THE FIELDS NEXT DOOR by Sherry Cassells

CHAPTER 1

My grandfather was barely a farmer. He preferred house plants.

During the winter months while my grandmother embroidered her way to heaven he learned to Frankenstein cacti. I was a childhood insomniac, I spent weekends at the farm and sometimes I’d get up in the night and I’d catch his monsters blooming. Some flowered for only a few seconds, others a minute or two, it was brief and gruesome and beautiful. 

He was always watching them, too, my fellow insomniac said he’d never missed a bloom, he waited in tearful delight. My grandfather never cried but for joy, and I have the same thing, equal and opposite, I laugh at sorrow. I am a nightmare, watch out.

My parents thought my grandparents were ridiculous, my mother admitted that she barely loved them, I am unsure if love can be modified by the word barely, I think it is love or it is not love, she said it was due to convention and obligation that she visited them at all, my father said they were harmless, he insisted they were harmless, but he later changed his mind, he said they had inflicted emotional damage on their only daughter, he said that his wife could barely love.

Whatever afflicted my grandparents afflicted me in equal measure, our kinship was undeniable, we squinted and stuttered and occasionally limped, we were insomniacs. While my grandfather and I watched the cacti, my grandmother spun wool in the corner, I remember the sound felt like the gears in my head, we were all allergic to dew and lint – and I realize only just now – perhaps prone to hypochondria. My mother pointed out that my weirdness, her word, was an enhanced version of theirs, more aggressive she said sweetly. I knew the sweetness was a put-on, she didn’t love me either.

On one side of the living room my grandmother embroidered like breathing, she dragged her home-spun wool through square holes, her arm exaggerating the loop, inhaling and exhaling, the occasional cough at a thick bit, she looked like a medieval surgeon. My grandfather on his side of the room practically levitating with delight, slicing his juicy monsters together, peering through a series of magnifying glasses that hung from the ceiling by strands of wool, they sent bubbles of light twirling about the room, perfect bright circles slid over my grandmother, I could feel them on my back. His abominations gnarled on the windowsill stabbing the winter sky, I half-expected it, the sky I mean, to burst and slip away, revealing sleepy galaxies.

She embroidered sentence fragments from the Bible, she stitched over her own penciled-in cursive upon burlap stretched over the skeleton of a collapsible dinner tray, her fork a needle her needle a fork, she picked around the edges of each word, pick pick pick, and then she filled them in, with gusto, PICK PICK PICK, her arm pumping the corner of my wide eye.

I didn't know how my grandfather maintained such a level of calm, how he was able to sit perfectly motionless and watch nothing slowly happen as his grafts took or did not take, he told me he was able to control his pulse, he said he could hold his breath for fourteen and a half minutes, that his heart beat in threes. I imagined a barely there waltz beneath his plaid pyjama pocket.

My grandmother did not have the stamina her husband did, she became bored of her work, I could never understand the words she chose, I mean if you had to pick a sentence from the Bible you would want to pick one with some oomph, but hers were dull and common – Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!  – is it any wonder she never finished a piece before she started the next. 

We used the incomplete as tea towels, the unstitched burlap eventually frayed away, little licks of it down the sink, between our cushions and toes, my father used them in the soil to retain moisture. A select few of the embroidered words remained intact, I scrubbed pots and dishes with Bible words such as behold wicked praise father, I don’t know why only the six letter words survived.

She eventually switched to Mr. Rogers quotations and my grandfather switched to roses, I could leave it at that but I feel the truth coming on, I used to lie and hide and execute enormously long and earnest stints with normalcy, I was good at it but it was unfulfilling and always ended in disaster.

As I said I am a nightmare.

What began my transformation into an honest farmer was the first quote she ever finished, she framed it and banged it into my bedroom wall: The greatest gift you can ever give is your honest self.

So here fucking goes. 

It’s barely raining, just a whisper over the fields. 

I inherited the farm and an inability to run it.

CHAPTER 2

When in a contemplative state, I contemplate to the right. When I walk – and I can see the worn evidence in the fields and along my favourite pathways – I veer to the right. I tilt. My head tilts further, it must look as if I am listening to my shoulder or tuned in to the ground. Like fucking Rain Man. I half-worry that this has caused a curvature in my spine, ever since the Fields moved in next door with their sparkling aura, happy families are my lop-sided Achilles, my wayward Icarus, do their fields grow greener taller richer from love?

