Zorrie

by Laird Hunt

  Zorrie had slept the night before in the hayloft of an abandoned barn behind a wheat field that ran green and sloping down to the banks of the Illinois, and when the day had gone to its grave, she started off for it. Janie called her back, though. She said Zorrie wasn’t going to sleep in any barn. Zorrie asked how Janie knew where she was heading, and Janie laughed and said Ottawa was just a little bitty town. For her part, she planned to move to Chicago as soon as she had tucked enough away, she told Zorrie as they went back to her house. She would live in her own apartment and take the L each day and never come back home to Ottawa. Well, except maybe sometimes on holidays. She didn’t like Christmas much, but Easter and the Fourth of July were fun. Zorrie asked her what the L was. Janie laughed again and hooked her arm through Zorrie’s. When they got to her house, Janie hugged and kissed and shoved her way through a horde of younger brothers and sisters, and, once they were in the small room she got to herself because she had started bringing in money, showed Zorrie a picture postcard of an elevated rail line that ran twenty-five feet off the ground. “You’ll think about clock faces tonight, but stay here a while and you’ll be thinking about trains that can drop you off in the stars.”

  Zorrie was too tired to think about clocks or anything else that first night and the ones that followed, and was happy for it, but she never grew tired of listening to Janie talk about Chicago. Sometimes Marie came over and took a seat at the huge table Janie’s mother set, and when they had finished helping clean up afterward, the three of them would step out into the quiet streets. Once or twice they met up with other girls from the plant and would walk in a large glowing group through the town. Zorrie saw her first movie in their company. She ate her first ice cream sundae with them. She collected her first paycheck with Marie on one side of her and Janie on the other, and that was the way they sat together during Sunday services. They swam in both the Fox and the Illinois. They lifted their hands above their heads and kicked their heels and shook the fringes of their dresses at the boys who were always just a soft holler away, always ready to joke and dance. Zorrie talked about home and Indiana so often she didn’t even know she was doing it. One of the other girls at work started referring to her as “Indiana,” but the nickname didn’t stick. People in town called everyone who worked with a brush at the radium plant “ghost girls.” One night Zorrie and Janie painted the bed frame of her littlest sisters with circles and squares so that it would glow while they slept. They told them a story to go with the design about a magical country filled with fairies. Zorrie thought of the landscape around her aunt’s house when she told her part of the story, though she didn’t say this. Marie almost always kept a tin of the company’s Luna powder on her, and whenever an evening out on Janie’s porch grew too dull or just quiet, she would toss a glittering pinch of it up into the air and break into song: “Ghost girl, ghost girl, why’d you grow your hair so long?”

  The subject of hair was a favorite one of the assistant supervisor. He thought the young women should do more than tie it back when they were bent over their brushes and dials, that they should wear it in special hats or nets for safety, but the girls all laughed this off and told him it would look too awful. The assistant supervisor was full of ideas to combat the dangers of the world. He was somewhat deaf, from a bout of fever in his childhood, and, it seemed to Zorrie, spoke more than he would have if listening had come more easily. Radium was a favorite subject. He said it was more marvelous than gold, more precious than diamonds. He said that someday great tales would be written about radium, that they were already being shaped, perhaps on this very floor. He liked to tell the girls that he put a pinch of radium in everything he drank and everything he ate. He even put radium in the bottles of Coca-Cola he got at the drugstore and drank every day with his lunch. There was dinnerware made with radium and beads made with radium that would allow a neck or wrist ornament to glow and glow. In Europe a company had woven radium with wool to keep children extra warm. “Think of it,” he said to Zorrie. “I want to learn how they do it, then try it myself to see if I can get it done.”

