The following is Chapter Two of a five-part short story entitled, “Peace.” Chapter One ended with the arrival of a mysterious man with a very familiar name at Clarence Peace’s grocery store…

Flat Rock
January 1983

Clarence stared intently at the mysterious young man who had just broken into his store. Was he dangerous or just crazy? “Your name is Carl Sandburg? Are you related to old man Sandburg who used to live up the hill at Connemara?”

The stranger’s placid smile morphed into a sly grin. “Am I related?” He reached down to scratch Squirt’s head. Then looking back at Clarence, he answered, “I suppose I am.”

The stranger picked up a copy of the New York Times sitting on the store counter. “1983,” he said softly. He laid the paper back on the counter and smiled at Clarence. “I was wondering if I could get your opinion on something I’ve been trying to write for a while now.”

Still confused by the appearance of the intruder, Clarence did not respond. The man in the odd clothes picked up a box of macaroni and cheese and frowned. “How do they keep this from leaking out of the box?”

“Are you hungry?” Clarence blurted out. “I’ll give you something to eat, but you need to leave. I’m closed.”

The stranger reached into his coat pocket and brought out a pair of spectacles that he perched on the bridge of his nose. He peered down at the papers in his hand. “Listen to this if you don’t mind. And please tell me what you think.” Without waiting for a reply, he began to read.

“The fog comes
a summer snow.

Throws a blanket
of white over the city
then melts away
a memory ago.”

The man looked up from his papers and arched his eyebrows at Clarence with a questioning expression. “Well? What do you think?”

Clarence, still very confused, but now also a little annoyed, shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. Is that supposed to be poetry or something?”

The stranger smiled again and sighed. “Yes. It’s supposed to be.”

“Summer snow?” said Clarence. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Carl looked back down at his paper and scratched through something with his pencil. “You’re right. Doesn’t work at all. “

“Look here, mister,” Clarence’s tone was insistent. “I’m closed. If you don’t want to buy nothing, you need to leave. I’ll call Sheriff Staton if you cause any ruckus.”

The stranger’s calm expression never left his face. “Please pardon the intrusion. And thank you for your assistance.” He replaced the black bowler on his head and nodded politely at Clarence. “Good day to you, sir.”

With that, he turned and walked back out the front door, closing it gently behind himself. As he did, the strange golden light that had filled the store gradually faded and the room again fell into darkness with only the single shaft of light from the open door to Clarence’s apartment. Clarence quickly walked over to lock the door before the stranger could change his mind and return. He reached up to reset the locks … and his hand froze suspended in front of him.

The lock was already set, and the deadbolt was securely in place.

--

The next morning, Louise Bailey slipped into the store to pick up snacks for a meeting of the Ladies Aid Society that evening. As she was paying for her purchase, Clarence asked her, “Did Carl Sandburg have a son or a grandson named Carl, Jr?” Louise shook her head. “No, he had three daughters and only one grandson. Named John I seem to recall. Why do you ask?”

“No reason. Just got to thinkin’ about him last night.” Clarence finished bagging Louise’s purchase and handed her the bag over the counter. “He used to come in for a bottle of milk sometimes. Told me not to tell his wife on account she only let him drink goat’s milk.”

Louise smiled. “That would be Carl. He could be something of a rebel at times.”

“He was a poet, right?” asked Clarence.

“Indeed, he was,” replied Louise. “Even won the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry.”

As Clarence watched Louise walk out the door, he decided it all had just been a dream. A vivid one, but certainly no more than that.

Flat Rock
May 1983

Clarence had been having a lot of odd dreams besides the one about Carl Sandburg. In particular, he frequently dreamed about his late father and mother.

In one recurring dream, Clarence’s father would tell him to do a better job of cleaning the store and try to hand his son a broom. When Clarence reached for the broom, however, his hands were full of paintbrushes. His father would become agitated and yell at Clarence, “You’re a Peace. You’re a grocer. Not an artist!” Clarence would wake up from these dreams and once again feel the deep pain of abandoning his wish to be an artist.

The dreams about his mother, Helen, were also upsetting, but in a much different way. In those dreams, his mom came to him and told him he was her favorite child. She would be dressed in all black with a black veil. Her eyes would be red and swollen. She would cup his face in her hands and tell him she loved him and then say a name. But it was never his name.

Instead of Clarence, she would call him Charlotte, or Perry, or Julie, or another name he couldn’t quite make out. He’d try to tell her his name was Clarence, but she always turned away and disappeared. When he woke, he felt the familiar ache of not being enough for his parents.

