Grayfield South (1) 01. I received your letter. Tonight, at midnight, I will fulfill your request. Of course, the fence outside prevents me from ever reaching you. I wrote a last letter to my parents that won’t be sent. They don’t visit me. They never understood me quite like you did. I doubt they ever will. We cannot choose them, our families. I think that was my biggest mistake. If I had to do it over again, I would have held you and told you everything would be all right, even if it was the greatest lie of our lives, I still would have told it. I say to my mother that I am leaving. She asks me where I am going. I am going to get away--To my favorite seat in the corner where I can watch and observe but on this day, it is crowded. All of the tables are filled except one . . . So, I ask him if I can sit down next to him. He politely says yes. And those eyes. Those brown eyes. They beg me not to move away. I turn away. Books. Miles and miles, rows and rows of endless books that moves up and down the library walls like a fisherman moving on a dock to catch bait. I turn back. It does not seem like it is going to happen, and then it does. An open table becomes available, and neither one of us moves. I am stiff and he transforms the image I have of myself. I no longer see the Medusa in front of me. I no longer see the serpents that are spitting venom in my cup, swirling around like a pipe player in paradise. I turn away again. A painting. In front of me. The serpent’s eyes. Art is surrounded by an empty universe of coffee drinkers who ignore its beauty until I bumped into it. Hi. Hi. Isn’t it hideous? No. It’s art. I don’t believe art is supposed to be hideous. Well, I do. There are no other seats in here. Can I sit here with you? Sure. I’m Sterling and you are? Gray. Grayfield South. That’s an unusual name. I’ll bet you’ve never met anyone quite like me. I don’t know. Time will tell. What’s in a name, right? Exactly. Twelve months later . . . 02. I got a rough start off in life. I never really knew my father. So, I took all of that aggression and put it into boxing. I kept hoping that if I could make it as a boxer, he might come back. I started off in minor boxing matches, sometimes fighting for my life, other times fighting for enough money for a motel room, a girl and a chicken dinner with a bottle of Hennessey. But no matter how many fights I won or lost, he never came. The more I expected him, the more I was disappointed and the more I began to lose more fights than I won. So, I quit. Got disillusioned. Took a job in a factory. Married Sunny because she was the emergency room nurse who stitched up my nose after I almost got killed in a shady Twelfth Street match with a German. I just didn’t want to be alone but now I am alone again. We are all alone in some way. My family is full of them—lonely people. We moved to Detroit from Georgia when I was a little boy. The house we lived in was perfect. One family lived up, the other family lived down. We were always surrounded by people but my ma hated it. She thought our family better than that, above that. She thought her newness made her different. But there ain’t no camels on our backs, I overheard one of my uncles say. In other words, we should be so grateful. It was cheaper to pack us all in the house like a deck of cards, one on top of the other. But those people drank and smoked themselves to death before Gray came. By the time she came around, I wasn’t close enough to the ones that were left and Sunny’s family hated me so they kept their distance. And then there was Sunny. I never wanted kids. I raised eight brothers and sisters, half of whom were dead by the time I was grown and I wasn’t looking for a family. Sunny and I didn’t date but two months before she became pregnant and we got married. I wasn’t optimistic in those days and she knew that Jack had caused me problems. I couldn’t help it, though. I loved liquor. I even put it in my bathtub like they used to do in the old days and on my wounds and hell, even in my food. It aged me but I didn’t care. It made me fight with my wife and pushed her away from me. After Gray was gone, I saw no need to stay there anymore. We had nothing in common. I saw then and understood why my father left. Two fighters don’t belong in the same house. Besides, there were too many fences that needed repairing. I received a letter not too long after that from Sunny. She was getting her tubes tied. Me, I didn’t care. Wherever my sperm landed, I didn’t plan on being around long enough to find out where it landed. Jack sent me to jail, where they made me repair the very fences I tried to break from. They said I could mend fences or write letters to Sunny. In jail, I mended wire fences but outside, I mended wooden fences. I liked those better. For one, I could be alone. Two, they didn’t tear up my hands. I knew they might need repair at some point and I needed to know that I was going to come back some day to fix them again and again. 03. I was born to Claudia “Sunny” and Souder South. As a child, I hated being named Grayfield. It was so unusual. But my mother and father were traveling when she was pregnant with me; they were traveling on the highway, coming back to Michigan from Ohio when the car got a flat tire on the road. They pulled off the main road. My mother saw a beautiful lake behind a fence in the field. She wanted to take a swim and got out of the car. At first, my father thought she was losing it but he said there was such beauty in that field so the story goes. She apparently took all of her clothes off and went swimming in the lake. She swam under the water and when she came up, I was born between her legs, just under the water on a gray, rainy day in a field just south of the highway. When I was eight years old, I was playing downstairs in the basement of our house. I was having a tea party with my stuffed animals. I could hear my parents upstairs arguing. My mother came downstairs screaming. She had my little brother in her arms. I remember her hair was in a beehive. I remember the Tigers had won the World Series. Her pink dress was covered with a brown liquor stain. Her red lipstick was smeared across her face and I could not tell the difference between her mouth and the blood and mascara caked on her. She held this brown bundle wrapped in a white blanket. My father was right behind her. He had her cornered in the basement. I saw him with a bottle of bourbon in his hands. She wanted me to call my grandfather, who was alive at