  Zorrie thought of it. She had often felt cold as a child, and even on chilly mornings at church her aunt had never let her sit close enough to warm her. If she had been able to wear a layer of warm radium, perhaps she wouldn’t have missed the mother she had barely known quite as much. She asked Janie what it was like to have a mother, and Janie leaned over and gave Zorrie a kiss on the top of her head and then turned her around and gave her a quick kick in her seat and told her that having a mother was those two things, and that if sometimes it was more of one than the other, it all balanced out in the end. Marie said it wasn’t kisses and kicks with her mother. It was more like breeze and wind or rain and snow. “You have to shovel snow when it starts to stick,” said Janie. Zorrie wasn’t sure why this was funny, but when they both started laughing, she joined in.

  Often as they walked through town or down along the river, Zorrie would think of Mr. Thomas, and her sharp eye would spot something worth picking up. She took to making gifts of the abandoned nests, arrowheads, monarch wings, turtle shells, and fistfuls of four-leaf clovers she would find. Marie got a river shell that seemed to glow as beautifully as Luna paint when the sun struck it, and Janie an overlarge pearl, lost some long-ago season in the back of an otherwise empty drawer in an abandoned house they explored one Sunday after church. Janie said there wasn’t anything you could buy in a store that was prettier. Both wore their gifts on strings around their necks the next time they went dancing. Hands and cheeks had been painted to glow, but it was the shell and the pearl that shone the brightest. Indeed the boys that night turned into moths, crowding Janie and Marie so closely that more than once Zorrie had to help swat them away. “You are a giver of gifts and a gallant defender and we will love you forever,” they said in unison, staring into her eyes during a break in the dancing. When the evening had come to its close, and the crowd had started to disperse, the three of them joined hands and went off running through the empty streets, leaping and shrieking and laughing under a giant moon.

  It was times like these that Zorrie knew she would miss the most when, near the end of her second month, she gave in to the call of Indiana and climbed onto a bus and waved to her friends through the dusty window and went home. Only there was no home to go to. She had had vague thoughts, encouraged by Janie, about trying to lay some claim to her aunt’s property, but the county official she worked her nerve up to speak to said that because her aunt’s considerable, long-standing debts had remained unsettled at the time of her death, it had already been auctioned off.

  Still, it was Indiana, it was the dirt she had bloomed up out of, it was who she was, what she felt, how she thought, what she knew. Janie had tried to convince her that the Illinois dirt was the same as the Indiana dirt and that the Illinois skies were the same as the Indiana skies, but she had failed. Zorrie sent Janie the letter she had promised and got one back at the boardinghouse where the remnants of her wages and a job rolling Bankables at the National Cigar Company in Frankfort had allowed her to take a modest room. “We Miss You! We Miss You! We Miss You!” Janie had written at the end of her account of her days and evenings, under which Marie had added, underlining the sentence twice, “It’s true!”

  One Saturday afternoon not long after her return, Zorrie hitched a ride to Jefferson to pay a visit to Mr. Thomas, with the idea of telling him about her adventures in Ottawa. She had kept a tin of Luna powder and the last clock face she had painted and brought them along to show him. She even thought, in her happiness at the prospect of seeing him again, that she might offer to sprinkle his beetles and butterflies with powder so that they might shine for him during the night as beautifully as they did during the day, but when she arrived at the little house, she found the front door padlocked and the windows boarded up. A neighbor working a gardening fork around a patch of delphinium said Mr. Thomas had had a letter from the county back in July that his school wouldn’t be opening up this y
ear and had decided to move away, somewhere down around Evansville, to live with one of his sisters.

  “He got that letter and was gone a week later, like he’d been fired out of a shotgun,” the woman said.

  Zorrie picked a sprig of honeysuckle and a handful of mint from his yard to sniff at as she went and walked back to Frankfort, wondering if Mr. Thomas had taken his books and pictures and albums with him, hoping he had. In addition to sprinkling powder and showing off the neatly painted clock face, and maybe, if she had felt bold, trying to describe what it had been like to glow a minute next to other girls under the night skies of Illinois, she had had thoughts of asking if she could have that sheet of things she’d collected after all, that she would be proud now that she was a little more settled to tack them up on her wall. It had struck her that doing so might provide an opportunity to tell him that she hadn’t been entirely honest during her last visit, that she hadn’t been living anywhere, least of all at her aunt’s place, and maybe even that she had known of his kind gesture with the buttons, though likely that would have been taking it too far.

