Footprints Under The Wheat

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.

The Tower of Marsh Creek

 In the last summer before the heat became permanent, before the hills dried to bone and the birds forgot their songs, I returned to the intersection at the edge of Marsh Creek. The sun was setting, stuck like a rusty blade in the west. The traffic lights blinked their futile orders into the emptiness. Red. Green. Yellow. No one obeyed. The wind shifted but the air remained heavy, as if it remembered something terrible.

I had been driving for hours through the golden hills of Northern California, following an old journal that had once belonged to my grandfather, who said he was following the writings of someone else, a man named Marcos who wrote about a house with a tower, a doctor who married a ghost, and Miwok bones buried under the floorboards. The directions were scrawled in pencil. When I reached the light at Deer Valley Road, I stopped, not because it was red, but because something inside me recoiled, like a horse smelling blood.

To my right, beyond the bleached grass and the oaks hunched like conspirators, was the house. The house.

It stood behind a barricade of false history and state plaques, half-hidden by shadows and bureaucracy. Marsh’s house, they called it, as if it still belonged to him. A Gothic mansion with a collapsed tower and a history as translucent as a ghost’s skin. John Marsh, the first white settler in the county. Physician. Opportunist. A man who spoke Latin to Miwok children and dosed them with herbs he barely understood. He’d been murdered by his own men. Some say it was rustlers. Others say it was the land itself.

I parked near the edge of the road and got out. The wind kicked dust into my eyes. I wiped them clear and the sun dipped further, like a curse completing its arc. No one else was there. The road behind me had gone silent.

***

As I crossed the dry grass toward the ruin, I thought of what Vollmann wrote: “all history is a failed attempt at love.” Each empire is a desperate caress yearning for completion. Each war is a misunderstanding between hungry ghosts, fought by machines and drenched in innocent blood. I thought of Marsh’s tower and why he had built it so high: not just to watch for rustlers, but to see who was coming to get him, what divine vengeance was running towards him from the past.

The closer I got, the more the ground seemed to shift underfoot, as if something were moving beneath the soil. This was not just a site. It was a vessel. The trees whispered in a tongue I could almost understand.

The foundation of the house was cracked and lopsided, stones the color of dead teeth; a plaque informed me that renovations were underway, though I saw no workers, only scaffolding wrapped like a noose around the broken tower stump. A second sign claimed the Miwok had helped build the first adobe house here, that Marsh had treated them kindly. Free medicine, it said. I laughed. A dry, involuntary sound.

Inside, the house was empty. The rooms smelled of wood, dirt, and an older sense of decay. The walls were covered with old wallpaper, some floral, some geometric, all rotting. Dust hung in the air like ash from an invisible fire. I thought I heard something upstairs, the sound of a feet dragging. I went up.

***

There were three floors, though the third had partially collapsed. The second was worse: half-burned rafters, a mattress with black mold blooming across it like ink stains. A bookshelf, empty except for a single volume whose title had been worn away. I opened it and found a pressed leaf. Underneath it was a note: “Do not look at the tower at night.”

Of course, I looked.

Through the hole where the tower used to be, through that vertical scar, I could see the hills behind the house, rolling golden like the bones of old gods. There were figures out there. At first, I thought they were deer, but they moved wrong. Upright. Stiff. The kind of motion that implies rehearsal. Or ritual. I closed the book and went back downstairs, but the house seemed rearranged. I could not find the front door. I wandered, and time began to unfurl itself like a snake.

***

Night fell. It didn’t just descend, it bled from above. The sky turned purple, then black, and the stars looked down at me with the indifference of ancient survivors. I found myself in the kitchen. The sink was full of something viscous and red. Wine, I thought. Then I saw the tooth. I stepped back.

There was a mirror by the back door. In it I saw my reflection, though something was wrong. My face was smudged, like it had been painted in oil then smeared by a careless finger. My eyes were holes. Behind me, I saw the reflection of someone else. I turned around quickly but I saw no one.

The mirror was cracked down the center. A hairline fracture that spread with a sound like ice breaking.

