The Fields

by Lacey N. Dunham

You call me on a Friday near summer’s end and suggest we go to the fields.

It’s easy to get me to skip the Friday night show. The movie theater in town is a creaky one-screen without air conditioning where patrons slip their five dollars under the window and wait for the quarter in change. There’s a rumor the owner uses his own lard on the popcorn.

You and I live at opposite ends of the same pitted road, but we are separated by many things: a cemetery, a worn playground, Wal-Mart, the police station on the top of the hill, woods haunted by deer, and, of course, fields.

 You drive from your end of the road to mine and arrive as I’m flossing my teeth. You stand patiently behind me in the bathroom doorway. I make eye contact in the mirror.

 “Where’s Margaret and everyone?” I ask.

“They stuck with going to the movies.”

I look away and throw the string of waxy floss in the toilet where it floats on the surface of the water. 

We pick our way through a nearby soybean field in an aimless, broken zigzag. I pause now and again to pull milkweeds while you watch, curious. Your father, unlike mine, is not a farmer, and you’ve never had to work the fields with a hoe over your shoulder, excommunicating weeds that threaten crops. The line of my shirt curves and dips over reddened summertime breasts and I catch your eye straying. I straighten quickly, the remaining milkweeds abandoned.

We walk in silence between the halves of the field, our feet treading two parallel tire tracks etched into the grass, worn down to dirt. Our town was entirely fields once, fields that stretched taut over the tender land, knitted together by felled forests and sweeps of green trees, by myth and history. Those fields replaced green forest; those fields, too, are being replaced by something called progress.

We cross the fencerow into the next field, crouching in the middle, the corn stalks above our heads alive with stories. You try to dig with your fingers but the ground is too hard. We haven’t received any rain in the past month. In another week, Daddy’s already suffering corn will give up breathing and will wither back to the soil from where it came. Daddy will look at his checkbook and tell me he doesn’t know where the money will come from, and I’ll voluntarily take Jill’s hours at work after she quits and Lindsey’s hours when she’s sick and Travis’s Friday night shift, which is good money, because the restaurant is always busy on Friday night.       

You look at me expectantly, so I repeat a story the mortician’s son, Mark, told me about the kids who work summer jobs detasseling row after row of corn. Up before dawn, they trudge through the fields, dirt filling their shoes. As the sun slithers across the sky, they reach up. Grab the tassel from the plant. Tug it free. Repeat. The slow march from stalk to stalk erupts time. The corn’s sharp-edged leaves cut and scratch, and kids will quit mid-row, squat in the dirt, and dig a hole, their calloused hands furiously attempting to wheedle an escape. 

The sun dips below the horizon, proving the fields can grow sinister. Stars pierce the dusky sky, their phantom lights winking between the cathedral ceiling of corn leaves that vault above our heads. It is said that the woman who once owned this land was a witch and that’s why she died alone in a house full of newspapers, decomposition clawing her body for several days before anyone found her. We know the stories. There are words that seed and grow with each crop, unfurled by the sun and, like too-ripe beans, wither and die, returned to the earth. The crops, the soil, the rocks, the land itself, layers and layers we ignore because the fields are tombs.

We head back to your car on the main road before we are lost to the darkness. The murmuring corn has been known to swallow children, their ghostly voices crying from deep among the leaves and husks. It usually happens at a birthday party or a wedding anniversary. While the cake is sliced, while Great-uncle Mick and Great-aunt Rosie are dancing to the same song they first danced to sixty years ago, the cornfields beckon, their breezy voices siren songs to the naïve, the out-of-towners, the second cousins visiting from the big city. The fields are rapacious, vengeful.

I tell you about what happened to my cousin, Ticker. No one saw him slip away or knew how long he was gone. He wasn’t crammed with the oldest cousins in line for cake and when we yelled his name, it only echoed back in mockery. Ticker, my aunt called into her cupped hands. Ticker, sweetie, if you’re playing games, time to stop now. You’re missing the cake, honey.

We searched the house. We checked the backseat of every car parked by the toolshed. The yard was empty, and Ticker’s baseball cap sat abandoned near the swing set. The barn was sepulchral except for the lowing of the cows and the thrush of the pigeons in the eaves. My aunt was desperate, her voice rising octaves. 

The police arrived, closely pursued by the fire truck and the ambulance. Ticker’s father was called and told to leave the factory early, there was an emergency. The youngest children were sent inside the house.

“What happened to Ticker?” you whisper, the sprigs of hair along your jaw like stiff threads of wire. I want to draw my thumb over them and feel them prick my skin, see if they draw blood you can lick off with your tongue.

 I shrug. “He’s fine.”

August heat pierces us like barbed wire, and there’s nothing to do but go to Wal-Mart and walk around, look at everything on sale. When we grow bored, we amble through the produce aisles: vegetables from Ecuador, fruit from Mexico. There are onions from Israel, red beets from Wales. The food we eat doesn’t grow in our own fields. The food we eat sometimes doesn’t grow in any field.

You pick up an enormous red tomato, cradle it in your palm. “How do you think they got it so big?”

I shrug and touch the tomato’s skin pretending it is yours. I put the tomato back with the others. They are all perfectly red, perfectly large. 

Behind us a toddler crashes a shopping cart into the pear display, and the fruit tumbles to the floor, crushed and bruised. His mother comforts him. “Don’t worry. There are plenty more.”  Farmers are prohibited from reusing their seeds, and I want to tell the little boy that the lack of money to buy seeds, the lack of yield due to blight or rain or drought, means his mother can't be right. When to whisper the truth and when to tell a lie?

We loop past the tomatoes again and again, refusing to talk about us. Time will pass and soon it will be that we haven’t spoken for many years. One day while visiting your elderly parents at one end of the long, pitted road, you will look out your window into the golden morning, coffee cup in your hand and a strand of your husband’s hair clinging to your robe, and in silent amazement your hand will reach for the phone. You will press the black void to your ear. I will drop onto a park bench near my office before I pick up, plagued by an ache across the years and the distance, so deep it burns through the air and crackles on the line as static. 

“The fields,” you will say, dumbstruck, uncertain of the truth. “The fields aren’t here anymore. The one Ticker got lost in that summer—remember? All of them, gone.”

The truth is often harder than a lie. When we are young we don’t want to talk about the possibility that there’s only so much food in the world or what would happen if the fields were gone. There are many things I don’t tell you because it’s impossible to find the exact words. I try to tell you with my laugh, my hand on your shoulder, the $1.25 pina colada flavored slushy I buy for you.

“Let’s go to the field on Ridgeville.” You suck the slushy through the straw.

“Which one?” I ask.

“The one across from the woods. With the abandoned house.”

It’s fully night now, the stars detailed and bright. You let me drive your car so that you can drink the slushy in peace, your face raised to the sky. Soon I will leave for a place with different stories stitched into the hilly, jagged land, one where fields grow tobacco instead of wheat, where the mountains seep ever closer to the ground with each passing year. I will not be home to see our fields eroding, washed away by rain, then hardened by too much sun. Houses will be erected like monuments where living things once stood. Only we will know what has been lost. 

We park on the shoulder of Ridgeville and leap across the shallow ditch to the field. You drop to the ground and inhale deeply, reaching for the soil. “Open your hand,” you command and slowly dirt sifts over my palm and through my fingers. This is what is weighted. This is what there is. This dirt that binds my bones shapes who I am, who I become. When your hand is empty you do it again and again until both of us are coated in field dust. Wind kicks the field into our mouths and we swallow rather than spit. 

Published August 30th, 2020