Fallow Ground

by Jon Fain

James and Yvonne have a son, almost as old as their relationship. James likes to believe that the resulting marriage ceremony had been as much his idea as Yvonne’s, but he doesn’t like to remember it in detail. His mother smiled, either genuinely happy, or in shock that he was marrying a woman four years older, who happened to be black. As for Yvonne’s family, they seemed to take his white skin as an insult.

While there are divisions of family at every wedding, how often is it so colorfully pronounced? Love can be — for all its power — ephemeral, shifting, hard-to-grasp. With even their own relatives against them, James wondered if their feelings were strong enough. At the reception, he felt at siege.

Fourteen years later, Yvonne’s parents are gone, his father as well. James’s mother has remarried, and is living in Florida. They exchange cards every year, at the holidays. She sends her only grandchild two checks every year, the larger one arriving at Christmas. Yvonne has a brother. He hasn’t been heard from since the wedding.

And so what James and Yvonne have is their son, Robert, but known as Bobby, as he prefers. James, at the time of his child’s birth, had been wishing for a girl, not sure of the reasons. As it was, in the delivery room, among the new-born of others, lay his own miracle, a quiet, pinch-faced bundle in the middle of the spectrum, as if, at conception, a prism had broken the banding of the genes, to spread a cool light tan over his body.

Bobby sits now in the back seat, and James glances up into the rearview mirror, to try and make eye contact, but as usual his son is ensconced in his phone.

“Did you see the cows back there?” Yvonne asks, half-turned in the maroon bucket seat. Her gold bracelets reflect the autumn sun.

“Clouds?” Bobby looks out the window. The sky could not be a more satisfied blue.

They are in the country to look for a pumpkin. Bobby wants the biggest. Yvonne is interested in the hunt as an adventure, has kept up a running narrative as they have searched: the scenery, passing cars, people inside them. James drives and remembers the large man in the plaid shirt, in the diner where they stopped for lunch. He plays with the dashboard controls, turning down the sound of the music, adjusting the heat.

“We were overdressed for that place,” he says, meaning fashion, but feeling hot and flushed instead.

“Is that what’s bothering you?” Yvonne asks.

“You and Mom were,” says Bobby, “not me.”

“Everyone was looking at you anyway,” James says without thinking, but doesn’t mean everyone of course. In the mirror, at last, he and his boy exchange looks.

“That isn’t very nice,” Yvonne remarks, “even though he was rather rude, with his elbows on the table, ignoring his poor parents with that phone.”

“You mean that fat cracker at the counter,” Bobby says.

James looks away, pretending to focus on driving. He wants to laugh at the word Bobby has used to describe the man. Instead, when he has finished shifting gears, he places his hand lightly on his wife’s leg.

Yvonne points. “There’s a place up ahead.”

At the front there is a large hill of pumpkins. The gravel lot is filled with cars parked at odd angles. Once out of their car, he and Bobby approach the pumpkins like pilgrims finally arrived at their goal. An elderly couple gives them room. Yvonne enters the garage-like building to look at gourds, root vegetables and the like.

Bobby chooses one immediately, a large, perfectly formed monster. James nods, and the boy surprises him, lifts it easily up from the rest. Yvonne has promised to pay for her son’s choice, and Bobby carries it over to her. James watches his wife as she talks with the girl at the cash register. She puts her arm around Bobby, introduces him as he puts down the pumpkin to be priced.

James walks past the stored bins of harvest produce. Back at his car, he decides to check the oil. Does anyone else do this themselves anymore? Certainly farmers do. He wipes and reads the dipstick, drops the hood, and looks out at the barren field that stretches out towards the horizon.

He wonders what a person’s life would be like if they got a chance at it again with such regularity. If they could plow it under every year, then have a while to plan, at leisure, a new crop. Would they simply do it all the same? Worry through the bad times, exult through the good, again and again? Or would they try something different, make drastic changes, hoping this time for the perfect crop, the perfect life, no problems, lush and thriving?

Besides the pumpkin, Yvonne has bought an apple pie and a package of figs. Bobby brings the pumpkin into the back with him, using it as an armrest. The figs are from California. Yvonne directs the passing of them, back and forth.

The smell of pumpkin reminds James of Halloweens past.

“You going to wear that skeleton suit this year?”

His son doesn’t respond, but Yvonne says, “James, you know how long ago that was?”

He doesn’t exactly, can remember only the costume itself. The plastic skull mask, the white bones painted on the black rayon of the suit.

“I’m too old for trick or treat, Dad.” Bobby’s voice cracks, pitches higher; James remembers his own father’s sexual advice, and wonders whether he will do any better when his time comes. Perhaps he is already too late. Plowed under again.

