by Laird Hunt
Zorrie slept in sweet, shallow bursts. Some nights, when she woke or couldn’t sleep, the walls fell away and the coming day unfurled before her. Lying there listening to the crickets, she could feel the corn against her waist and wrists, the tangled beans against her ankles. The wet dirt sucked at her shoes. The sun hit hard against the back of her head. Zorrie, Zorrie Underwood, Harold said, his soft voice winging her brand-new name out from under his hat and across the waving green toward her. She did not dream. Harold slept like a lamb. She kept the cigar box shut, and still the deep hours seemed filled with light.
On the Fourth of July there was a picnic in the schoolyard at Hillisburg. Gus and Bessie drove down from Forest with four pies and a badminton net. The school building was considerably smaller than the one Zorrie had painted dials in with Marie and Janie. She stood a moment looking at a line of windows on its west side and realized it had been a very long time since she had held a paintbrush in her hand. Bessie made a fuss over Zorrie, gave Harold a loud kiss on the cheek, and then went over to visit with some of the older women she couldn’t keep caught up with, now that she and Gus had left the farm.
It was quite a gathering. Young children squealed and chased each other while older ones organized games with sacks and balls or took turns at badminton. Some of the older teenagers had paired up and stood together, teasing each other or speaking quietly, occasionally looking into each other’s eyes. A big green tarp had been rigged up to provide shade. Bessie and her friends sat beneath it, fanning themselves and laughing frequently and sipping none too daintily at their lemonade. Gus was over at the badminton net giving demonstrations. When Zorrie took a turn with one of his pupils, he leaped around next to the court, swatting at a spare shuttlecock and saying, “See, see, just like that.”
Harold stood in a crowd of men wearing loose-fitting cotton pants like his own. They all had cuts and scrapes on their hands and forearms and faces burned various dark shades by the sun. One of the men stood off to the side and, as the others talked, looked out over the road to the cornfield and woods beyond. Although she would never have said it aloud, Zorrie thought he was very nearly as handsome as Harold and wondered if he wasn’t slightly taller. While most of the men stood with their hands on their hips or shoved casually into their pockets, he held his strangely immobile at his sides. Every now and then one or another of the men in the group would turn to him and make some remark or clap him on the shoulder. He would smile but not respond, as if he was there and not there at the same time.
After she had played Gus to an amicable draw at badminton, Zorrie helped set up the food tables. A woman named Phoebe Johnson handed her a bright blue apron and a fistful of serving spoons. Another, Ruby Summers, asked Zorrie if she could help her fetch a punch bowl and some cups from her truck. The women were as scratched-up as the men. Few of them wore lipstick. A number of them had clearly cut their dresses from the same pattern. They discussed their gardens, their social clubs, the challenges posed by the times, and made loud, self-deprecating remarks about the food they had brought so that the others could contradict them. Nobody seemed to have to know where Zorrie had come from or how she had ended up in this part of the county. She was daughter-in-law to Bessie, and that seemed good enough for them. They pointed out their men, ballparked the locations of their farms, and complimented Zorrie on the catch she had made in Harold. At this, Ruby winked at Zorrie and said she reckoned maybe the catching had been the other way around. Ruby’s remark set a few of the girls hovering at the edges of the conversation to swishing around the tables and whistling. After a minute Ruby got up and started swishing, then Zorrie did too.
They ate at tables that spilled out around an old red oak that sat in the corner of the yard. There was a lengthy prayer delivered by Reverend Carter, which conjured up troubling images of divine fury in Zorrie’s mind and elicited an especially hungry-sounding “Amen” from the crowd when it was finally done. Harold and Zorrie sat with the Johnsons and the Duffs. Ernest Johnson was a quiet man with a wide face, large brown eyes, and an appetite that took several trips back to the food tables to satisfy. He partook of the ham and beans and creamed corn and various casseroles with such vigor that Zorrie felt full just watching him. While he ate and Zorrie watched him and looked around at her new neighbors, their faces shining with sweat and holiday excitement, Phoebe talked quilt patterns with Helen Duff, and Ralph Duff discussed oat yields with Harold. At one point the young man Zorrie had noticed earlier stood up from the table where he had been sitting with Ruby, Ruby’s husband Virgil, and Gus and Katie Roth, and walked off toward the school.