As a child, Clarence had been keenly aware of the specter of death that hung over the Peace household. Clarence’s older sister Charlotte died just hours after being born. Heartbroken but determined to have a family of their own, Rufus and Helen tried again, and Clarence was born on November 19th, 1921. He was a frail baby, but Helen hovered over him night and day and he gradually grew stronger.

Still, the angel of death was never far from the Peace home after that.

Sister Julie was born in 1923 and lived only 10 days. Perry was stillborn in 1924. The next year, a third son was born and died on the same day. By then, the grief experienced by Rufus and Helen Peace was so great that it was too painful to give the tiny corpse a name. The unnamed child was buried, along with his three other siblings in the graveyard at Mud Creek Baptist Church. The Peace plot had become a nursery of death.

As Clarence grew older, he became acutely aware of the tragedy that defined the lives of his parents. Helen Peace hovered over her son like a mother hen and admonished him anytime he tried to participate in the childhood endeavors of climbing trees, swimming at Front Lake with the other children, or riding his bike down Depot Road to Markley’s blacksmith shop to watch old Jim shoe horses for the locals. “I’ve already lost four children,” Helen Peace would say to her son. “I ain’t gonna lose another one.”

Under the smothering attention of two dour parents, Clarence struggled with the feeling that he’d done something wrong. He’d lived but his brothers and sisters had died, and his mother was consumed with grief for siblings he never knew. Too young to understand the idea of “survivor’s guilt,” Clarence grew up feeling that somehow, he was responsible for their deaths. He wondered if his mother secretly wished that one of her other children was holding her hand when she took Clarence to visit the graveyard after Sunday services.

By the time Clarence was a young teen, he understood that he was living in a house of unspoken pain. Rufus never discussed what he’d seen in the trenches during the Great War. Helen Peace spoke to no one about her brood of deceased children. And Clarence Peace never told his parents how much he hated being an only child.

--

Spring arrived in Flat Rock and the dogwoods behind the store and across Greenville Highway were in full bloom. The grand summer homes of the village were splashed with the vivid colors of hydrangeas and azaleas. The woods between estates were dotted with trillium blooms, bloodroot, and pink lady’s slippers. And at Peace’s Grocery, Wick and Albert sat like two venerable bookends on either side of the store’s potbellied stove.

The warmer weather had compelled the old friends to forego cups of coffee for a selection from the large red soda coolers at the back of the store. Wick took a swig of his Dr. Pepper and wiped his brow with his handkerchief. “Did I ever tell you about the time we swam across Bonclarken Lake to swipe some of old man Ellis’s apples?” he asked Albert.

Albert sighed and slumped down in his chair. “Only ‘bout a hunnert times.”

“Well, a bunch of us kids were walking down Depot Road one day,” started Wick, unfazed by Albert’s lack of interest.

“Oh, Lord. Here we go.” Wick rolled his eyes and shook his head slowly.

“…we couldn’t a been no more than 11 or 12 years old. I recall there was about eight of us. A regular pack of feral boys. Anyway, we were bored and hungry. Then Cam says, ‘I sure could go for one of them apples from that orchard across the lake.’

“Weren’t nobody around and we didn’t have swimsuits, so we just shucked all our clothes, left them on the bank and struck out swimming for them apples. We each nabbed a couple of the juiciest ones and then tried to swim back a holdin’ them apples. We were kickin’ and splashin’ so much it looked like that lake was a boilin’.

“About that time, here comes Father Wright drivin’ past the lake after havin’ Sunday dinner with the Smythe’s out there at Many Pines. When he saw all the commotion in the lake, he stopped and jumped out of his car and commenced to a hollerin’ about swimmin’ on the Sabbath day.

“We hopped out of that lake like frogs off a hot skillet, grabbed up our clothes are started running buck naked in eight different directions. We looked like a covey quail flushed out by a bird dog. Whooping and hollerin’, all legs and arms and bare asses going every which a way.

“I don’t know that Father Wright ever knew exactly who we were but ‘spect he had a pretty fair idea. So that next Sunday, we were scrubbed and brushed and sittin’ in the pews at St. John when Father Wright started preaching from Ephesians, “Walk as children of light, for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true.” And the whole time he’s lookin’ down from that pulpit and fixin’ his beady eyes right on us.”

“Did you feel obliged to confess your mortal sin?” asked Albert even though he knew the answer already.

“Hell no! But I did slip him one them apples as he was greeting the parishioners after the service.” Wick’s face broke open in a huge grin. “Only thing redder than that apple was Father Wright’s face.”

--

As Wick told his story, Clarence was sitting behind the counter about to doze off. But he did enjoy the stories from Wick and Albert. They helped pass the time and he didn’t mind that he’d heard them all before. It was good to have the company.

