by Laird Hunt
She dug one of his watches out of a drawer, wound and set it, wore it loose and lightly ticking as she went about her chores. She turned her mind actively to remembering in the evenings. Occasionally she would hold his picture in front of her, or let her eyes glide over one of his letters, or pick up his fishing hat or coffee mug, but usually she just sat there and eventually saw him, with a clarity that relieved her, walking across the barn lot, or standing, shoulders slumped, hands plunged deep in his pockets, head thrown back, or striding through the clover with a tire iron in his hand, or running the tractor across the open field, or slinging the rifle over his shoulder and heading for the woods. It was not uncommon in these moments that other images—some directly related, others related only in that they belonged to Zorrie’s past—interposed themselves: the towheaded Kelly twins working a cat’s cradle in the school yard, Zorrie’s aunt frowning as she canned peaches, Gus getting angry over cards, a young couple at a Fourth of July picnic looking hungrily into each other’s eyes, Mr. Thomas walking through the woods, pointing at leaves with the same ruler he used in the classroom, Janie’s hand reaching for the powder-filmed bowl of red hots next to her basket of dials, Noah biting into an apple or reading aloud from one of Opal’s letters or staring out across the fields. Sounds, smells, and tastes came and attached themselves to the pictures she saw: old leaves rustling as she and Harold moved through the underbrush in search of a spot to eat their sandwiches, the big smell of Mrs. Thomas and her cohort on a blazing August afternoon, the mineral-sweet taste of warm blackberries picked off the vines along the back fence. During daylight hours, when she was bent over the spinach or feeding the chickens or going over some point of business with Lester, she called herself foolish or self-indulgent for dwelling on the past. But more and more, as the air grew cooler, evening came on, and the night, with Harold’s watch wound to neatly mark it, stretched ahead, she became aware that the past, what her aunt had called “nothing but a tinker’s circus of two-bit shadows,” and what she had worked so long to forget, was where she felt most at ease.
One night, though, after she had spent hours revisiting the first days of her courtship with Harold, when she had been meant to look over equipment prospectuses, she woke with a start from a half sleep and saw Harold leaning in the doorway, looking at her. She shut her eyes, and when she opened them he was gone, but then the air beside her ear grew cold and she shivered and she heard Harold say, “I’m hungry, Zorrie. It’s been years since I ate anything. You’ve got to give me some food.”
That was a dream, Zorrie thought. I wasn’t awake yet. But her ear still felt like it had spent time in the icebox, and there was a damp smell to the air. Harold’s watch had stopped, but instead of rewinding it, she yanked it off her wrist and, all but gasping, tossed it back in the drawer. Later, after she had gotten her breathing back to normal, and her mind had set the door of her world more or less back on its hinges, it struck her that, worse than getting carried away, she was losing control. Complicating matters was the fact that she couldn’t decide if the prospect felt agreeable or unpleasant or both.
She thought about it for days. She was short with Lester and sent Earl off in search of a set of scales she told him was in the barn but that, in fact, she had taken to the dump years before. She saw Lloyd Duff at the bank and didn’t recognize him at first because the wrinkled and crook-shouldered figure who stood endorsing a check on the other side of the lobby looked almost nothing like the image of the younger man she had seen chuckling in a group with Harold during one of her recent reveries. When he looked up and said, “Well, there’s our farming gal, Zorrie,” it was a long moment before she was able to answer, and on her way out she stumbled on the lintel, flailed her arms for balance, and almost fell into a hedge. “You’re not decrepit yet, so quit acting like it,” she said aloud to herself.
But the next day she forgot to feed the chickens, burned her breakfast, made another mess of plowing, and dreamed that night about flightless jays and silences and floating through the air. She woke disoriented and sweating in an early light laced by dream residue and thought of Virgil and Noah. The next morning, shivering as she walked along the fencerows and negotiated jagged bean stubble, she went to look for them. She found Noah, saw in hand, in the branches of the same hickory he had been trimming the day before. Virgil, wrapped in a bright blue scarf and a winter coat, sat on a low stool under an enormous black oak.
“You’re getting this tree into shape,” she said.
“It’s either that or lose it,” said Noah.
“You need any help hauling branches?”
“Just going to pile them up and light a match.”
“I could help pile.”
“I bet you got your own work.”
“I do.”
Noah leaned into the tree, his wrinkled brown coveralls blending in with the trunk’s dark crenellations. He looked down at her, then closed his eyes, lifted a gloved hand to his mouth, caught his breath, pulled a gulp of air into his lungs, and sneezed.
“Bless you,” said Zorrie.
“Virgil never liked that,” said Noah. “He says that blessing a sneeze is like taking up a shotgun to attend to a fly. He’s got a German word he likes to say when there’s a sneeze. Well, when he was saying things.”
Zorrie looked at Virgil, who appeared to be dozing.
“He’s not asleep,” Noah said.
Zorrie nodded.
“He hears us. He’s hearing me right now. I just don’t know where my voice goes when it gets in past his ear. Maybe all the words fall and just keep falling.”
Zorrie said maybe that was so.
“I wonder what it’s like to have words falling through your head.”
“Nice, I hope.”
Noah looked over at Virgil, shook his head, said he wasn’t sure. He said he thought maybe it was words that tripped a person up in the first place. Words in free fall couldn’t be a good thing, especially if, as in Virgil’s case, they were falling through so much quiet, when before there’d been so much talk.
Zorrie didn’t say anything. A heavy truck went by on the road. Small mechanical sounds drifted across the fields. Noah coughed and asked Zorrie if she would like him to climb down from the tree.
