With Ash and Seed

Gillian Parrish

 

The barn felt like a church, the dim cool feel of it, the way his vision went red and black for a second, shifting from sunlight to thin dusty half-light. Joe had almost forgotten the barn in the shock and rush of the funeral, the blur of days packing away three generations of living into the U-Haul. Goodwill wouldn’t come out this far. No, indeed, he thought, not much Goodwill out here, remembering the way Reverend Carr glared at him as he stood numb beside the casket.

Fairy, they called him, the boys in his year, that was the first word, the nicest. It began with Matt Miller during recess. Matt, who bellowed and gleeked, spraying spit through his teeth. A loud life nothing like Joe’s, who read under the elm at the edge of the playground. He looked up one day with Matt and Brandon Kelly standing over him, blocking the sun. “Joey’s a fairy,” Matt announced. For a split-second, Joe was pleased. He felt seen. How could they know? They didn’t like to read, and his mother didn’t leave the bedroom much anymore, so she couldn’t have told them the stories she’d heard from her gran, stories of folk who made their home in stones and trees, stories of fairy courts under hollow hills, and gifts they gave of second-sight and singing.

But Matt said it again, and Joe heard the same slant that his father’s voice took on at night a little into his whisky. And then they pushed him down, started kicking him. Karin Fischer saw it all and ran to get Mitch, who was playing ball across the playground. He waded in and pulled them off and shook them good, told them he’d better never hear it again. Mitch was big and quiet and smart, knowing just when to toss out a sly observation, funny or fair, always at the right time.

But of course, the next week, they did it again. All through junior high and high school, though the names changed, and the pushing down became something subtler, became where Joe lived, down in an underwater world, under a layer of ice, suspended in blue shadows, waiting to leave that town. Mitch couldn’t do much, the game was set, but he knew where to find Joe on hard days after school, down back of the long yard, through the brambles. They sat together there, quiet, watching fireflies.

“Hardly any fireflies now,” Mitch had told him last time they talked. Joe ran his hand along the workbench Dad and Mitch had made. Dad died a few years after Joe finished college. Mitch had weathered their father’s fury. He had a grudging respect for Mitch that he’d never had for Joe. Mitch learned the land from their father and fought with him too, he wanted to try older methods, but their father said, “This is the business now.” After their dad died, Mitch worked dawn to dark, watching the fireflies dwindle with the bees. Farming was harder alone, and it was harder too trying to turn the land back to what it was. His high-school girlfriend, fed up, left town for nursing school. Her picture hung among the tools on the pegboard next to a photo of their mother young, her black curls blowing, pretty in an emerald dress.

Their mother was sick a long time. This was in the ’80s, when they’d started to sell off pieces of the farm. She read them books, told them stories her grandmother told her, stories of thin places between worlds, stories of times before now. When she died, Joe’s world ended until he left for college. Their dad started drinking hard at night after she died. He’d come after the boys for playing too loud or for muttering too quietly, slamming doors and cabinets in the kitchen, barking orders, hounding them through the house. They were young then, 11 and 12, thin-skinned, keen-eyed, sensing their father’s changes like the moon. They knew when to run. Down the long yard, past the big raised beds of vegetables where Mitch spent afternoons, through the blackberry thicket. Behind the tangle of bushes, there was a small meadow with a few old mulberry trees, where fireflies would gather, where Joe had found rings of white mushrooms in the grass. “A magic circle, like in Mama’s stories,” he told Mitch the first time they hid there. “We’re safe here.” Mitch, older, circumspect, tipped his chin to look at him, a quiet, measuring look. Nodded.

Sweet smell of gasoline and hay. Mitch had got rid of the chickens and the last cows weeks ago. If Joe had known, he’d have come home. Mitch had sold the big machines months back to pay the lawyers. He’d already had to sell the last of the fields. This is what had killed him—the empty barn, the porch facing the fields across the road, fields that he and his father and his grandfather had tended, taunting him from the porch. Right there, but not in reach. They had killed him, the men who came up from the city hounding him and hounding him, saying he’d sown saved seed. In the end, they dropped the lawsuit, no apology for their error. But it had all been too much, and not enough, for too long.

Now all that was left in the barn was the workbench and a fridge retired from the main house years ago. The old machine hummed, ran barely cool. One lightbulb flared on, and Joe’s throat caught at the jars of seeds, all labeled in Mitch’s sure hand. These were seeds from his vegetable beds, beds that their father let him tend young. This was where he was happiest, planting tomatoes with marigolds, squash with beans, tendrils of field peas climbing the corn stalks. Joe pushed the jars aside, reaching to the back of the dim fridge, and there was the jar for the garden under the window, seeds of prairie grass and flowers, larkspur and ironweed, aster and indigo, the garden Mitch called “a piece of old prairie” that he planted for their mother so she could see it from her bed.

Joe took the jar of prairie seeds, went back to the house for a different jar, heavy, hard to carry. Then down the long yard, past the vegetable beds falling to seed in the late September twilight, thrashed through the wall of brambles to the meadow, the moon rising through a mulberry tree. Brother, he thought, and saw Mitch’s big careful hands in the dirt, gentle with seedlings and worms, Mitch warning with his eyes when their father came silent to dinner, bear-hugging Joe when he got his scholarship letter, tipping back in the rocker, kicking his feet up on the porch wall, looking out at the fields. In this meadow, so many times, he saw Mitch coming through the thorns to find him, knowing when to say a funny word to change the pain of the day, or no word at all, letting it rest in the air between them. “You’re safe now,” he said, and stepped into that magic patch of the meadow, dropping handfuls of ashes, powder-soft and gritty, thick with bone and wild seed, casting the old prairie inside the fairy ring.

The sky turned upside down, then back again. He stood in chest-high grasses, bluestem and switchgrass and brome. This was the land before the corn, before the soy. Nothing but tallgrass, an ocean of grass, the wind like running water. He sensed them on the wind, felt them sink into his skin. His stomach alive with their anger, his throat thick with their grief—the long agony of the sod-busting, pushed down, pierced with machines, the slow leaching away of the soil, and the death ride, rising up into blizzards of dust, years of dust. Then dulled by the chemical stink of poisons, soaking shoot and root and seed. Pushed down, underground, though they were made to dance as light on the leaves, light on the foxtails, the milkweed, and rue. Beautiful and terrible as storms, they gathered like clouds. Now they were made of waiting. Their voice was the wind in the grass, almost a song, more like a sigh, some humming rush of what the world was, and is in secret, and will be after the tide of machines has receded. Yes. This, he thought, if breath was thought, if earth could be a breath. The sky shifted, and he was back in the meadow, and the moon had not moved. He sank into a crouch, his heels heavy on the ground, touched the short grass scattered with ash and seed—brother. Walked back to the house, through fields of fireflies.

 

Gillian Parrish serves as an assistant professor at Lindenwood University in St. Louis. She is the author of a book of poems, “of rain and nettles wove” (Singing Horse Press), with another book “supermoon,” forthcoming this winter. In her spare time, she serves as the mothership for spacecraftproject.com, a journal of interviews with artists that also features poems and fiction. The little Midwestern story here—rooted in the fairy stories of her London childhood as well as in more recent reading about Big Ag—was sparked by a remark by a British folklorist: “Re-enchantment is resistance.”