The Parasol Prince

“Can hardly see anythin’ in this piss pourin’ rain...” the driver would grumble, the words coming out in a chewed jeer from the side of his mouth.

“Road’s flooded...Bridges’re flooded...Everything’s damn near flooded.”

From the back seat of the road car, Florence would keep her amber eyes on the passing terrain outside, the jostling of the tires bumping over stones and dips doing little to muffle the crude comments Mr. Barham had about the torrential rain peppering them as they drove. She’d made the choice when she’d called on him to drive her not to begrudge him on his temperament; He’d always been a curmudgeonly man, boisterous and abrasive, but he at least could be credited with trying to be considerate of her when they were together. Whether it be speaking in mumbled spats or abrupt groans and grunts, he never failed to remember that he was in the presence of a lady. And then, cramped together in that bumping, rattling road car, the tires barely staying on the rundown trail as Mr. Barham drove, it was all he could do not to hand out a flurry of colorful phrases that Florence was certain she hadn’t wanted to hear.

“Did I tell you you’re just the sweetest man for doin’ this, Mr. Barham?” she’d speak up from the back seat, her gaze finally shifting from the rain and gray outside and moving to the irritable driver in the front.

“Daddy did all the drivin’, and mama and I about drove him to distraction tryin’ to make him give us lessons. But you know how he was, he’d rather eat a railroad spike than put someone up drivin’ his car. No, if you hadn’t answered when I called I just don’t know what I would’ve done.”

Reaching out her pale, buffered hand and placing it on Mr. Barham’s shoulder, Florence would give him a warm smile and a faint squeeze, watching with amusement as his portly face grew a deep shade of red. At her touch, he’d shift a little in his seat, his plump body twisting just a bit as he moved to glance back at her, his brutish expression moments ago melting away with a half-smile. Though he was a prickly man by nature, his relationship with Florence and her family had gone as far back as the young woman could remember, having been in a partnership of sorts with her father, and it was no question that he’d cared for her as a result of that time working with her parents. Of course, she wasn’t naïve enough to believe that his readiness to help her had come strictly from familiar relations; There comes a time in every young woman’s life when she’s found to bloom, her petals and leaves rising and reaching, beckoning the eye of many a man regardless of if she wanted them to or not. Curtis Barham was a handful of years older than she, but Florence knew that he had looked on her once, if not for a moment.

“Shame I’ve never been much for marryin’,” she’d think, pulling her hand away from the driver’s shoulder and letting it rest in her lap, her fingers delicately curling around the roughened spine of the book nestled there as the drive went on.

As the rattling car turned a right onto a dirt path leading into town, the jostling and jerking would settle a bit, replaced with the scuttling and chatter of the square as Florence’s eyes found the shoddy leather covering protecting the book in her hands. In actuality, she could scarce call it a book, being more of a collection of loose papers and scribblings barely held together by bits of material folded over to serve as a cover, a single frayed string wrapped clumsily around it to keep everything in place. Since her father had died and she’d found the book in his study among his things, she’d poured over the pages in the book a time and a half, and once again found herself lost adrift in the wonderings it brought with it. Almost as if it called her, she was weak to resist perusing its haphazard innards, even then in the back seat of Mr. Barham’s car she found herself carefully unwinding the string that held it closed, a gnawing in the pit of her gut urging her to gingerly cradle the leather spine so as to keep anything from spilling out as the car moved. As far as she could recall, Florence had never lain eyes on a book such as this, the pages having no writing in the sense that those in her father’s study had but instead being nothing more than backgrounds to pressed and flattened flowers, mushrooms, leaves and other bits of grass and garden. Some parts of the book had been just simple sheets of paper lined up like pages, while others had been folded pockets of parchment, little makeshift envelopes filled with crumbled bits of mushroom caps, cattail fuzz, and other odds and ends one would find out in the greens of the old south. It was a compendium of life lost, but beautifully preserved and kept, little scribbled diagrams and bits of writing dictating what each plant was, every tiny bud to every rigged leaf named and graphed for her to observe. Even more curious than the fact that she had never known her father to have such an interest, each plant she turned to would have some sort of little tag applied to it, loosely and carefully tied with a bit of twine or even just stuck next to them in their respective places, with what appeared to be names written on them in what she knew without a doubt to be her father’s writing. Fuzzygut, Sticker from the Graves, Overnice...

Of the few things she and her father had shared, their love of books and stories, their passion for his studies and her wonder, had never held room for secrets or shadows. So what reason could their have been for her to have been kept in the dark about such a harmless trifle as this?

