I.
It began with a photocopy.
A piece of paper yellowed at the edges, kept inside a cracked plastic sleeve in
the Brentwood Historical Society’s back room. The page had been typed in 1995
by someone named Kathy Leighton—a
name that sounded to me like a character from an abandoned Steinbeck story.
Across the top of the page, crooked and faint, were the words: JUDGE ROBERT WALLACE.
I read it one afternoon when the air outside shimmered like old glass and the hills around Brentwood looked like the flanks of sleeping animals. The librarian had gone home early. The town felt hollow, like a mouth with too many missing teeth.
The page told me that Robert Wallace Jr. had been “prominent in local politics” and that he had played a key role in “the taming and development of East Contra Costa.” The language was full of those nineteenth-century verbs—taming, founding, settling—that always made me think of violence hidden under a Sunday hat. I imagined the judge’s boots crushing the dry grass, the creak of the first windmill, the faint smell of wheat and blood.
Maybe that was the beginning of the haunting.
II.
At night, I walked through downtown Brentwood, the streets already asleep. Behind the glass of a realtor’s office I saw photos of new subdivisions: houses identical as playing cards, lawns still too green, names like The Estates at Crown Hill or Heritage Meadows—phrases that could easily appear in an old will or a bad poem.
Somewhere beneath these new streets, the judge’s fields were buried. The text said he had been “one of the first wheat growers in the region.” I tried to imagine what it meant to grow wheat in 1870, before the railroads and the highways, when the wind must have carried the dust all the way to the bay. The soil then must have been pure memory.
I stopped at the edge of a construction site. Machines slept there, hulking like dinosaurs. The night was cold. I thought of Wallace’s office—the text described it as “a small building where Rich’s Drive Inn is located today.” I had eaten there once, long ago. The burgers tasted of aluminum foil and old oil. Perhaps the judge had stood exactly where I once stood waiting for my order, his black coat smelling faintly of tobacco, his hands sticky with law and wheat.
Ghosts always return as investigators. They ask small, impolite questions. They don’t demand justice—they demand remembrance.
III.
I began to collect fragments about him.
From the archives, from forgotten corners of the internet, from local gossip.
He was born in San Francisco, 1859, to English parents—Robert and Ann Wallace,
“natives of North Shield.” I misread it at first as “North Shield of England,”
which sounded mythic, like a lost kingdom. The family moved to California in
1856, then settled in Brentwood around 1870.
He became a justice of the peace, an insurance salesman, and one of the founders of the Bank of Brentwood. He sold coal, wood, and ice to the settlers. I liked that detail. It gave him weight. You could imagine him sweating over the accounts, fingers blackened by coal dust, eyes burning with the excitement of possession.
His house, said the document, was a “beautiful two-story home on Railroad Avenue between Dainty and Pine.” I drove there one morning. The traffic was slow, the light already cruel. At a corner where a CVS Pharmacy stood, I saw what might have been the outline of an older foundation, a faint depression in the sidewalk. I parked the car and walked.
The air smelled of asphalt and hay. A man in a
pickup asked if I was lost.
“No,” I said. “Just looking for ghosts.”
He nodded like it made perfect sense.
IV.
I spent that week reading the text again and again. It was written in the flat, dutiful tone of local historians who love their towns too much to see the cracks. But behind the words I felt another rhythm—a tremor, a hesitation. The text wanted to celebrate Wallace, but it couldn’t help revealing the distance between his certainty and our unease.
He had been a member of the Byron Odd Fellows, the Masonic Lodge, the Contra Costa Agricultural Association. He was the sort of man who believed in progress, who probably shook hands like he meant it. And yet what remains of him now? A name on a page, a half-remembered address, the ghosts of wheat fields under supermarket parking lots.
Sometimes, while driving the back roads beyond
Vasco Road, I imagined his voice in the wind. A calm English accent, dry,
rational. He might have said: You see, young
man, we built all this from nothing.
And I would have answered: Yes, Judge, but
the nothing might be coming back.
V.
It’s strange to think how history becomes personal. When I was young, I wanted to escape this valley. The hills bored me; the sun felt oppressive. Later, after years in other cities, I came back and found that Brentwood had multiplied like a dream—new houses, new schools, the same restless wind. The past was disappearing so fast that even nostalgia couldn’t keep up.