  When she was back in her room, she put the tin of powder and the clock face, along with the letter from Janie, in an oversize Bankable box she had rescued from work. Sometimes over the following weeks, when she couldn’t sleep, and she could feel the weight of the deep hours settling over her, and missed her friends, and wished that Mr. Thomas hadn’t moved, she would open the box and take out the face and look at its neat, glowing numbers. A little of the Luna powder had spilled out into the box when she tried to retighten its lid, so it glowed too. More than once she only put away the clock face and closed the box when the wrens that lived in the mulberry bush outside her window had begun at last to sing the world back into being and the pillowcase she had put over the cracked glass had lit up, to her considerable relief, with its own fresh luster.

  II

  running together, the day falls copiously

  Fall, then winter, came and went, and Zorrie’s job with it. She worked for a time at a dry-goods store on the town square, but filling orders didn’t suit her, nor did the owner’s sharp tongue, so she found another job at a seed company in Rossville and in the surrounding fields, where for some years her work with a hoe, and her regular attendance at United Methodist services, was positively remarked upon. When the seed company went belly-up and the farmer she had done work for retired, she said her farewells and packed her things again.

  She went to Boyleston and then to Forest, where she split and stacked wood for an older couple who lived across the street from the church. While she stacked, she whistled the tune of Marie’s old Ghost Girl song. It had not come to her in some time, and it pleased her to find it again. The man complimented her on her technique, but said she was letting her mouth get too moist. He had her swallow twice and then dab lightly at her lips with her tongue. He made a remark about pace and tone. He said to imagine her pursed lips were like the smooth casing of a silver flute. Under his instruction, Zorrie took a try at “Let There Be Peace on Earth” and “Shall We Gather at the River?” The old man did his own versions. When he was finished, Zorrie clapped. “We can talk about the style to it later,” he told her and had her start up whistling again.

  The old couple, Gus and Bessie Underwood, had a spare room with a cot and no one sleeping in it. Zorrie set her big cigar box on the windowsill and cooked and washed and milked the cow they kept in a shed at the back of their yard. She churned butter and canned ham and beans and went across the street to the church with them and sat out on their front porch as they propped up their feet in the evening and just generally pleased them both, as they liked to reiterate, to no end. When they asked her where she came from, she told them about her parents, dead long ago on the far side of Tipton County, and the years with her aunt and about her months in Ottawa and time out on the road. She made it sound as if there had been somewhat more fun to being without a roof than there had been but thought that, in the main, she had stuck respectably close to the truth. Bessie said that she herself hadn’t had it any too easy at the start and asked Zorrie if it had been very hard to be alone these last years. Zorrie said she mostly hadn’t minded, which was true, then added, after a pause, that being alone wasn’t necessarily what she aspired to. “What do you aspire to?” asked Gus with a gleam in his eye that Zorrie hadn’t seen before, and which took her a moment to understand. Bessie’s expression was the mirror image of her husband’s. Zorrie already knew that prior to their retirement, they had run the family farm near Hillisburg and that these days their son “had the reins.” This son, Bessie now said, was about the best-looking fellow Zorrie would ever see. Gus winked and blew a little burst of air through his own flute casing at this.

  “He arrived late,” said Bessie.

  “Not much older than you are,” said Gus.

  “We’ve been praying someone he’d enjoy meeting might come along.”

  “And now here that someone has come.”

