HE WORE SULLENNESS like a cloak.
Falter Macree was a man without a mission, yet his days seemed full of activity as he swept away the dry dust that blew up from the south every Spring Halt only to be ground down into the cracks of the paving slabs outside his toy shop by the tramping feet of passersby.
Yes. Passersby. Not visitors, not customers, not people intent on entering his little abode of happiness where children might marvel at the wonders within. People who just walked past, barely giving the dusty shopfront a glance.
He polished the window glass till it became invisible. This only encouraged wobbly pigeons to crash into it, adding their burden of dusty feather marks to its hard and unyielding surface. Thus he found himself at times sweeping away wing feathers discarded in the shock of impact after a particularly impressive avian bounce and squawk of alarm, all the while wrapping his cloak of sullenness tighter around himself.
This was not how it was meant to be.
Those bright colourful brochures he had found under the door mat back in Little Steadfast where he once lived had crowed optimistically about the golden glories of the western districts of Frangea. There was the sea, the beaches, onshore breezes full of seaweed aroma and many independent shopowners doing a brisk trade in the consumer paradise that was the ever-burgeoning Cherryball Flats.
'Marthy,' he had said to his indulgent wife of ten years standing, 'look around you. What d'yer see?'
'A few trees Falter. Nice bit of grassland off into the distance and, oh look, another lightning strike on Digger Pontoon's water tower up yonder.' Marthy Macree enjoyed sitting on the porch in her rocker and counting the flashes of blue light that scored the metal tower on the horizon. It had been painted red only two Summer Pauses ago. Now it was a brown, flaking thing, occasionally giving off superheated steam with such a whistle like a giant kettle it could be heard all the way to Winding Stream five miles off.
'And that's it Marthy. We're surrounded by nowhere. Every step we take takes us nowhere.'
'Mine takes me to Mother Bash's Knit Store,' Marthy disagreed with her husband's bland assessment of the quiet village that was Little Steadfast. 'She's got a good selection of wool there, to my mind.'
'Wouldn't you rather though, see the sea?'
'See the sea? What's to see at the sea but sea?' Marthy replied with a chuckle and sought some of Mother Bash's wool to begin another pair of unnecessary socks. She was going to try a new pattern this summer, one with whorls in it that discouraged bugs by sowing confusion in their bloodsucking ranks.
'Marthy, I'm selling up,' Falter decided to dive right in without preamble, seeing as how that would prove pointless to such an immovable soul as the light of his life appeared to be. 'We're at a deadend here in Steadfast, whittling toys and making pipe whistles for a living. Ain't gonna make us rich.'
'Why be rich? We got all we need,' and she indicated the barnlike structure that was their home. She had decorated it nicely with innumerable knitted curtains and mats and tea cosies devoid of tea pots to cosy and socks missing the necessary feet to make them of use. 'Well, almost all,' and she remembered the little clutch of tiny mittens she had made, some in pink wool and some in blue, and just to be safe, some in a kind of purply shade too. They were in a cedar box her husband had whittled down from a large tree struck by lightning. It took him four years with a knife and chisel and as it never seemed quite square it was eventually whittled to a smallness that only served as a repository for the tiniest things. Baby clothes no less.
'But we ain't got all we want,' the man insisted, waving the brochures left by some enterprising salesman who had passed through the area, scattering dreams and unsettling settled lives in the quiet eastern districts of Frangea.
'Says right here a man can make a fortune on the back of hard work and tireless endeavour way across the land in Cherryball Flats. All we need is a startup business plan and a space to work. A space to expand, Marthy, and make something of ourselves.'
The lady so addressed in high words of encouragement took one of the brochures and glanced over it with a doubtful eye.
'Says here, it'll cost a might of coins to get started, and there's them percentage things to consider too.' Her education might have been limited to the necessaries of life, but she was an astute body in her way. Suspicion of outside influence, that is, beyond that of cousins and carefully vetted in-laws, was a natural consequence of the easy lifestyle around Winding Stream, the main settlement of the area.
'That's just details, Marthy,' the man said in a voice that betrayed the dreaded tones of decisiveness. His mind was made up and Marthy knew when a Macree set his mind upon something he would pursue it to the end of the next field, and beyond sometimes. She sighed, sat back in her rocker and blessed the season.
Perhaps, she thought to herself, a change of air might do the trick. Thus she made no further objection to this momentous decision to relocate from the backwoods of a peaceful land to the hustle and bustle and even more hustle of the waterfront world by the Big Blue Sea.