After the Dream
An Uncanny Story for STSC Symposium: Sports
“This field holds a bit of local lore,” the agent said, pointing over the overgrown diamond nestled within the stalks of corn. “You’d think the previous owners would have gone out of business, plowing half their yield into a baseball pitch, but some sort of fortune shined on them and kept them running long after all the neighbors had been bought up by the agribusiness giants at this point. Is why their property is for sale at such a price: the inheritors refuse to sell to a corporation. ‘Must be real people,’ they said.”
I peered out over the overgrown field. Rotten bases barely flattened out the grass in four quadrants. The running path was still visible as a weedy section between the long natural grass and forbs. Rusted stands bent on either side. Crooked stadium lights had fallen into the corn years ago.
“Should work, actually,” I said. “My wife has in mind we’ll raise some animals, so this area could be redeveloped into a pen or something.”
“Raising animals is something,” the agent said. “Kinda a shame, though. This soil is the best in the world. You could grow pretty much anything here.”
“Do kids use this to play, or… something?”
The real estate agent squinted against the bright sun. “There’s not much community around here anymore. Not at least until you drive about 45 minutes to town. No, I don’t really recall the field being used by children. Tourists just came from miles around to look at the field itself.”
“Why?”
“Not sure. But yeah, you can do whatever you want with it.”
“The cable company says it’s going to take two weeks to build out the lines to our property. It’s practically costing us half a year’s mortgage payments for this line alone,” I gripped. “Jesus, how could we have missed that when closing?”
Jen shrugged. “We can use data for the short term. Besides, all these tractors seem to run off of satellite Internet. You made the decision for cable.”
“I’m not paying money to some tech surveillance overseer to use Internet,” I said, only half-believing myself.
“As if the telecommunications companies are less evil than the Silicon Valley companies,” Jen said, only half-teasing.
“Cable is faster and more dependable, which you’ll find you’ll need when you want to upload and download your videos.” I didn’t know this for sure.
It was Jen’s idea for the homestead. We had met, married, made some money, and wanted children. The big city life in Chicago had burnt us out. I wanted to write. Jen wanted to craft. So we found this patch of land in Iowa.
We had set up the house nicely. The kitchen overlooked the corn fields, which we were warned we might have to plow over and reseed, since over the years of neglect it may have inherited corn from one of the neighboring agribusiness fields, and that seed was patented.
We weren’t sure we wanted to grow corn. In fact, we weren’t sure what we were going to do with the farm. We knew we were supposed to have a plan before staking out, but we didn’t. It was surreptitious fun not knowing what we were doing at all, it gave us the childish thrill of knowing you’re doing something wrong and subconsciously expecting to get caught.
I will say one thing about our new home, though: that was a damn beautiful sunset out the kitchen window over those cornstalks.
“That’s a beautiful sunset,” Jen said.
“I was just thinking that.”
We kissed. It was a nice, communicable kiss you do when you’ve been married for years and want to say I love you. That wouldn’t do. I pulled her closer and kissed her deeper. She giggled underneath her lips.
“What’s this for?” she whispered.
“Living the dream.”
I kicked one of our half-unpacked boxes out of the way and lifted her to the kitchen counter. She squealed and wrapped her legs around me for support. I leaned into her. She started kissing my neck. I saw the red light of the sunset across her hair, and then I saw the old man staring at us through kitchen window.
I dropped Jen right into the sink.
“Ow, careful!” Seeing my expression, Jen twisted around and gasped.
“You made it different,” he said. He looked to be about 80.
Jen and I hadn’t known what to do, so we had brought him in. Jen was making tea. He was sitting at our little card table we had put up in the kitchen to eat off of before we built a real dining table.
“It’s not finished yet,” Jen said apologetically, “we just moved in and haven’t built all the furniture. Uh, are you from around here?”
He pointed out the kitchen window. “I guess you could say I come from there,” he said, “but yeah, I’m from around here.” He spoke his words one at a time, not so much in remembering how to speak but orienting them. He looked at the walls as if he was supposed to see something else but the walls persisted in being in the way.
“Is there someone we can call?” Jen asked. “Like your family?”
“Yeah, I have family,” he said. “But you don’t need to bother them tonight. They won’t come to get me. Maybe later,” he said, with a tinge of hope.
“Okay,” Jen said carefully. “Well, what’s your name?”
“Ray,” he answered.
Jen looked at me. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to tell him.
“My name is Ray, too. Nice to meet you.”