“There goes Noah,” said Ernest, looking up over a dripping spoonful of beans.
“That’s Ruby and Virgil’s boy,” said Harold to Zorrie. “He’ll help us sometimes. Solid set of shoulders. Different, though.”
“He hasn’t had it easy lately, the poor thing,” said Helen.
“Tough row to hoe,” said Ralph.
No one else said anything. Zorrie put a piece of corn bread in her mouth and chewed it slowly and watched Noah Summers sit down on the steps of the school building and fold his long arms over his chest.
After everyone had finished, some of the men and boys went over to Stowe’s Ice Cellar down the street and came back with watermelons in their arms. A cheer went up when the first one was split, and it wasn’t long before cool watermelon juice was dripping down fingers and wrists and smiling faces all over the schoolyard. Gus got up a seed-spitting contest that drew a crowd. After the kids were done, the adults took a turn. Harold and Virgil Summers were the finalists, with Virgil edging Harold by two inches in the last round.
Zorrie went around with a tray of watermelon slices. The juice had begun to warm, and her hands felt sticky holding either side of the tray. She didn’t like the looks a couple of boys gave her as they snatched slices off the tray, and she thought she heard someone make an unflattering comment about her dress. For about thirty jarring seconds she wanted nothing more than to set the tray down, rinse her hands, run home, and hide under the bed, but then she saw Harold across the lawn laughing, with his arm around Virgil’s shoulder, and a moment later Bessie came up beside her, touched her arm, and said, “Oh my glory it’s hot!”
Yes, that’s it, Zorrie thought.
Dusk began to settle, the mosquitoes came out, and there was a good deal of swatting. Then the fireflies started up, and the younger children ran after them with jars. Helen Duff oversaw the laying of a fire with the idea of making things festive despite the heat. There seemed to be more couples than there had been earlier. Some of them didn’t yet know how to stand close and kept leaning toward and away from each other. Noah Summers seemed to have disappeared.
Zorrie and Harold sat with Ruby and Virgil, the three of them listening to Virgil talk. Zorrie had never heard anything like it. It sounded a little like Reverend Carter’s prayer, only there wasn’t any religion involved. There was a fair amount about Rome, more than one or two French writers mentioned, and any number of leaps off to the sides of things. When there was a pause, Zorrie said she thought she needed a dictionary to keep up, and Ruby said, “We all do.”
Harold said, “Virgil used to teach school.”
“Taught me,” said Ruby. “Even if I wasn’t worth much in the classroom.”
“Ad astra per aspera,” said Virgil. “She was my brightest star.”
“Virgil can speak in French,” said Harold.
“That’s true,” said Virgil, “but what I just said was in Latin.”
Zorrie said she had had a good teacher for a while but had never heard French.
Virgil scrunched up his forehead and said, “Ce n’est pas toujours facile de vivre sur terre.”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“More or less the same thing as the Latin: something like ‘It’s an excessively long, hard road to heaven,’ ” Virgil said, then added with a wink at Zorrie, “which theme, if I’m not mistaken, is what every word and verse of
the Good Book is dedicated to.”
“Not every word and verse, husband,” said Ruby.
“Most, then.”
They smiled at each other. Zorrie liked the way they did this, the way it made them look like two halves of the same sentence. She liked the way they frequently reached for each other’s hands too.
“Let’s settle on ‘some,’ ” said Ruby.
“All right, wife,” said Virgil. “Let’s.”
