by Laird Hunt
Every now and again Virgil would come out and join them. He had his own opinions about Hitler and Chamberlain. One day he said the war would kick the United States of America out of its doldrums. He said it needed a kick. Harold said he wasn’t so sure, that maybe a kick was in order, but this might not be the right kind. At this, Noah leaned forward, pulled up a handful of grass, let it fall back through his fingers, looked sideways at Harold, and said, “I reckon Virgil knows his way around how a body can be kicked. Those boots of his may not look like much, but they can wallop.”
Virgil looked over at Noah, bit his lip, and then looked at his hands. “He’s talking about papers I signed about his Opal. Papers I had to sign for safety’s sake, even if I didn’t like to. I reckon I would have taken it like a kicking if I’d have been in his place. If he’d have been in mine, I wonder what he’d have settled on doing.”
“Not that,” Noah said, a fierce look Zorrie hadn’t seen before sweeping over his face. “Never that.”
“No,” said Virgil slowly. “I suppose not.”
Zorrie glanced at Harold, who shook his head. They all sat there uncomfortably. Not two minutes later, as if she had been called, Ruby came across the field in a red apron with five slices of pineapple upside-down cake and a pail of cold milk, and everyone calmed down.
That evening, over supper, Zorrie asked Harold what Virgil had meant, but Harold said he didn’t know any more than she did and then stood, took his plate over to the sink, mumbled something about the pigs, and walked out the door.
Fourth of July came and went. Gus stopped by the next day to tell them about the picnic. This year there had been a baseball game, a tug-of-war, and a sack race. Bessie had taken too much sun and was laid up. He had eaten so much he was going to have to get a bigger belt. After Gus left, Harold told Zorrie they would go the next year. Zorrie didn’t say anything. She had been in the middle of sharpening blades on the back steps when Gus had arrived, and now she took up the whetstone again, chose a pair of shears to see to. Harold offered to help. She said it was the easiest work in the world and added that she imagined he had chores of his own. He said this was true but didn’t move. After Zorrie had taken a few slow swipes, she flicked her eyes up at him.
“We could’ve gone,” she said.
“I know we could. We just didn’t,” Harold said.
“There’s no shame about what happened.”
“I know.”
Zorrie set down the stone, ran her thumb along both blades, then picked up the stone again.
“None at all.”
“I know it.”
“You say you know it. I told you I was fit to go. Everyone was there.”
“I know what you told me.”
“You’d think it never happened before.”
A red-winged blackbird went flashing past. They both followed it with their eyes. Harold took off his hat. He put the back of his hand on his hip and then wiped the pearled sweat off his brow with a forearm. Zorrie finished with the shears and turned to the garden knife.
“You’d think,” she said as she worked the stone down one dull side and then the other, “that this was the first time in human history that something like this had occurred.”
Harold put his hat back on. Zorrie set the stone down and stood. Harold looked like he had more to say, but she walked straight past him, went across the yard to the garden, and cut some lettuce. Satisfied with the knife’s sharpness, she inspected the early sweet corn and hoed a few weeds. She dug shallots and pulled up a fistful of carrots that weren’t yet ready to come out of the ground. There were more aphids flinging themselves through the air than she would’ve liked. An old gray cat that had taken up residence in the barn that winter wove her way slowly through the peas and waving ladyfingers, brushed against Zorrie’s leg, gazed up at her, and walked on. Zorrie went inside and washed the lettuce and shallots, then peeled the carrots and cut them into disks. She took two loin chops out of the icebox and set them on a plate by the sink. She was reaching for the vinegar when Harold came in, sat down at the table, sucked in his breath.
“I just thought that maybe if I’d done more of what needed doing …,” he said.
“Or you thought if I’d done less,” said Zorrie.
Harold’s green eyes were surrounded by red. They shone in the overhead light. He looked at her and nodded.
“I have thought that.”
“I know.”
