To Give Away The Farm by Sherry Cassells

I know it can’t be true but it’s not exactly bullshit either.

Uncle Max, I was named after him, he told us kids that he had delayed hearing.

People thought there was something wrong with him but our mother said it was only that he was more thoughtful than most men, he used to be impulsive she explained, too quick to bring home wounded animals they could do nothing for, so many cats and dogs and other strays, including our father. A parrot once landed on his shoulder and this was northern Ontario where it’s mostly hawks and ravens, he asked around and nobody was missing a parrot, they thought it was the set-up to a new kind of knock knock joke, and those of them who thought he was simple asked parrot who?

Parrot Who is still alive, he's mine now, I let him go every summer and he comes back on cool nights, and returns for good the morning of September first each year like calendarwork. He stands on my shoulder and together we look out small windows unto the great northern snowfalls.

Uncle Max didn’t laugh at our jokes right way, it took him a long time to say yes or no when my mother asked if he wanted gravy or would he be spending the night. Mrs. Blackwell taught at our school and was his girlfriend for a while, we died laughing when she came over in a sundress, her ageing hand resting on his knee, she said he had staircase wit – do you know what that is? – it’s when you get the perfect comeback too late, you think of it on the way up to bed, the person your words would have decimated long gone.

Uncle Max worked for the department of transportation in White, Ontario, drilling and blasting through the Canadian Shield to make way for the roads. He was on the committee responsible, so there’s a road named after each of us – Shirley Drive, Little Max Pass, and the one named after Dev was like a game of telephone – remember those hot whispers you had to listen so carefully and then pour what you thought you heard into the next ear? What started as Devon's Gale Road ended up Devil’s Gap Road.

The other day Shirley said I think I’m going deaf like Uncle Max and she sort of shook her fists at heaven, there was still something of an optimist in her I suppose, I said Uncle Max wasn’t deaf.

She hated that I had the better memory, she pounded her mug on the coffee table stump between us and stared straight ahead, my sister always had her dukes up. We were at the farm where we grew up, we met there on weekends pretty often, not so much to spend time together as to get the place ready to sell, or at least that’s what we told ourselves, but we rarely got anything done. In spite of our mediocre intentions, we usually just basked. Dev lived farther away and came less often, when he did show up there was always a fight between him and Shirley who he called Squirrelly all his life, and you’d think she’d have been used to it but no, every time she bristled freshly about it, she tried calling him Devil but he liked it.

I’m supposed to meet them here today, Shirley’s got Mrs. Blackwell coming. Mrs. Blackwell was, in rapid succession, first Shirley’s, then mine, then Dev’s grade three teacher, she gave it up for real estate. Shirley hadn’t let on until a quick phone call this morning and when I protested she said it is what it is whatever the fuck that means.

They arrive at the same time, I hear Dev squeal Squirrelly! and she says fuck off, Dev.

First thing I say is I don’t want to give this place up. I fling my arms toward the fields, all overgrown but fully gorgeous nonetheless, vague checkerboards, some purple with clover and fragrant, others leaning with tall grasses, some producing weirdly tall stalks of errant corn, gigantic walnut trees bubble all across the horizon, three pale barns, it’s ours as far as you can see all ways. We grew up here. It runs through each of us like blood, our feet are planted, something in our cores move with the clover, the spikes of corn, the grasses lean, the bubbles, scent after shape after shade.

We all love this place Shirley says but the market’s high right now, it’s actually peaking Mrs. Blackwell said, and look at the house. In pecking order we turn, one two three, and yes, it is old and creaky and dry and cracked and faded and longing and beautiful. It’ll cost a fortune to fix, I don’t know about you guys but I don’t have a fortune. We talk some more, Dev’s the one who sways me, he says Squirrelly’s right you know Max and it's the first time he’s ever said that.

We love the farm. But before Mrs. Blackwell drives up the driveway we decide to sell, she has a buyer she says right away, somebody who already knows the farm, they don’t even have to see it, fair price, fair everything, before we know it we are sitting around the kitchen table, Shirley in her chair, me in mine, Dev in dad’s signing papers.

Uncle Max detonated the explosion from two hundred feet away. The strange part was the silence – he said it felt unreal, prolonged, disconnected – it was not until things were in mid-air he said that you heard the explosion at all.





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