Clarence had spent his life either alone or as a loner. Without siblings, life at home was the somber and drab experience of a child who only spent time with adults. He started working at the store when he was old enough to push a broom across the weathered wood floors of the store. By the time he was in grade school, he would spend afternoons filling the store shelves with cans and boxes of food. While other kids were riding bikes or horses, playing in creeks, or roaming the woods that surrounded the great estates that populated Flat Rock, Clarence was working.

The lack of time with kids his own age contributed to a social awkwardness that most clearly manifested itself at Flat Rock High School. He was an average student. But his love of drawing and his penchant for daydreaming distracted him from math and English which were the hallmarks of successful students. He was also not athletic. The other boys impressed girls with their ability to run, hit, and catch. Clarence preferred to sit by himself at recess or lunch and sketch.

Clarence graduated from FRHS in 1939 and immediately joined the family business full-time. Money was tight and he lived at home. He was eighteen and never had a girlfriend. He’d been sweet on a few but could never get up the nerve to say something to them. When some of the pretty girls who lived in the fancy houses along Little River Road teased him about his haircut or his well-worn shoes, he retreated to the refuge of his art. He preferred to be ignored. Life was easier that way.

So it was that Clarence Peace spent the halcyon days of his young adulthood stocking shelves, unloading delivery trucks, and carrying groceries out to the cars of waiting customers. Sometimes they’d drop a nickel in his hand for his trouble, but most of the time they’d ignore him and drive off without a word. As he stood under the store’s portico and watched them drive off to their big houses and fancy parties, he wondered if perhaps he was invisible.

Clarence lived a life of endless gray that dissolved into monotony as deep and as wide as the ocean he’d never seen. His life was a silent and aimless drift through time. Until one day in the summer of 1943.

--

In 1943, the world was at war yet again. Rufus Peace complained about the politicians who ignored the sacrifice of his generation and so eagerly sent young men to die in foreign lands. Clarence watched as his high school friends and other young men his age eagerly queued up to volunteer to fight. Clarence wanted to join them, but as an only child working in a family business, he was eligible for deferment and his father refused to let him join. “If politicians and generals want to fight endless wars, let them send their own sons. Not mine.”

There was a steady stream of young men in uniform coming through the store and walking the streets of nearby Hendersonville on Saturday nights. Clarence watched as the girls fawned over the soon-to-be soldiers and felt more invisible than ever in his civilian clothes. From time to time, customers would even ask why he hadn’t yet volunteered.

It was during this time that Emma first came to the store. She was 19, from Charleston, and a student at Converse College in nearby Spartanburg. Her family had a large summer home tucked well back in the trees off Little River Road at the end of a long and winding driveway.

Clarence always remembered the first time he saw her. She wore a sleeveless summer dress that revealed her bare shoulders and long bronze arms. The dress was cinched at the waist with a narrow belt and flared at the hips before falling just below her knees. The bright red flowers embroidered on the white cotton material seemed to dance and sway with the movement of her hips as she walked.

Her chestnut hair was meticulously styled in “victory rolls” and a swipe of red lipstick added a touch of glamour. Mostly, Clarence remembered Emma’s eyes. A deep dark brown, they seemed to sparkle when she smiled and exuded a palpable feeling of warmth and kindness. Emma Middleton left a lasting impression on everyone she met. Clarence Peace was no exception to that rule.

He hadn’t noticed Emma when she first entered the store with her mother. He was sitting behind the counter and engrossed in a pencil drawing of a bear he’d seen run across the road that morning during his drive to East Flat Rock to pick up a shipment of oranges and lemons sent up from Florida. He didn’t hear her as she approached the counter.

“Very nice,” she said. Startled, Clarence reflexively slid the drawing below the wooden counter between himself and the pretty girl who had materialized before him. He said nothing, entranced by her deep brown eyes.

“Don’t hide it,” she laughed. “Please. Let me look.”

“It’s just chicken scratch,” Clarence stammered.

Emma laid her left hand on the counter and leaned over. “Please?” Her fingers were long and graceful. With no rings. A fact which made Clarence even more nervous. He pulled out the bag and laid it on the counter for her to see. She picked up the bag and examined the sketch. “This is amazing. Have you been to art school?”

Clarence blushed. “No. I've just been drawing stuff since I was a kid.”

Emma laid the drawing back on the counter. “And that? Did you do that?” Emma pointed to the painting of Markley’s blacksmith shop that hung high on the wall behind Clarence. He looked up at the painting, not sure if perhaps something else was there, then looked back at her and nodded wordlessly.

