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.