Marcas was no fool. He was well and truly capable of surprising feats which came together to shape the well-rounded image of a formidable and unassuming man. There aren’t many who could in earnest claim to have achieved what he had when coming from the poverty of his youth, back when he had owned no more than the clothes that he wore. Nor could they claim to have achieved all that he had after what much he had lost, the thing that struck him with all the brutality of a heavy hammer that had all the power to break and destroy a man – but not Marcas.
Marcas learned from the versatility and inability of his youth, and he single-handedly gripped the clutching folds of his grief and turned them outward toward his bidding; they would not contain him and he would channel that red-hot passion into crafting a forward-going passage. Or so he thought. Little did Marcas know that granting his grief long-term accommodation, even if toward the means of production, gave it the opportunity for its roots to grow so deep that it would in time become a most stubborn tenant. This is how he lived, Florris reckoned, and that is how he would die.
“A contribution of our coin could easily see it done, Florris. It would do little harm to the amounts that we’ve amassed, which have done little else but contribute to the bank.”
But Florris shook his head and avoided the man’s eyes. He absently terrorised the village of peas on his plate and prodded a select few victims onto the ends of his fork. “That’s unnecessary,” he said to the man across the table. “The house is only half of the goal, the other is the commitment. We have to earn it.”
Marcas’ brow furrowed as a look of confusion struck him while he held his eyes on his son, even if the eye contact was rarely ever reciprocated. “Would you not say that you’ve already earned it? You’ve been a part of this business for years and you’ve never held much concern for coin, at least never for more than you’ve needed. Most men your age would and should take advantage of what’s been given to them.”
Florris grunted and chewed into the abducted peas. His gaze never matched his father’s and his jaw rolled slowly as he chewed, deliberately making enough time to think of his response. “Toward the ends of excess?” He said after he swallowed. “I’m sorry but I fail to see the reason. What good would coin do me if I already had everything I needed?”
“For a moment such as this one, Florris,” answered Marcas. “So that it would be readily available when required. You have been at odds against your growth and now that you’re thirty, you finally see the value of things you should have seen ten years ago. Very few people in Bree have gotten the same opportunities that you have, but you seem to have a habit of making light of them or discarding them altogether,” Marcas tried but he couldn’t completely obscure the bitter taste in his words. Wine seemed to have a stronger effect on him in his age.
“You don’t understand.”
Anyone who knew Florris well enough (and there are very few of those) knew that he almost certainly would rather be doing anything else than keeping company with people, his father least of all. It wasn’t a matter of spite or unattended grudges so much as it was a matter of the awkward, uncomfortable state of their relationship throughout those years, which only grew worse as the winters turned. The reason behind Florris’ compliance to attend supper with him was one that often put him into similar states of discomfort and that was his weakness toward sympathy. He had learnt that a bit of discomfort and weakness could at times become a blessing once the worst of it had passed.
Ruevir, for all the times she had criticised his sympathy or blatantly confronted him on his weaknesses, was almost none the wiser that those supposedly diminishing qualities were the ones that had brought him to her in the first place. The irony of her lies or half-truths that were meant to play on his sympathy were never the ones that kept him at her side for as long as he did because they were thought to be insignificant in comparison to the whole mess of a woman where the needle probed deep to find the worst of her (many) weaknesses.
“You don’t want me to understand, Florris. You know how little time I have to spend at home and when I am home you so rarely come to see me.”
“That’s your own doing,” answered Florris as he impaled the final bunch of peas. The motion of his fork was slow, methodical and as precise as an artist’s brush. His voice, though soft and tame, carried a sharp sting against his characteristic monotone that now moved with certainty. He decided that he wasn’t about to be scolded and his gaze met his father’s now. Sometimes even parents needed reminding that their offspring weren’t children any more. “You don’t need to be taking to the road anymore and yet you do it anyway.”
Marcas quickly shook his head. “I’m good at it and I do it well, I do it because this is the best I can do for the business. The best you can do for the business is here, in Bree.”
Florris shrugged his left shoulder in a display of palpable doubt and he shook his head with similar disappointment. His gaze descended to his plate where straight cuts of lamb meat were untouched and getting cold. He took his knife and cut smaller portions out of them.
Marcas was dangerously unimpressed by the lack of response and stared at Florris over careless bites of his gravy-wet mash. “If there’s a point you want to make,” he said after a bite, “or something you want to say to me, then you should just say it. I’m getting too old for this, Florris.”
There was plenty that Florris could say and plenty that he didn’t want to say. He had already been harsh once and knew that there was much more he could say on the matter, which he chose not to. He wasn’t sure if his father was prepared or capable of taking the brunt of what was in his mind and so a merciful, sympathetic part of his person worked to subdue those words. “You don’t understand.”