Emma laughed. Her eyes and smile radiated a light that filled the store. “Do you always prattle on and on like this? I can hardly get a word in edgewise.”

Clarence shrugged his shoulders. “Sorry. I mean … no. I guess I’m not.” He looked down and mumbled, “A big talker that is.”

Eleanor laughed again and then turned her head slightly and pursed her lips. Just as she and her sorority sisters had practiced when discussing how to get a boy’s attention. “I like a man who doesn’t have to brag about himself to impress others. Still waters run deep, you know.”

Clarence furrowed his brow. He was unsure if she was making fun of him.

She extended her hand and said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been so nosey and haven’t even offered a proper introduction. I’m Emma.”

Clarence looked at her hand for a moment before realizing that he should return the gesture. Shaking her hand awkwardly and overly enthusiastically. “I’m Clarence Peace. Nice to meet you.”

“Do you own this store? Is all this yours?”

“Oh no. My dad owns it. I just run it for him. Been working here since I was big enough to carry a gallon of milk.”

Emma reached into her handbag and pulled out a black and silver Kodak camera. “I’m doing a summer photo project for school. Could I take a photo of you?” She asked with a smile that made it impossible for even someone as shy as Clarence to say no. Emma backed away from the counter a few feet and Clarence stood behind the counter smiling stiffly. The camera clicked. “Got it,” reported Emma. Then she walked up to Clarence and handed him the camera. “Now, you take one of me!”

Clarence held the camera like a teenage boy who had just been handed a newborn baby. “I, uh. I don’t know how to .. I’ve never taken a photo before.” Emma laughed and stood beside Clarence. “Just turn this ring until I’m in focus. Then hold real still – holding your breath helps. And push this button here slowly.” She stood so close to Clarence that he felt the warmth of her body and smelled the shampoo in her hair.

She stepped back across the store and turned a slight angle, threw her hair back, and smiled at Clarence. Clarence peered through the viewfinder and held his breath. Actually, he realized he had been holding his breath from the moment she handed him the camera. Click. “Wonderful,” gushed Emma. “Thank you so much, Clarence.”

Clarence was about to offer Emma a soft drink from the cooler when her mother walked up to the counter with a small basket full of items. “Emma, I don’t see those fancy crackers you like. All they have are these saltines.”

Emma smiled, “Oh I’m sure I can last a few weeks without Ritz crackers.”

“I can order them for you!”, Clarence blurted out without thinking. “I can have them here by the weekend.”

“Would you? That would be so sweet. I’ll be sure to come back,” said Emma. She smiled and gave Clarence a wink.

Emma’s mom paid for her groceries and the two ladies returned to their car parked under the Peace’s portico. It was a shiny seafoam green Oldsmobile with a white top. As they drove off, Emma leaned out of the passenger side window and shouted, “I’ll bring you copies of the photos when they are developed.”

As Clarence watched the Oldsmobile drive down Greenville Highway, he realized he wasn’t sure where he’d find Ritz crackers for Emma. But that was OK. He was simply happy to have been seen.

---

It was the end of another day and as Clarence prepared to lock up, Squirt jumped silently onto the counter and walked back and forth swishing his tail. “How did you get in here?” Clarence asked. All the doors were closed, and the windows had screens. Cats could squeeze through the smallest spaces he thought. He made a note to check behind the coolers to make sure there wasn’t a hole into the crawlspace beneath the floor.

As he walked over to lock the front door, it began to rattle gently. As he got closer, the shaking increased and got louder. Clarence’s thoughts immediately went back to the strange visit from the young man claiming to be Carl Sandburg. He lunged for the door to slide the deadbolt when the door flew open. The same golden light from before splashed through the doorway and Clarence stood frozen as a figure stepped into his store.

He was a middle-aged man wearing a gray wool jacket and course homespun cotton pants. He wore a wide-brim hat and his dark leather boots were caked with mud. Suspenders under his coat kept his trousers high on his hips. Clarence thought that his pants looked like they were splattered with blood.

The stranger spoke, “Is Antha here?”

Still confused, Clarence replied in a shaking voice. “Antha?” The stranger sounded anxious to Clarence. “Antha Hood. She is usually here to help me.”

“Antha Hood?” Clarence repeated the name incredulously. “Yes,” replied the stranger. “I need her help.”

Clarence’s head was spinning. Was this another dream? How could this be real? “Antha Hood is my grandmother,” said Clarence.

The stranger’s eyes searched the store, obviously looking for something in particular. “Can you get her for me? It’s urgent.”

Clarence stared in silence for a long time before answering. “Grandma Hood died 42 years ago.”

###

Next week:
Chapter Three, “Discontent”