Zorrie

by Laird Hunt

  For Carolyn R. Anderson and Stephen B. Hunt

  And in memory of Maurice O. Hunt

  Indiana-born all three

  ALSO BY LAIRD HUNT

  In the House in the Dark of the Woods

  The Evening Road

  Neverhome

  Kind One

  Ray of the Star

  The Exquisite

  Indiana, Indiana

  The Impossibly

  The Paris Stories

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  When she reached the crest of Equemauville she saw the Honfleur lights sparkling in the night sky like a company of stars; beyond, the sea stretched dimly.

  —GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, A SIMPLE HEART

  I

  out of this shadow, into this sun

  Zorrie Underwood had been known throughout the county as a hard worker for more than fifty years, so it troubled her when finally the hoe started slipping from her hands, the paring knife from her fingers, the breath in shallow bursts from her lungs, and, smack dab in the middle of the day, she had to lie down. At first she carried out this previously unthinkable obligation on the worn leather of the daybed in the front room, with her jaw set, hands pressed tight against her sides, staring up at the end of a long crack that ran the length of the ceiling, or at the flecks of blue light thrown onto the legs of the dining room table by the stained-glass jay that hung in the south window. When after several minutes of this she felt her breath slowing and the blood flowing back out through her veins, she would ease herself up, shake her head, and resume whatever activity had been interrupted. Once, though, after she had slipped in the garden and landed in a tangle of rhubarb, she lay down on the daybed and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep that wasn’t interrupted until, late in the evening, the cat began mewling and scratching at the side door. It took her a long time to come fully into consciousness, and as she lay there, vaguely urging her eyelids to open, aware that she was not quite awake, it seemed to her she had never felt so comfortable, so careless, so at ease. She set a feather pillow on the daybed and pulled a light wool blanket out of the upstairs closet. She began to intersperse her work in the garden and yard with regularly scheduled naps. She would lie on her side with her back to the room and look at the deep white of the wall. She would be unaware that her eyes had closed. She would sleep. Every now and again her conscience would chase her up off the daybed and back into her weedy rows or fruit-filled trees, but mostly during the time she had allotted, and sometimes past it, she just gazed at the wall or slept. One morning, well before it was time to lie down, she looked over at the pillow and blanket and soft leather and realized, with a shudder that seemed to chill and warm her both, that she was filled with longing.

  She had never liked to dream. After diphtheria took first her mother and then her father, she was raised by an elderly aunt who told her that people were born dreaming of devils and dark roses and should beware. This aunt, whom her dying father had only called on reluctantly, for she had drunk too deeply from the cup of bitterness after a badly failed marriage, shook and scolded Zorrie vigorously when, as happened frequently during the first months, she woke up crying. If she woke up screaming, she received a slap. Sometimes she received a slap anyway. Either because of what she was leaving behind in the dizzying hallways of her head or what she was waking to, Zorrie came to harbor what proved a lifelong distrust of the deep hours, as her aunt referred to them, when the mind played tricks on itself.

  Days were different. Zorrie ran, she skipped, she won a prize at school for turning the best cartwheel. She and the other children played with hoops and balls in the yard. No one could climb a tree as quickly as she could, and there were only two boys in the school who could beat her at arm wrestling. The teacher, Mr. Thomas, would take them on long walks through the woods and across the fields. Often on these expeditions they were asked to collect interesting objects. Zorrie would run back and forth like a dog working a field, her quick hands flashing down to the ground and up again. Heart pounding, she would bring her discoveries to Mr. Thomas for inspection. He would lift each leaf or mushroom or insect close to his face or up to the light or under his magnifying glass and, with Zorrie leaning over his shoulder, or even holding the magnifying glass herself, murmur, “Yes. Very interesting. This is a good specimen, Zorrie. Well done.”

  When it rained, Zorrie sat at her desk and, brow furrowed, labored over her slate while the other children played checkers and spun tops and jumped around the room. She liked the musty smell of the books and the feel of chalk residue on her fingers and couldn’t be convinced that the inside of the schoolhouse was meant for anything but learning. She loved the songs Mr. Thomas taught them and the stories he told about battles fought long ago. She didn’t learn to read as quickly as some of the others, but when she did, she rarely made a mistake. From the start, her mind moved quickly through figures and made light work of anything to do with geography. In fact, she knew the capitals of the forty-eight states and the names of all the South American countries before several of the older children and, after whispering the names of the major European cities to herself over and over again before she fell asleep each night, received the highest marks of the school on a year-end geography exam.