Ruevir had no right nor any power over him, still, she thought his sympathies to be stupid and still he wouldn’t be moved by her opinion. She was a different brand of person, born into a different lifestyle and Florris accepted that her opinions were different. Yet, he set them aside to recognise that others also deserved the same from him as she did; except for Flutists. Once such an instance was with Mister John Catesby, who had once attempted to assault him and then actually succeeded another time in Ruevir’s absence. Though he would be cautious of the man from that day onward he had still believed that Mister John Catesby was a good person at heart; when Myrelle had not been attached to him.
He ultimately saw Myrelle as accountable for deliberately motivating the unpleasantness and because of that it was easy to forgive Mister John Catesby and see the better of him, but that is where Ruevir’s insults of his stupidity had finally won. For a long time, despite her harmful actions portrayed on a countenance of innocence, Florris held greater sympathies for Myrelle than he did for both Ruevir and Mister John Catesby. She was a pitiable creature, who unlike Ruevir portrayed herself to be just such a thing and she was Ruevir’s friend from what he had seen and heard. He found it strange how Ruevir would snap back and complain when he would encourage her to spend more time with Myrelle or to be kinder to her friend. It seemed uncharacteristic of one friend to seemingly evade another when they had lived together for a time. Florris was persistent and probably annoying in his encouragement at the time, but he was also very unfair.
Of course, Florris didn’t know Myrelle as well as Ruevir did and it was ever so easy to vilify Ruevir when she stood beside Myrelle, and he made it clear to her that he did so. She was surprisingly mature in the admission of her brutality toward Myrelle, but a certain part of her seemed to detest that such cruelty had happened once her base satisfaction had passed. Still, against Ruevir’s agitation, Myrelle appeared to Florris the way he believed now that Myrelle wanted to appear and his narrow perspective didn’t widen until he had finally heard the two of them together. Florris feared that he was responsible for the loss of any other friends that Ruevir might have had - especially Myrelle - and so when Myrelle and Ruevir had the chance to speak after a long separation he stood back to listen. It was wrong to eavesdrop the way he did, but it had been worthwhile to come by the understanding that he was wrong in allowing his sympathy to encourage Ruevir the way that he did. For a woman who usually celebrated all of her victories, be they large or small, she took this admission from Florris with a bittersweet humility.
“You won’t let me understand, boy! I’m trying, don’t you see that I try – what more can a man do for his son? I can’t ever help you or know you, let alone understand you if you never allow me the chance to do so.”
Florris could hear Ruevir’s nagging and complaining despite her absence. ‘That’s weak and iffin’ stupid!’ She would say if she could see him. Ruevir knew him better than anyone, even Marcas, and she had received the harshest ends of his words, though they beat at her with nothing short of fondness when she needed to know that he understood even the worst parts of her.
“Calm down,” Florris said, his voice remaining in its monotone even as he felt his pulse quickening in his chest. The nagging voice, now urgent in its egging demanded that he retaliate in kind. Florris retained composure and let a small sigh fall from his lips. “She’s gone, Father and you’ve accomplished everything that you set out to do in her name. You hardly knew me as a boy and now not knowing me as a man comes as a surprise to you? That’s hardly fair. These are the consequences of your own doing, though I understand them and don’t judge them I fail to see how the expectation of closing this rift between you and I lays on my shoulders.”
Marcas readied a retort but Florris didn’t give him the chance. “The truth, Father, is that our paths were set to diverge from the moment you left me with Ma and Pa for months on end, for years. Still, this distance between us surprises you when you put it there. It surprised you when I had no appetite for adventure after I was always left behind. Again it surprised you when I put fire to this arrangement you asked me to undertake in the name of your business-”
“Now you wait right there-”
“- in favour of something that will inevitably take me away from it.”
“It was all for you, Florris,” said Marcas, restraining his voice when it wanted to roar and his eyes were already getting wet, his face becoming a few shades darker in his anger, something that Marcas was rare to express. Florris felt a sting of something like regret in his chest, not out of fear, but out of sympathy. He didn’t wish to see Marcas this way. “That’s why I left and had to leave, that’s why I spent the whole of my life putting this company together.”
“I disagree. It wasn’t for me. It wasn’t about me. I know that you kept me in mind, but I was never the reason for it. You were thinking about mother, always. She must have been an extraordinary woman if this was everything you could accomplish for her, but it was all in her name. Not in mine.” The words hardly felt deliberate at that point. He had started something and let it out of its bag, and it simply refused to settle. For the longest time, Florris and Marcas had a tacit agreement to speak as little of her as they could and Florris brazenly crossed that line
Down came the rain. Marcas cast his fork down onto his plate with a small splash of mash and gravy. His anger had been dismantled and his head bowed in the shame of his grief. Florris felt that feeling tighten in his chest and lost himself staring at the unpleasant wreckage of a man whose worst pains had just been exhumed and wielded against him. It felt wrong, not his simply taking the falsified version of his father’s story only to retaliate with a truthful edition, but to use it for the sake of winning an unpleasant argument.
