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.

 

Dead Worlds

we called them dead worlds

they were fashionable for a while

a blank slate where colored birds would roam

at one point I figured out how to cross the threshold

and I did visit a small one

before the end

it was simple enough,

I took the escalator and walked to the double doors

beyond I saw the flatlands

I shivered when I saw the monkey cages

the millions of shoppers

the modern architecture that held a promise of headstones and weeds

I made a conscious choice and shed the resistance

I became smaller

more proper

I was a consumer

and I dipped my hand into the fish tanks,

swallowing minnows whole

I surrendered to the oblivion

and pretended it was simple

a spiral of want and fetish and desire

I abandoned my hopes and silver dreams

I walked with the rest of them

drawn with restless blood

over the winding streets and promenades

I exchanged my vitality for the promise of something else

something held out in front of me like gold on a string

visible and intangible

I moved in a lucid haze

my fingers turned green

I was carried for a time

then I carried others

I learned how to sing a dozen different songs

later I awoke

on the other side of the double doors

I saw the flatlands

the crumbled headstone

the red and blue birds