Another Man’s Castle

by Kelly S. Hossaini

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
parts 1, 2, 3

conclusion

After six weeks in the hospital, Daniel was discharged and, Mr. Hembrey’s ghost notwithstanding, happy to be back in the house on his farm. His farmhands had kept the place running just fine, and his parents made sure that bills got paid. No one reported any ghost sightings to Daniel. Perhaps, thought Daniel, Mr. Hembrey was satisfied that he had tortured Daniel enough. Maybe, but Daniel couldn’t make himself believe that.

Over the next couple of weeks, life on the farm was uneventful. While Daniel was in the hospital, and to surprise him upon his return to the farm, his parents took the opportunity to plant pumpkins, zucchini, and other squashes in the two-acre piece next to the barn. The plants were thriving and full of blossoms, promising a bountiful harvest in September.

Neighbors stopped by with regularity to drop off food and help with any number of tasks, including mowing the lawns and watering the garden. Daniel felt blessed to live with so much support from so many. Farmers took care of each other.

One day, Daniel asked Jose to help him make an inventory of the shelves in the shop. He wanted to start economizing a bit. If he knew what he actually had, he wouldn’t have to make so many trips to the hardware and auto parts stores. Daniel took the lower shelves and Jose climbed the ladder to reach the upper shelves. As Daniel poked among the mask filters, belt sanders, and screwdriver sets, Jose came down the ladder with a medium-sized cardboard box with no lid. Jose handed it to Daniel with a shrug and then climbed the ladder again.

Daniel looked into the box and saw dozens, perhaps even a couple of hundred, neatly organized small notebooks, the kind a man would keep in his shirt pocket with a pen in case he needed to write something down on the fly.

As Daniel picked through them, he saw that they were filled with the mundane. There were dates different areas of the orchard had been sprayed to control for fungal disease or damaging insects, and dates that trucks and tractors had their oil changed. There were lists of items to buy at the hardware store or the feed store. All of the notebooks were filled with Mr. Hembrey’s large, blocky print. Sometimes the notes were in blank ink, and sometimes it was clear that they were taken with a carpenter’s pencil, which Mr. Hembrey likely sharpened with a pen knife.

When he and Jose were done with the inventory work, Daniel took the box back to the house and set it on the office desk. Although he couldn’t explain why, after Daniel’s parents went to bed, he felt compelled to look further at the contents of the box. From his cursory review earlier that day, he had no reason to believe that there was anything in the notebooks beyond the workaday records that he had seen.

As far as Daniel could tell, the little notebooks did not contain Mr. Hembrey’s reflections on the meaning of life or big thoughts on big questions. They were simply there to capture the daily fabric of Mr. Hembrey’s life. On the other hand, anything that could help Daniel understand Mr. Hembrey would be worth knowing.

Daniel flipped through a few notebooks toward the bottom of the box: nothing different there. Then he decided to see if he could find the most recent ones. This wasn’t too difficult as he had already discovered that the notebooks were more or less in chronological order. Daniel chose one that he suspected might have been close to the last year of Mr. Hembrey’s life. Opening it, he saw that he was right.

Now, instead of documenting the need for a particular set of spark plugs or batteries for the flashlights, Mr. Hembrey was keeping track of doctor appointments and chemotherapy treatments. It was all there, set out as meticulously as the more benign farm notes. No commentary, no editorializing, just a simple listing of facts and events, as if the writer’s feelings about any of it were immaterial. That is, until the last six months of Mr. Hembrey’s life.

Partway through one of the last notebooks, Daniel noticed a flash of red as he began to flip through it. Instead of the black pen or carpenter’s pencil, Mr. Hembrey had begun to trace out his blocky scrawl with a red pen. The writing itself looked angry.

“Where am I supposed to go? There is nowhere else. They can’t make me go!” This in red ink. And then, further down, in pencil: “September 2, 2:40 pm oncologist. Be there 15 minutes early. Hillsboro office.” And then, in pencil again: “Rocker cover gasket for grey tractor. Air filter for green Cat.” After a few pages, however, the red ink returned. “I will not sell! If I see that bastard up here again, I’ll shoot him. Nervy bastards!”

The last couple of notebooks were filled completely with red pen and angry declarations of the same variety. Mr. Hembrey also made it clear that he was living for the day that he would feel well enough to set the orchard on fire and then the barn and then the shop. If the orchard wouldn’t burn, he’d poison it. He had built everything and he wasn’t going to leave it for someone else.