“Oh. Is it?” Ray looked at me with a bit more interest. “And do you hear the voice too?”
I looked to Jen. This is what we were worried about. In Chicago, we would have never let some wandering stranger into our apartment, no matter their age. Maybe the same rules apply here. People don’t wander up unless they’re crazy.
But where the hell had this old man come from?
“No. I mean, I’m not religious, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Ray stared. He looked so fragile, his head was always shaking, perhaps some form of Parkinson’s? It took him effort to stare.
He got up. Despite herself, Jen rushed over to support him by his elbow. “Thanks,” he wheezed. “I think I better get moving along. I’ll visit you tomorrow.”
“Uhhh…” I looked at Jen again. She was stricken as answerless as I. “Sure. Sure, Ray, then maybe we can get to know each other. I’ll drive you if you’ll tell me where you’re going?”
“Oh, no need,” Ray said, “I’ll walk.”
Jen silently mouthed at me, “Drive him.” I shrugged. What was I supposed to do?
Ray walked out the door. Jen and I watched as he walked into the cornfield, slowly disappearing behind the stalks.
“I don’t know. Looks like it could be a quarter acre?” Jen said, looking at the baseball field.
It was a few days later. Ray had not, in fact, visited us the previous nights. We had focused on all the housework, unpacking and organizing, until we finally admitted we were afraid of finding Ray dead somewhere on our property.
So we were surveying our land as an excuse to scan around and make sure there were no dead bodies in the rows of corn.
So far, there hadn’t been.
“Looks a bit smaller than a major league field, but I dunno, I think it’s a bit larger than a kids’ field. Maybe we should look it up?” I said.
“I don’t think we need to know what size a baseball field should be, I’m pretty sure we just need to know how big this particular one is so that we know what to do with it,” Jen said.
“Fair enough.”
I was perambulating the field with a planimeter app when Ray showed up again.
“You hear the voice yet?”
I looked up from my cellphone. Backlit against another a high afternoon sun was the shrunken and bent figure of Ray, sitting on the Western-side stands.
“No…” I said. “You sure you want to sit there? Those stands don’t look safe.”
“They’ll hold up a bit longer,” Ray said as I approached him, “they’re sturdy. I built them myself.”
Ahhhhhhh…
“Oh. So you… you built… all of this?”
Ray smiled, sadly. “It’s a nice field when it’s maintained. You have to maintain it. Nobody’s gonna play on this field unless you keep it clean.”
“I mean, Ray, we’re probably not going to keep this field.”
“No?” Ray looked at me, and my heart sunk. In his face was the disappointment of a fiery love spurned. “That’s a shame, Ray. I don’t know what will happen if we lose it.”
“Well, we bought this land from you. I know it must be tough, it was your home. You’re welcome to visit, but we have plans for it.”
“Plans,” Ray said simply. My skin tingled with nervousness. How could I inform this guy that we didn’t, really, actually have plans? That we were replacing his home in mere whim?
On the other hand, it wasn’t his anymore. “I should get you home, Ray,” I said.
“What are your dreams?” Ray asked.
“What?”
“You said plans. But what are your dreams?” Ray pointed at the field.
“Uh. To be a writer, I suppose. And to have a place of our own.”
“No, those are plans. Not dreams,” Ray eyed my face. “Do you like baseball?”
“I don’t mind baseball,” I said, “I don’t really follow it.”
Ray shook his head. “No religion and no baseball. No wonder you don’t have dreams.”
“I mean—” I started.
“That’s why you don’t hear the voice. You have to have a dream.” He cocked his head, listening.
In his pause, I heard the breeze sashaying through the stalks. I heard the whine of a distant tractor on one of the corporate fields, remotely controlled by however means. I suddenly felt this land to be terribly isolated from civilization.
“You know, Shoeless Joe Jackson played on this field. He did so every night for forty years. At least as long as I was around.”
“Oh yeah? Was this his practice space?”
Ray once again looked me over, once again sadly, like I was every kind of disappointment to him. “You don’t believe in baseball.”
“No, I guess not,” I copped.
Ray nodded. “I knew a writer once. A great writer. He was especially attuned to this place. He,” with a meaningful nod to me, “he believed in baseball.”
Ray told me about baseball. He told me about the games he had watched, the players, their skill, their joy in play. They sounded forever. He told me about the audiences, people coming for miles, people cheering wildly and loud and people sitting contemplative like church.
As his stories went on, I watched the field. I could imagine the cheers, the cracking of the bat. I could hear thump of fly balls caught in aged leather gloves. I could hear the scrape of dirt as players slide into bases.