  If Zorrie was at home, which is where she was to be found on school days after her fifteenth birthday, she helped with the goat or the garden or the chickens or the cooking or the sewing her aunt took in. Though her ruined marriage had left her at best ambivalent about the faith of her former husband, her aunt never set aside a Lutheran’s belief in the redemptive power of work, and something like a gleam, a little bit of breath on a little bit of near-burned-out coal, would enter the old woman’s eye whenever Zorrie would finish a job quickly and start another one. At moments like those, her habitually pinched lips might part and a few words emerge. Sometimes it was about a plan she had once had to open a flower shop in nearby Frankfort, a nice place with peonies or lilies in the window and a chair or two on which her tired customers might sit a moment on a hot day. She would talk too about a trip she had taken before her marriage, to Bedford or Bloomington, where she had spent hours in a fabric store running her hands over bolt after bolt of crinoline and serge and silk. Every once in a great while her aunt would sing softly in a voice that was thin but true, songs that tended in the main toward melancholy, like the one about a man who each day put on his suit, cut a single flower from his garden, and carried it five miles along a dusty railroad track to the house of the woman he loved. Sometimes in the song he did this until the woman agreed to marry him, and others he did it until one or the other of them had died.

  As their shovels scraped or their needles flew, her aunt might, on exceptionally rare occasions, offer some comment about Zorrie’s parents. A blue dragonfly had once landed on her mother’s finger at a church supper and made her shriek. She had loved blackberries and angel food cake and had had an uncommonly loud laugh. Her father had been good at horseshoes, bad at plowing, and given more easily than was seemly to tears. Zorrie worked, on those days when her aunt’s lips parted and she spoke or sang, until her fingers ached and her eyes blurred in hopes that it might continue. She worked until it felt like there was a knife blade jabbing at the muscles around her neck. She worked until she had started making mistakes and then stopped, took a deep breath, and picked up where she had left off. Once, on one of those long days, when she had finished hemming a skirt and had reached for another, her aunt called her a good girl. Zorrie waited for years but never heard it again.

  Her aunt died of a stroke three days after Zorrie�
��s twenty-first birthday and left her nothing—not even a key to the front door—so Zorrie went to Frankfort to find work. It was 1930, and there wasn’t any. She looked for a week and then walked back out into the countryside to try her luck in some of the smaller towns. One of the doors she knocked on in Jefferson turned out to belong to her old teacher, Mr. Thomas. He was balder and somewhat heavier but otherwise unchanged, and she was very happy to see him. His house was filled to the brim with books and pictures. Photographs were neatly arranged along the mantelpiece. There was a gold-framed painting of a man standing hat in hands and head-bowed in a churchyard, and a glass case of butterflies that Mr. Thomas said he’d collected over the years in fields and forests across the county. The breeze spilled in through big west-facing windows, bringing in with it the braided smells of mint, thyme, and honeysuckle. Mr. Thomas had Zorrie sit down at the kitchen table and put two fried egg sandwiches, pickled carrots, and a pitcher of iced tea in front of her. Zorrie said she liked to work for what she was offered and would be glad to help after the meal with any chore, large or small, Mr. Thomas might have on his hands, that she could sew, chop, and churn until the cows came home. As she ate and drank, as slowly as she could stand to, Mr. Thomas chewed on an unlit pipe and told her that she had been much missed in his classroom after she had left, that she had been liked and admired by her fellows and greatly appreciated by him. He spoke of her unswerving dedication to the task, no matter how tedious the lesson, and her resolute kindness to younger children who were struggling. He wondered if she had been told that he had attempted more than once, to no avail, to convince Zorrie’s aunt to let her return. She said she had not.

  “She was most impressive in her way, was your aunt,” he said. “I heard of course about her demise. Please accept my condolences. I expect it’s hard carrying on there at home without her.”

  Zorrie nodded and smiled. She did not like to lie even halfway to her old teacher about her circumstances, but felt too shy to worry him about where she was now sleeping, so changed the subject and asked what, now that she had eaten at his table, he had for her to help him with. After remarking that everything was under control, especially since the school year would soon be over and he could look to shoring up the home front, Mr. Thomas responded to her insistence by vanishing for several minutes and then coming back with a few pressed shirts that were missing buttons. He had a sewing kit she could use, and “spares” that matched the missing buttons so perfectly that it was clear to her that he had gone into his bedroom and carefully torn them off. Zorrie found it curious that in such quick succession first she and then he had jostled the truth for fear of incurring discomfort or upset. For a moment, as if the years had been set aside and they were back in his classroom, she had an urge to raise her hand and ask Mr. Thomas if truth was hard and impervious or soft and easily bruised, but instead she reached for the sewing kit and let the small smile that formed on her lips at the thought of raising her hand after all this time serve in place of what might have been an interesting answer.

  While she worked, with the fine, clean fragrance of the shirts wafting up around her, Mr. Thomas chewed on his pipe and showed her an album of pressed leaves and flowers on one of the pages of which a pretty red maple leaf, rimmed emerald around its edges, sat between a purple chrysanthemum and a cluster of burnt-orange mycena above the neatly printed words “Specimens Collected by Zorrie Callisher on October the 19th, 1923.”

  “It was that day along Sugar Creek at the back of the Freeman farm. We had to go back early because of a storm,” Zorrie said.

  “We had to double-time it, didn’t we?”

  “And we still got soaked.”

  “It took my shoes about a week to dry. I’m not sure they ever quite recovered.”

  Zorrie touched at the album page, ran her finger around the edge of the mycena. “I didn’t know you kept these things.”

  “I kept them all. Everything that could be pressed, anyway. I have more of these albums over at school.”