Emily Owens, who had won the children’s seed-spitting contest, got to light the fire when it was ready. The wood had been laid down in a crisscross pattern with plenty of bark, kindling, and balled paper. Emily touched it with a match, and orange flames began crawling this way and that. It was too warm to get close, but that didn’t stop everyone’s eyes from turning in its direction. Moving light reflected off the faces of her new neighbors, made them suddenly distinct again, where before the shadows had all but swallowed them. Zorrie turned to Harold and smiled, but Harold did not see her, and a moment later Noah Summers emerged from the dark. His hair was mussed and he was soaked in sweat so that his hands and face threw off more light than anyone else’s, even when he was still some distance off. He’s got into some Luna paint, Zorrie thought. He walked up fast and stood with his hands held stiffly at his sides, no more than a foot away from the fire. He leaned forward, his jaw set, head cocked slightly to the left, looking into the flames. Zorrie could see the muscles in his forearm quivering. Helen Duff put her hand over her mouth. Lloyd Duff took a step forward. Virgil started to stand, but at that moment Noah looked over at Virgil, shook his head, shrugged, took a step backward, pivoted, stepped between Reverend Carter and Emily Owens, and, glowing with reflected light, strode back off into the dark.
“He’s always been his own brand of bacon,” said Harold that night after they had taken turns soaking in a cool bath and were sitting on top of the sheets, dipping their spoons in and out of a jar of chilled raspberry preserves Zorrie had taken from the icebox. “But what he’s been through lately. I just think of it, and even hot as it is, it gives me chills.”
“What was the reverend saying to Virgil as we were leaving?”
“He wants Noah to talk to him.”
“Will he?”
“I doubt it.”
I wouldn’t either, thought Zorrie, closing her eyes, then opening them and, setting the jar of preserves aside, taking Harold’s arm. “When’s she getting out?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think any of them does. She’s been in before. They won’t let Noah up to see her anymore. He caused quite a stir when he tried, and they say she got too worked up.”
Zorrie couldn’t stop seeing Noah’s glow as he had come up out of the dark. She tried to picture Opal Summers, Noah’s wife of no more than a few months, who less than a year before been taken back to the Logansport State Hospital for setting her own house on fire while she was in it and for refusing to leave, so that Noah had had to carry her out. She imagined Opal, lying now in a room much larger and darker than this one and twice as hot. She tried, in turn, to imagine Noah lying in a bed somewhere in the big brown house with the green roof on the farm next to theirs, his head full of smoke and a vanished wife, but began drifting so that Noah’s long body blended with sliced watermelon, Emily Owens’s match, Bessie’s “Oh my glory!” and Ernest Johnson’s dripping fork.
The Newtons’ farm formed an L around their own. The Summerses’ farm made another border, and there were Duffs and Dunns scattered across the ditch beyond. Zorrie was always in the field with Harold, and because everyone helped everyone else, she soon became a familiar sight on the surrounding farms. She loved the smell of the clay-rich dirt and the warm ache that sprouted up in her neck and shoulders as the hours wore on. She loved, after a long day, walking back through the tangled beans or sweet-smelling clover. She loved being teased by Gerald Dunn or Lloyd Duff or Virgil Summers when they would meet along the fencerows, and she loved even more the twinkle in their eyes when she would put her hands on her hips and tease them back. Living at her aunt’s, or during the years around Frankfort and Rossville, she had not felt the tilt and whirl of the seasons the way she did on her own farm with its busy springs, summers, and falls that went by in green and brown blurs and its long, quiet winters when the weeks seemed marked only by the scratching of the chickens or the scruffling of the pigs.
They took turns reading to each other during the cold months. Zorrie liked to hear Harold read from Psalms. She would close her eyes and, caught up in the images, which had seemed terribly abstract during her childhood, imagine God himself walking alongside her, light dripping like rain from the heavenly clouds. Often Virgil lent them books. Harold’s favorite of these was Herodotus. Both of them had trouble with some of the names, and it was hard to keep track of who was fighting whom, but the stories were wonderfully strange. “Imagine that,” Harold said one afternoon. “Imagine going out to fight the wind with swords.” When the temperature dropped and it started coming down again toward evening, Harold bowed and presented Zorrie with a small hatchet to go with the carving knife he was already holding, and they went outside giggling in their shirtsleeves to try their luck against the snow.
Friday evenings, when the roads weren’t drifted, they would drive over to Forest to play cards with Gus and Bessie. Gus generally took the game too seriously and tapped his finger on the table when he got impatient or was falling behind. Bessie had a hard time concentrating and jumped up constantly to see about things in the kitchen. Zorrie had a knack and was considered the most desirable partner. Harold took a long time over his cards, laughed a good deal, and played conservatively.