“Miss Bird,” Mr. Barham would speak up, his voice a little raised as if he’d had to say it twice. With it, Florence would blink away her idle musings, finding that the car had stopped.

“You sure you ain’t want me to see you inside? I know you got your business to tend to but-”

Before he could finish, Florence’s lips would curl into a reassuring smile, her hands deftly but carefully working to bind the old book back up before he had time to ask her about all the garden pieces she’d had sprawled out in his car.

“Oh no, and put you out more than you already been?” She’d ask, shaking her head and moving to open her door to step out.

“I’ll only be a minute, just need to see a man about this book my daddy left me. You will do me a kindness and wait for me, if it’s not too much trouble?”

As she clumsily climbed out of the obnoxiously bulky little road car, feeling her dress snagging a bit and her heeled shoes slipping in the grimy mud beneath her, she could make out Mr. Barham nodding and saying something to her in answer, most likely telling her that he wouldn’t mind to wait for her to come out so that he could take her home. Shamefully, she couldn’t much stand around to wait to actually hear his response, the weight of the discordant journal in her arm much too heavy in her heart and her belly for her to observe her inherited manners. The hem of her dress stained in the mud, her hair quickly made a whisper of brown coated in a nest of heavy droplets and her mother’s hat barely held on by nothing more than a hat pin, she painted the image of lunacy and unruliness no doubt, but it didn’t matter in the slightest to her-She had a man to meet, questions to sell and answers to buy, and a rainy day was hardly going to stop her.

With the engine of Mr. Barham’s car dying behind her, the kindly man watching her back in concern, Florence would take a shallow breath and swallow, having no misunderstanding as to why he’d offered to escort her inside; Standing on the curb, unfazed by the downpour pelting her with the discouragement of the cold and wet rain, her eyes would take in the bustling, shoddy little bar tucked away in the corner of the town’s main street, the wood of the doors bearing faded and scratched paint in places, the panes in one of the windows smashed out no doubt in a bar fight. The sign nailed above the entryway read FLANNERY’S in patchy, scuffed writing, and a single, rusted and beaten weathervane creaked from the roof above, the metal piece fashioned in the shape of a compass cross pointing in each of the four directions, although none of the arrows were pointing truly in the right way by this point. From the inside, she could hear the sawing of a fiddle cutting the air like a jagged knife, the instrument’s tune carrying a song accompanying the yelling and cheering inside, the clacking of glasses and stomping of chair legs the unorganized percussion. It was a dreadful, time condemned hovel that stood as a landmark to the town’s corner of the Old South, and ordinarily Florence would never have dreamt setting foot inside. But in that moment, with the answers she was looking for so close, it was perfect.

“Cover your eyes daddy,” she’d warn under her breath, stepping onto the porch of the bar and pushing through the doors, knowing full well that if her father could see her he’d have a fit.

Once she was inside, the sourness of spilled drinks and unwashed bodies used to being out in the fields far too long would hit her like bricks, her little, wiry frame already being jostled and bumped around the minute she stepped over the threshold and into the crowded bar. Most of the crowd seemed to be convened around the bar itself, the one barkeep a dolled up young girl who couldn’t have been any older than 18 scrambling to take away bottles and refill glasses, the shoulders of her dress falling loose around her shoulders from the all the commotion. There were a handful of men scattered in loose groups throughout the bar as well-Farmhands, ditch diggers, even a man Florence recognized as the lawman who oversaw some of the business dealings her daddy and Mr. Barham handled. It was a blend of refined and rejected, buttoned up and undone, but it was none to keep her distracted from her interest in being there. Pressing forward and ungraciously stepping into and around the pods of men and bar girls across the floor, her eyes would flirt around the room generously, taking in every face until she thought she had seen him, the journal kept tucked beneath her arm against her side as she moved. It wasn’t until she narrowly avoided being stepped on by a drunk that she finally fell her gaze upon him, her stomach turning over disruptively once she’d finally found what she’d been looking for.

He sat folded into a secluded booth on the far side of the populated bar floor, his arms held tight around his chest and his knees closed together beneath the table, refusing to look out onto the room around him it would seem as he kept his eyes on the area within his seat. A burlap hat that had seen better times sat crooked on his tousled head, little tufts of gray, straw-like hair curled up around the misshapen brim, and he wore a pair of overalls riddled with holes and frayed patches, the pants tucked into an unlaced pair of worn boots crusted with mud. As she grew closer, making her way to his table through the crowd, she could make out a spray of sunspots and marks along his arms and face, years under the sun evident on his body like stories told with few words. When she was finally standing over him somewhat, her hands held together and picking at her fingers in apprehension, she wondered at how her father could have ever known him, what sort of bond they had that would bring him to reach out to her after all these years, once her father had died; She’d seen many farmers and fieldworkers deal with her parents and come in and out of her family home, but he was not one that she could recall, having never actually seen him. And when she’d received a letter from him after her father’s funeral, claiming he was an old friend and that he wanted to request something from her...She had recently discovered the journal among her father’s things. To say the timing was unsettling, would have been a misstatement.

