The Chapel Field - Short Story by Lynda Tavakoli

 

The Chapel Field - by Lynda Tavakoli

 

Some called it Cold Acre.  Others simply, the Fallow. Yet I knew it always as the chapel field although neither church nor chapel was in evidence there during my lifetime at least.  However, by the time my parents built a house on its strangely rich loamed soil, myth and imagination had combined to cement its mystical reputation firmly into the psyche of the local populace.  But my father had been blessed with a sense of humour.  He named the house ‘Cold Acre Fallow’ and my normally unflappable mother was suitably incensed.

“You’ll only manage to annoy them William,” she said, eyeing him at the hearth where, poker in hand, he was sizzling the black letters into a flattened slice of bog oak. “They’ll think we’re taking the mick.” Then seemingly as an afterthought, “It might bring bad luck.”

I was sitting at my father’s stockinged feet absently poking the stray embers under the grate and tipped my head slightly in order to see better his reaction to her rebuke.  The corners of his lips remained curled pleasantly upwards.  Those robin’s eggs eyes of his never left the white-orange tip of the poker while he added the final ‘w’ to the sign and paused to survey his handiwork. I could still hear him whistling a jig when he went to hammer it in on the gatepost some moments later.

If the neighbours were annoyed by it they never said.  Perhaps they had already accustomed themselves to the smiling demeanour of a man whom they had known from a cub and whose only misfortune was to be handed down a piece of dubious ground by his crabbit and not so affable father.  And so there was a certain forbearance bestowed upon my family by the community and none of the bad luck my mother had anticipated seeped into the pages of our lives.  For a while at least.

Life on the Acre and its craggier appendages was as hard and as easy as for any of our fellow neighbours.  Unforgiving winters bleached the countryside in swathes of snow on a bad year, yet mellow summers tucked their way in behind disappointing springs on a good one, painting a landscape of unforgettable azure and green.  It was on one such summer; the summer that I turned ten and was one day returning across the Acre from school, that I experienced my first vision.  I say vision, but in truth it was more a sense of something harbouring the space between me and my sister as we progressed towards the house. 

“Do you feel anything?” I inquired of my infinitely more sophisticated sibling when the sensation became so intense that I could no longer ignore its presence.  Her pace began to slacken and she turned her face deliberately to fix me with her hazel eyes.  She possessed the same sunny disposition of our father and I was taken aback by the gradual furrow indenting her brow and an unexpected startled expression stretching over her face. 

“You mean something spooky that sends shivers right up your spine?” she replied, “Like this?”  And releasing both hands from the confines of her pockets she tickled her wriggly worm-like fingers along the contour of my back.

“That’s not even funny,” I said pulling away sharply when I realised how I’d been duped.  “I did feel something.”

“Whoooooh!” she howled, racing on ahead of me with arms flailing like a demented scarecrow and skinny legs kicking up dust as she went.  I waited until she had retreated behind an old yew tree near the corner of the house and could no longer hear her harmless mockery, before starting off again.  But my feet had locked themselves into the ground as though the earth itself was somehow sucking me up and refusing to release its grip.  Then quite unexpectedly a stab of pain shot through the back of my head – the part where adults are prone to patting you in church as you walk between the pews on a Sunday.  A second it took, possibly less, I do not recall exactly now but it indented itself like an unseen bruise within my skull. I was only ten years old; too young to understand it properly perhaps, but even then I sensed that visitation rights of sorts had only just begun. 

If she had died that day or maybe a week or two afterwards, I might somehow have connected better the events, but she did not.  Instead it was some eight months later that my sister met her death and by then all thoughts of apparitions or the like were long since absent from my mind.  She had been with Dan in the stable. Dan, my father’s gentle cob that never once was known to buck or shy or misbehave in any way, yet still he caught her with a hoof that saw her skull split clean from ear to ear.  When I found her she was cold and motionless, slumped on the reddening straw and Dan was blowing warm breath pathetically into her lovely face. 

My mother never really recovered from it and blamed herself in whatever way a mother could for the loss of a beloved and only daughter.  Yet I knew better where culpability lay and agonized as to whether I should tell my parents of the part I played in their daughter’s tragic demise.  But what could I have said?  That I had chosen to ignore a warning I myself had failed to fully comprehend?  That I should somehow have foreseen my sister’s death and thus prevented it?  So it was that my confession remained unspoken until, albeit unintentionally, my father released me partly from my guilt.

Some months had passed since the funeral and we were out digging potato drills while the earth was still soft enough for spade and graip to take unchallenged.  I noticed that the soil was changing in tone from a rich syrupy brown to pale honey every few yards and I remarked on it to my father.  He seemed to chew the thought over carefully before making a reply, as though considering whether I was old enough yet to appreciate the value of his words.

            “Do you believe the stories they tell about this field son?” he asked, an elbow leaning against the hilt of the spade as he paused in order to demand my full attention. I was wondering what his question had to do with the shifting hues of the soil.

