Cheap Suit

Other people may have been able to see hope in the sunshine shimmering off the waves, but the man with the cheap suit could see only despair. He had come from the north, confident that the warmer climes would bring him good luck, yet as he sat on a bench at the beach, he was all too aware that he had not only failed to make any money, but had actually lost some. He hadn’t lost everything, but he had lost enough to know that his wife was not going to be happy, no, not at all. He could already almost hear her chiding him for being too trusting. She always said that people were no good, and he had always argued otherwise. She was a good wife, but he didn’t have anything to compare her to. He thought to himself that maybe she was right after all. Nobody cared about anybody; they only thought of themselves.

As he looked out from the beach the sun was a ball in the sky and a line on the water; both glared at him, making him squint, and as he did, he could not convince himself that it was the sun responsible for his expression instead of the disappointment he felt. He had had such high hopes for this trip and it had turned out to be a dismal failure. He’d even spent a little money on the cheap suit he was wearing, thinking it might make him a little more impressive. It was supposed to be an easy money deal; he and the friend of a friend had put some money together to buy some old southern muscle cars that they could sell for twice the money back home up north. The trouble was, his “partner”, whom he barely knew, and who had all the money, never showed up to pay for the cars. He had trusted the wrong person, and in doing so, earned himself another dose of reality. He had a little money left, but not much. Within a week, he would have to return home empty handed and hear for the umpteenth time what a sucker he was.

He pulled a crumpled cigarette from a tattered pack and lit it. When he threw his spent match on the sand, a passing gull swooped down to investigate it, and then immediately flew off with a disappointed screech that sounded to the man like sarcastic laughter. He watched it fly off toward an old building that sat on stilts about a hundred yards off the shore. It was little more than a large box with windows long broken. It had the remnants of a ceiling and the floor must have still been somewhat intact; the side boards were weathered and gray where the guano hadn’t covered them. Oysters clung to the stilts like fuzzy socks on spindly legs. It didn’t sit straight up in the water, but leaned to the right. The man wondered how long it had been there, and how much longer it would be before it went totally off balance and slid into the sea. He took the final drag off his smoke and thought that he was much like the building. He, too, was askew, and in danger of slipping beneath the waves of disappointment that constantly lapped at him. How he stayed standing was sometimes a mystery to even him. He stubbed out his smoke and got up to walk to the town to get some dinner and a room before heading back tomorrow.

He was in a very small fishing village that attracted tourists who were willing to spend big to get away from the weather up north, if only for a little while. It seemed like every other house he passed had some sort of small business operating. One local merchant made his living renting golf carts, although the island was small enough to walk the entire circumference in about twenty minutes, but the tourists who wanted rustic didn’t want it so rustic that they had to walk. Another house offered watercolor paintings and another proffered jewelry made from shells. He could see a sign hanging a couple blocks away for an inn, and he was making his way there when he heard a clattering noise to his left that overcame the sound of the surf to his right. As he looked he saw an impossibly old woman bending to pick up the old crab trap she had dropped. The trap looked far too heavy for her, so he trotted up her walkway asking if she needed any help. She didn’t seem to hear him as he approached, and he thought he might startle her when he asked if he could help, but she behaved as though strangers appeared on her porch at any time; they were as common an occurrence as birds or bugs. She accepted his help in a matter-of-fact manner.

He stayed on her porch for a good half hour helping her arrange her antiques (as she called them; to the man in the cheap suit it was junk) and when she was finally satisfied with the display, she walked back into her house without a word. For a minute or so, the man was unsure if he should stay or go, but the woman came back out with a tray of lemonade and two glasses. The man gladly took a glass and was surprised when the woman produced a pint of bourbon from her apron pocket with a wink and a wry wrinkly smile. She offered him a seat on a rickety looking porch swing and they sat down side by side to drink their drinks and gaze out at the sea. The woman told him she had lived in this town all her life. She had been married for nearly fifty years when her husband passed and now she made a meager living trying to sell the junk he had collected to curious tourists. He told her how he came to be sitting here, although he left out the part about losing money. He had a feeling, though, that she already knew that. They made small talk about the fishing village, and he even heard some gossip about the other merchants as the sun fought a losing battle to keep itself up.

There came a time when the conversation stopped, as if it was too much effort to talk and watch the sun fall below the horizon at the same time. It was time for the man to be moving on; the conversation had dwindled beyond pleasantries and it was about to die completely. With his drink nearly empty, the man asked the old woman why no one had bothered to tear down the slanting stilted building that sat alone off the shore. He expected to hear about some fool who had started something he couldn’t finish or that it was a fish cleaning shack, but his words had sparked the woman’s tongue again. She looked out at the building for a moment, then back at the man, and as she did so, he felt that she could see everything he tried to keep hidden, like a mother looking at a lying child. The bottle of bourbon appeared again and the man listened to the old woman’s story.

The shack had been built in the fall of 1918 by Mister Douglas Llewellyn Pratt. He wasn’t a gentleman by birth, nor was he wealthy, but he had been born on the island and had lived there all his life. The man knew that Pratt’s title wasn’t “mister”, but the old woman seemed to think he deserved it. She said she was just a girl when the shack was built, and she remembered it as though it were yesterday. Mister Pratt had been, like most of the local men of the time, a fisherman. The woman remembered the men leaving at the break of dawn and not coming home until nearly dark every single day, as long as it wasn’t storming. They would take their catch to the mainland to sell it, and it was there that Mister Pratt had met a girl he was very sweet on. He wasn’t a rich man by any means, but he was determined to prove his love to his sweetheart. While he wooed the mainland girl, he spent every hour he wasn’t working and every dime he didn’t absolutely need to build a honeymoon house on the water. Of course everyone on the island knew what he was up to, and they all managed to keep it quiet from the mainland folks. Pratt had told his friends that he was going to marry the girl in January, right after the New Year arrived, and everyone pitched in to help him because that was the way things were done back then.