I pine. I long. My fields are a flop.

Yet the gardens around the house are glorious, the roses my grandfather crafted almost gruesome with vitality, he could never get them anything but red, when you touch a petal it feels as if you might break skin – what if they are haemophiliac roses? – the beds around the house would look like the hallway in The Shining. Surprising how they are to the touch, they are not the velvet your fingers expect, there’s meat there, that’s the cacti influence of course, and a bit of salt. I didn’t know for a long time that he watered them with a portion of his own tears. I maintain this practice but use table salt.

My grandmother dyed her wool, my grandfather as I said used it in the soil, and still I see colourful worms of it, the birds see it, too, the nests around here are chromatic and the birds orderly, the ones who have made a blue nest keep it blue and likewise for the greenish goldish purplish, the ish due to the seeping dirt, it washes away eventually, colours are peculiar, the blue is never ish.

Mice don’t give a rat’s ass, their bedding quilted in all colours, muted and permanentish.

Jesus I bet you hope I drop that one, I do tend to tend, to fixate, hence the rightness like a magnet, the pull of the Field’s fields – homonyms can be tricky hope you’re okay – the way I write this story down these early mornings it feels as if there’s a weight to the words, as if the page can only handle so many, some days can take more than others. I do not know upon what hangs this balance. I can feel when it’s about to give, I have to carefully finish a thought, the sudden economization not poetry but not not poetry either, and then it says WHEN!

This is a story of my farming years, my barren fields, they were my grandfather’s barren fields before me, he had the soil tested, he studied it, he asked the Quaker guy who bought from neighbouring farms what the problem might be and the Quaker guy, the buyer, said he hadn’t a clue. My grandfather paid for another Quaker guy to come out and assess, the guy said he didn’t understand it, the soil was exactly the same as everywhere else in the region, there were no extraordinary parasites. Have you ever seen soil under a microscope? I would never say those bearded squirms were ordinary. He said maybe it’s the water, but the rain was so plentiful there was no need for watering, but the Quaker guy said the neighbours watered, so my grandfather put in a system, good thing his roses had caught on my then, everybody wanted them like sturdy pets. The water system made some beautiful rainbows, my grandmother said they weren’t the wishing kind, the fields did not improve, could not even cough out a weed.

But they coughed out something else one day, I was on the porch veering, Mrs. Field was living alone by then, she hired me to care for her fields and if that’s not an extension of faith what is, something caught my left eye – I feel a WHEN! coming on – a wink of light from my field, I ran through its failed furrows in a bare foot curve toward the clean and sparkling tip of a jewel, I tried to pick it up believing at the moment it had fallen from a careless beak but it would not budge, I could not determine its colour the sun was so attached to it, my saturated retina held the image and flashed it throughout the field, I waited for this effect to fade but it did not, what I thought were afterimages were actual sparks indicating more jewels. I ran for my shovel, my feet sinking into and pulling out of the mud so rudely and so loudly Mrs. Field, who was hanging laundry next door, stopped mid-swoop and looked my way.

She later said that’s when she fell in love with me but I have to wonder, I mean if you pull that sinking running frantic messy image to the forefront a minute it’s not very appealing is it.

I wonder if she loved me at all.

CHAPTER 3

Some days you can unravel forever. Wait. My wooly grandmother used to joke about unravelling as in going crazy. I’ll try that again. You can unravel some days forever.

Once in a while I have a dream in which an entire lifetime is lived overnight like gulping down a whole-life novel. Maybe you’ve had dreams like this, too, I don’t know if they are for everyone. The me in these dreams is only slightly the me that I am, and I remain this other me upon waking, until I am absorbed, and I don’t mind saying sometimes reluctantly, back into my own skin.

That’s what the day in the field was like, and when I remember it, I am not sure I was on that day the me that I am when I am me.

Still with me?

That day was full, endless, page after never ending page. 

I hope the distant souls in the permanent folds of dementia are quietly unravelling days and nights such as these.

One of Mrs. Field’s sons lived in town and that very morning he had delivered to his mother her mail, and there was an imposter in the mix, a letter addressed to me, and she learned my last name was not that of my grandparents but that of my mother, her maiden name Chayn, a variant of the Irish surname MacSeain, meaning "son of John".