            “No father,” I said, not knowing what else to say and unwilling anyway to tell the truth.

            “This is the chapel field,” he went on.

            “Yes, I know that but there isn’t a chapel.”

            “No son, but there used to be and long ago they say there was a graveyard here, right under our feet.  In the places where the soil changes colour is the mark of a grave if you’re inclined to believe it and that’s where the stories have sprung up.  They think we’ve built our house upon hallowed ground and disturbed the resting place of the dead.”  He offered this like a teacher explaining some fundamental truth to an uninformed child, giving little hint of his own beliefs in the telling of it, but still I needed to know more.

            “Do you believe it then father?” I asked, “That there are ghosts here?”

            He stooped suddenly and scraped a handful of soil from one of the drills letting the earth trickle through his blunt fingers before saying, “I believe that we can all give something back even in death.” He drew the remaining soil to his nostrils and breathed it in deeply, adding, “Even if it’s just to feed a row of mangy old spuds.”

 I knew that he was thinking of my sister buried on consecrated ground behind the village church and it seemed odd that he should find solace in the thought of worms feeding from her corpse.  Perhaps I was too young after all to recognise my father’s wisdom and learn from his words but I was old enough to know that he had still evaded answering my question.  

“And the ghosts?” I pressed, “Are they alive?  Can they come back to punish us and haunt us from the dead?”

“If they think they have just cause for doing so, then yes,” he said, “perhaps they do exist.  But your sister is at peace now son and you don’t need to fear any ghost of hers.” I could see that he misunderstood my meaning and was tempted to let it lie, for after all what purpose would it serve to burden him with childhood fantasies such as mine?  Though stronger was my need for him to understand the inconceivable; my conviction that something within me had attracted the spirits of the dead which in turn had resulted in my sister’s death.

“Father,” I began but it was useless; the words restricted by a terrible tightening within my chest that suddenly precluded speech.  Yet he himself appeared unseeing to my pain, the space between us having succumbed to a force so bizarre that I alone could realise its significance and know then with sickening certainty that my father’s fate, like my sister’s before him, had already been sealed. 

Within a year he was dead, felled by a massive heart attack whilst digging turf on the high bog not a mile from his beloved home.  My mother had sent me out with tea and farls to dampen the hunger of his labours but his soul had already flown when I arrived where he fell, his big hand still clutching defiantly onto the butt of the spade.  There was no surprise in it.  I had known of course it was inevitable and with equal conviction recognised the futility of my preventing it. For an impotence was seeping through my bones and with it the spirits of the dead whose graves, I was convinced, we had unwittingly defiled.

            I began to notice other things too.  A bird with a broken wing found some days after I sensed a baffling ache in my arm, or a sightless rabbit, eyes sticky with some deadly virus discovered only weeks following an infection in my own eyes.  Coincidence perhaps, but such incidents and many other more besides began to torture me because I could do nothing to assuage the victim’s pain and halt their ultimate deaths. And all the while inside our soulless house my mother slowly shrank indifferently into grief, cocooned within some grim and tragic wasteland of her own until the day I saved her soul by sending her away.

            So I came to accept the fate that had been chosen for me; the Acre had become my nemesis where no living thing was destined to survive its retribution, save for me.  Each blade of grass, each leaf, each tiny insect vanished over time, sucked inexorably into the blackened sterility of the land.  I was afraid to stay.  Afraid to stay yet more terrified to leave because I knew the thing I feared the most would always hold me to the land; the thought that I might carry the curse along with me, blighting those outside. 

            Now with each passing day I wait and yearn for death. The final reckoning it seems is yet to come but only when the Acre claims its ultimate reward and frees me from its spell.  I dream these days of golden celandine in bloom and buzzards circling overhead, or blackened earth becoming softened to a brownish hue once more.  For at my journey’s end and I am gone, the land I’ve loved will surely breathe again and underneath this hallowed ground the souls of the disturbed must find some rest. Yes, I am ready now to pay the price.  So therefore let it be.

Lynda Tavakoli lives in County Down, Northern Ireland, where she facilitates an adult creative writing class and is a tutor for the Seamus Heaney Award for schools.  A poet, novelist and freelance journalist, Lynda’s writings have been published in the UK, Ireland, the US and the Middle East, with Farsi and Spanish translations.

Lynda has been winner of both poetry and short story prizes in Listowel, The Westival International Poetry Prize and runner-up in The Blackwater International Poetry Competition and Roscommon Poetry Competition. Her poems have also appeared in The Irish Times, New Irish Writing.

She was recently a guest poet on RTE1 The Poetry Programme and her poem, ‘You’re Beautiful’, was featured in the ‘Words Lightly Spoken’ podcast.

Her debut poetry collection, ‘The Boiling Point for Jam’ is published by Arlen House and includes these three poems which concern the plight of refugees, a subject that has sadly been forgotten about recently.