The old woman recalled that the whole island could feel the love that Pratt had, and they wanted to be a part of something that was almost like a fairy tale. Their lives were sometimes difficult and almost always mundane, and Pratt’s love for his woman brought a spark to the island that hadn’t been seen in some time. Everyone remembered what it was like to be in love. On the day that Pratt came home and announced to the islanders that he had asked his woman for her hand and that she had accepted, there was a boisterous party, with much well-wishing and a multitude of stories of how other loves had come to be. Some even told stories of loves lost, but all were told with a hearty laugh and a lesson learned, even if it was painful at the time. For a night, it seemed, love ruled the island and every married couple thought in their hearts of how they had felt when it had come to them. The man watched the old woman as she spoke about Pratt and his wedding. Her eyes were fixed on the shack in the water, but what was behind them was miles away.

The date was set and the islanders as well as the mainlanders made preparations to help Pratt and his girl get off on the best foot possible. The honeymoon house on stilts was finished. Some of the island women had gotten together and made huge quilts of bunting to hang from the roof and there was a day not too long before the wedding when wine and rowboats were employed to wrap pink ribbons around the stilts all the way to the high water mark, and more than a few island women got wet. Back on the mainland, a feast was prepared and it was going to take no less than five boats to get just the food over to the island. The local fishermen all had lists of who was going to ride on which boat to the ceremony which was to be held on the island in a gazebo at the park. The day before the wedding, there came word that the bride was feeling a bit ill, and it was assumed that the wedding day jitters were upon her. There was a flu that going around on the mainland and lots of people were under the weather, and the most jovial talkers said that if she’s too sick to be married now, then they would wait until she was well. Some even joked that the thought of marrying a fisherman who spent long days at sea would make for a wife who would constantly worry herself sick. The islanders went to bed still joking about Pratt and his woman, and each was giddy about the following day’s event. As a young girl, the old woman knew that love would bloom in the shack on the sea and all would catch its bouquet, if only for a day.

The woman stopped talking and stared out at the gray leaning shack. The man looked too, and was curious to know how the wedding went and what kind of revelry took place on the day that love visited the island. The woman stood mute as she looked at the shack; the faraway look she had earlier was even more pronounced now. After a couple minutes the man asked if she was alright, and urged her to finish the story. He had forgotten his own troubles for a while and didn’t want to break the reverie. The love story she told, even though it was second hand and generations before he was born, captivated him and made him feel as though he was living in the past and sharing in the joy that people have always felt. The old woman finally shifted her gaze from the shack to the younger man, and he could see that she was crying. She wasn’t bawling, but her eyes were full and a wistful tear snaked along her wrinkled, leathery cheek. The woman said people were dying everywhere. The Spanish Flu pandemic was at its height, and millions the world over were dying. Of course he wouldn’t have known that; it was years before he was born, but it surprised him that he had never heard of it. She said Pratt’s bride died the morning she was to be married.

She said he never sat foot in the honeymoon shack he had built for his bride. In fact, no one ever had. In time, things on the island got back to normal, but Douglas Llewellyn Pratt was never the same. Oh, he still worked, and occasionally he would laugh, but mostly he kept to himself. The bunting and ribbons that hung from the shack that were supposed to be symbols of a new life became instead bright, haunting sentinels that reminded the entire island of the fleeting nature of love and life. In time they succumbed to the weather and the sea, but the old woman said that for weeks after the wedding day they flapped in the breeze, sounding for all the world like tiny claps of thunder that scared her dreams away, leaving her awake and frightened. Sometimes, the old woman would get out of bed and look outside and see Mister Pratt standing on the beach, looking at the shack. She said that in spite of the sound of the flapping, tattered decorations and the surf, she could swear she could hear his heart breaking. She said that once, after she had grown up and Pratt was getting on in years, she had asked him why he hadn’t found another woman, and he told her that he didn’t try to not love another, it just never happened. He said he didn’t want to be alone, but he couldn’t force himself to love. It either happened or it didn’t, and it must have been his lot to have only one love in a lifetime. He smiled a rare smile at the woman, perhaps because he could see the worry in her eyes, and he told her that in spite of his misfortune, he wouldn’t have it any other way. He said he had known a love that quelled the fear that all men have in their hearts, if only for a little while, and he was thankful for that.

The man with the cheap suit looked at the old woman when she stopped talking, and she was looking at the shack, now bathed in moonlight, with guano glowing like strips of a whitewash job that was never finished. She stood silent for a few minutes, and then abruptly thanked him for his help, and bade him good evening. He thanked her for the drinks and walked off her porch toward the inn. He could hear the rattling of the empty glasses on the tray and the sound of her screen door shutting behind her in a house she shared with no one as he walked up the street. When he got to the sidewalk that led to the inn office, he stopped and looked back at the gray shack leaning in water. He thought of his wife at home and wondered if she were gone, would he have the same outlook as Douglas Llewellyn Pratt did? He wasn’t sure, and he went to bed uneasy, unable to stop himself from getting up and looking out at the empty leaning building that sat in the moonlight, never occupied, waiting to collapse.