Come with me while I digress a moment, let’s talk about falling in love, a term which indicates a certain trajectory that I have trouble with.

I cannot distinguish between varieties of love, its many splendours are but one to me, there is no difference the love I feel for breakfast when I am hungry, a breeze when hot, happiness on a forlorn day, my dog Blue, a well-structured bloom. And so when Daisy, Mrs. Field’s name was Daisy, when she told me she had fallen in love with me that day, I felt a variety of misgivings, perhaps I had piqued her curiosity but how on earth her heart?

For years I wondered what made her fall in love with me, what took her so long and yet why so suddenly. My circumstances were not yet influenced by the absence or the presence of giant gemstones, and I did not arrive at the solution until she was my wife of several months.

(The gemstones are rolling around in my mouth but in the name of good storytelling I must keep them out of your reach a little longer.)

I was passing through the kitchen when her same son Simon came with the mail, our mail, and for the first time she saw her new name in the little glass window. Mrs. Daisy Chayn. Never had I seen her more delighted. I stood a moment speculating upon the name of her first husband – and if you’ll allow a sloppy homonym his name was Barry Field and he was – but that matter aside you can see why she married him once you know why she married me. 

I finally understood the nature of her love for me as it began, and since it had grown into something quite else by that time, I hooted at the revelation, unable for the moment to tell her what was so funny. Our love, very different from the love I have for everything else, began with the possibility of a most lyrical name. Mrs. Daisy Chayne.

Jesus Christ that was a long story, or maybe I just told it long, but the real story in this chapter is the discovery of another homonym, sorry I know you were gunning for the gemstones.

I had not seen my parents since I moved from their house to the farm when I started high school, I knew nothing of their lives, they wanted nothing to do with we three oddballs, but there came a day the summer after Daisy and I married – these backstories are killing momentum – but I must tell you we lived in Daisy’s house so The Fields Next Door were my own fields, I wasn’t sure how I would manage the left tilt, but the transition was natural as could be.

There was a knock on the door, my eyes darted left, I opened the backwards door – here we go again but you see everything was backwards in Daisy’s house due to overwhelming the lefthandedness of its previous occupants – I opened the door to the left and there stood a wide-eyed girl, she was wearing a seersucker dress, disheveled, like when the vertical hold is making wild patterns on the tv, there were heavy-duty braces on her teeth and she sprayed words at me, none of which I could properly hear, she was crying at the same time, she looked rather mechanical.

I’d been watching television, or trying to, the reception was always shit, and when I invited the poor thing inside and directed her wobbly to the couch, the picture steadied immediately – she was an antennae – I saw for the first time Elly May Clampett clearly, oh my, it pained me when my wife came in and snapped it off.

This strange girl cleared her strange throat and wiped her strange nose on her seersucker shoulder. She then revealed herself in a series of mad hiccups to be my sister, Daisy Chayn, and if that’s not the homonym of the century, I’m not Clayton Handsome Chayn.

Chapter 4

I don’t know why in Canada's true north when we should have been learning about our home and native land, we studied everything but – The Balkan States, New Zealand, Japan, The Soviet Union – and in grade eight it was Latin America. I chose the Yucatán Peninsula for my presentation, I liked all the chewy syllables, and when I stood in front of the class it was its underbelly I talked about, the impact crater called Chicxulub, formed when a six mile wide asteroid hit southeastern Mexico 66 million years ago.

Think about that I demanded of my classmates and then slowly like air from a balloon I hissed six miles wide sixty six million years ago and my first stint at public speaking spiraled like the spent balloon, into constellations and galaxies and black holes. I roared, I spewed, I soared, the teacher gave me a D-minus, she said I didn’t even mention the Yucatán Peninsula once.

I carried that asteroid around in my head, always wondering whether any hurtling debris had made it through the atmosphere, and by the time I got to high school the shooting stars in question had come to rest as twinkling interior meteorites.

Plugging through the fields that day to get my shovel, Mrs. Field frozen at her clothesline as if she were hung there herself, again I thought of Chicxulub. How joined are the events of our lives to the earth and the heavens? I was convinced that  beneath my field churned a miniature Chicxulub that housed a solar system of jewels, the former playthings of angel-children.