  Zorrie tapped gently at the maple stem. She had stopped to pick it up as the first fat drops of rain had begun to fall. She had not thought about that day in years but now remembered with pleasing clarity the sound of laughter and hollering as the rain started hitting them, the way their feet had pounded down the lane like they were horses in a great race, and the giant grin that had taken up lengthy residence on Mr. Thomas’s face when they made it back to the classroom.

  “You can take that page with you if you want it,” he said when she had finished the last shirt.

  Zorrie thought about it, imagined what would happen to it out under the stars where she had spent the last few nights, let alone the next time it poured, and said, “I think I’d rather it stayed in here with all the others.”

  Mr. Thomas handed her a sack full of plums at the door, but Zorrie wouldn’t take the dollar he tried to press into her hand along with it. The meal, the plums, and the chance to think a minute about happy times had been all the wages for doing nigh on nothing that she required.

  “It wasn’t nigh on nothing having you here, Zorrie,” he said. “Both me and my shirts are the better for it. You need anything from your old teacher in the days to come, you shout. Now go on.”

  She ate a plum each day for a week, then drifted west. There were others living like her—indoors when they were lucky and out when they weren’t. Sometimes she would stop and exchange a word or a scrap of food, or share a stretch of road, but mostly she kept on alone. In Lafayette a man with some hump to his back gave her three dimes and a melon for helping him shift a shed full of seed bags. In Attica a woman served her a slice of ham and a piece of bread with some buttermilk to dip it in for watching her baby and darning a basketful of socks. The woman asked Zorrie as she chewed her ham if she didn’t have any place or people she could go to, and though her mind flashed briefly to Mr. Thomas, Zorrie raised her eyebrows and shrugged. “Well,” said the woman, considering her appraisingly and offering her a second half-slice of ham, “you’re no giant, but you look like you can take care of yourself.”

  She got a ride on a seed-delivery truck to Morocco but thought the prospects there looked so dim that when the driver told her she could continue on with him into Illinois as long as she helped him unload his cargo along the way, she readily agreed. When the truck broke down outside Kankakee and the driver thought the time might pass more quickly if he put his hand on her leg, Zorrie struck out at him so hard he fell back, stunned, and then she ran off through a mustard field and into a beech grove. There she cried amid the pretty trees for a time about where the deaths first of her parents and then of her awful old aunt had brought her. Soon, though, she became furious with herself for carrying on and for thinking of her poor dead aunt as awful, even if on balance she so clearly had been, so she set her chin and marched into town, telling herself as she went that she had to live up to the Attica woman’s observation. She asked in the drugstore who needed her to do something because she wasn’t ready to starve, then asked the same question and made the same statement in the bakery and at the lunch counter. No one needed her to do anything, nor seemed inclined to rip buttons off their shirts to help her in her plight, but a kindly man wearing outsize overalls standing by the filling station gave her part of his sandwich and told her that if her eyes were good and her fingers could move fast, they were always hiring this time of year up the road a ways in Ottawa.

  It took her two days to get there. The first day she walked because she didn’t like the look of the drivers of the few vehicles that went by. On the second day she had three rides that took her fewer than ten miles each and then a fourth, in the early evening, that drove her right up to the Radium Dial Company’s doors. The office was closed but there was a sign on the window that read “Hardworking Girls Wanted.” She was standing under it first thing the next day.

  She was to sit in a large, airy room in the converted high school and paint the numbers on clock faces with luminous paint. This was, she was told
, important work. Not just households across the region but the mighty armed forces of the nation were depending on it being done well. She received twenty minutes of instruction, which included several comments about the safety of the dull yellow powder she was supposed to dip her wet brush into before placing it between her lips to point the tip. The powder tasted like metal mixed with the late roots her aunt had always insisted they boil and eat, even when there were other options in the pantry cupboard, and her first few attempts at making lines and numbers on the practice faces were a mess. She soon saw how it could be done, though, and her instructor nodded, patted her once on the shoulder, and told her she could now work on the real thing.

  When the instructor was gone, the girls on either side of Zorrie rose as one from their places, took her by her elbows, and led her into the adjoining, windowless lavatory, where with some ceremony they had her stand in front of the mirror over the sink before flipping the lights off. First Zorrie saw that her lips were alive with yellow, and then that her fingertips were covered in glowing splotches. The girls behind her were glowing too. One of them had painted a heart on her cheek. The other had painted an eye on her forehead. Their hair and dresses shimmered. Their lips and teeth too were golden. They waved their arms and shook their shoulders and, as they giggled, sent off little clouds of glowing powder to drift through the dark.

  “I’m Marie Martins,” said the one with the heart. “And I’m Janie Clemmons,” said the one with the eye. Zorrie’s head felt like it might float off her shoulders when she came out of the bathroom behind them, and her feet felt just as light. She thought she might rise entire from the floor to twist and float against the ceiling beams. Marie and Janie shared their lunches with her. They ate at their places and had a bowl of peppermints they encouraged Zorrie to help herself to. Many of the girls kept candy near them to counter the taste of the paint. They laughed a great deal and made their brushes fly over the clock faces and almost never stopped talking as they worked.