***

Later, I woke up on the porch. I don’t remember lying down. The hills were glowing faintly in the starlight, and the oaks stood motionless. A voice came to me from the distance, not loud but persistent. A woman’s voice, speaking in Spanish or a language that had faded into Spanish centuries ago. I followed it.

The voice led me down a dry creek bed where the frogs had all turned to stone, where the dancing leaves were whispers. At the bottom, I found what I thought was a well. It wasn’t. It was the old adobe foundation, older than Marsh’s house. Stones laid by Miwok hands. The voice stopped. I looked down into the pit and saw a figure sitting cross-legged in the dark. It looked up. It had my face.

***

I don’t remember driving back, but I must have. I woke up at the intersection. The traffic light was green.

A white car passed, headlights blinking like insect eyes. The buildings on the corner, a bank, a restaurant, glowed faintly from inside, though they must have been empty at this hour. I saw my own reflection in the window. This time, the reflection smiled at me. I did not smile back.

***

Weeks went by. I told no one what had happened. What would I say? That I had met myself in the ruins of a house built by a man who feared the land he claimed to own? That the hills had whispered secrets into my mouth and now I couldn’t sleep without tasting iron?

I began to write things down. I drew symbols I had never seen. One night, I woke up standing in the yard of my house, barefoot, with a cold wind speaking through my teeth. I had painted something on my chest. Rancho Los Méganos. The Sand Dunes.

***

I read about Marsh’s tower. How it fell in the 1868 quake. How he rebuilt it in wood and it fell again in 1906. A structure fated to collapse. He built it too tall, they said. Too proud. But maybe he built it for someone else. Maybe he was waiting.

I returned to the house. The renovations had ceased. No one was there. I climbed through a window. The air was thick and soft. I found the old tower shaft and descended. There were stairs, though they should not have been there.

At the bottom I found a room. In it, I saw a stone table, a ring of dirt, and a single candle, unlit. I heard chanting. I saw shadows. I do not remember the rest.

***

They say Marsh was murdered by the men he trusted, that they dragged his body to the creek and left it for the animals to feed on. They say that the Miwok grieved him, that others rejoiced, that his wife died before she ever saw the house finished.

They say the tower was cursed, that the hill rejects permanence, that the land was never his to begin with.

They say a man lives in the house now, quiet, thin, always watching. No one sees him come or go. They say he speaks in riddles, in half remembered dreams. They say that if you knock, he will answer with your own voice. They say the hills remember everything. And they do.

 

Rare Is The Moment

A little piece of paper with a name and a phone number written on it. Such proposals can lead to an unexpected degree of change in the self...

Right before waking I dreamed I heard the doorbell ring and saw her face. It startled me awake and I realized that it had been yet another dream.

What good is it to hold onto ghosts? A surge of light that emerges from the caves and not from the sky, from the depths and not from the heavens?

The old architect upstairs knew that this couldn't be good, but this was what would make her love me in that way that was so rare that I might as well make it happen any time I could.

The first time I saw the time machine I was skeptical.
I remember I asked:
"Does it work?"
and he answered:
"Kind of."

It worked where rare is the moment, where rare is the space, where rare is the mass that falls without making a sound, and rare is the sound itself... so rare that I might as well make it happen any time I could.

This was what would make her love me, the boy that played by himself in a dark garden full of mountains of sand and intricate structures of loose bricks. Elements of ground and blood and stone and wind, elements of word and phrase and symbol, elements of dream and myth and shadows that are only partly seen...
What good is it to hold onto ghosts?

A little piece of paper with a name and a phone number written on it.

The old architect upstairs knew that this couldn't be good. He developed vision complications in the left eye.

There were three circular tunnels that fed into a single cylindrical chamber. It was lined with a reflective silver insulation. The outside was all white plastic. At the top of the cylinder was a magnetic motor which resembled a giant fan with a crank to start it.

Right before waking I dreamed I heard the doorbell ring and saw her face. It startled me awake and I realized that it had been yet another dream. A surge of light that emerges from the caves and not from the sky, from the depths and not from the heavens.

"What if it works?" I asked.
"I don't know..." he confessed.

