The Bleached Field

March 2, 2011

by Alexandrea

I was sixteen when my father decided to take the old County Line Road to my grandmother’s farm. It was a route we’d driven a hundred times, a ribbon of cracked asphalt that snaked through the fallow cornfields, their stalks bleached to the color of bone by the October sun. The sky was a hard, cloudless blue, and the air had that crisp, metallic bite that comes just before the first hard frost.

My father was talking about the price of grain, but I wasn’t listening. I was watching the fields, the way the light seemed to hang over them, making them shimmer like a mirage. Then I saw her. She was standing at the edge of the field, about two hundred yards ahead, right where the old irrigation ditch cut across the land. She was wearing a dress the color of the dead stalks, and her hair was a shock of white against the brown earth. She wasn’t walking; she was just standing there, staring at the road.

I remember saying, ‘Dad, who is that?’ He glanced over, frowned, and said, ‘I don’t see anyone.’ But I saw her. I saw her as clearly as I see my own hand. She was young, maybe my mother’s age, and her face was blank, like a sheet of paper before it’s written on. And then she raised her arm and pointed at me. Not at the car, not at my father, but at me.

The next Memorial Day, my father and I were on the same road, on our way to put flowers on my uncle’s grave. The fields had been planted, and the corn was just a fuzz of green against the dark soil. The light was different, softer, but the woman was there again, closer this time, standing in the middle of the road, right where the pavement dipped into a shallow culvert. She was wearing the same dress, and her hair was the same pale white. She didn’t move as we approached. My father drove right through her. I felt the temperature in the car drop, and for a moment, I couldn’t breathe.

‘Did you see that?’ I asked, my voice shaking. My father just stared ahead, his knuckles white on the wheel. ‘I’ve been seeing her for years, son,’ he said slowly. ‘Ever since that woman from the old Miller place got hit by the train. They say she was chasing after her son, but they never found his body. They say she’s looking for him still.’

But the woman I saw wasn’t the woman from the Miller place. The woman from the Miller place was older, with dark hair. This woman was different. I started asking around town, but no one had seen her. They all said I was imagining things, that I was just spooked by the old story. But I knew what I saw.

The summer before I left for college, I was driving that road alone, at dusk. The sun was low, and the fields were golden, and I saw her again, standing at the very spot where the Miller woman had been struck. She was wearing that same white dress, and her hair was flowing in a wind I couldn’t feel. For the first time, I saw her face clearly. It was my face.

I slammed on the brakes, and the car skidded to a stop. She walked toward me, her bare feet brushing through the dead grass, and she stopped at my window. She put her hand on the glass, and I could see through her, see the field behind her, but her eyes were solid, and they were full of sorrow. She opened her mouth, and I heard her voice, dry as the corn husks, ‘You have to find him.’ Then she was gone.

I never drove that road again. I moved to the city, went to school, got a job, tried to forget. But sometimes, in my dreams, I’m standing in that field, and I can feel the train coming, and I know I have to run. And I know that if I ever go back, she’ll be there, waiting for me to do what she couldn’t. To find the boy. To bring him home. But I don’t know where he is. I don’t even know if he’s real. All I know is that the woman in the field is me, and I’m not done with that place yet.

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