The Shrinking Field

A story about inheritance and secrets.

Unlike each morning for forty-odd years, no ledger lay open on Ronald’s kitchen table, no cup of tea steamed itself cold. On this bright morning he was out before his wife came down the stairs to make toast and lightly squeeze his shoulder. When the sun rose above the barley, he was at the upstairs bedroom window, a kind of terrified exhilaration replacing the ordinary weariness. He couldn’t say exactly how he knew. But beyond the rusting red combine lay the north field. And overnight, the field had ever so slightly shrunk.
In the byre, Ronald found the laser measure. Tesco had demanded an audit of ventilation, Ronald had obliged, and then they’d quibbled over this and that, and the deal fell through. Usefulness owed more to time and place than anything innate, and while he once rued noting the purchase in his ledger, he was glad of the dust-covered measure now.
On the border nearest the house, Ronald held the measure against the central post. He pulled the trigger and the laser found the post parallel, far off down the field. Ronald glanced at the reading and whistled. Altogether, he noted four lengths and three widths. He plucked a blade of grass and chewed it. Often, he could be seen like this. Chewing grass, hand on hip, staring out at the earth as if it might give him direction. A word of advice, even.
Each reading was the same; the field was now perfectly square. Its width had narrowed by twenty point four inches, its length shortened by twenty three inches dead.
What to do? What to do?
Certainly not tell Julie. He loved the socks off that woman, so why bother? She’d only worry. And it'd be with a particular nervousness; the kind that tested his pacemaker. His mother had the same affliction, Granny too; a hard-headed compulsion to face reality. To fuss, really.
No, this would be a little secret between himself and the soil.
Families have secrets after all, often from themselves. His own father never breathed a word of concern, even in the darkest of times. But children have big ears. They become little Poirots. And Ronald, a little cold boy, heard much.
His father was such a slight man, always with a pencil which seemed an extension of his long fingers. He never grew out of Uncle Jack’s handedowns; even his flat cap hung loose. All of this gave his father the look of someone who disappeared into himself.
Agnes, his wife, Ronald's mother, was huge from breast to boot. She never seemed to eat a meal, but was constantly cooking. Ronald joked with Julie that Agnes ate all the food before it got to the plates, and although Julie smiled politely, the joke died there between them.
Coming home from school one day, it was strange to find his mother at the table with a pencil, and his father bent over the stove.
“What’s wrong?” Ronald asked.
His mother glanced up, eyes red. “Nothing. Go to bed.”
“I’ve only just come in from school.”
“Then go outside,” she said, raising her hand. “Get into trouble.”
As he went out, his father turned. Surprised, gazeless eyes looked through him. Ronald opened and shut the front door without exiting through it. Then he stood with an ear to the kitchen door.
“You told me. You said it.”
“Nevermind that now. Whatever will we do?”
He didn’t hear much more than that, and besides couldn't remember it now almost sixty years later, but the hushed tones remained with him. They were so quiet that he didn't hear them finish, nor Agnes getting up and coming to the door, nor her turning the handle, his weight against it by his ear. Falling head first into the kitchen, he certainly remembered the rough hand pummeling his lower back and bottom.
He supposed he felt more than he heard. The atmosphere in the house. If his father was disappearing before, the magic trick was then complete. Overdone, if anything. He was antimatter, his worry sucking and distorting the air around him.
Agnes stood at the bottom of the stairs, not seeing Ronald in the washbasin. “Have you asked him?”
“What? Oh yes. Yes.”
“You haven't asked him, have you?”
“No, no.”
“We've got to face it, sooner or later.”
His father went pale. “Don't make me do it. Anything but that.”
“Do what you think is right,” Agnes said, and went about her work.
It was a few weeks later, after a full week without meat, that Uncle Jack stopped by, and spoke to his mother and father in the kitchen. A few years after that his father had the first of three heart attacks. Somehow, even as a teenager, Ronald understood there was a link between those worrisome weeks and the failing of his father’s valves.
He'd always meant to ask his mother exactly what the issue had been, but it never seemed right to ask while his father became a frail old man with a loosening grip on his dignity. And then he'd gone and outlived her. So he'd asked Uncle Jack, who'd looked cold, and said, “Just an issue with the books, I doubt. Wouldn't have thought you'd remember.”
In all those years after, Ronald never once allowed himself to cut a corner. He checked, rechecked, and re-rechecked the books. He knew exactly how many kilograms of wool he would get off the sheep on Eynhallow. And he knew the sizes of his fields to the sixteenths of an inch, which he thought about now in particular, as he fired the gun once more, and saw the length of the field had decreased by a further eighth.