It worked where rare is the moment, where rare is the space, where rare is the mass that falls without making a sound, and rare is the sound itself... so rare that I might as well make it happen any time I can.

I wake with the lyrics to "You Only Live Twice" in my head, as if a part of me is reciting the words over and over as I sleep, like a mantra to pull me awake again.
I jolt awake and sit up in bed, the feeling that I am supposed to be somewhere else gnawing compellingly at my heart.

A little piece of paper with a name and a phone number written on it.

Such proposals, where rare is the moment, can lead to an unexpected degree of change, where rare is the space. Three circular tunnels, like a mantra, where rare is the mass. A surge of light  that falls without making a sound, elements of dream and myth, and rare is the sound itself...

So rare that I might as well make it happen any time I can.

The Door

When the door first appeared in a corner of the family room where there had never been a door before, reactions were mixed. Some were for opening it, others against. Mother suggested we sleep on it and decide in the morning.  By breakfast, however, we had begun to believe that the door had always been there.
It was a closet, of course, better left undisturbed since we had undoubtedly been storing old jackets and boxes of photographs in there. Father even asserted that he now recollected having put his missing coin collection in there some months ago and this explained why he could not find it under the bed.
In our socks and robes, we drank glasses of orange juice and consumed bacon, eggs, and blueberry pancakes until we were convinced that it was an ordinary Sunday morning.
Father dressed and went out to mow the lawn. Mother got dolled up then helped grandmother into her best velour jogging set and took her to the Indian Casino for the day. The twins dug out their allowance and walked to the Cineplex to see a movie with some friends.
My sister Madge and I exchanged a significant look in the hall way, her brown eyes magnified by her thick glasses. We paused there silently assessing one another’s level of skepticism. It was clear that we both had our doubts, but her closed lipped retreat to her bedroom spoke of a willingness to go along with the others.
I went and stood in front of the door, studying its features. It seemed to me equally plausible that I could remember the door having always been there and that I could remember an empty space where now a door stood. It reminded me of the time I couldn’t remember whether I had left the hose on in the backyard or not. The vivid memory of having turned it off was made less credible by a certain nagging doubt. The same was true of the door.
I could simply open it and know the truth, but was too terrified, not only of the possibility of the mysterious but more so of the possibility of the mundane. I had almost made up my mind to do it when my father came in and suggested taking me out for ice cream. We fetched Madge out of her room and drove to the drugstore for double scoops of strawberry with sprinkles.
The first time that the door opened and one of THOSE came in, we were all sitting in the family room watching Masterpiece Theater on PBS.
Again I would say that reactions were mixed. The cat hissed and jumped off the back of the couch. I looked up and saw the door opening, saw IT coming in and glanced at my family to see if they could see IT too. Clearly they did. I observed each one react, even if for only a moment before they quickly averted their gaze and pretended to be watching TV. Madge continued to stare silently at it. Grandmother, sitting in her wheel chair clucked her tongue and said, “Gads, not this again.” but my mother quickly hushed her, “Ma, we’re trying to watch.”
My grandmother sighed and joined my parents and the twins in their defiant TV watching while Madge, the cat, and I watched IT walk out of the family room and down the hall.
By the end of the week their visits were quite frequent. They came in groups of two or three, sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes during the day, to roll, run, and scamper down the hall. They would leave all the cupboard doors open. The cat grew accustomed to them and sometimes chased after them as they frolicked.
While we played a board game, did homework, or ate dinner at the kitchen table, one of THOSE would sometimes stand there and watch. They didn’t usually open packages, but were always interested in food that had been left open or left out. They would drink the remaining milk from our cereal bowls if we left them on the table and would eat the crusts of sandwiches left on plates. We could no longer keep a glass of water by the bed because they would come and drink it while we were sleeping.
Nobody besides the cat, myself, Madge, and occasionally Grandmother, acknowledged their presence. My parents and the twins pretended not to see or hear them. Eventually it began to seem as if they actually were unaware of them. Grandmother would shoo them away in the same manner that she shooed the cat, waving a hand if they came close or were in her path and saying “Git” or “Shoo.” Madge would have staring contests with them, gazing silently and expressionlessly at them. Mesmerized they would stare back.
I took a page from the cat’s book. I would pretend that I wasn’t paying attention to them. Then, just as they got close enough I would whirl, roar, and charge, sending them scattering. I had the impression that they enjoyed it, but to leave no doubt of  my good will I would leave out cups of milk and plates of cookies or cheese.
 At the height of their presence they began to come in groups of up to five. They giggled rather loudly in the night and banged around in the bathroom and kitchen while we tried to sleep. The cat would nap all day, tuckered out from the nightly rumpus. They had started doing little favors for Madge and I, finding items for us that we lamented loosing, fixing broken toys, leaving strange little gifts such as unusual coins and glass marbles.
One day I saw Madge issuing commands in her bedroom, “Pick up my socks and put them in the hamper please. And close the window.” They obliged and stood waiting for the next command as if playing a game of mother may I.
In February, things tapered off. They came less often and in smaller numbers. A week passed when none of THOSE was seen or heard. The cat sat in front of the door waiting, tail twitching. Then one night we came in to watch Masterpiece and the door was gone. My mother stood there and stared at the empty part of the wall looking puzzled.
“I thought there used to be a closet here.” she said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. The show’s about to start.” my father answered.
My grandmother shook her head. Madge looked at me. Her lip trembled a little and her eyes got watery, but in her usual style she managed to maintain a straight face. The twins were crunching loudly on a bowl of popcorn. I invited our poor lonesome cat to come sit in my lap and scratched her chin until she remembered how to purr. The sound soothed me, but I couldn’t concentrate on the show. Absently, I gazed on, bathed in the glow and garble of dialogue.
Like Madge, I was saddened by the disappearance of the door, but worse was a nagging fear that by tomorrow I wouldn’t be sure if it had ever been there at all. And to be honest, I’m not entirely sure that it was, but the cat still sits in front of the wall sometimes, waiting. Now and then I leave out milk and cookies, just in case.