the time but when I headed toward the telephone, my father stopped me. He slapped me across the face so hard that I was knocked back into my chest. I think that was the day I developed asthma. She kept telling me the numbers but my father told me not to move so I didn’t. The crying was too much for me so I closed my eyes and pretended she was singing. The louder she sang, the happier I felt. The next day, she was in the kitchen like normal. I had just arrived home from school. The school bus had dropped me off in front of the house. I was in my snowsuit. I wanted to come in, make myself a snack and head outdoors to play. She has a beautiful face like an art teacher. She is making dinner but there are tears running down her face. Then, I realize she usually is not home so early. I ask what’s wrong. She says that she is mad at me. Why, I ask her out loud. My mother says because I did not call my grandfather yesterday. I ask her if I can have my snack and she says no. It was then that I realized that there was a part of myself that needed to be free. I walked away from her, hearing her sing. Her voice was not too bad; the song was not too loud. I stopped playing with dolls that day. They reminded me of myself: I screamed at them and they said nothing. I ran off and they didn’t chase after me. I threw those dolls away, over our back fence where they laid next to crushed leaves, whose soft dirt slowly decomposed them. 04. I wrote a letter to you but I will never mail another one because I never heard back from you. I receive dozens of letters from people across the country. I have even received pictures of you, me, Gray, her home and the backyard where it happened. How did it all happen? That’s what my friend sitting across from me had asked me. What is her name again? Her name is Greyfield South. I met her in the city. Greyfield? What kind of name is that? Where is she from? She was named after a place. Where she was born. In a field. It’s weird but I don’t care. Oh, yeah. What does she look like? Is she pretty? I know she’s a brunette, right? Yeah. Oh, and what colors are her eyes? Are her eyes blue, gray? They’re brown, or black. What’s wrong with you? You’re not acting like yourself. I’m in love with this girl, she’s beautiful, but . . . But what? If my parents find out . . . So, you won’t tell. Right. But that didn’t change things. I lived in two different worlds. At home, we ate what everyone else ate. I longed for something other than being like everyone else. Everyone had school had predictable names and faces. Mine, the most predictable of them all. Once, I had seen these two people on television kissing. One of them looked like me and the other looked like Gray. My parents were in the kitchen and my mother turned off the television in disgust. She shook her head but never said anything. In public, she acted the same way. My entire family did. Lies. We were living the American Dream. We drove the nicest cars, we always wore the nicest clothes and yet, we ate dinner in silence. I told her not to call me. I called her, though. When my mother received the phone bill, I just told her that one of my friends, from one of my classes, lived in the city. She assumed this friend was male and I let her keep that assumption. I moved through my life as restrained and reserved as I was expected. I knew when Gray told me what she had done that there was no turning back. I had blood on my hands and I wasn’t even there. I lived in a near-perfect world where too much was expected of me and now I was colliding with her dysfunctional world. I think we both realized then that we had gone too far. I told one of my buddies, Aaron, a little bit about Gray. He said to leave it alone but I didn’t listen. I had previously worked as a camp counselor. I had told my kids that they would never have to worry about trouble and soon, I was sure, they would see my face on television and know that I was wrong. 05. I look out the window. The snow is falling on the ground. I always seem to reflect the most when there is whiteness in front of me. I am a wanderer of my mind. The only visitor who is brave enough to swim through the vultures is the homeless woman I befriended. She warned me over a cup of tea about all of this but I didn’t listen, not then. His name is Sterling White, and I met him at a coffeehouse. Sterling? What kind of name is that? Who are his people? His name is Sterling like my name is Greyfield. It’s part of him. It’s his story. Why are you looking at me like that? Cause I know you, and I know somethin’s up. I can feel it. Your number came up today. What did my number say? It said you are playing a game you are going to lose. Where does this boy live? He lives on the other side of Eight Mile. Outside the city? Yes. That’s not a good sign. Why? Because your number came up. So? Your number wasn’t eight. I don’t care. Well, care about this. I see something else. (Under the tree where the leaves fall.) What? A young woman, she is free, was born in a field. She was born when every ray of the sun extended its arms to welcome her here. She has eyes that feel like the wind, burning down fences across fields until there is nothing left but land. And? (More coffee, please. Thank you.) She thinks her duty as a daughter is to stand behind that fence while her father holds it up. She dare not cross that fence. She doesn’t want to know what’s on the other side. What is on the other side? She goes on the other side and there is a mirror. She stands in front of the mirror. The Medusa image is shattered. The snakes fall on the ground and wither away but she realizes that she will not look at herself. If she sees her face, she will surely turn to stone. So, what does she do? That I cannot see. That is up to you, my dear. I have not told anyone what I am feeling inside. When we are born, we are alone. There is no else who is naked except us. Our bodies need the touch of others in order to survive. I should have listened to that woman. She could see the real me. I wanted out of this body that I am in. She said that I had to wait and be patient. I thought I was going to be trapped. I listened to my mother because I didn’t love it and I didn’t want it. 06. The other day, my daughter came home and told me that she was going out with this guy. I had warned her before. I told her that it was going to cause a lot of problems. She even brought him home. My wife had all of us take a picture and he looked awkward.
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