It was never in his nature to seek victory for victory’s sake and a part of him immediately resented himself for taking it so far. His conscience scrambled to blame Ruevir’s influence but he had only himself to blame. It felt like an irrevocable offense had been dealt to his sympathetic character and he already found himself wishing that he could take it all back. Then the few, albeit pleasant memories of the little time he had spent with his father came flooding back. Florris remembered sitting on the banks of Brandywine with his feet ankle-deep in the flow of the river while his father taught him the nuances of catching his food. It was a beautiful day tucked between the setting of Spring and the rising of Summer, and Florris was fourteen years old with only the smallest spark of youthful aspiration to prove himself to his elders. How disappointed he was by midday after having not gotten a single bite, but Marcas pat him on the back and told him that it was alright.
Florris remembered failing in the erection of his first tent and the lighting of his first campfire, then he remembered how Marcas pat him on the back and told him that it was alright, that he would get it later. He did get it, of course, though it took a bit of patience for him to become accustomed to working with his hands but Marcas walked him through it with a seemingly endless supply of patience for his son; something that his son didn’t show him in that moment. He felt a sickness in his gut.
Then Florris remembered one of his worst days whose memory he held with utter revulsion. It was his and Alissa’s wedding night, and Marcas was over the moon with broad smiles and full of wine. Marcas seemed to glow so much that Florris forced himself to put on a happy smile and make everything look okay for his father’s sake. Alissa had also been over the moon with excitement. How could she not be? She and her new husband were being celebrated and she would embark on an exciting new chapter of her life, only to be disappointed when everyone had gone to bed and when Florris refused to go to hers. The full moon that night was among the most beautiful things that he had ever seen, though that bright silver plate in the sky appeared saddened somehow.
Alissa had just come down into the dining room to find the wet, sobbing figure that was Marcas. “What did you say to him?” She said to Florris, glaring sharp daggers into him. He deserved it. The fork and plate noise likely alerted her to the turn that the conversation had taken and her concern couldn’t be sated until she saw it for herself. He deserved every ounce of contempt that she had to show him and that sickness in his gut felt realer than ever now.
Florris didn’t feel ready to leave but stepped outside into the cold regardless of his feelings. It was a miracle that there had not been a single wisp of wind that night and the dogs across town were restless again. A distant howling repeated several times over and other barks echoed from across the streets in different, frustrated voices all coming together in one cacophonous chorus. He looked upward and the dark void of the thin sickle-moon and cloudy sky in all its bleak deprivation of light seemed to resemble the way he felt while the vague silhouette of a cat prowled the high rooftops in search of something to sink its claws into.
Florris had not been ready to leave when he stepped outside, but now he felt a deep yearning for Ruevir’s company. The problem was that she was more likely to give him a pat on the head and tell him he did ‘good’ rather than empathise with his guilt, at least that’s what he expected. She had grown a lot over the two years that they had been together and these days he found her capable of surprising him more with her mature mindset than her outrageous youthful mischief did when he had first met her. Just thinking about her balmed the sickness that he was feeling.
It was nobody but his influence. Callous as he was, the harsh words that he spoke had been brewing for a long time in the back of his mind, though he never fathomed giving voice to them; they were just those kinds of words. The trouble was that Marcas had a habit of speaking in circles whenever he and Florris had come together and that constant re-resurrection of dead topics had been spent to exhaustion. It was always ever about the business or what Florris was meant to do with his life and the grand reminders of what he was doing wrong; Marcas saw bright and grand futures for Florris, while Florris wanted very little. Even now, the objective of owning a house is more than that and Marcas had difficulty seeing beyond the value of the thing. He was right though, Florris wasn’t doing a good job of helping him understand because Florris didn’t think he deserved it and because he doubted that Marcas was capable of understanding.
The nightly din of the dogs continued through most of his way home, but he decided that he would be later than expected and took a detour. Thirty years had gone by since Elsie passed and though time has long since flung him and his father far beyond the proximity of that moment it had a way of always feeling too close for comfort. He hadn't had the chance to know her, but he knew that he had the same colour eyes. Nobody more than Elsie deserved the largest portion of his sympathy, for he was to blame for her loss. Marcas had worked tirelessly for thirty years, day by day and piece by piece to breathe life into his and Elsie’s shared aspiration, and he had succeeded. That was over ten years ago. Today Marcas persists because it’s the only method to his madness of endlessly honouring her memory after it had already been done.
He felt it for Elsie, for Marcas, for Alissa, for Ruevir, for John and even for Myrelle despite how he came to see her, but after all these years he struggled to feel it for himself. It’s not that he deserved it, at any rate.