My shovel revealed many stones of no colour and little hue, I held them to the sky they only slightly altered the blue, some leaned bluer, some less so, a few gave a beautiful algaeic tint, one or two pinked like the air around my grandfather’s roses. I poured them into my shirt pocket, astounded when one of them slid straight through the fabric, I pressed my hand, both hands, firmly against my pocket and ran through the mud, squelching, this time to the barn where I placed them into a steel bucket of water and like the Alka-Seltzer® my grandmother used to let me plunk into her tea, I waited for the fizz to dissipate and then slowly scooped from the water to my lap the oddest of entities, some were like pale raisins, some soft pyramids, others thorns and teeth.

Suddenly Mrs. Field was behind me, she whispered diamonds, my love over my shoulder. She later told me she rushed over because she thought I was having a heart attack the way I ran amok through the fields clutching my chest.

I was living alone at the time, my grandparents had moved to South America for its extended growing season and superior wool, but one never lives alone on a farm, for the animals were my tribe, my ilk – two pigs, two ewes, two goats, two cows, two llamas, two chickens too many – you could call me Noah but for a single farting bull, who I called Frap, all of us animals adopted a toothy indignant grin whenever he blurted his own name.

Diamonds, my love.

The words on either side of my were as unexpected as what happened next, Mrs. Field took full and utter advantage of me right there in the barn, in front of my blushing tribe.

Our courtship was brief, by the time we left the barn in the morning we were already betrothed, when I said after you, Mrs. Field, she whispered, call me Daisy. I looked back at the animals, all heads were high, all eyes sparked at mine, Frap frapped, we all tooth grinned and chortled, Mrs. Field, I mean Daisy, included.

I had forgotten all about the diamonds, or whatever they were, until I saw them once again sparkling in the field, the field that could grow nothing, no stalk nor weed, yet allowed these marvelous stones to reach the light of day all of a sudden, but then it occurred to me also all of a sudden, that perhaps my grandparents had been privy to the field’s secrets, I mean how rich can you get selling roses to a loyal but small community. They’d sent me pictures of their new home in Montevideo, both of them strong, their skin rich from sunlight, they each wore a white knitted scarf which in the strong salty breeze shot straight out from their golden necks, their white hair also sideways, and the entire field of tall grasses leaned. All of these things pointed to their gigantic gemhouse which reflected sharply the South Atlantic Ocean, a moat of blood around it – my grandfather’s roses.

But back to my sister Daisy Chayn, we were in the kitchen, my happy wife made us blood pudding and eggs in our small kitchen, she butchered and cooked and gathered the eggs I could not, she turn turn turned with the Byrds on the radio. I’d had the picture of my grandparents enlarged and it hung on the wall beside where we ate. My sister Daisy rather drank her food due to the overwhelming braces, I was surprised she could hold up her head at all, the radio was coming in loud and clear thanks to her, and she looked at the picture. She pointed to what I thought was a flaw in the print, I must say it was so similar to the introductory flash I saw in my field I did wonder at first if my grandfather had tried a new sort of farming, my sister Daisy laughed, she chortled, she said look how my braces caught the sunlight you can barely see me!

And then I noticed the chain of pale raisins around her golden neck.

A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones
A time to gather stones together

If you want to listen to that song a million times like I did, here it is.

Chapter 5

My wife saw Daisy’s necklace just as I did.

I am the slower one, I was still marvelling that this toothy girl across the table from me was the very blemish in the fuzzy photograph I’d nailed to the kitchen wall, my wife dashed to the table and hobbled her chair so close to my sister she balked, she swooped to the young white neck like a vampire to blood, she screeched ah-haa! and in homonymic harmony my sister screeched the same, hers for fear, my wife’s for discovery. She looked at me and invited by gesture that I study the raisins but there was no need, I already understood, my grandparents had known all along about the diamonds and the existence of a granddaughter, why they had chosen to keep their finds to themselves I thought about slowly and to no avail.

My exhausted sister soon went for a nap, she left her practically soleless shoes in an over easy X beneath the kitchen table, I noticed a red frill around the holes and believed it to be layers of worn sole but I soon began to notice unpickupable petals strewn about the floor and realized my poor sister’s feet bled. I had not until then wondered how she had arrived at our house but it seemed clear now that she had walked, no wonder she slept through lunch, it wasn’t until I was cooking dinner when she opened the door of the balloon bedroom, her yawn flared with the streaming solstice sun, she came to the kitchen stumbling with sleep, tripped over nothing, I said oops-a-Daisy as one does, and although serializing this story had not yet occurred to me, something within me must have known, for to avoid duplication and confusion, my sister’s altername was born – for this story, for this day, this moment.

