The Ghost in the Field

It began in 1917. Our father, Jeremy, had been gone two years, serving in the Great War. We received messages from him via military mail throughout his first eighteen months. The excitement of receiving those letters was beyond any I have felt before or since. To know he was alive and well. And then the letters stopped. And the mist came. My mother said that there were many campaigns being fought all over the world and that it was not easy getting mail out from some places as it was from others.

So we waited.

And we waited.

While we waited, my older brother, only eleven years old at the time, began to see things. Believing our father to be alive and fighting to get home, he would stand at his bedroom window every night in the hope of seeing the lights of a car coming down our driveway. But all he saw was mist. Every night, it would descend across the fields between our house and the farm across the way. And in the mist was a shadow.

I never saw such things. I was younger and more prone to tiredness. He was braver than I and would run outside as soon as the shadow presented itself, but when his foot hit the field, the mist would dissipate. His vehemence for what he saw was such that I could not disbelieve him. Every night, he saw the same thing: mist and a shadow. With each night, the shadow would get closer. Closer. To the point where my brother swore he could see our father’s medals glinting on his lapel.

I awoke one morning to find my brother out in the field, asleep, freezing, his hands covered in mud. He had spoken with our father, he said. “Dig,” he was told. “Dig.” And dig he did. But he found nothing. The next day, our mother presented us with a letter informing us that our father was missing in action, presumed dead. Only a handkerchief bearing his initials and spots of blood was found and now presented to us along with the letter. My brother, as expected, was distraught. But his belief that our father was alive was total.

And so, night after night, out into the field he would go. My mother took to locking our door and windows, but my brother would not be deterred. He said our father was trying to communicate. If not his body, then his spirit. To tell us where he was. And then one night, my brother did not come back.

We searched the field and nearby farms, but there was no sign of him. Except the handkerchief. In the center of the field it lay. I ran to it and tried to claim it, but a gust of wind lifted it and blew it away from my grasp. And so it was gone. My mother was broken by my brother’s disappearance. We engaged with the local townsfolk in the search. We scoured the land and water but found nothing. I went to bed that night in tears, missing my big brother. A well of emptiness suddenly dug into my chest, the weight of nothingness crushing me down.

Then I woke, feeling hands over my eyes in the manner in which Leonard had done in play so many times. I pulled the spectral hands away, hope upon hope that I would see the mischievous face of my brother.

But there was no one.