“Ronald?” Julie was looking out from the front door, a glass of orange juice held uncertainly in her hands. She was in her nightgown. “Breakfast’s ready.”
“Aye, aye, aye. I'll be there in a moment or two.”
“Come here a second, will you?”
“Can’t you see I'm busy?”
Julie came to him instead, stepping carefully around coils of chicken excrement. She looked at him carefully.
“Anything the matter?”
“No,” Ronald said. “This isn't your woman's intuition again, is it? What have I told you about that?”
“No, no. I just missed you at the table.” She put her hand on his shoulder, and moved close so that he felt her breast against his side. “I've just seen the electric bill, it's almost a thousand pounds.”
“I'll take care of it.”
“Out of some secret account?”
“Yes,” Ronald said with a grin. “I'll have to decide between Panama and the one in the Cayman Islands. Now, get yourself inside, I can feel how cold you are, and I can't have the neighbours talking about the young harlot I'm hiding from the wife.”
“You horrible man,” Julie said, handing him the juice. “It's good for you.”
Ronald drank it in one gulp.
“There. I'll never die now, I suppose.”
“Well you don't know what I laced it with.”
Julie tapped her nose, and left.
Of course, his father wasn't completely to blame for the mess Ronald inherited. It all started with Grandfather Bews, Bess the Cow, and the evacuee.
After James Isbister was killed in his field in Stenness, the first British civilian death of the second war, a change came over Grandfather Bews, who had some dealings with James at the mart. Life is for the living, he'd said, and I'll not toil in the field for the damn war effort without getting mine. Or at least this is what the rumours, which still circulated in Ronald's day, suggested.
The evacuee’s name was Marie in some accounts, Josephine in others. A quiet girl with long dark hair and golden eyes. Ronald heard a lot about those eyes over the years, how they made the local boys sick in that place below their stomach. Even the farm wives liked her. She always asked before she picked any wildflowers on their land and brought little bunches of primrose to any that agreed she could. And the flowers she picked smelled better than any flowers the women could remember. Uncle Jack always laughed at that, a little uneasily. “Things always do when you don’t get them yourself.”
She came from Guernsey, and the cow was definitely called Bess, but beyond that the story was, Ronald guessed, clouded by the level of superstition a person could live with.
Ronald bent down now, feeling the soil. Normal to his touch, but perhaps he better test it. A man’s perception is easily clouded.
She was sent off to Grandfather and Granny Bews as they had two sons but no daughter, a truth amongst lies, and Granny was heavily involved on the home front with her sewing, and was well known to have been anxious for a girl of her own.
But it was Grandfather Bews who the girl warmed to.
At first, it was innocent enough. He taught her how to milk the cows, read to her, and taught her how to read the poems of Edwin Muir, and seemed to take an interest in the differences and similarities between life on their respective islands. They would spend long evenings, Ronald’s father attested to this, burning peat in the front room into the early hours.
And she must have trusted him, for one night she told him a secret. No-one knew exactly what the secret was, only that it existed. The fact of a secret was only known after the fact, not before. But for those who told the story, the secret was the important detail. They told the story out of order, as if the secret was known all along.
Other than the deaths blared out by the wireless, and the fact they were hosting the girl, the war didn't touch Ronald’s family deeply. Both sons, Jack and Ronald’s father, were too young to fight, and Grandfather Bews, despite being in his thirties then, was in a reserved profession. And the farms in Orkney did well from subsidies, high prices, and demand.
But for Grandfather Bews this wasn’t quite enough, it seemed. As the farms around his own did equally well, he began to search for a competitive advantage. By all accounts he saw himself as a visionary, Uncle Jack still professed he was of a kind.
‘I’ve an idea, my sweetness,” he said to Granny one night, sometime in late 1942 or early 1943. “So that when we come out of this war, and the subsidies dry up, we are best positioned.”
“We are doing okay,” she said. “Best to learn some German just in case.”
“You mustn't say that. The war is turning, the Russians, the Americans, the Empire. Not even that little carpet chewer can stand up to this pressure.”
“I was, of course, joking, my dear. But please don't plan too far ahead. Focus on here and now. Che sera.”
“Italian, too?” Grandfather gave a big throaty laugh. “But I am. I am planning for the here and now.”
The next morning a sign went up. It still sat in the barn to this day.
Pre Black-Out Show. 17:30, Friday, in Bews’ Barn. Young men and women, old men and women, come and see the girl from Guernsey. Singing and more. 3s. Free popped corn.