I could even see… no. I couldn’t quite see. The late light tickled the shadows of long prairie grass and weeds. A run from second to first base, that was a light breeze. The baseball rocketing through the air, that was a bird flitting in the corner of my vision. I even spent time staring at the towering Shoeless Joe Jackson, until he faded away and I realized he was Ray’s own shadow, disappearing now that the sun was sinking below the cornfield.
Ray had talked me into sunset.
“Good stories and good baseball, they both require dreams,” he said. “So what do you believe in?”
“I mean” I said, “my wife and I are trying to build something here. We just need something of our own, something we built ourselves. I guess you could say we believe in making our own story.”
Ray frowned. “But what is your dream?”
“This, I guess,” I said, waving my hand over the field.
Ray followed my gesture, his eyes taking in the field as it was, not as he knew it. “You know, someone once told me, ‘If you build it, they will come.’”
“Yeah,” I said, “I think that’s smart. You just got to make something, add to the world rather than just consume from it.”
“Sure,” Ray said. “But you can’t build what you don’t believe in.”
“And you didn’t give him a ride?” Jen asked.
“No. He said he would be back, I honestly thought he was gonna take a piss, and next thing I know I realized he disappeared off somewhere again,” I explained.
Jen rolled her eyes. “Well, next time he shows up we’re gonna have to explain to him that we’re sorry he’s grieving, but we have better uses for the property.”
I took a bite of lasagna. Jen had spent all day making the pasta from scratch, but the ricotta, meat, and sauce were from the grocery about 60 miles down the highway. Her first goal on the homestead was to make a full lasagna with all ingredients from scratch.
“So Jen, what’s your dream?” I asked.
“Ray, you know my dream,” she said.
“I mean, is homesteading a plan or a dream?” I asked.
Her face tightened in confusion. She chewed slowly.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way,” I said.
“Homesteading isn’t the dream, Ray. It’s a step to the dream.”
“Okay,” I said. I realized I had no idea what she was talking about, and now I was worried.
“Anyway, speaking of plans, I got the blog up and opened up a few profiles on Instagram and TikTok,” Jen said.
“Cool,” I said, “that’s great.”
“It’s the shortest route to the house,” the contractor said flatly, “otherwise I need to run the cable all the way around the back of the property and it’ll cost you a lot more.”
We were standing in the baseball field. Jen and I had discussed it, and since it was cheaper to dig the line directly through, we’d just split off the acreage on the cable line and partition one side for plants and one side for animals. The cable was already costing us enough as it was.
However, it meant we had to dig up the baseball field.
“Yeah, go ahead,” I said.
The contractor nodded and trotted off, beating stalks to either side as he huffed and sweated through the corn.
The workers removed the bleachers first to get them out of the way of the backhoe. Then they drove heavy equipment onto the diamond, but the work went quickly. A few strong men and a few pieces of bright yellow heavy equipment, and the cable was run to our house, finally connecting it to the modern, technologically up-to-date world.
They cleaned up and removed the equipment, but there was still some torn up soil and weeds, and those dirty old bases to attend to. It was a warm evening. Jen was cooking and the kitchen was hot, so I told myself there was no good putting off until tomorrow what could be done today.
I went to the field with a rake and a shovel and several industrial-sized trash bags to clean up.
The breeze was nice. I could see the enjoyment in this work, the fresh air and the clear and endless sky and the rustling sound of the stalks. For all the work, I found myself comfortable here.
I took a pause from scooping dirt and inhaled deeply, closed my eyes and tried to feel the land around me. Maybe this was the right choice. I could sense a connection here.
When I opened my eyes, I saw Ray. He stood at the edge of the cornstalks, and he was surrounded by baseball players. In the twilight their eyes twinkled like stars. They had their hand clasps in front of them in observance, as if in a funeral, or at prayer.
Ray frowned at me, and nodded to his friends. They turned around, and disappeared into the corn like a movie fade.
This uncanny story is presented for the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) Symposium. The STSC is a small, exclusive online speakeasy where a dauntless band of raconteurs, writers, artists, philosophers, flaneurs, musicians, idlers, and bohemians share ideas and companionship. Each month STSC members create something around a set theme. This cycle, the theme was “Sports.”
If you are a writer, you might consider joining us.
Also to give credit where it is due, this story is an homage / unofficial and unsanctioned sequel to the 1989 Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams, which I loved as a kid… because of the ghosts.
To experience my previous STSC Symposium submissions:
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