“And I’m sorry for it, Zorrie. About as sorry as I think I’ve ever been.”
Zorrie sat down at the table across from him, reached out, and ran the backs of her fingers across his unshaven cheek, then took his hands.
“I know that too, Harold,” she said.
The summer slipped by. Harold and Noah harvested the wheat, cultivated the oats and beans, clover and corn. There was a bad hailstorm late one afternoon in early August that left them standing anxiously at the window, but the crops weren’t hit hard, and after they had made their inspection, Harold took Zorrie in his arms and swung her around.
Zorrie felt her strength returning and, though the doctor still wouldn’t give her permission to help in the fields, went back to slopping the pigs and keeping their stalls filled with fresh straw. There was a pig she liked, a sow she’d named Mrs. Thomas in honor of her old teacher. No matter how hot it was, when the other pigs were lying sound asleep in the shadows, Mrs. Thomas would rouse herself and come over to snuffle and lick Zorrie’s fingers. Zorrie made a point of bringing her the most unusually shaped turnip or prettiest squash blossom to nibble, and if she came across any blackberries in the woods, she always shared a few of the ripest ones. She liked patting Mrs. Thomas’s fat pink flanks while she ate, and always stood swatting the flies away and scratching her ears a few minutes before moving on.
Mornings, after Harold had left the house, Zorrie took long walks along the ditch and through the fields to build up her endurance. On one of these walks she came out of the corn and met Noah along the fencerow that split their farms. They moved together quietly on either side of the fence for a time, and then Noah asked Zorrie what she knew about whirlwinds.
“You mean tornadoes?” said Zorrie.
“Whirlwinds,” said Noah. “Like in the Bible and old stories. Like what Virgil says is starting to happen over there in Europe and the Pacific. Like what I get going in my head sometimes.”
She thought carefully. “A whirlwind’s a powerful force,” she finally said.
Noah nodded. The sunlight coming over Zorrie’s shoulder shone full on his face. His hair swept back in dark wet wings off his forehead, and his eyes were very blue.
“My wife’s been writing me about them,” he said. He reached into his hip pocket and pulled out a piece of paper that had clearly been folded and unfolded a considerable number of times.
“This is about one that hits the farm. The way she describes it, just about everything is whooshing around. Cats and pies and tomato plants. The place our house used to stand that now lies over yonder in that clover field. She writes me pretty frequent.”
“Do you write her back?”
“I try to. Virgil helps. But they won’t take the letters.”
“Who won’t? You mean the hospital?”
“Won’t let me up to see her anymore either. Her family signed papers say I can’t.”
“I thought it was Virgil.”
“That was to get her up there in the first place. That was his part. After she set the fire. That was bad enough.”
“But Opal’s your wife.”
“I know it. It’s others that don’t.”
Noah put the letter back in his pocket and left his hand in there with it. “I’m sorry about what you and Harold lost, Zorrie,” he said after a moment.
Zorrie, surprised by this sudden shift in the conversation, opened her mouth to thank him, and then stopped. Looking at Noah, she felt something that had been held tight as wound baling twine inside her all summer loosen and her breaths started to co
me fast and shallow. She nodded, pressed her lips tight together, and wrapped her arms around herself. As she hurried away through the corn, the image of a bamboo fishing pole caught up in a whirlwind came along with her.
A year passed. A second. A third. They tried but couldn’t get another baby to take hold. Harold began to speak about the war differently. He went to basic training, then to Europe to serve as a navigator in the air force in the fall of 1942. Gus and Bessie moved back out to the farm with the idea that Gus would oversee the daily operations and Bessie would keep Zorrie company, but Gus was too worn out, as he put it, to do much in the way of overseeing, and Bessie spent the better part of the afternoons and evenings in bed. Zorrie, who for some time had been carrying about as much of the load on the farm as Harold, put Gus in charge of the stock, Bessie in charge of the kitchen, and hired on Lester Dunn to help in the fields because Noah had his hands full helping Virgil. Lester came early, worked hard, ate all the pie Bessie would feed him, and spoke rarely. He had a flair for finding mushrooms and sometimes, before he set out to join Zorrie, left a pail full by the door, which Bessie fried up with eggs, potatoes, and onions for dinner.