“Ye didn’t bring anyone with ye?” he’d ask abruptly, bringing her out of her mired wonderings. As she brought herself back to the meeting, she tried to ignore the fact that daydreaming was starting to become an unfortunate habit of hers.

“A man drove me here,” she’d answer, awkwardly smoothing down the fine material of her dress as she slid into the seat across from the bedraggled man. As she did so, the man would grow a little restless, almost rising from his seat as he looked around as if to tack the spot her guest stood.

“He’s a family friend. I got him waitin’ out in his car, so if you’ve a mind I’d appreciate it if we didn’t keep him waitin’ too long.”

Tilting his head a bit to the side as Florence spoke, it would seem as though the man had accepted what she’d said, his shoulders relaxing a little as he settled back into his seat. Once he was calmed down, she couldn’t help but notice that he’d had rather pretty green eyes; Eyes like moss, but much too unbelieving, tainted with skepticism.

“I don’t reckon two people talkin’ in the middle of a rum shack is calls for so much secrecy if you don’t mind me saying, Mr. Seether.”

Keeping his green, unwavering eyes on her as she spoke, calling him on the seemingly unnecessary seclusion and aversion to meeting with company, Mr. Seether’s lips would purse and his eyes would squint a tad, as if he were rolling Florence’s words along his own tongue, tasting what she’d said before he proceeded. He was a careful man, a cautious man, that much was to be seen.

“What you reckon don’t much matter to me, girl,” he’d retort, his voice coming out in a gravel. Putting up a wall of sorts to Florence’s attitude towards him, he would keep his arms close to him and lean into to the table somewhat, almost like he’d been trying to fold in on himself right before her eyes.

“I like my privacy, have for nigh on fifteen years. ’Specially now, gonna have to crawl under a rock before I get them eyes off me.”

Their voices buried somewhat beneath the cacophonous fiddle sawing and the bar crowd around them, Florence couldn’t help but lean into the table a bit as well at Mr. Seether’s abrasiveness, latching onto his words with an irritable questioning that bubbled on her painted lips, a rising bile coming from her gut that she was obliged to push down, resisting the urge to chastise him for speaking to her that way if she actually wanted this meeting to be productive. It wasn’t as if she had asked him there; He had written to her, had hired a delivery to her estate requesting her, calling on her to meet with him in this seedy, unkempt place. What had he meant when he said he needed to get someone’s eyes off of him? If he didn’t want to speak with her in public, why bring her here in the first place?

“Mr. Seether,” she would begin, carefully choosing her words before she continued. Much like Mr. Barham, Florence could be a bit easily ruffled as well, much to the disdain of her parents.

“Now you asked me to bring you this book, right as I turned it up in my daddy’s things. I ain’t never known you from Adam, but here I am receiving a letter from you weeks after my daddy’s put in the ground. I would think between the two of us, I would be the one lookin’ for a bit of security.”

For a breath or two, Florence wasn’t completely sure he’d heard what she’d said, or at the very least hadn’t actually listened. His eyes were on her for the most part as she spoke, but it was evident that his attention was elsewhere, scattered to the corners of the bar as if he were waiting on something to jump out at him, an assassin hiding under the cover of drunken farmhands creeping in the crowd. Waiting for a response, she would watch as he finally honed back in on her, letting out a defeated sigh before callously pushing his burlap hat from his head, folding it in his hands on the table as he wrung it in anxious worrying.

“Look,” he’d begin, turning his eyes away from her once more before meeting her own, a solemn weight settling into the lines of his face.

“Your pa and I...We was like kin folk, for a long time. Got into business with each other, even thought about buyin’ some land out in Savannah, go in together on some ranchin’. He was...Your daddy was a good man. Best man ever was far as I could see, and when I found out he’d died I-”

“Wait, wait,” she would interrupt, her mind reeling as she straightened her back a bit, bringing her hands up and making like to stop the man in his tracks. Kin folk? Buying land together? Until she’d gotten his letter, she’d never so much as heard this man’s name.

“My daddy never spoke a word about you, or doin’ any business out in Savannah. Daddy worked in bookkeeping, financing, that sorta thing. I doubt that man even knew what a horse plow was, let alone had a mind to go into ranchin’.”