The Ghost Of Fasler Cove

There is something rather extraordinary about my hometown of Fasler Cove. It is a phenomena that flows from the gift given to one ordinary man.
Walter Pedington was not the sort of fellow to rock the boat. How many people, if you gave them the gift to travel forward and backwards through time, would stay in the same small town doing the same small things that could have been done anyway?
Some people will tell you that they would go back to stop Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth, or Adolf Hitler. Others would want to go back and see a dinosaur. Most would be bent on increasing their own wealth; perhaps collecting antiquities to sell in a future where they are valuable or bringing a handy gadget from the future into a past where it can be passed off as their own invention for profit, or even playing the stock market or betting on ponies. Some would try to rule the world, others save it, which might amount to the same thing.
But when Walter Pedington received his gift, none of these things apparently interested him or crossed his mind. This perhaps, was the very reason he was trusted with the gift, for that we know of, he never abused it for profit or to change the course of history.
It was common to see Walter at age 54 sitting on the porch swing of his parents' house on Behemoth Lane conversing with Walter at age 7.  He very much enjoyed talking to himself. Indeed, you might run into him at Morey Point watching himself painting a picture of the sea, or catch him at the Fallout Cafe playing a game of chess with himself while a younger Walter shared a cigarette with a pretty girl outside and a fourth sat brooding by the window, remembering that same girl's death. Walking your dog along the path from Pelican Landing to  Frost's Wood you might  be passed by Walter at the age of 10 zipping by on his bike only to then pass Walter at age 64 sitting on the bench before finding Walter at 18 laying on a blanket in the grass with a sweetheart.
There is a possibility that Walter is guilty of that sin for which I acquitted him, for if he had already altered the course of history and ruled the world before I was born, I would have no way of knowing it. I have often compared the face of 19 year old Walter to a photograph of a bust of Alexander the Great. It is possible that after 12 years of conquest he was prepared to live a quiet life again in a world shaped by his own youthful ambitions. But how would I ever know? And further, Walter has always seemed more interested in introspection than in governing others.
His funeral was a mind bending affair. Walters of various ages were in attendance and out numbered other funeral goers. He outlived his friends and lovers and left no survivors. Once he was married to a young poetess but she left with a younger version of himself before filing for a divorce later that year. Likewise he never had children, for he had himself all those years and always kept a ball and mitts, bicycle, and snacks on hand for when he visited and even drove himself to his own sixth grade piano recital. There were days when his yard was filled with a chorus of his own youthful laughter while six or seven young Walters played capture the flag or kickball.
Even after his death we continue to see Walter, in line buying tickets at the new Cineplex, hiking the trails in Frost's Wood, eating a banana split at the ice cream parlor. It is impossible to imagine Fasler Cove without him, though as time passes, we see less of him and he is more often alone. I imagine that in another 20 years, there will be no one left here who remembers who he is, no more grandmothers who can point him out and say that their mother went to school with that boy, or kissed that young man at a barbeque 100 years ago.
He is like a ghost from a time that has slipped into the realm of fantasy, but soon he will be such a ghost that his presence will go unnoticed and seem utterly ordinary.

