Fade by Robert Cormier

cried out, “The hell with you.” He stalked away without looking back while I watched his departure with regret, knowing I had had no choice but to let him go.
    Uncle Adelard had chosen that afternoon to initiate me into the fade, borrowing the apartment of my uncle Octave and aunt Olivine in my grandfather's house while they went on a picnic to Lake Whalom.
    Now we turned into Mechanic Street, past the houses to which I had once delivered papers whose tenants were now Bernard's customers.
    “I came back because I knew it was your time for the fade,” he said.
    “How did you know?”
    He sighed, placing his arm around my shoulder. “Something in the blood. Something that passes through the generations. I look at you, Paul, and see myself as I was back on the farm in St. Jacques. I asked the same questions of my uncle Theophile, who revealed the fade to me the way I revealed it to you.”
    My shirt was damp with perspiration from the heat and my overalls clung to my body.
    “Theophile was a commercial traveler, a fancy name for salesman in those days. He made his home in Montreal and visited us once in a while on the farm for the holidays. Les ßtes. But he arrived this time in July and stayed a few days. One afternoon he followed me to the outer fields and showed me the fade. …”
    Dust danced in the sunlight, rising from the street that had been tarred and covered with gravel earlier in the week.
    “My uncle Théophile told me all that he knew about the fade. He said it passes from one generation of the Moreauxs to another, always from an uncle to a nephew. And how it all began a long time ago….”
    Anticipating my question, he asked: “How long? Who knows? Back to the time of Christ, maybe. Uncle Théophile traced it for me as far as his knowledge took him. He was initiated in the fade by his uncle Hector when he was eight years old. That was in 1878,1 figured later. And Uncle Hector learned about the fade from his uncle, a man named Philippe, back around 1840 or so, according to my calculations.”
    We left the paved section of Mechanic Street and headed down the hill toward the city dump and the cemetery.
    “I spent only that one afternoon with Théophile and the poor man tried to tell me all he knew, which wasn't much. There were big gaps he couldn't fill in. He said Hector told him of a peasant in France, a Moreaux, who was a fader. This Moreaux sailed on a ship to New France, which is what Canada was called then. This was sometime in the middle of the seventeenth century. Do you see how far back the fade reaches, Paul?”
    Arriving at the house of Mr. Lefarge, we paused in the heat and glimpsed the desolate tombstones in the cemetery. I followed my uncle as he traversed the narrow road barely wide enough for funeral processions.
    “So what we know of the history of the fade starts with that peasant who came to Canada. We can guess the rest, of course. He settled in Quebec, farmed the land, raised a family, had descendants. You and me. Philippe and Hector and Théophile before us. He instructed his nephew in the fade as he had been instructed, as Fm instructing you.”
    We rested on a stone bench, the heat of the sun passing through the fabric of my overalls, stinging my skin. Uncle Adelard leaned back, thrust out his legs, and closed his eyes. Lines of weariness were in his face, like old claw marks.
    “I wish I had a lot more to tell you, Paul. More history, more rules and regulations. Answers to all the questions that must be in your mind. But that is all I have to offer, sorry to say.”
    He opened his eyes and looked at me. “Maybe you'll find out more about the fade yourself in time to come. Maybe you'll write about it. Not for others but for people like us, faders, as a guide for them. We do not have many consolations….”
    The sadness I had come to identify with him was there in his eyes. Where was the sly trickster my father had told stories about? This wan, weary man did not resemble my