hands like his mothers were suited to the doing of things, and yet he could not find the kindness within himself.

“I was never much for the classics,” he lulled, lying, and the sound of it rolled like a river over rocks.

[Agnes Ogden]

Like a river rolling over rocks, his voice lulled.

Again, Agnes went stock-still like the motion of her might frighten him. In triplicate she blinked at him, holding the breath she had sucked in at the sound of him hard in her chest.  It strained and stung but she in her stillness persevered.

It had been a long time since she had heard the sound of home, and from it she put the sum of his parts together.  His voice held more rs in it, ending words they should where hers fell off, and the vowels of him, though round, were not so rounded as her own; that put him further up the coast, perhaps amid the snow-capped Smokeys or offshoots thereof.  There was something in the furrow of his eyebrow that painted him a creative, for only one who made art could have such a deeply defined worry line, and Agnes knew from his curls that he was a poet, for they were the sort of brown curls that poets always seemed to be possessed of--as if some far-off and largely absent god made all poets’ curls brown for their universality but also for their poetically defiant plainness.

And he was reading Faulkner, beside.

“Oh,” she said, and then, “well.”

Somewhere in the glowing center of herself, she recognized that this was an Experience.

Her hands poured out a whiskey, rockless unlike his voice, neat and tidy unlike the thoughts racing through her head.  The cut glass clanked as she placed it against the bar, her fingers not leaving it until they had slid it almost to bump against the cream canvas binding of his book.  There they let go, and there too they started to itch, to tingle, to seek out--and when they did this, as such, they were only ever in search of a pencil with which to write.  The ancient grandfather clock set in the corner--a relic of the time The Hind had been a house and not the slip of a pub it was--struck out seven bells and, with nothing more than a nod to the man who had stoked it within her, Agnes turned and left the book, its man, The Hind to write.

[Arlo Mason]

Arlo Mason drank his whiskey, neat, and when he too left The Hind, its glass, the girl behind to write, he left the book in its gentle cream canvas with Harold for the girl and her next shift on Sunday’s after church rush.

fin.