I worked on a train that travelled through the countryside. The train travelled between the trees and over the brooks and through the mountains until it reached a place where the trees began to thin, and this was where the fields began. The long yellow grass that filled the fields was waving and a darker yellow than you could imagine, but still it was not brown. It was yellow, and the fields were broken by long lines of trees that ran perpendicular to the train tracks.
I sat on an old chair that had both back legs missing and a long jagged crack in the yellow vinyl seat. I picked at the cracked yellow foam, turning brown, that I could reach through the crack in the vinyl. I balanced my chair against the wall and that was what made it a chair. I looked through the doorway at the passing fields.
Each farm was a long rectangle with one of the short sides provided by the edge of the railway embankment. Each farm had a house at the far end near the road, and I wondered if they put the houses there to keep them closer to the road or farther from the train tracks. I could see windows and doors in the houses but could not tell if the doors were front doors or back doors. I wondered if the houses turned their backs on the train, or did they turn away from the road. I wondered if they liked the train or hated the train, if they liked me or hated me, and what the train and me represented to them.
To me the farms were stability and peace and families around the dinner table and healthy glowing skin. I hated the grimy train and the cracked yellow vinyl of my chair. I hated the rickety movement and the way my life had never stood still since I was seventeen and took a job with the railway. I hated the countryside because it told me that I was alone. But when the trees began to thin I looked through the open door and watched the lines of trees and deep yellow fields go by, and looked for her.
She was always there, standing in the field of one particular farm, facing the train tracks until she saw me. When I came within sight she would start to wave and keep waving until I could see her no more. I always waved back, and sometimes I wondered if she really only waved at me, or if she waved at the whole train. I was sure it was just me she was waiting for.
The house she stood in front of was white with a blue roof, and it looked so fresh and clean standing there that I wanted to go to it.
As the years went by I watched her grow older. Her shoulders sagged within the simple print dress she always wore, and her red hair faded to a rusty orange. I could not see her face very well, she was too far away, but her eyes were big and green and they seemed to glow, warmly glow when I passed by. I loved her eyes.
The only part of her I could not see was her feet. The deep yellow grass, even in the spring, came up higher than the hem of her dress, and I used to imagine what kind of shoes she wore, old tennis shoes with no laces, or sandals, or no shoes at all, but I knew the tops of her feet were soft and browned by the sun, and I knew that I would like to visit her one day.
Between the house and my girl there was a yard where children played with a brown dog. The children and the dog ran around, the kids chasing the dog around the yard, and I wondered if the dog had a ball in its mouth.
One day, when my train went by her farm, I watched her waving at me, then when I could see her no more I stood up and let the chair fall to the floor. I walked along the train and when it stopped at the next town I got out. I climbed down from that train and did not look back. I told nobody where I was going, did not even tell anybody that I was going anywhere at all.
I walked the dusty roads of the town and found a road that seemed to follow the train. I walked along that road, back in the direction the train had come from. Gradually the farms and the lines of trees grew more and more familiar until I saw one that looked like it had to be mine. There was a white house with a blue roof, and I turned onto the dusty driveway and came close, and then I was standing beside the house.
The white paint was peeled and blistered and the house sagged. The windows were opaque with dirt. The roof was covered with blue shingles, cracked along their exposed edges, many of them missing entirely. I walked around the house and into the yard.
A group of children ran in circles around the yard, chasing a pale yellow dog with pieces of two-by-four. When one of the children got close enough to the dog, the child swung the chunk of wood and struck the dog with it. The dog yelped and twisted away and then it was another child's turn to get close.
I walked through the yard and into the long grass. It had changed. From the train it was a deeper yellow than you could imagine, but as I walked through it I could see that it was just yellow like the dog. Hidden in the grass, invisible from the train, were hundreds of rusty old farm tools and car parts. I walked carefully now, but I walked on, to where I could see my girl, deeper in the field, standing with her back to me, waving at the empty train tracks, waving at nothing. I walked on until I stood beside her, stepped around to the other side of her, and looked into her eyes.
She was a scarecrow. She was a burlap sack full of pale yellow straw, covered with an old print dress, with a tired old wig perched on top, the hair faded by the sun. Her eyes were the broken-off bottoms of green pop bottles. They stared blankly at me, and the broomstick that was her arms creaked and wobbled in the light breeze that riffled the pale yellow grass.
She was planted into the ground with another old broomstick. She had no feet at all.
I walked through the yellow grass to the railway embankment, and sat down to wait for my train. Looking back at the farm, I thought about how pretty the house looked from here, with its white walls and its blue roof, with the group of children playing in the yard, and the pretty girl standing in the field, waving at me.