With each moment that Florence protested, the disbelief and shock in her voice impossible to hide as she became more animated in her questioning, Mr. Seether would become more and more agitated, his deep green eyes rolling and a bothersome groan rumbling from his throat as he spoke up.

“Girl you could fill up a horse trough with what you didn’t know about your daddy,” he’d spit back, his unkempt brows raising a bit as Florence listened.

“You think you knew all’s was to know about that man? I helped Joseph write his wedding vows to your ma, I stood in when the preacher man swore them wed. I got a life of memories with your daddy, but...But that ain’t why I asked ye here. I asked ye here because I want that book ye brought. His her...Herba...Ah shit, herb something.”

“Herbarium,” she would interject, her words barely rising above a whisper as the word came back to her; When she’d first found the book in her father’s study, she hadn’t known what to actually call it, seeing as how it wasn’t really a journal, and it wasn’t really a book, but rather pinches and plucks of garden pieces flattened and pressed together. With the name leaving her lips, she would absentmindedly bring the book up to the table, her hands cradling it carefully as she let it rest on the surface before her.

“I...I never even saw him with it. Mama and I always worked the garden, daddy was always cramped up in that study or off going over some papers with someone in town. Why do you want this?”

It would be a moment before Mr. Seether would actually answer her, and as she finally looked back up to him she would find why; Whereas a few moments ago the grungy man couldn’t keep his attention to one place for longer than a second, drowning in a splash of paranoia and distrust, his eyes were now glued to the book set between the two of them, as if he were trailing his gaze along every etching in the leather binding, ready for the book to jump at him from the table at any moment. He watched it with a mixture of disgust and uncertainty, like he wanted to reach out and touch it, but wasn’t sure if he actually could, not trusting his body to smack it away from him the moment he did so. Her eyes shifting back and forth between the he and the book a few times, Florence would wait as the man took a dry, heavy gulp before he spoke, his voice shaky and ragged as he did so.

“Because I’m gonna burn every piece of paper in that damned thing until there’s nothin’ left.”

At first, for a moment, Florence hadn’t actually processed what he’d said, his reaction towards the harmless book of plants confusing and unsettling all the same. If it was just a collection of plants her father had kept, a private hobby he hadn’t shared with his family, what could be so sinister or untoward about it that he’d want to see it destroyed, and with such impassionate distaste? It was strange, it was enigmatic, and would bedevil her most certainly, but...It was just a book, wasn’t it?

“Mr. Seether,” she’d exclaim, retracting the book towards her as he reached out for it finally, his sun marred hands like clutches clawing out at her.

“I won’t pretend to know what in hell my daddy was doin’ with a book like this, but it’s still one of his personal things. It’s part of all I got left of him, his little bits and tags, the funny little-”

“Names,” he would interrupt.

“Names?”

With a grim nod, his eyes widening like a wild man taken to shine, his dirty nails digging into the wood of the table as he rose up some from his seat, Mr. Seether would spit the word out again, as if it were a filthy swear too uncouth for civil ears.

“Names! Names, names names!” He’d yell out, his fist coming down hard on the table a couple of times with a clatter, the already beaten furniture threatening to splinter from the brunt of his slamming.

“He fuckin’ named ‘em! Fuzzygut, Blisterwort, Swimmer in the River, damned lunatic named em, now they got eyes on me, had eyes on him! I can’t work my fields, can’t let the horses out without the eyes bein’ on me! So I’m gonna see it burned to Hell!”

The more ferocious and addled that Mr. Seether got, the wild man beginning to hurl curses and filth all around, the more unsettled Florence had become, choosing to stand her ground and wait to plunder what she could from his ramblings and ravings but quickly beginning to waver in her choice to do so. As the enraged farmer jumped up from his chair and brought his hands up harshly to the underside of the table, she would quickly rise up from her own seat and step aside in time to avoid being practically flipped with the table, the hobbled piece of furniture clamoring into the next seat behind them as he grew more belligerent, eventually moving in closer to her. She could feel her skin crawling as he latched onto her arms, his nails biting into the fabric of her dress sleeves and her body rocking as he shook her about, her face twisting into a grimace as he began to spit a bit with his yelling. Clutching the book to her chest as best as she could, she would thrash somewhat against him to try and free herself, only a few other patrons around them catching onto what was happening, her rising panic bubbling up into her chest as she fought against him. Fuzzygut, Blisterwort...All names that she had seen in the book, all names she’d found reading her father’s herbarium, she knew that he’d seen it, that there was something founding behind what he was telling her. Choosing not to dwell on that at the moment, her mind reeling as she fought against the raging man latched onto her, Florence would cry out as he pushed her back and sent her sprawling to the floor, her mother’s hat and her book scattering about around her as she tumbled down.