The Wanderer

He expects nothing of anyone.
He looks out into the dust of the world, scorching fallen bones to white stones.  Water is perhaps days away and he does not expect to find it.  The desert floor is scattered with the fallen, both man and beast have succumbed to their thirst in this vast yellow wasteland, all of them left there uncovered as food for the scavengers. 
He expects nothing and gives nothing.
He takes what he finds, what he needs. Men have died beside him and he has stepped sideways as they fell. It is by chance that bullets and arrows have all but missed the target. 
He continues on, his face cracked and blistered and burning, an unrelenting sun high above that has no mercy for the weak. Sucking on stones as he stumbles over the few patches of withered grass, he has not lost the desire to live, just the expectation that life somehow belongs to him. 
There is no god above to save his soul, to pluck him from this dry bed of dust and wind. There is nothing, no one beyond his own skin, nothing but the determination to keep moving and follow the stars. Perhaps he will stumble upon a watering hole. 
He does not pray for rescue or grace, does not hope to find some other man along the path with a full canteen and dried meat. There are no friends in this place, not in this desert or in any town he has ever been. There is no sweet smelling woman that does not hold her hand out for coin or gift, no act of mercy ever granted without expectation of consequence. 
The men out here come as vultures and thieves and even those he has ridden side by side with watch him with suspicion, as he does with them. 
He expects nothing of them and he gives them nothing. Each man rides until he is unable to do so any longer. Then he is left and forgotten, stripped and left to the sun and rain, to the vultures and time.
Scanning the ridges of far away mountains for signs of smoke and silhouette, for enemies and arrows and bullets aimed at his chest, he walks on, his mouth dry as the desert sand and cracked earth.
The wasteland is for the solitary drifter, each man experiencing the earth with eyes colored by his path and choice.

Phoenix

He had grown old, his wrinkled hands leathery, his hair thin and white. Once he had been strong and swift. He had been legend, born in the fire, a man of destiny. Living by the gun, he had no reservations about dying by the gun. And yet somehow he was still here, haunting a sagging ranch house adrift in an endless sea of yellow grass; the ghost of a legend.
It had been a long time since he had first come to this house and fallen in love with its occupant, a lovely young widow with flaxen hair and freckled cheeks. Somehow he had married her and stayed, and it had been a long time since then, a long time since he took off his guns and hung them in the closet, trading them for a hoe.

She died and his unborn child died with her. He buried them not far from the house. What few neighbors they had came to lay their hands on his shoulder in silence, one at a time before drifting back out into the golden abyss.
He might have left then, he had still been young enough. He could have taken up his guns and forgotten this almost life in a glorious blaze of gunfire. Instead he stayed. He hitched his horse to a plow and tore through the unforgiving earth as if in a trance.

He could no longer  live, and yet he did not die. His days played out in an uninterrupted flow of monotony under a cloudless blue sky. Like the hands of a clock, he moved as if propelled by hidden gears, a prisoner of time frozen in a story that had ended prematurely. The days bled one into the other, each indistinguishable from the last. Only the occasional visit from a neighbor, once or twice a year, punctuated the seemingly endless single day that sucked his youth away.

