Reverend Vargas carried the inert feline body to the field in front of his house, tenderly placing it next to the garden. Returning to the porch, he slipped off his shoes and sat in the wicker rocker, contemplating the end of yet another day.
The Wheat Woman
THERESA HOTTEL
Graham County, Oklahoma, 1998
As the noon light bounces brilliantly off the kitchen tile and outside the tractor roars—it’s summertime, it never stops—this mother stares at her daughter and feels an almost violent distance. She feels cold. She feels that her ten-year-old daughter, fidgeting by the dishwasher, is a small, dangerous animal that sneaks through the farmhouse and plans secret attacks. Her daughter looks unkind and white.
Fields surround them. I have to feed this child, the mother thinks. When her back is turned she feels her daughter’s eyes slice at her back, unbearable. She senses threat, sourceless and unprecedented: Why? Is it this house? Has her daughter made it so tense? Who is her daughter? Who knows the child’s thoughts?
I am a bad mother, the mother thinks. I failed to buy bread. She microwaves a leftover hamburger patty and hesitates. But her daughter’s eyes glint and she says she will eat it, plain, wrapped in a napkin. No, she doesn’t want rice.
This daughter wants to vomit. She feels it too, a tension like each kitchen surface hides a needle. The tension has built for weeks but unexpectedly unfurled this morning, and now this farmhouse, their home, feels like hands around her throat. She longs to run.
“No,” she says again, so the mother shuts the rice cooker. The mother decides to eat like her daughter, chewing meat out of a napkin. They stand at the table, across from each other, sucking up crumbs from the blue paper. Out of loyalty and deep love they both stay. But they don’t understand the feeling all around them. Their eyes are cold. They look out the window on the farm. This beautiful American farm. Who are we?
The wheat woman is coming across the field.
The daughter sees this specter from the kitchen window. Slow stroll toward the farmhouse, bare feet curdling soil with each step. She makes a sound like worms within her throat. She might have flaxen hair, the daughter thinks, a word learned from an English storybook. “What color is flaxen?” she asks, knowing her mother cannot answer. The mother cannot read English text. When the mother looks out the window she cannot see the wheat woman, she sees only the slow tractor of her American husband, green beast wading through gold crop, back and forth before the window like a parade of provision.
My daughter is a small woman, the mother thinks. I built a frame for us. I came to this life to escape but I feel hunted, when I should feel at rest.
The daughter can’t breathe. Guilt seems to compact her, for no reason. She feels like she has hurt her mother, but her mother before her is unharmed and neither of them can trace the pressure to its source of shame. The wheat woman walks closer.
“Mama,” the girl says finally. “I have to tell you. There is a pale woman coming now, across the fields. She is coming here to kill you and take your place in our home. She is beautiful with flaxen hair.”
Who is my daughter? What is my daughter? The mother sets her meat-filled napkin down. She feels, incredibly, that the child really wants to hurt her. She feels her daughter’s words and eyes like knives, aimed at her exposed neck.
So this is the feeling that makes the house so tense. All this time, that wheat woman drew near.
“Do you love Dad?” the girl wants to know. She forces meat down her throat. She longs to sprint outside and burrow into wheat. Instead she waits. She repeats the question in two languages.
“We’re not from here,” the mother finally says. “I’m not. It’s this place that’s wrong for us.”
“The wheat is wrong?”
“Wheat fields.”
“They’re the only fields I’ve ever known.”
She has arrived.
The wheat woman is stooping at their doorway. The wheat woman wants to come inside. She’s silhouetted, flaxen, soft, and solid. The mother still cannot see her, but she can smell her, the rich smell of smoked meat, warm lumber.
It’s a tender smell. Her daughter looks pinched and vulnerable in the midday light. Her daughter stares at the opening door. Her daughter yearns for the relief she might find.
“Come here,” the mother says to her daughter. She opens her arms. “Please, come to me. Don’t welcome her.”
They wait to see if the daughter will come. In the daughter’s sight the wheat woman’s mouth cracks open. The wheat woman says, “I love him so.” Meanwhile, the mother feels wordless. She has short black hair, speaks English with an unrelenting accent, and her husband calls her his Suzie Wong. She understands the ghost her daughter sees. She knows the hunted, panicked feeling, the need to run to wheat, to make it end. To burrow your body in the surfaces of this land.
“Mama?”
“I can’t rest. That’s this feeling.”
“Where are we from, then? Tell me.”
“I can’t. There’s no place now.”
The small, mean-faced daughter backs away from the table. Through the open door, wheat rustles as if alive. The air is humid and heavy. The tractor’s hum recedes, then nears, then falls again.
“Welcome me,” the wheat woman says. “Welcome rest.”
Her words twine with the tractor’s hum. The wheat is high and whispering. The daughter longs to let her in. She could let her mother go and thus be free of her mother’s burdens, of feelings that smear her own sense of self. The house as tense and sharp and twisted as barbed wire. She grasps the feeling close. She lets it cut her.
Then she turns her back on the door and takes her mother’s hand. The mother’s fingers