When they were done, and Gus had finished either crowing or complaining about his luck, they would sit in the front room by the fire and sip hot cocoa. One evening during the third winter of their marriage, when there was a lull in the conversation, Harold started in to bragging about Zorrie. He bragged about how she had whipped the accounts into shape, had helped him make a plan for the next year’s crops, could recite a number of the Psalms aloud, and cooked so well and kept the house so clean it was like living in a luxury hotel. He went on so long about things he had already bragged about many times before that Gus chuckled, Bessie said, “I bet there’s other things you could brag about,” and Zorrie, blushing, said, “Stop it this instant, every one of you.”
At this Harold stood up, kissed Zorrie on the cheek, did a little dance by the sideboard, whacked his hand down on the dark wood, and told Gus he’d better break out the cigars.
“I knew it!” said Bessie.
“I’ll get a whole bushel of cigars!” said Gus.
Zorrie smiled, looked down into her cocoa, brought it slowly up to her lips, and took a long sip.
Mornings and odd times of the day were difficult at first. Late one afternoon, Harold saw Zorrie come out of the bathroom wiping her mouth and said she’d better rest up, that he’d take on her evening chores. She spent exactly ten minutes with her feet up by the fire before she put on her boots and joined Harold in the barn. They fed the cows and pigs, put out fresh straw, and looked in on the chickens, their black eyes flashing in the half dark. Zorrie said she felt wonderful, but a moment later told Harold she had better take his arm.
It grew warmer, and Zorrie, recalling the assistant supervisor’s pronouncements about the tonic effects of radium, retrieved her can of Luna powder and took to quietly spooning some of it each morning into a glass of water. Bessie paid frequent visits and insisted on cooking some of the meals. When Zorrie started to show, Mary Owens brought Emily over to see what an expecting mother looked like. Emily looked at Zorrie’s stomach, then up at Zorrie’s face, then slowly reached out her hand, held it against Zorrie’s apron, frowned, looked back up at Zorrie’s face, then said, “How does it breathe?”
Bessie started to say something, then stopped.
Mary said, “You don’t ask questions like that.”
But Zorrie said, “Like a fish,” then put her face u
p close to Emily’s, opened her eyes as wide as she could, puckered her lips, put them together, and then popped them gently apart.
The next day Harold came home from a trip to the hardware store in Kempton and said, “There must have been three or four jokers making fish faces at me.” That evening they found a book on angling propped against the side door with a note in it from Virgil that read, “Thought you might enjoy this …,” and Sunday the minister paused in the middle of his regular fire-and-brimstone, gave them a wink, and made reference to the miracle of the loaves of bread and fish. Harold took to popping his lips as he walked around the house and made a show of organizing his tackle box and making sure he had plenty of strong line on hand for the big day. Zorrie stood behind him as he arranged the lures into rows and made a joke about whether or not it would be best to cast, trawl, or just bob. When she woke one morning the next week with awful cramps and blood between her legs, the first thing she thought in her confusion was that the fish had swallowed the hook and torn its throat.
Noah Summers helped out around the farm that spring and summer. A pair of accidents in the field had robbed him of three of his fingers, but his hands still looked uncommonly strong, and if they bothered him, he never spoke of it. Zorrie, who was healing slowly and under doctor’s orders to limit her exertions to light chores, would carry mason jars of iced tea out to them and, when Harold claimed they were too busy to come to the house and clean up for dinner or just wanted a change, carried out sandwiches that the three of them ate in the shade of the oaks beyond the ditch in the back woods. As they sat there, Harold took large bites of his sandwich, smiled infrequently, and spoke a great deal about whatever came to mind. One day he went on and on about the events in Europe. He said he thought they were getting ready to ruin everything all over again, even though they had done a pretty fair job of it the first time. One of the boys up at the grain elevator had read aloud some of Kipling’s war poetry to the general approval of those gathered, but Harold hadn’t found much in it to inspire him to want to get shot at or gassed or blown up. Noah always ate neatly, appeared to listen carefully, and frowned.