A  tanned old man with pale blue eyes, he stood on the porch staring out at the prairie grass, watching a figure approach from the distance. It seemed to be a child, coming in at a good clip. He stood and watched as the details emerged.
Yes a child, a girl, with soot on her hands, face and apron. Red hair, streaks in the sooty cheeks to mark the passage of tears. Maybe it was nothing that he could see, maybe it was something that he felt radiating from her, or the simple fact that she was a break in the endless predictability, but when she was near enough for the details to become apparent, he felt swept up by a wave of emotion and ran out to meet her in the field. He dropped to his knees and took her by the shoulders.

“Child, what happened?”
She gasped, and sobbed,
“Bad men. Bad men came. Bad men with guns.”

He looked over her head at the hills and could see the wisps of smoke dissolving in the sky beyond the hills. Then he looked back into her face, into her eyes, into all that must have happened written in the burning eyes of a child. He looked into the fire in her eyes and felt something quicken inside of him.
Standing, he scooped her up and carried her swiftly to the house and up the porch steps. It was the way he had carried his wife up those same steps after their wedding, but now it was a child and the feeling in his chest was different. He set her down on her feet inside the door and went to the closet.
His whole body was steadily flooding with heat, he could feel it in his limbs, his chest, his face. Opening the closet door he reached inside and took up his guns. He strapped them on without hesitation. It had been many years, but his fingers moved deftly as he opened the barrels, checking that they were loaded. He gave them a spin.

He stood in front of her then.
“What’s your name?”
“Margaret. Benson.”
A flash of recognition. Benson.  They raised  horses over the hill. Or they had until today.
“Can you count?“
She nodded.
“How many men were there? Take a minute, think about it.”
“Six.”
“You’re sure?”
She nodded.
“What about your kin…anybody hurt?”
Again she nodded but this time her freckled face crumpled to expel the fresh tears that welled up in her eyes.
He laid his hand on her shoulder,
“You get yourself over to Doc Hoverstad’s place. You know where that is?”
She sniffed, “No.”
He motioned toward the back of the house.
“That way, north, across the creek. ”
They locked eyes again. He lifted his hand from her shoulder. Then he passed through the doorway and down the steps, eyes trained on the faint bluish curl of smoke in the distance.

He found the girl's parents together, Mr. Benson with three wounds in his chest, Mrs. Benson draped over his legs, half her skull missing. A young cow hand lay dead further from the house.
By the smoldering barn he found a man still breathing, a bullet lodged in his belly. Gasping like a  fish out of water, the dying man didn’t seem to see the other at first. He was older with a grizzled chin, beads of perspiration all over his forehead.
The man with the gun knelt beside him and the dying man whispered:
“Don’t worry about me none. They took the oldest girl, Lizzie. Left an hour ago I think. You’ll catch them… you’ll catch them, I can tell, I know it, you have the look. Go on. Go…on…go…”

Another familiar feeling had come over him, replacing all the heat. Now he was cold, as if his heart could pump a blizzard through his veins. Everything was crystal clear, every slow steady thought, each strong quick motion.
It took him no time to recognize their tracks and follow them through the pass and out of the valley. They’d taken 20 or so horses with them, making them easy to follow. 20 horses and one girl.
How many years had it been since he put down his guns? It could have been no time at all. It could have been yesterday, except that he felt old in his bones, a bit stiff, slower than he had once been.
As the terrain leveled out and the grass gave way to dusty earth and brittle bramble the answer registered with clarity; 15 years. 15 years, six men, 20 horses, 1 girl. The world could be distilled into these figures.

They appeared to him as a cloud of trail dust. He stayed just near enough to follow them, far enough away that they wouldn’t notice him in pursuit. As dusk approached they made camp around an outcropping of large boulders. Thankfully, the terrain was littered with such groupings of stones.
The man with the gun left his own horse behind  and approached in the descending darkness, just as they were lighting their fires, arguing about who would cook and  who would stand guard while the others used the girl. He waited to see how the quarrel would go, if  one or two might die before he descended on them.
One was already wounded from the raid on the Bensons and sat slumped against the rocks ignoring the others. The girl was laying  where they had dropped her, on her side with her hands tied behind her back, a gag in her mouth, 15 feet from the wounded man, seven feet from the rest of the gang.