By the last notebook, every page was filled with the same words, now all in capital letters: “I WILL NOT LEAVE! I WILL NOT LEAVE! I WILL NOT LEAVE!” There were even stab marks on some of the pages, likely from the pen, as the marks were often accompanied by red splotches.

Daniel shuddered and dropped the last notebook in the box. He didn’t ever want to see any of this again. He took the box out to the burn barrel next to the shop and set the box and notebooks on fire. As he watched it all burn in the dark, he felt cold again, like he did the night that Mr. Hembrey tried to choke him.

Daniel quickly looked around him but saw nothing. He then poured water on the charred remains in the burn barrel — no sense in giving Mr. Hembrey an opportunity to burn the place down — and went back to the house.

* * *

As the days grew consistently colder and Daniel’s parents decided that their return to California was imminent, Daniel planned a dinner to thank his parents, neighbors, and employees for helping him during his recovery. Daniel and his parents prepared a special menu featuring the vegetables from the two-acre garden. Along with six roast chickens, Daniel himself made several pans of baked butternut squash pasta. For dessert, his father made several loaves of zucchini bread, and his mother made five pumpkin pies. Of course, there were also plentiful hazelnuts from that year’s harvest.

Everyone enjoyed the feast, at least at first. Within hours, however, the first guest became quite ill, and soon most of the others, including Daniel and his parents, also suffered some level of intestinal disturbance.

As Daniel kept close to the bathroom that night, he seethed through the bouts of nausea that gripped him. “You sonofabitch,” he said over and over, “goddamned sonofabitch. Happy now? What are you really accomplishing? Damn dog in a manger. Insane asshole.” An observer might have thought Daniel delirious. Who was he talking to? But Daniel was as lucid as he had ever been. He knew who he was talking to.

Thankfully, all of those who ate the dinner recovered. Even so, Daniel couldn’t fight the dreadful feeling that there might be something more serious going on, especially given the persistency of his spectral adversary and, if he was right, it could affect his hazelnuts, thereby putting him at huge financial and legal risk.

Reluctantly, Daniel made an appointment with the State Department of Agriculture for testing. When the testing was completed, the man from the State had all kinds of bad news. First, the vegetables tested positive for high levels of cucurbitacins, which is a natural toxin, the man explained, and causes toxic squash syndrome. The man from the State couldn’t say exactly why Daniel’s squash had it, the man didn’t find any helpful clues in his investigation, but the toxin was there all the same.

Second, and worse, soil samples turned up alarmingly high levels of arsenic, lead, and cadmium in the farm soils. “These elements are naturally occurring in the soil, too,” the man from the State explained, “but your levels are off the chart. You’d think you had a mining operation going on here. We’ll need to test your hazelnuts next, but my guess would be that they’re toxic, too. I’m sorry to have to give you all this bad news. It’s a real mystery, frankly.”

But it wasn’t a mystery to Daniel. It was no mystery at all. Mr. Hembrey had won.

* * *

Several days later, Daniel laid off his workers. As he was loading possessions into his truck, was surprised at how hollow he felt. He knew that continuing to fuel his anger was pointless, especially since anger had doomed Mr. Hembrey.

And, yes, Daniel believed that Mr. Hembrey was doomed. The old man could now spend all eternity haunting his contaminated kingdom, scaring others away, estranged from both his ancestors and the family he had known as they, too, passed into the next realm.

Daniel hadn’t given it much thought up to this point, but decided that he could buy into an afterlife that included at least that: old Mr. Hembrey having given up everything, even in death, just to hold on to some tiny spot of dirt on a small planet in a vast universe.

As it turned out, Daniel was eventually afforded the opportunity for some revenge and accepted that opportunity without much moral quibbling. It was a simple fact that he needed to sell the property and make at least enough from the sale to pay off the mortgage. It was also a simple fact that there weren’t a lot of buyers for contaminated farm property.

Eventually, Monty Pike managed to find Daniel the one buyer who would cover the outstanding mortgage. Under the circumstances, it didn’t hurt that the buyer was VanderZanden Aggregates, which would mine the property for gravel.

Over time, the once beautiful property would become nothing more than a giant, ugly, brown gash on the landscape, and every transient thing Mr. Hembrey had built upon its surface would be obliterated: the house, the shop with its tidy shelves, the implement shed, the neat rows of hazelnut trees, and that nice, flat two-acre piece next to the barn that was perfect for growing fall vegetables. It would be as if Mr. Hembrey had never existed.

Daniel couldn’t deny that there was at least a little satisfaction in that. “Enjoy your eternity, asshole.”