There are antique stores to go to, another meal in a restaurant, without incident this time, either real or imagined. They are the typical family on their Sunday outing. Does any other family do this anymore? As usual, part of his love, his admiration for Yvonne comes from her easy way with people, whether farm stand cashier, shop owner, or waitress. She is a large woman, expressive and articulate. She senses what is proper in dealing with people, a talent he doesn’t have. She is able to give them what they want, like a smooth politician.

She is the perfect stranger, he thinks.

On the way home, after dark, the work and school weeks hanging in front of them, they pull into a gas station. Yvonne, still searching adventure, goes off to find the ladies’ room. Behind him, Bobby lowers his window.

“How’s school?” James has tried to sound as if they are in the midst of conversation. “Don’t get a chance to see you that much, now that — ”

“Being team manager keeps me busy,” says Bobby.

James realizes that the job of collecting towels and rotating fresh footballs into practice sessions means a lot to his son. He wonders though, if he is picked on, the subject of jokes, pranks. He knows enough about sports to know Bobby’s choice of extra-curricular activity is not a glorious one, and choosing it is an act requiring a modicum of teenage courage.

“How have they been treating you?”

“What?” Bobby has dipped back to his phone.

James is unsure himself; at least, not sure he wants his thoughts and conclusions confirmed.

“Has ever… has anyone said anything to you?”

“About what?”

“Well it’s a new school, and sometimes kids tease. Do they say things?”

“What things?”

“They don’t … there aren’t many blacks out here.”

“I’ve made some friends,” Bobby says.

James’ imagination has leapt ahead of what his son was going to say. He’s suspected that the boy has been unhappy since their recent move out of the city to their new home, preoccupied by something or battling something, some crisis, and has been for some days now.

“Do they tease you?” but that isn’t the right word. “Has anyone done anything?” He stops himself from adding, yet.

“It’s not like when you and Mom were growing up. It’s not cool to be racist. Kids are more open these days, and we grow up faster and can handle it.”

James decides not to say anything.

Yvonne opens her side of the car and slides in. She smiles, pleased with imagined male conspiracies that were being discussed while she was gone. The car is new, and comes to life at the first twist of the key. James embraces the security he gets from the machine.

That night at home, Bobby is down the hallway. Their bedroom door is closed as well. To James, it is yet another reminder of the barriers that separates him and his son.

“I’ve been talking with Lewis,” Yvonne says.

Out of the shower, she has three towels with her; a large one around her body, one wrapped turban-like around her head, another in her hands. Beaded water remains across her shoulders, having somehow eluded her touch.

“Lewis? Your brother?”

“He’s invited Bobby to spend Thanksgiving with him.”

“Your brother? What for? What, all of a sudden he calls after… how many years has it been?”

“It hasn’t been that long.”

Yvonne has a way of lifting her top lip, pulling it tight, guarding her upper teeth. James knows her so well; that she does it when she feels defensive, unsure that he is going to accept what she is about to say. He had noticed the same quirk, the family trait, in her father, the two times they had met.

“I didn’t tell you because — ”

“You didn’t tell me? Tell me what?”

She towels her head, as if shaking off the anger that has come into his voice.

“That he and I have been talking again.”

There is, once more, the hint of conspiracy. That those close to him — those few — hold secrets. He remembers Lewis’s outburst at the wedding, which made James feel guilty, guilty of the love he felt for the woman he so hoped was in love with him.

“I just think he should start seeing the other part of his family.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think it’s obvious. Especially now that we’re living here, in this town, mostly, entirely white… That he needs to see another part — ”

“What are you talking about! I have no brother… my family… we don’t have any family! Just us! Don’t you see it? We’re alone!”

“I have a family,” Yvonne says, so calmly he is immediately contrite. “My brother and his family. His wife, Bobby’s cousins. And they’ve invited him to Atlanta for Thanksgiving.”

She looks at him in a way that makes it seem as though it is the first time they have seen each other in a long time.

“And I think he should go. We talked about it. He wants to go.”

In the wide, brightly-lighted mirror in their bathroom, James wipes away the lingering steam from Yvonne’s shower to look at his reflection. Although Bobby usually uses headphones, he hears his son’s music as it pulses through the small upstairs of the house, the volume turned up, in spite of the late hour.

James completes the necessary functions, takes his time, finding himself comforted by familiar ritual.

As he pauses in his darkened bedroom to consider the music, it is suddenly gone, headphones back on, or shut off. Yvonne seems to be already asleep. James, wide awake, goes to bed, and listens carefully.

He tries to match his breathing with hers, but he is unable to slow down, unable to catch up.

Originally published in Little Death Lit, Issue 6, Spring, June 2021