Reading about Judge Wallace felt like reading about an ancestor I’d never met but somehow remembered. Maybe because he represented that first generation of settlers who believed the land could be possessed, that the future was a blank page for their signatures. I see it as a metaphor: the naïve dream of order built on buried chaos.
Once, walking along the edge of the old Byron Highway, I imagined a scene: the judge and his sons loading bags of wheat onto a wagon. The sun setting behind Mount Diablo, red as a wound. In the distance, native grass still growing wild. A world barely conquered.
The text mentioned his son Richard, who later managed the Bank of Brentwood and became postmaster. I imagined the father’s pride, the son’s weariness. Each generation repeating the same ritual of belonging until the place itself grew tired of them.
VI.
Late one night I dreamed I was inside his office. The room smelled of ink and cold iron. On the wall hung a calendar from 1902. The desk was covered in papers, receipts for coal, letters written in perfect cursive. Outside the window the town was a handful of wooden houses and dirt roads.
He looked up from his chair—tall,
clean-shaven, eyes gray as morning fog.
“You’re trespassing,” he said, but not unkindly.
“I’m looking for you,” I said. “For what you left behind.”
He smiled. “All men leave the same thing behind.”
“What’s that?”
“Dust.”
When I woke, the room was full of that same dust, floating in the weak light from the streetlamp. I had left the archive box open. The photocopy lay there like a wound.
VII.
In the following weeks I started seeing his name everywhere: in old deeds, in cemetery records, even on a cracked marble slab near the edge of the Byron Odd Fellows Cemetery. But what interested me most wasn’t the facts—it was the silences between them.
Who were the people he judged? The immigrants, the drifters, the farmhands accused of theft or drunkenness? Did he ever doubt his own verdicts? Did he dream of England, of the cold North Sea wind, of the horizon of another continent?
The text said nothing about that. History rarely does. It speaks only of achievements, not of remorse.
I thought of defeated men chasing the shadows of forgotten poets. That’s what I felt like: another obsessive tracing an absence, a ghost hunting for a ghost.
VIII.
One Sunday, at a flea market outside Oakley, I found an old photograph album. Inside were sepia portraits of unknown families. On the third page, a man with a trimmed beard and a stern gaze sat beside a woman in a lace dress. Someone had written beneath it, in fading ink: “R. Wallace and wife – Brentwood.”
I bought it for five dollars. That night I stared at their faces under the lamp. The woman’s eyes were sharp, almost mocking. His expression was harder to read—somewhere between pride and melancholy. I felt they were judging me across the century.
I imagined telling them: Your fields are gone, your house is a realtor’s office, your
descendants live in suburbs named after flowers that never grew here.
They would have nodded, perhaps. Or maybe they would have said: Everything changes, but nothing is lost.
IX.
The haunting deepened in subtle ways.
Once, while waiting at a red light near Sand Creek Road, I saw an old man
walking along the shoulder, carrying what looked like a ledger. He was dressed
too formally for the heat—dark vest, white shirt, black hat. When I turned for
a second look, he was gone.
Another time, while dozing in the public library, I dreamed I was reading a letter written by Judge Wallace to his son. In it, he described the first harvest after the rains, the way the wheat “swayed like a congregation at prayer.” He wrote about his hope that Brentwood would one day be “a place of learning, of law, of righteous men.” The last line said: Guard the land; it remembers.
I woke with the taste of dust in my mouth. The clock said 4:44 p.m.
X.
There is a particular loneliness in researching minor historical figures. They are too small for the history books, too large for gossip. They exist in the interstices—between memory and oblivion.
Sometimes I thought of Judge Wallace as a symbol of the century that followed: the belief that progress was a form of salvation. He built banks, courts, and farms. His world was made of straight lines and clear boundaries. Mine is made of detours and ambiguity.
Yet perhaps we are not so different. Both of us trying to leave marks on the same shifting soil.
I began writing notes for an essay, though I wasn’t sure who it was for. Maybe for the town. Maybe for the dead. Maybe for myself.
XI.
