O.D.A.M.

O.D.A.M

OR

Of Dreams and Madness

The Story of Harland Deville

By John Chapman

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © by 2013 John Chapman

All Rights Reserved.

Chapter 1

Harland Deville was born in March of 1945 in Langston Tennessee. There was nothing special about him or his family or childhood, except that he had few friends and actually preferred having only a few. It seemed to him that other children his age always tried to tell him how and what to do when he knew very well himself how and what he wanted to do. Being alone offered no social problems, and to him the lack of companionship was in a peculiar way comforting and a reassuring logical reality. Harland was a different kind of child, that is true, and his mother kept him out of school until he was seven because he seemed slow to mature.

During his early years he did have one close friend. His name was Raymond Barns. He was an old man who lived next door to Harland and his mother, and Harland liked him, and enjoyed spending time with Raymond when his mommy, Grace Deville, would leave him there during her time away while shopping. Raymond talked with him and listened to his ideas and complaints. Harland would play games with Raymond who always let Harland win no matter what they played. The old man got a kick from watching the child act superior.

When Raymond died at the age of eighty-three, and Harland was eight, it was Harland who discovered him still sitting upright in his lawn chair in the backyard. His head was bowed forward on his chest but his eyes were still open, and Harland thought he was pretending not to notice him when he patted him on the knee trying to get his attention.

He told his mother that Raymond would not speak to him. She went to see what the problem was and realized he was dead. It was two weeks later when his mother told him that Raymond had died, but she did not tell him when or how. It would be seven years later when he was fifteen years old that she finally informed him he was the first to discover Raymond’s body. He almost didn’t believe it. But after a time he began to accept the fact that on the day the old man died he was not playing possum, and his trying to communicate with Raymond was done in vain. He would dream about the encounter many times until well after he was a grown man.

One fall day after Harland had arrived home from high school, during his junior year, he answered the telephone and heard his Aunt Lea—his Mother’s sister—tell him that his Mother and Father had been killed in a car accident only two hours earlier three blocks from their home. He uttered the words they are dead over and over but the reality of their demise would not immediately take seat. Finally, late in the evening, it did and he cried for many hours, partially because, being their only child, he was suddenly alone with no way to care for himself.

After three weeks of seriously deliberating about leaving, he stopped going to school and ran away from his Aunt Lea’s house in November of that year and ended up in Florida. He was lucky to have met with an old couple going to Tampa who saw him sitting by the side of the road, and stopped and ask about his wellbeing. He rode down there with them, and they even gave him some money which he used to secure a motel room until he found a job washing dishes making three dollars an hour.

It was while working at the restaurant he had his first visionary experience. Upon seeing a naked woman sitting alone in a booth in the restaurant he accepted her presence as real, and his heart beat fast and hard in his chest. But when soon she looked directly at him she was clothed. And then she vanished. He was instantly frightened and dubious of his sanity but told no one about what he thought he saw.

Had the woman been ugly he might have grown tired of thinking about the vision but she was beautiful, and after only a few days Harland began to wish he could see her again. He even tried to conjure an image of her, or her, he thought. But his efforts were in vain, and after a time he forgot about the vision, deciding it was simply a fluke of his imagination and would never happen again.

After working as a dishwasher at the restaurant for several months a man came in one day for a cup of coffee. He sat at the counter close to where Harland was working and spoke to him.

You ever have any house painters come in here?

You talkin’ to me? Harland said.

Shor, nobody else around is’a?

I don’t know no house painters. How come?

I need a painter helper and I’z lookin’fer one.

I bet I could paint a house, Harland said.

A whole house?

Shor, Harland said. The man laughed. But after talking with the dishwasher for a while he offered him a job.

I do a lot of traveling. I paint gas stations mostly, and I got a passel to paint from here to Chicago, and I need me a helper, one at can travel. It pays five dollars an hour and we work from dawn to dusk, ever day except Sunday. Can ye hack it?

I believe I’d make a damn good house painter, Harland said.

He was hired and glad to be leaving the restaurant. The man’s name was Ted Marshal. Harland noticed other people calling him by his last name, Marshal, instead of his first name. So that became his habit also. In time he would completely forget the first name, and Ted would not be aware of it, nor would Ted care. Marshal was his name.

When Ted signed his name he simply signed Marshal unless someone objected, then he would sign T. Marshall. If there were further objections he acted huffy and signed Theodore Marshal. But he would not answer to Theodore, and only to Ted if he knew you. It was obvious that he liked Marshal best. If modern civilization with all its rules of propriety and regulation would simply leave him alone he would completely forget his first name. He had never liked Theodore, or Ted, and for certain he had never liked Teddy. Marshal Marshal would have suited him just fine.

Marshal was a cantankerous man. At fifty-five years of age he was still a hard worker but he drank too much, smoked too much, ate jelly beans all throughout the day, and had halitosis, but was unaware that he had it. Harland got a whiff of his bad breath when he first met him on the day he was hired, but thought nothing of it. On some days Ted’s mouth odor was worse than others though every day his breath stank like shit Harland thought, like an old outhouse, and he tried to keep a certain distance between Marshal and himself when Marshal talked, but it was not always possible. You act funny as hell, Marshal said to him one day after Harland had backed away.

They were working in the town of Meridian Mississippi, painting a new gas station, and Harland was painting a run of simply crown molding in one of the small bathrooms when Marshal came in with a brush and bucket of paint, and climbed up onto the scaffold with Harland. Yor damned slow today. I gotta come up here an hep ye. When ye gonna learn to keep a-lead outta yor britches? he said, his mouth only inches away from Harland’s nose.

