Published September 20, 2005
The farmer died the year before and his widow let the vast fields in front of their home go fallow. The land was left unplanted yet ready for whatever came next—perhaps another crop after the widow’s period of grieving had passed, perhaps the sale of the family land, perhaps the site of a missing child case that would haunt the town of Wynotte, North Carolina, for years to come.
I often wonder what would’ve happened if the widow had planted a crop that year. The wide-open fields would not have beckoned to us if cornstalks had stood in our way. We would not have gathered there to play our night games. The stranger would not have seen the flashlight beams bouncing as we ran and hid, prey for a predator, moving shadows under a crescent moon. If the fields had been planted, none of it would have happened the way it did, and my brother, Davy Malcor, would still be here.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame the widow. From what I’ve gathered, she was elderly and unwell. The farm had been a lot to keep up with before her husband died. And the land was worth more to one of the many developers sniffing around Wynotte in the mid-1980s as northerners migrated south, businesses moved headquarters to warmer climes, and their transplanted employees spilled over city borders and into our small town, looking for a place to settle. Letting the land go fallow was the first step in letting go.
The widow, like me, had no idea what one decision would set in motion, the many lives that would forever be changed because of it. She and I would both have to live the rest of our lives with the decisions we made. Decisions that, at the time, seemed inconsequential, yet proved to be anything but.