Dad Set Fire To A Field

This is what happened.

Sometime after summer, my Dad set fire to a field. He set fire to the stubble field behind the barn, where the sun goes down.

It must’ve been cold, with Mum shouting at Dad to stop being bloody stubborn, because the people from the bank had big coats on. When the fire caught hold, at the open edge of the barn, where the gap opened in the metal sides, it grabbed hold and went up.

No one could stop it, it just exploded.

I drink.

Given up trying to think about it.

It’s not what happened, it’s the order of things. Maybe it’s different than you remember but. Only some bits stick in your head. It’s too difficult to get to the stuff that doesn’t, so.

I drink.

Even though it’s getting cold, and I should be getting home, and the drink isn’t warming me, I want to watch the sunset.

Today I need to.

The windows mist up. I turn the engine over, rev it some more, turn the blowers on. Some things trigger it worse, and today is always bad. A smell or a siren, the gaps you don’t fill. I wait for the heat to settle and get comfortable, wipe the car window, raise a plastic cup.

Watch the sun going down in the West.

-

I’ve got memories of them telling us. That morning, all of us sitting around the table, Dad was cleaned and scrubbed fresh, stinking of soap. Soap and Dad were occasional things so we smelt the soap and knew straight away something was wrong.

We were in the kitchen but Mum wasn’t making anything to eat. There was Dad, my brother Dave and my sister Yvonne. Dave was five years older than me. Yvonne was older too, but I was bigger than her and with only 18 months in it, I saw us as equals.

When they told us, Dad choked, couldn’t speak, Mum finished speaking for him. Told us it was very sad but for the best. Everything was going to be OK. Dad gripped Mum’s hand, and her hand went white. She did what she could to smile and gripped his hand back. ‘It’s for the best. It’s for the best.’ and ‘It’ll be Ok.’

One of the favourite things me and my sister Yvonne loved doing was taking our wellies off and squelching our bare feet in the mud that slimed out from underneath the carrot washer. It smelt pretty bad but the mud was fine, because of the way the washer filtered out all the rough bits so stepping in it felt like you’d imagine the mud baths you saw on the tele must be. There was this TV show, where a woman travelled the world staying in hotels and doing stuff like mud baths and boat rides, which seemed like the perfect way to make a living. I told my dad I was going to travel the world living in hotels when I was older. Make a job of it.

He laughed. Said something to my brother. My brother laughed as well.

Another time me and Yvonne, we are hiding under the bed in her room, whispering about mud baths and travelling the world, when the doorbell goes and we hear Mum and Dad arguing, and then we heard the Policeman asking Dad to stop the fire and Dad just laughed, said.

You forget what was said. The order of things. I mean.

I’ve tried. To remember.

I’ve asked Yvonne. She lives up in the Borders now, with her husband from Edinburgh. Stockbroker type. She moved out as soon as she could. I tried asking her, the way it happened, in between talking about the kids and Christmas but I guess we don’t know how to approach it or fill in the gaps.

I asked my mum that night when she put me in bed, before she switched the light off, ‘What did Dad say to my brother Dave?

Mum looked flustered. ‘He said you’ve not got the bits for it.’

‘Bits?’

‘Bits.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You’ll learn,’ she said. ‘Get some sleep.’

-

The police cars arriving is another thing I can’t wipe from my mind no matter how much I do.

Mum shouting at Dad ‘You’ve stopped the bloody traffic Alan.’

It was the smoke from the field. Every year, he’d burn the stubble off and the smoke spread and drift along the treeline, then fall into the gap and fog up the motorway. In the blackness of smoke, you’d hear cars at a standstill alongside the top field, engines running, fumes adding to the smoke adding to the fumes, which always seemed to annoy the Police and it really annoyed my Mum too. Dad never seemed to care. He just shrugged. ‘Once it’s got going all you can do is let it burn’ he said. ‘It’ll stop, eventually.’

Seeing the Police arrive at the farm, and seeing the smoke, got so usual, it’s burnt in my head. I got a memory of the police even if I don’t know when they turned up or what they said. Or how long they stayed. I just remember the radios and the static and the hats on the table. The hats on the table next to the mugs of tea. And the crying, and the sad looks and the wailing. And just the taste of it all.

For what it’s worth, I loved my big brother Dave. He was the best. He was going to join the army when he left school and would have been the toughest soldier there. No-one worked as hard as him. When the people from the bank arrived, he must have been watching them when Dad walked off to the top of the stubble field to set it alight. Dave worked his summers on the farm, knew the place as well as anyone I’d say. When the bank people arrived to hang labels on things and liquidate the assets, which even today still sounds odd, he was there, watching. At night, Dave would tell me about the grain stores, about how much hay we had, show me pellets from the barn owl nesting above the grain stack, but what did I care? I wanted to watch cartoons on the tele, I didn’t want to work every hour God sent like they did. Dave kept the owl pellets in the chest freezer and I opened one years later. Still there, sealed in tinfoil. I wondered about the owl, wondered if it got lucky that day? I don’t remember seeing it again, although things are a little confused from back then. I remember the pellets frozen holding mouse bones, fragmented carbon in ice.

When I try and get to sleep some nights, I remember Dad saying to my Mum ‘You can’t put it out. You can’t stop it’ and the men from the Bank ran to move their cars and the fire engines came with the sirens and tyres squealing and the flames mauling the barn and the paint just kind of flaked and hissed and Mum was shouting ‘The hay, the hay,’ and Dad said ‘The bloody fuel’ and I knew it was bad when Mum started shrieking and the barn exploded and Dad had to stop her running into the fire and he held her back, kept saying ‘You can’t stop it, you can’t stop it. He’s gone.’