Harland staggered back away from Marshal’s malodorous breath. He was suddenly overcome with the stench of it, and quickly climbed down and exited the small enclosure fearing that he might retch and further enrage Marshal.

God dammit! Marshal bellowed . I’ve had it with ya! He pulled a roll of money from his front pocket and took from it a hundred dollar bill and threw it out the doorway toward Harland’s feet he could see from where he stood on the scaffold. That’ll cover what I owe ya! Now you get on outta here! I don’t’ never wanna see ya again!

Harland picked up the money and left the new station. It was a five mile walk back to the motel where he had a room rented next to the one Marshal rented. After arriving he put his dirty clothes in a black garbage bag, and crammed it in the small suitcase with his other clothes, and checked out of the motel. He began walking to the main highway going toward Tennessee. He had decided to return to Langston, where he knew a few people, and would try there to find work painting.

The man he was riding with let him out just inside the city limits of Langston Tennessee, and he then headed out Boy Scout Drive. It was going to be a two mile walk on into town. Harland was hungry so he walked up to an old trailer restaurant called The Quick Burger and ordered a hamburger, fries and a coke, and sat at a picnic table to eat. A pickup with three men sitting in the front seat parked near him. The men in it ordered something to eat from a girl who came out of the trailer restaurant with a pencil and tablet.

They looked like construction workers so Harland asked them if they knew of any jobs in the area where painters were needed. They did, and after he and the men ate he rode with them back to their job-site, and talked with the building contractor there who put him to work that very day painting the house they had built. The man’s name was Renaldo Jenkins. He told Harland he would keep him busy for awhile if he was a good worker.

Harland found a cheap sleeping room to stay in that night, and with two other men he painted diligently on the house for a week afterward. Renaldo liked his work, and told him he also had other things to do.

Summer was in full bloom and the work for a while was steady. Harland worked with a number of house painters and learned much about the painting trade. He felt as though he had found a profession that suited him in many ways. He could eventually be his own boss, keep his own hours, and there was something very satisfying about completing a job and doing nice, clean work that pleased people.

When fall came he got rid of the old car he had bought from a co-worker and bought a good, used Chevy van, and before long he had collected many of the typical tools painters use. Just before Christmas Harland found a good inside job painting a house, and told Renaldo Jenkins he appreciated all that he had done for him but he felt it was time he ventured out on his own. Renaldo said he would use him when he could and that he should stay in touch. Harland said he would.

Chapter 2

Word of first-rate, dependable workmanship travels fast it would appear because by Christmas time Harland was booked for the present and also booked for the winter ahead. He had been clean, considerate of his customer’s thoughts and opinions, and thorough with his work. It was women, mostly, who were responsible for the positive opinions about the new painter, and their praise was no stretch of the imagination. Plus, most of these women thought he was very attractive.

And he had learned much during his first few months as a house painter, but the main thing he learned was to please the people he was painting for. And he understood the importance of consistent, personal hygiene. He wore clean clothes every day, bathed every night and brushed his teeth every morning before going to work, and used tic-tacs regularly. He was a healthy young man and this also was noticed, and his was a face you would trust.

Pamela Johnson thought he was handsome. She was the daughter of a neighbor of a family he painted for. She came over one day to borrow sugar and met him. She came back several times that afternoon feigning one reason then another, but the sole purpose for these visits was to look again at Harland and let him see her.

He noticed her and thought she was pretty, and rightly suspected that she came again and again that day to flirt with him. Embolden by her flashing blue eyes and silly giggles he asked the nineteen year old girl to go to the movies with him. She accepted.

He had heard of love at first sight, and after a week of seeing Pamela almost every night he was convinced it had happened to them. She was smitten also, and was not shy about letting him know this. Their petting became heavier and on their tenth date, lying together in the back of his van, he put his hand up her dress. It was what she had hoped for, and a week later he proposed to her. She said: I most certainly will.

They had a simple, small wedding at her house. Her mother and father attended of course, and a few of her cousins. Harland didn’t even have a best friend present. There was no best man. Her mother had located a minister, and her aunt Betty took care of the refreshments and other usual amenities.

After the wedding they drove to Gatlinburg and spent the night in a cheap motel. The time was January 1965. They walked the streets and spent more money than either had planned to. And then their honeymoon was cut short by Pamela getting sick, probably food poisoning they thought from food eaten at the motel restaurant. They returned to Langston. But they were in love and she mended quickly, and Harland returned to working on a regular basis.

They rented a small house on Dill Street and began making plans to buy a home as soon as it was possible. They talked about having children, and planned to begin as soon as they were certain they could afford a child. Harland and Pam were happy. They were young and the future looked bright.

In June of that year Harland was painting in the home of the town mayor Günter Jones. It was a big job, one that involved much planning and would take a lot of time to complete. Harland went about it one room at a time in order to cause the least amount of disruption possible to the families’ daily routine. They were all away, involved with their regular activities, and he was alone in the house in the great room. All the furniture had been removed and the hardwood floors covered with paper and drop cloths. He was painting the wide crown molding up ten feet high, standing on a ladder and using a brush. To move his stepladder he would climb down from it to slide it over the drop cloth a few inches at a time.

He would remove his gallon of paint from the top of the ladder then slide the ladder, but for some inexplicable reason he mistakenly decided to leave the open, full gallon of