Grandfather was not seen much in the field that week. He was in the barn with Josephine or whatever her name was. Early in the morning Bess was brought in, and then Josephine was led in, a blindfold over her eyes. Only in the evenings an odd golden glow emanated from the barn.
Of course, people got talking, if the promise of free popcorn wasn't enough. People gave Granny off-kilter looks, still did when Ronald knew her as an old woman, and made comments about her husband and the war effort. She tried once more to convince him to call the whole thing off, that it wasn't necessary, but he'd already sold fifty tickets, with more expected to be sold at the door.
Ronald stood now looking at that door. Still locally called Bews’ barn. He'd half a mind to tear it down once or twice over the years but always found himself with a need for it.
By the time Saturday rolled around, it was all anyone talked about. They managed to pack over two hundred people in the barn, starting just before sunset. Most came for the promised singing, and maybe there was some truth to this. Josephine often sang hymns as she picked wildflowers and those who heard her were enchanted. But, if they were inclined to be honest, Ronald thought, the ‘and more’ on the sign, along with the rumours of weird goings-on in the barn, was not a small part of the appeal.
Nobody ever spoke about what actually happened. Perhaps they did when Ronald wasn't around, or Ronald made sure he wasn't around when they did.
After five or so minutes, there was a loud thud as Mary Hurst, the owner of the local shop, fainted. Something of a stampede and Grandfather's voice bellowing, “It's all part of the spectacle, all part of the spectacle.”
Uncle Jack was up in his room. Up to that point it had been a clear, still night. But a storm blew in, and the mist and glow from the barn clouded people’s faces. No one could quite say for sure who was and wasn't there. Everyone was and wasn’t; that was the sense Ronald had been able to make of it.
As they came out into the night, each face twisted into visceral disgust, even those home on leave from the front, young men who’ve seen lifeless corpses half-buried in mud, rushed out to the now-shrinking field. Bess bolted out behind them. They got into their cars, the ones who could remember how to drive, and many couldn’t at that moment. They pressed buttons and turned their windscreen wipers on, and reversed into the cars behind them, leaving as quickly as the cars could propel them. Many returned for their cars the next day, having ran home and drank excessive rations of whiskey. One of those cars was abandoned beside the red combine, before the red combine was parked there.
Granny stood at the window holding a child in her arms, her face in shadow. But her head shook as she watched them. Her dignity protected her from the lion’s share of scorn in the decades that followed.
Barely a week passed until the decision was made to remove the girl from their care. They tried once to remove her, but she ran to Granny, tears streaming down her face, begging not to be moved. That night she went out on her usual flower picking. She seemed much the same as ever, except that her eyes were not quite so golden, and she didn't sing, and no one opened their door to her. The boys she had once made lustful were now sick to their stomach at the sight of her.
She made tea, and the next morning, wasn't in her room. They eventually found her out in the field, no one could say for sure which field, although Ronald had his guesses, and she looked as though she had simply fallen to sleep out there on the mud.
Ronald had always had difficulty believing most of the supposed facts of the story. For one, there was little evidence. And two, they were only a generation removed from a community who found a decomposing sperm whale on the beach and termed it a monster, and still held to the idea that a mermaid lived in the waters just a little out from the coast.
For certain, there had been a cow named Bess, and a fairly attractive evacuee had come from Guernsey and was later removed. But, Ronald thought, the reason for her removal was likely for more scandalous reasons than any glowing barn, and more to do with a young girl whose eyes slowly lost their light.
But here was the field shrinking before him. Another eighth of an inch. And the story seemed less ridiculous than it once had.
Any longer standing in this spot and he’d arouse Julie's suspicion.
As he counted his steps back to the house, a step or two shorter than usual, he was not so concerned about the field itself. It was shrinking, of that he was sure, and there wasn’t much to be done about it.
But as he sat in the kitchen, as Julie spoke to him, seeming to go on and on, he watched her lips move and they seemed to move with the ticking of the clock. He tried to work it out, sat there, sitting on such knowledge.
He’d been standing out there for no more than ten minutes while it decreased by a full quarter inch. He could work out an approximate hourly rate from that.
But as he looked between Julie's lovely old face and the ledger on the table, he was not trying to surmise how long until the field reduced to nothing. Until it most likely swallowed them up with it. But how long until she noticed that the walk to her flowerbeds was so many more steps. Until she stood at the door and realised there was room for her car to fit alongside his truck in the driveway.
And she would know by his meticulous nature that he'd been aware all along.
Then, all the secrets would spew out of him as they had with his father and his grandfather before him.

Author's Note

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