Harold sent letters to Gus and Bessie, which Gus read aloud at the kitchen table after supper, and to Zorrie, which she took up to bed with her and read over and over again by lamplight, trying and failing to picture Harold’s distant hand and arm and eyes moving back and forth across the page. She kept them in the cigar box with the old clock face and Janie’s letter and what was left of the powder. Two or three times a day she would open the box, pull out a letter, and read a few lines. At night she would let the box sit open and once even spilled out a little more of the remaining Luna powder so that she could see the pages glow. One, in which Harold attempted to describe the differences between Belgian and American ears of corn, was a particular favorite. More than any of the others, even the one where Harold described the sensation of riding in a “great machine that is going to take you speeding out over the dark Channel and the dark country beyond,” it seemed to Zorrie to be imbued with some trace of its sender, some hint of the man she had lain and worked and fought against the snow beside, the man who had picked her up and swung her around. Still, it bothered her that the letters did so little to offset his absence. She had expected them to help more, to reduce the fear her mind had begun to fill up with. Thinking of Noah, she tried carrying them around with her, unfolding them on her tractor, in the barn, in the churchyard, under the south eaves on a rainy morning, beside the hickories in the small, sad autumn light. She tried keeping one crumpled up in her fist, another close to her heart. Frustrated, she spoke to Bessie about it, told her that no matter how brightly the letters glowed, they had all gone blurry, and she could barely see them or the man who had written them. Bessie sighed, asked Zorrie to fluff the pillow behind her, and said the only thing that would help was for Harold to drop out of the sky on a parachute and walk back in through the front door.
“I don’t think he’s ever going to,” said Zorrie.
“Oh, hush now, he’ll be back soon enough,” Bessie said.
“No,” said Zorrie, sitting down on the edge of the bed and letting her hands fall limp in her lap. “No, I don’t think so.”
Harold was killed in December 1943 off the coast of Holland when the final engine of the B-17 Flying Fortress he had served upon failed after sustaining heavy fire during a night raid on German artillery positions. The United States Air Force sent back his belongings, an honorary uniform, a medal and accompanying certificate, and the start of a letter written two days before his death.
My Darling Zorrie,
It is ten days since I last wrote you, but that was only because they have been keeping us busy and not because I have not been thinking about you like I always do. Thank you for the photograph of you standing by “the fields in November.” You and home is all I can think about. I wish you were here with me and we could walk together through this countryside, where even now, when it is so cold, the grass smells like flowers.
Memorial services were held at both Hillisburg and Forest. Bessie could not get out of bed to attend them and asked only that they be sure to read the Twenty-Third Psalm. Gus tried to make a speech at Hillisburg and read a poem at Forest, but he didn’t get far with either. Zorrie asked Virgil to say a few words at Hillisburg. He wove John Adams, Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson into remarks that many said afterward had far outstripped Reverend Carter’s. Ruby sang “Amazing Grace,” and Laetitia Bunch sang “The Old Wooden Cross.” Noah, dressed in a dark suit, sat very still throughout the proceedings. When, at both churches, everyone else had sung or spoken, Zorrie stood, thanked the congregation, then sat back down and put a hand over her eyes.
The night after the second service, Zorrie dreamed that she was back at her aunt’s house, sitting in the darkened front room sewing, and couldn’t get the stitch right. She tried and tried while her aunt stood over her, shaking her head. After what seemed like hours of this, Zorrie woke, reached for Harold, and gave a strangled cry.
Then the years sped past.
