by Peter Camilleri (Directed by Heinz Insu Fenkl)
Cantaloupe Kingdom is the manuscript of a novel in progress. The piece is concerned with the intersection of history, religion, and identity, and represents the intersection of those contemporary forces through the opposition of non-binary identity and conventional language usage.
The protagonist, Peony, is a non-binary woman who lives on an organic vegetable farm in the town of Lloyd, NY. Peony’s roommate, Maurice, is a young farmer and singer who serves to antipode the vulnerability through which Peony expresses reality. Both characters live under the roof of the farm’s owner, Anselmo, through whom the issues of generational trauma, worker rights, and environmental negligence is illustrated.
The subtext of the manuscript evokes a resonance with a religious community established on that same farmland in 1800. Pilgrims set out from Litchfield, Connecticut in search of the Public Universal Friend—a non-binary, predominantly Quaker preacher who had established a religious settlement by the Finger Lakes in Penn Yan, NY—but instead, the pilgrims purchased fertile land where the piece is set. The name of that land is known as the Pang Yang, dialect for Penn Yan. That the farm contains an echo of the pioneer prophet and the pilgrims serves as background to the sense of revelation which follows Peony and Maurice.
Cantaloupe Kingdom
In that wild country called the Pang Yang I knew Maurice Morrigan, who tried to make me a murderer. I know it’s true because he whispered to me—in the beginning, when he knew I could hardly contain myself—that he would make me do it.
“But you’re a filthy little coward, aren’t you, a sick little thing, your mother’s mongrel,” he said to me.
A yellow spotted turtle slipped beneath the duckweed surface of the irrigation ditch. Maurice spat and missed. The spit trickled down his goatee.
“I know your type,” he whispered.
In the field under the sun, on the 6th day of my secret fast, I knew I couldn’t hit him. I wouldn’t say anything. The owner needed him more than me. And anyway, I was supposed to love my neighbor.
About halfway through the Trump term I found myself at wit’s end and stripped of things I once took for granted. Destitute, lonely, and ill, I dragged my limbs out the slaughterhouse of New York City, ninety miles north, to the relative peace of Ulster County.
After a few months of scrounging around and squatting in dilapidated garages and barns, I found residence in a farmhouse. It wasn’t long before Anselmo—landlord, owner, boss, housemate—acquiesced to my request for work. I was a twig, but he told me he could use the muscle.
He entrusted me first with the lawn, then the cats, the chickens, the goats, the donkey, and finally, he handed me over to the manager, Maurice Morrigan, to whom the farm owed any semblance of success.
The farm should have been a swamp. Ages ago, glaciers had sliced the land flat and deposited enormous pools of decayed vegetable muck in their sluicy wake. It seemed the pools were still draining. The soil was called black dirt—technically and colloquially. The government made it illegal to sell, or else those farmers would have gotten too rich. The black dirt was so dense in nutrients it seemed as though you could drop a rock in the mud and it might sprout green veiny wings and fly away, or, sink to bottomless forever.
A stream flowed through that farmland, joined the Black Creek a few miles north, and emptied out into the Hudson. Polish immigrants had thought to dig irrigation ditches from the swampland to the stream. The Dutch hadn’t trusted the black dirt. They’d sold the land to religious pilgrims, cheap. But maybe their reluctance was wisdom. The irrigated tendrils would flood the fields in storms, and when no one had broken up the beaver dams. The fields would become a lake. Then the crops would rot and the peninsular fields crumbled into broken islands.
Some looming indifference to human endeavor haunted that land and the people who tried to tame it. Legends told of travelers on horseback gobbled by the mud passes. The ditches sunk inevitably. And every season sent men to their knees pulling weeds. Nature spoke in the innocent form of African nutsedge, razor sharp almond grass that pierced the plastic landscape covers like flak through sky. The seeds of countless flora would find home in the tattered plastic. Stiltgrass, mugwort, mustard. Milkweed, buckwheat, rose. You had to slice and tear through a weedy jungle to get to the crops, as though nature had decided to impose a tax in the local currency of sweat, human frustration. I saw farmers stick adhesive to the back of their salty caps to capture the buffalo gnats assaulting their skulls. There was a black, twitching horde on the back of Maurice’s cap as he spoke to me.
“You could never do it,” he said. “You would never do what you wanted.”
I said nothing. I knew I could do what I wanted, but it took me a long time to listen for what that was. And I wouldn’t let him know what I thought I wanted, for him. I felt sorry for him. I felt sorry for him, alone in those crazy fields, in his damp dirt caked slacks, singing to himself, heaving his wheelbarrow. One flat foot trudge squeezed past the next, the wheel would carve a stiff perfect line through the mud. He was a self-proclaimed socialist, and his back had already begun to fold in on itself at the ripe age of 27. He would call the farm the ‘Cantaloupe Kingdom’ because sometimes, in late August, if they ran out of time to harvest, the back fields would burst with overripe cantaloupe and their thick skins would split, rot, and lay there until the fields simply ingested them.
It’s funny what time can do, and how sometimes you need to do nothing to help it work for you. Before I earned his trust I was sorry for him, even as he berated me. I wouldn’t hurt him. I was alive already. I had a roof, a bit of a job. I was alive under the sun in a field of buzzing bees, gnats, and all kinds of crazy, endless pulsations. I could outlast his taunts. But I didn’t understand why he needed to be like that. The ambiguity almost made me burst with laughter. I was still enamored by the idea I was innocent. Maybe that’s why it was easy for me to make the words that came out his thin Irish lips meaningless against the incessant hum. His words were like a breeze. I was overcome by a desire to love him, to let the words thrashing my ears sear a bond to my heart to remember the great speechless earth, the invisible humming, me. His lips were reeds.
“You won’t make it here. I’ll be sure you pay,” they whispered.
I said nothing. I pried a cantaloupe off its stem and placed it in the crate between us.