One bandit did pull his gun and point it at another, two more moved to restrain him. In that moment the girl wriggled up to her feet and started running. Someone gave a shout and all their attention turned to her.
The man with the gun took the opportunity, first firing on the bandit who had already drawn his weapon in the argument.  Five. That one fell dead and another whirled, reaching for his guns. The horses had begun to scream and tug against their ropes. He dropped the bandit who was closest to catching the girl before turning  his gun on the bandit who was drawing. 4.
Here he missed and had to duck behind a boulder as the bullets came screaming after him. Then he took a second shot and landed it in his opponents throat. 3.
The two bandits left standing gave up chasing the girl as their companion fell gurgling, grasping at the geyser of blood.  They peered searchingly into the darkness, but the man with the gun ducked behind the boulder and waited, listening to their exclamations.

“Shit. Shit. They got us.“
“How many are out there?”
“Shit.”
“Hey, shut up, how many of them?”
And then a third voice, a lot fainter, the wounded man,
“Just one I think.”
“I ain’t waiting to find out. I’m tearing out of here.”
“No you ain’t!”

The man with the gun seized the new opportunity, rose swiftly and fired on the bandit who had put a restraining hand on his cowardly companion. 2.
The coward spun wildly around drawing his gun and firing before the man with the gun could react. He caught a bullet in his shoulder and stumbled backward. The bandit fired again but missed giving the man a chance to recover. He rushed forward gun blazing until the coward hit the dirt with a thud. 1.
There was a momentary quiet. Then a single shot. The man felt the hot blood spilling out of his gut. Much too slowly he turned to the man who had killed him, the wounded bandit slumped against the boulder. They looked at each other silently, firelight dancing over their faces. Then the man with the gun took aim and shot the man who killed him in the head. 0.

He fell to his knees then, still holding his gun. 15 years and six men gone. 20 horses and one girl.
“Lizzie!” he shouted, “Lizzie Benson!”
It took a while, but the girl returned from the darkness and crept carefully over the bodies, kicking one that was still breathing. She came and stood in front of the man on his knees who was struggling to breathe.
“Lizzie.” he said.
She stared at him, the dirty gag still in her mouth. He motioned her closer and she got down on her knees in front of him. Letting go of his gun, he reached around her head and untied the gag.
He pulled a knife out of his boot and cut the rope that bound her hands.
Wincing in pain he dropped the knife and placed a hand on his blood-soaked belly.

“Who are you?” she asked.
“I met you when you were a baby.” he managed to say. “You must be 12 now.”
“13.” she said. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember you.”
“Doesn’t matter.”  he said. It was getting hard to see her, shadows were bleeding over her face, green eyes, red hair, freckled cheeks. “Your sister Margarette came and got me. She’s at Doc Hoverstad’s now. You know the place?”
“Yes, I do.” she answered.
“She’ll be needing you now. You better take those horses. Those are your horses.”
He couldn’t see her at all now, just the front steps of the farm house, the door slightly ajar. He must have fallen over because he could feel the hard earth against his shoulder. Her hand was resting delicately on the other shoulder.
“You know the way home?”
“I think so.” She was crying, he could hear it in her voice, but he was looking at that door, slightly ajar.
“North east. You can wait till the sun comes up, follow your own tracks back. You can take my belt, take my guns.”
“Mister, won't you come with me?” she sniffled.
“Not this time.”

He turned away from the door, heard it shut behind him, and looked out at the wide blue sky. His guns were hanging at his side, his horse was saddled and waiting. He smiled at the sun  from under the brim of his hat and mounted in a swift fluid motion. Feeling young and feather light, swifter than lightning, he gave a little kick and was off, riding into an unfamiliar landscape, strangely beautiful, eternally uncertain, overflowing with terror and delight.