My wife had been out painting the porch which she did every solstice, yellow, she came in the house and into the kitchen where she herself tripped over her own nothing, she said oops-a-Daisy, and before she steadied herself the wet paintbrush slapped against the fuzzy photograph and made a perfectly round blot, my grandparents gone forever. Seeing what she had done my wife again said oops-a-Daisy more severely this time, my sister took to her new name immediately, I had not announced it nor suggested it in any way, she turned from the table beneath which her worn feet had slipped into their worn shoes among the petals, she looked at my wife and said yes?

We each ate a fresh trout – did I mention the lake? – Oopsa asked for seconds but I had caught only three, I told her as much and she said my brother is a fisherman and as I was sitting right next to her I said Veronica Lake makes everyone a fisherman, the trout are eager if not foolish. She laughed. No, brother, not you, I mean my other brother. Daisy looked up from her trout which she had been working on with enormous enjoyment, she said what other brother? and Oopsa said as if she were commenting only on the weather when clement, Clayton Handsome Chayn.

That was the moment when I realized my wife and I, Daisy Mae Chayn and Clayton Handsome Chayn, of Witchita Falls, Ontario, did not exist.

You might think this story would take a turn now, that me and Daisy would fight for existence in the world, that I would go on and on about the supernatural or delve into the dreaded science fiction realm for excuse over explanation, that you would find out it’s all not only false but impossible, that I’ve been lying my head off all along.

But no.

When one is presented with the prospect of being a ghost there are options.

I N T E R L U D E

They say to make an outline first so your story does not get out of control but I fucking live for that challenge, I have no idea what’s coming until it arrives and then I manage it like plates in the air, am typing like mad right now looking out the window where it's still dark, I can hear the birds, my cat is wagging her paw beneath my closed door, asking if this is turning into a ghost story are we in or are we out?

h a n g i n t h e r e

There’s a fine line where ghosts stand not unlike the line from Peter Pan that says about disbelieved-in fairies falling down dead, the ghosts will either fade or become opaque.

o n e m o r e t h i n g

This has happened before.

R E S U M E

When I caught my wife’s eye there was a tear in it, she realized at the same moment what we were when we traipsed through the fields next door at night gathering stones. We did not at the moment wish to analyze our situation, but only to remain present, for we breathed, we loved, we ate, we drank, we knitted, we learned, we managed, we welcomed, we watched Murder, She Wrote that night with perfect reception, blurred commercials when Ooopsa went to the kitchen for a single stalk of rhubarb each time, she came in and broke them into three, Daisy had quickly knitted her up some healing slippers so nothing was in her wake but a few grains of the sugar she had sprinkled into the rhubarb’s gutter which she wet with spit from her tongue.

In the morning, my sister was gone.

I leaned hard left that day as if listening to the wind for the coordinates of my sweet sister, and where on earth was the brother she spoke of, our field is restless, the corn blows one way in a gigantic wave, and ripples back to the tornadoed centre, it is a stormy sea and we, my wife and I, sit on the dock in our Adirondack chairs which ping from side to side – and it catches me – something red in the corner of my eye, I half-expect a pirate’s sail, slowly I turn toward the fields next door.

But it is not a pirate ship and this is not the sea, we come to stillness and the dock is again a porch, the red is the moat around my old house which contains roses again, before my eyes one then another spark to colour, do not worry this will not take a fairy-tale turn but for a quick mention, suddenly the windows of the kitchen which never before opened, open, and a soft arm comes out with a watering can, a Snow White-like profile in the dawn, water falls onto the roses and they respond as if their flowers are mouths, they drink, squiggle and bloom, she turns my way, east, the rising sun catches her mouth in an atom-bomb smile.

My sister Oopsa waves with her free hand and hollers, I can barely hear the words and would not know them had I not heard them all my life. The syllables come in spite of the distance, it’s my name, I smile and wave as if she is sending me a personal salutation but then I put together, in a dash of retrospect, the words that come after it, just as my recovering wife, she is prone to seasickness, sings the same words in a weak display of homonymic harmony, Clayton Handsome Chayn is coming today!




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