III
no shining roof or glittering window
Bessie died in her sleep one spring morning in 1954. Gus did the same less than a year later. Zorrie was the only beneficiary named in his will. She took the proceeds from the sale of the house in Forest, made a donation to the church, then bought herself twenty acres of fallow land that Rupert Duff had put up for sale. She hired extra help and immediately put the field under cultivation. Two months after she had purchased it, bright green sprouts were pushing up through the black furrows.
As a general rule, Zorrie set to work before her help arrived and didn’t stop until after they’d left. With Gus and Bessie no longer around to drop by and check up on her, she pushed even harder. More than once she fell asleep sitting on the tractor and woke later shivering and covered with mosquito bites. She grew so lean for a time that Ruby asked whenever she saw her if she was all right. Ruby had her own worries. Virgil, always so eloquent, had fallen slowly into silence and was often found out wandering the woods and fields, unable to remember where he was. Ruby had tried putting reminder notes in his pockets, but it didn’t help. She found them scattered throughout the house, across the yard, floating in the birdbath, under his pillow. If no one was watching him, he wandered off and didn’t know the way home.
Zorrie saw him one day as she was plowing the back field. She had been daydreaming, not doing her best job, wondering what Lester would think of the mess she was making, when she spotted Virgil standing motionless by a maple stump near the ditch. She couldn’t convince him to get on the tractor, so she climbed down, took him by the elbow, and led him home. Noah, who was trimming a hickory in his east woods, walked out across the field to meet them. He thanked Zorrie and then put his hand on Virgil’s shoulder. Watching them walk away together, it struck Zorrie that the silence that rode the air between them was a comfortable one. For just a moment, she thought how nice it would be to walk in their company, or, better, to just float quietly between them, caught on a forward-tending gust of air. Then she turned around, went back to her tractor, and climbed on.
In the months after Harold’s death, after Gus and Bessie had at her insistence moved back to Forest, when Harold seemed to be standing just around every corner she turned, and the repeated realization that he wasn’t standing anywhere, not even on French, Dutch, or English soil, let alone somewhere on the farm, set her to pacing the hallways of the house for nights entire, she had thrown herself at the ever-present acreage around her with all the strength she could muster. She took to countering every thought of Harold’s physical erasure with an image, as quickly made actual, of her arms hefting a hoe, a bag of seed, a bale, a well-sharpened scythe. How the horseweed fell that first summer! She would speak about Harold if the subject was raised but would suffer for it afterward, and did her best never to bring the ongoing fact of his absence up to herself outside the formulas of nightly prayer. The crisply ch
iseled tale of time told by the clocks and watches she had once helped paint faces for came to seem complicit in the agonized unfolding of her grief, so that soon the farm and the surrounding fields and the endless ark of change that enclosed them were the only timepiece whose hour strokes she could abide. Small but sure of purpose within the great mechanism of the seasons, she became a pin on a barrel of wind, a screw in a dial of sunlight, a tooth on an escape wheel of rain. The crops went in, the crops were cared for, the crops came out. The earth rested in its right season, and she with it. If the ache of Harold’s absence descended on her during the quiet months, she would take a rag to it with her mind and rub.
Over the years, this approach so drastically diminished the frequency with which Zorrie thought of Harold that she eventually worried there might be some fault in it, especially because now when he was mentioned by one of her neighbors or she chanced upon an undiscovered fishing lure or belt buckle she hadn’t yet learned how not to notice, the burn that had always hit her at the back of the chest was gone. This lack of any painful reaction—a lack she had so longed for—struck her, now that it had arrived, as too complete. It made her feel she had taken it all too far. You came to terms with things, but not by carrying them out to the field and burying them under the beans. Mr. Thomas had long ago told her class that “the encumbering elements of our histories must be spoken aloud, at least in the caverns of our brains, if we wish for them to take up wings.” Remembering this as she thumbed through a volume of Longfellow at Mary Thompson’s estate sale, it occurred to Zorrie that there might be some compromise available in thinking not of Harold’s death and absence, but of him.