He was ordinary. That is the kindest thing we can say about him. Nondescript. No one knew where he came from, so being a man of no importance was to say quite a lot.His eyes were such a pale blue it was difficult to discern where the pool of his irises merged with the surrounding whites, whites that were closer to off-white so that the tone leaned into a mysterious dull grey mist similar to an overcast mid-summer dawn. Like his other features it gave his face a washed out feel.
When he spoke, which was seldom, the words mingled with a wheezing breathiness that made him hard to understand. People often asked him to repeat himself, but even then he was hard to follow and people would walk away instead of making an effort to capture whatever meaning he was trying to convey.
I used to be that way. His indistinct diction left me muttering to myself so that others sometimes asked that I repeat what I'd said. I now find this funny. I was only talking to myself.
His name was Carlton Pennington. Carlton used to refer to a place before making the leap from geography to personhood. Carl descends from the root ceorl, meaning "a free man" or non-servant peasant. The latter syllable comes from the root tun, meaning town, farm or enclosure.
Pennington is an old Anglo-Saxon name that may have meant Penny Farm. The Penningtons are listed in census records from a thousand years ago. Carlton, it would then seem, had a good pedigree.
We met at a writers group in the Poconos in Eastern Pennsylvania. I was a newby to the group, having recently moved to Lehigh Valley to escape the suffocating expansion taking place in Harrison, New Jersey. Townhouses and condos were metastasizing like malignant tumors.
Pennington had been a regular with the group, which had been active more than 40 years, I was told. After attending awhile, I noticed that he had yet to share anything he'd written. When I privately commented on this after one of the meetings, our host shrugged. "He's actually quite perceptive and when he brings something to share it's always good."
Pennington sat in the same chair every Thursday evening, third from the end, next to a window that looked out upon the parking lot and, beyond that, a stand of white pine. In winter the window became a black mirror. During the warmer months Pennington occasionally watched the birds.
He brought a notebook with him, one of those black-and-white composition books schoolchildren use, and kept it on his lap. I never saw him write in it.
For the first several meetings I assumed he was simply shy. Writers groups attract shy people for reasons that should be obvious. We spend months alone arranging words and then discover, to our horror, that someone expects us to read them aloud.
There were eleven of us then. Martha wrote murder mysteries. Tom was working on a Civil War novel he had been revising since the Clinton administration. Ellen wrote poems about her mother. Two others were writing memoirs, though neither appeared to have done anything yet worth remembering.
Pennington listened. Whenever someone finished reading he would nod. That was about it. Then one Thursday in October, Martha turned to him and said, "Carlton, you've been coming here longer than any of us. When are you going to read something?"
Pennington looked toward the window.
It had been raining most of the afternoon. Water wandered down the glass in crooked little rivers. "I can read something," he said.
Everyone became quiet. It was the longest sentence I'd heard him speak. He opened his composition book.
The first thing I noticed was that his hands were trembling. "The man had recently moved to the Lehigh Valley," he began.
I lifted my eyes. There was nothing remarkable in that. Half the people in the room lived somewhere in the Lehigh Valley, but it made me perk up anyways.
"He had come from Harrison, New Jersey."
It seemed a strange beginning and I stopped breathing for a moment.
Pennington continued. "He told people he had moved because he wanted more room. This was partly true. The town where he had lived was disappearing beneath townhouses and condominiums. They seemed to him less like homes than tumors."
Someone chuckled.
I didn't. That was the word I had indeed used, but not at the writers group. I had written it in an email to my brother two months earlier.
Pennington turned the page.
"The man sometimes talked to himself. He had done so since childhood, though in recent years he had begun pretending that he was merely thinking aloud."
Now everyone turned to glance at me.
"That's enough," I said.
Pennington stopped. His pale eyes rose from the notebook.
For the first time I noticed something I hadn't noticed before. They weren't expressionless. They were sad. "I haven't reached the interesting part," he said.
No one laughed.
I asked him where he had gotten what he had written.
Pennington seemed puzzled by the question. "Where does anyone get anything they write?"
"That's not what I mean."
"I know."
He closed the notebook.
The rain tapped softly against the window as Pennington leaned toward me and said something in that breathy, indistinct voice of his.
"What?" I said.
When he repeated it I still couldn't make it out.
He leaned closer. This time I heard him.
"I wouldn't go home by Route 309 tonight," he said.
I stared at him. "Why?"
Pennington slipped the composition book into his satchel.
"That's where the next page begins."