One afternoon, driving west toward Antioch, I stopped by the Point of Timber Cemetery, where the judge had once served as a director. The gate was rusted, the grass high. A few headstones leaned at awkward angles, like tired sailors. The air buzzed with insects.
I walked between the graves, whispering the names aloud. Some were still legible; others had been erased by rain. I found no Wallace there, but I felt a presence—as if the ground itself were waiting for me to speak his story.
I sat on a stone and watched the wind move through the weeds. The world felt suspended, like a page about to turn. In that stillness I realized something simple: the dead don’t haunt us because they want revenge. They haunt us because they want to be remembered correctly.
XII.
After that day, I stopped searching for facts. I began to write him into fiction.
I imagined a young reporter arriving in Brentwood in 1902, working for a small paper called The Contra Costa Beacon. He interviews Judge Wallace about the coming of the railroad. The judge speaks in long, measured sentences. Behind him, the windmill turns slowly. The reporter notices the judge’s hands—scarred, restless—and wonders what those hands have done.
That night the reporter stays at the Rich’s Drive Inn (then a boarding house). In the dark he hears footsteps outside, the creak of a wagon, a door closing softly. He looks out the window and sees the judge walking toward the fields, carrying a lantern. The wheat glows pale under the moon.
The next morning, the judge is gone. Only the lantern remains, burning weakly among the stalks.
XIII.
Fiction can rescue history from its own arrogance. Bolaño knew that. His narrators don’t discover the truth—they circle around it until it becomes something human.
So I wrote another version: a modern narrator (myself, perhaps) discovers the judge’s bones under a new subdivision. The police arrive, confused. The developers want it quiet. The town historian insists it’s a misunderstanding. But the narrator keeps hearing the judge’s voice in the irrigation pipes, in the hum of the transformers. Guard the land; it remembers.
Eventually he realizes the voice isn’t the judge’s at all. It’s the land itself, speaking through borrowed syllables.
XIV.
There is a moment in every investigation when the line between obsession and devotion disappears. I reached it one evening when I caught myself addressing the photocopy as if it were a person.
“Why did you come here, Judge?” I asked.
“What were you looking for?”
The page didn’t answer, but the air in the room thickened. Outside, the hills
were burning with sunset.
Maybe all of us who return to small towns are judges in disguise—measuring the distance between what was promised and what became.
XV.
I visited his house one last time—or rather, the place where it had stood. The new owners had remodeled it completely. Only the front porch remained original, its wood faded to a ghostly gray.
A woman watering her plants looked at me
suspiciously.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I think your house used to belong to someone I’m writing about.”
“Oh yeah? Who?”
“Judge Robert Wallace.”
She frowned. “Never heard of him.”
I thanked her and left. As I walked away, I heard the sprinklers start—small arcs of water falling over a manicured lawn where wheat once grew wild.
XVI.
Driving home, I realized that Judge Wallace’s story was less about him than about us—the ones who inherit the silence of the towns we think we know.
Every place has its ghosts but only a few people bother to listen to them. The rest build malls and highways over their bones.
In the distance, Mount Diablo glowed purple. The air smelled faintly of smoke and hay. I thought of the judge, of Kathy Leighton typing her report in 1995, of all the small acts of remembrance that keep the past from dissolving completely.
Maybe that’s what writing is: the modern equivalent of planting wheat. You scatter words into the wind and hope some of them take root.
XVII.
That night I dreamed again of the judge.
He stood in the middle of an endless field, the stalks bending around him like
waves. He handed me a sheaf of papers—the same photocopy, but now the words
shimmered and changed. I read the last line aloud:
“As I look back once again to the otherside of yesterday, I can’t help but be impressed by Judge Wallace and the pioneers like him that paved the way for East Contra Costa to develop.”
But in the dream, the sentence continued:
“…and yet the land remembers every
footprint, every shadow, every silence.”
When I woke, I wrote it down.
XVIII.
Years from now, no one will remember that photocopy. The archives will be digitized, the originals thrown away. But maybe somewhere, under the concrete and the lawns, the seeds of that old wheat still sleep.
I imagine them waiting for a different kind of rain—the kind that falls inside memory. Until then, we keep writing, keep remembering. Judge Wallace, Kathy Leighton, the nameless settlers, the nameless ghosts. All of them part of the same invisible harvest.
