Road Trip Episode 3: A Ghost in a Michigan Cornfield

In this week of Hallow's Eve and All Saints Day, a story of a first kiss and a life harvested way too soon.

The sign pointing to Deerfield snapped me out of the meditative state I found myself in after driving past countless corn fields on either side of the Ohio/Michigan border. Some fields appeared pregnant with corn ready to be harvested, while others cried out to be planted—barren wastelands forgotten and abandoned on this secluded highway.

A Southeast Michigan cornfield ready for harvest

Flashes of a tall teenage boy with straight brown hair and a sly smile appeared in an empty field. My junior prom date and my first, and one of my only, boyfriends.

I met Kevin through a family friend in Arkansas. When the company my dad worked for, Daisy Air Rifles, moved from Plymouth, Michigan to Rogers, Arkansas, in the late 1950s, a lot of Michiganders moved with it, leaving siblings, cousins, grandparents, and others behind in Southeast Michigan’s farm country.

Kevin’s uncle was Daisy’s plant manager--one of the hundreds of Northern immigrants who moved to the South during those years. His wife, Kevin’s Aunt Kay, became friends with my mom in Arkansas. When Kay heard I was planning to return to Michigan to attend a Catholic girls boarding school in Adrian, less than twenty miles from where Kevin and his family lived in the small farming community of Deerfield, the matchmaking began.

I don’t remember the first time I met Kevin. I have a vague memory that his mother brought him to the Academy one Friday afternoon when students had permission to wander into town. It’s possible that we went to Big Boy and had whatever one had at Big Boy in those days. A Patty Melt was my favorite, so I probably had that.

I remember that I liked him. He was funny, gentle, and kind. We laughed and goofed around like two teenagers because that’s what we were. When his mother dropped me back at school, I can’t imagine that we kissed. He might have pecked me on the cheek as I got out of the car, but that would have been the extent of it.

Because St. Joe’s was a girls school, every day was Saddie Hawkins Day. If you wanted a date to go with you to a school dance, girls had to do the asking. When it came time for the junior prom, I knew I wanted to ask Kevin. Although I could feel my heart race and my palms sweat as I dialed his number on the pay phone at the end of hall in my dorm, I felt confident he’d say yes. I was relieved to discover I was right.

I didn’t wear a long prom dress—at least I don’t think so. I don’t remember if any of the girls did. Although I can’t find it for the life of me, I know I have a photo of Kevin and me from that night. I’m pretty sure I’m wearing a dress that falls well above my knees, and Kevin has on a dapper brown suit. We look like a proper couple—the only formal photo I ever had taken of me with a boy.

What I remember most about that night is kissing. We started kissing early in the evening. Perched on a cast iron garden bench my friends and I borrowed from a nearby yard as part of the prom décor, Kevin and I kissed long and hard. I’m embarrassed when I remember it now—an unseemly PDA (public display of affection) in today’s world. Certainly, it was then.

But that night, it seemed magical to me. I’d never kissed anyone before. Kevin taught me how much I liked it. He liked it too, so we both imagined that kissing would became a central part of our relationship. Little did we know then that the universe had other plans.

In my senior year, just a few months after the junior prom, I got a call—I don’t remember from whom—that Kevin was in the hospital. The psychiatric wing. Kevin had attempted suicide.

I got permission from the nun who was in charge of our dorm to visit him. I stood by his bed and held his hand. I could tell that whatever troubled him gripped him deeply. It made me sad to see him like this. I didn’t push him to talk, so he didn’t. And we certainly didn’t kiss.

A few months after that, I fell in love with a woman. Kevin and I still talked now and then after this, but we rarely saw each other, and we never talked about the hospital. I also never told him about my new love. I felt guilty that I couldn’t be his girlfriend anymore, and hoped that wasn’t causing him pain, even though I had no indication that he wanted to be my boyfriend.

A couple years later, he called me out of the blue and invited me to join him at a gay bar in Ann Arbor. How did he know? The better question is how did I not know? Like me, Kevin was gay!

Is this what had precipitated his suicide attempt in high school? He never said, but I’m fairly sure it was—something not easily accepted in his conservative Catholic family.

When I arrived at the bar, he ran over to greet me—his joy palpable and energy infectious. “Let’s dance!” he shouted above the rowdy disco din. He grabbed my hand and skipped away as if leading me down the yellow-brick road.

It didn’t matter that we wouldn’t be kissing that night. We had both learned about who we were in the intervening years, and we were happy we could just be friends. I loved seeing him filled with joy. He had found himself, and so had I.

In so many ways, finding out he was gay relieved my conscience. I could be his friend and not worry that he wanted more. We could be gay together! I looked forward to other opportunities to go clubbing with him at the various Detroit area gay bars.

That is until I heard that Kevin had died. His mother told her sister, who told my mom, who told me. I don’t know if suicide finally got him or, if, given it was the 1980s, AIDS was the culprit. I just know that his spirit evaporated from the earth, and all that was left was a fallow field where joy and passion had once lived.

A half century later, as the turnoff to Deerfield faded in my rear-view mirror, I felt his lips on mine. I was an awkward sixteen-year-old again who just discovered one of the greatest pleasures of life. Then the image of us kissing faded, as a cold, sterile hospital room enveloped me. I took his trembling hand into mine. But before I had a chance to feel sad, Kevin’s infectious smile appeared in front of me as he swayed to the rhythm of his new life surrounded by others who accepted and loved him.

Three moments that tell the story a life—a life harvested long before it was ready.

They say you always remember your first kiss. I remember mine. And I’ll always remember Kevin’s gentle spirit as we discovered who we were each meant to be. I will also always wish he was still alive to celebrate our discoveries together instead of a ghost haunting a desolate Michigan corn field.