  Zorrie laughed and shook her head and said she didn’t know anything about such things, which comment landed considerably farther from the facts of the matter than had the improvised chronicle of her life. For she had looked closely at more than one boy in Ottawa and talked about their neat waists or broad shoulders with Janie and Marie, and there had been boys whose aspect pleased her out on the roads and at work in the fields and in the shops of Rossville, some boys she had even exchanged glances more than once with, and she still thought about them all more often than she could admit without blushing brightly enough to explode. So it was not as surprising to her as it might have been that when she went to church the following Sunday, and the son was introduced, Zorrie took his hand, looked up into his green eyes, and found she couldn’t speak. Nor could she listen to the minister’s exhortations, and when he told the congregation to open their hymn books, she found she couldn’t sing. Standing there, wondering how Harold Underwood’s eyes had made their way down her throat and stolen her voice, she thought first not of the handsome boys of recent years but of another, a slip of a thing, who had once come and knocked on her aunt’s door and stood there even after her aunt had threatened him with a broom and bellowed at him to go away. The boy, who eventually left, had not returned, and Zorrie had not seen him again. Still, she thought of the feeling of him now as she stood in church, not singing, his features mostly faded from her mind, his blond hair shining in the remembered evening light.

  She kept up her silence through dinner. Bessie insisted that her son have seconds of everything. When Bessie put a third piece of pie on his plate, he smiled a little wearily at Zorrie and shrugged. He had large white teeth. His face was flushed. Faint ovals of sweat darkened his white shirt at the shoulders, as if someone who liked him a great deal had rested her palms there. When Harold noted that there was some nice curl of light to the afternoon air and suggested the two of them take a turn, Zorrie carefully folded her napkin and stood.

  They walked under enormous black oaks, beside sprawling forsythia, past gardens that needed weeding and others that didn’t, across the church lawn where small girls set loose in their Sunday dresses were playing chase. Zorrie picked up a perfectly round pebble, tossed it into the air, and Harold caught it. He then tossed it back up, and she did the same. An unusually fat bee scrabbling around in a pink rose made Harold laugh and Zorrie smile. Dogs were barking about something in the distance, and a woman in an elaborate purple hat, taking tiny steps, made her gingerly way across the street from them, carrying what looked like a birthday cake. Harold told her she was the first Zorrie he’d ever met and that he was embarrassed to say he wasn’t even sure how to spell it. Zorrie found her voice—not stolen but hiding in a swirl of feelings that felt as strange as the complicated country names she had once memorized in Mr. Thomas’s schoolroom—and said “H-A-R-O-L-D.”

  They were married at the start of summer. Zorrie wore Bessie’s dress. The Lord’s Prayer was read once at the beginning and once at the end of the service. Ea
ch time she felt her eyes mist for the good brave beauty of the words—“For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory for ever and ever, amen …” Gus gave out a loud trill when the kissing part came. Zorrie’s lips had never touched another’s, and it was true, as Marie had whispered to her during a heated scene in one of the pictures they had taken in, that looking at kissing and doing it were two entirely different things.

  Harold had a hundred acres of beans, oats, wheat, corn, cows, pigs, and chickens, located on a slight rise south of Hillisburg. There was a white house and a white barn and a shed for the implements. Pig hickories and sugar maples yawed this way and that. A yellow rose grew up over a persimmon stump. The house had a bachelor’s scent. Zorrie spent a week cleaning and then turned her attention to the garden. There was some lettuce and chewed-up spinach and what looked like it was supposed to be a row of onions. The baby sweet corn was entirely lost to the weeds. Zorrie called Harold over, looked at the garden, and then looked at him. Harold smiled, wrapped his arm around Zorrie’s waist, and said it seemed pretty grim. Zorrie smiled back and asked him to fetch her a hoe.

  The evenings were all mystery. They would carry their plates out onto the screened-in front porch and eat looking out over the dusk-lit yard to the woods and fields. Fireflies drew their greenish-yellow traces through the air, tree crickets screamed, and when the sky was clear, Venus showed bright through the darkening blue. Every now and again a jay that hadn’t settled would swoop by, and Zorrie would imagine that it was inscribing the improbable arc of her days into the cooling air, that instead of just flying across the yard, it had flown all the way over from the Illinois beech wood in which she had once wept. Harold would talk, in a soft voice, between bites of whatever simple thing she had prepared for them. He would talk as they washed and dried and put the dishes away. He would talk and then not talk as they lay, later, for hours entire entwined.