“Gimme that goddamn book,” Mr. Seether would froth, quickly diving to the ground near her as she scrambled to get her bearings, his sun spoilt hand clutching at the leather of the book and tearing some of the pages out as he snatched it toward him.

“No!”

Before he could retract away from her completely, her light brown hair hanging in disarray around her face and her right dress sleeve torn from her violent tossing around, Florence would clamber forward on her hands and knees and smack her hand down on the shaped fabric of her mothers hat discarded on the dirty floor, wincing a bit at the sharp prick of her hatpin jabbing into her hand from the frantic motion. Ignoring the pain and the trickle of bleeding she could feel beading down the side of her hand, she would clumsily pinch the sharp hatpin in her fingers and stab down into the back of Mr. Seether’s weathered hand, the unseemly farmer letting loose a shriek unbefitting of a man his size as he ripped his hand away from the book, crawling back away from her for a little out of reflex as he clutched the bleeding appendage. Frantically recollecting herself, Florence would ungracefully crash and stumble to her feet somewhat amidst the disastrous scene, her hands whipping out and scraping around her along the ground to desperately try and gather up as many of the scattered pages and envelopes as she could before Mr. Seether regained his composure and attacked again. Her lungs burning a little from the panic, her ears pounding from the excitement, she would turn her eye in time to see him lunge back at her on his knees, snatching and clawing for her dress clumsily to rip her back to the floor, only to miss as she stumbled back.

“I gotta get them eyes off me!” He would roar out, crawling and climbing up to his feet to try and grab at her again as she made for the door in a messy bolt, butting and hurling into big, burly bodies around her, Mr. Seether’s swears and cries of rage chasing after her just as hard as he was.

Once Florence had finally made it across the threshold, her heeled shoe catching on the bit of wood separating the porch from the inside and her right arm butting into the frame of the doorway in the commotion, she would tumble to her knees and throw her hands out to catch herself, the grated wood of the planks scraping and splintering her palms and forearms a little as she hit the floor once more, the book slipping from her grasp and scattering in a pile before her again. Whimpering a little from the stinging, throbbing pain, she would try and catch her breath and turn back towards the unsightly bar, certain that Mr. Seether would launch out of the door and come down on her in another attack. When he didn’t however, the sound of crashing and shattering glass inside giving her reason to believe he’d caused a mess inside with the other patrons in his chase for her and the book, she would cough up a bit and crawl forward a little, her chest heaving as she tried to fill her lungs again. In all of the chaos and riotous fleeing, she hadn’t realized that Mr. Barham had gotten out of his parked car and stomped over to her, fretting and furrowing over her tattered and torn frame perched in the mud outside the bar. She could make out his red, sweating face as he tried to help her up, gripping her arm a little roughly despite trying to assist, and could tell he was a little out of sorts about it as she shook her head and coughed out a “No,” reaching forth and plucking the scattered pages and bits of the book out of the mud and dirt. For the most part, it seemed like she’d gathered up a big portion of it, if not all of it, but there was one specific page she was searching for, her heart slamming against her chest as she dug and scraped around, refusing to even be lifted up from the floor until she found it.

And when she did, she could breathe again.

“Oh, thank you Jesus,” she would breathe out, her breath slowly coming back to her as she picked the page up, giving it a look over as Mr. Barham finally had had enough, and heaved her up off the dirty ground, fussing over her to try and make sure she wasn’t too badly hurt.

She hadn’t known how to say it to her family’s friend at the time, amidst all of the hellish trifling about, but...She would have slept in that wet mud if that’s what it had taken for her to recover that page, had it actually been lost. Florence had known there was something amiss around all of this when she’d made the call for Mr. Barham to drive her that day, when she’d received the letter, when she’d found her father’s book, but in truth, there was one piece in all the uncertainty and enigma that she clung to in all this; The page in her hands. She’d looked it over until her eyes hurt, fought with it, stressed in her heart and her mind over what it meant, but came to no conclusion every time. Running her fingertips along the blank page, her eyes falling on the single paper tag stuck to the paper, the single word scribbled on the bit of paper that eluded her so, she would remind herself that this was the beginning. That this was no stop, only a turn.

“Don’t worry,” she would say softly, her fingers glancing over the name scrawled on the tag on the empty page.

“I’ll find you, Toddle.”