Yes, I would, Zorrie thought. That is exactly what I would like. She thought of everything she’d planned to say as she walked around the house, waiting for the birds to start up: that the past seemed to have sprung itself on her just when she thought she was clear of it; that all she’d wanted was to think about Harold a little, bring him back to her, and then the whole old ugly clockworks had come crashing down on her in a jumble of gears and springs; that she wanted to plop herself onto the cold, crumpled grass near the two of them and just sit there and not move; that there were dark roses and pigs and dead husbands and throat-torn fish in her whirlwind of a head.
She sighed. “No,” she said. “I should get back. Thank you. I was just out taking a turn.”
As she walked away, she stepped on a wet branch hidden under a gathering of oak leaves. The surprisingly loud snap made her start and sent a pair of nuthatches flicking off through the gray air around the black oak. Virgil didn’t seem to notice.
“Next I’ll step in a well,” she said, waving over her shoulder and hurrying off.
“Don’t do that, Zorrie Underwood,” Noah said.
Her aunt had disparaged the concept of hope with such caustic efficiency that Zorrie had naturally learned to discount what had ever been an important part of her nature. If she had done her best to seal up the spring during those early years and then again after Harold’s death, hope had nonetheless often found a way to seep out and surprise her, bow graciously, extend its hand, and ask her to dance. It had done so when she had knocked on the door in Jefferson and found Mr. Thomas with his plums and iced tea and albums standing before her, and it had done so when Gus had decided he liked the way she whistled, and spoke to Bessie about their spare room. Hope had also, certainly, flapped its f
air wings for her when a man with a sandwich to share had told her about jobs to be had in Ottawa. She had occasion to think of this later that day when she opened her mailbox and saw that a postcard had been set to lean in the shadows against its rusty wall. It took her a moment to recognize the picture, which showed a train car on what looked like an iron bridge. On the back was printed “Chicago’s Famous ‘L.’ ” There was a hole at the top where the tack had held it to the wall. The tack had been brass-colored. Zorrie could remember touching at its smooth head with her finger more than a few times. As she read and reread the note scrawled in Janie’s riotously looping hand, she understood that she was holding one of those rare objects brought into being by a hope you didn’t know you still had.
Took me a while but I finally got up there. How about you, Ghost Girl? You take a ride on your own L yet?
Zorrie planned it out early the next morning—she would drive herself north to the great city, where she could walk along Michigan Avenue and gaze upon the giant buildings and look in the shop windows and step into Marshall Field’s and ride a screaming train through the sky. Then she would head down to Ottawa and see Janie and Marie and tell them about it and learn what they had done with themselves over the years and visit with some of the other girls. Maybe even some of the boys. Show them the sprinklings of gray she was getting. See if they’d had any early winter sky settling down on them too. Laugh with them about too little sleep and too much thinking that made you forget things. They were all older, but they could still paint themselves in Luna powder if they wanted, could still walk out through the quiet streets and stand luminous under the stars. She told Lester to look after things, that she would be gone for a few days, maybe even a week. The distant months she had spent in Ottawa danced before her eyes as she drove first east then north up past Lafayette, Monticello, and Rensselaer. She’d recently had new tires put on her truck, and if the old engine complained about the unaccustomed speed Zorrie was encouraging it to achieve, the tires hummed and sang as the towns and fields blurred by.
It began raining near Demotte, and she discovered she needed new wipers. When she found herself in Valparaiso instead of Merrillville, she knew she had gotten turned around. She got gas, fresh wipers, and directions at a filling station, but either the directions were bad or she hadn’t listened closely enough because pretty soon she was at Woodville, then Porter, and instead of passing signs for Chicago, she was seeing signs for Lake Michigan and the Indiana Dunes. She went as far as the road would take her and ended up in a parking lot nestled against high hills of sand. She got out and walked up a trail. The sand made it feel like she was walking through molasses. It even stuck to her shoes as if it were as syrupy as it felt. The rain had stopped and left a thick mist behind. She thought she might as well go as far as Lake Michigan before she got herself steered back in the right direction.
The dunes stretched all around, as far as the mist would let her see. Little wind-harassed trees grew here and there, and the dunes were covered with long grass and did not look like the pictures she had seen in Life magazine of their great cousins in the Sahara Desert. Gulls called overhead. There was no one else around. The sand never stopped moving. She bent over and dragged a finger through it. In places it was damp and in others dry. She took up a pinch between her fingers and saw that not only were the grains different colors, they were also different sizes. Some of the bigger grains were rose-colored, a few appeared almost violet, and she wished she had better light and a magnifying glass. She tossed what she was holding into the air. The sand rode out and then down in a wind-feathered arc that pleased her so much she did it again. Standing there, she realized she could smell the lake, had been smelling it for some time. The smell seemed strange and bottomless and gave her a pang in her stomach she couldn’t put a name to. She had heard Lake Michigan was very beautiful. Bessie and Gus had taken Harold camping on its shores once. She started to move again, hoping soon to hit water, sand crunching and pillowing underfoot. She felt sure she was getting close when it started to hail. All she could think to do, besides bury herself in the dunes, was head back to the truck. The sound of the white pellets striking the sand was wonderfully muted, and if they hadn’t started to hurt as they hit against her, she might have stopped to more carefully listen.
Once safe inside the cab of her truck, she thought that since it wasn’t even midday yet, she would wait it out and take another try at reaching the lake, but when the hail turned into more rain she put the key in the ignition. The engine started slowly, sounded tired when it did catch, and it coughed twice as she was pulling out of the lot. One of her sweet new tires took a nail before she had a chance to turn west out of Porter. Though she got the tire changed without trouble, she ended up soaked and chilled and wondering what to do next. The simple yellow town dress with a worn lace collar she had tossed in her bag to put on in Ottawa when she was with her old friends wasn’t the kind of thing you could wear out on Michigan Avenue, she thought, much less into Marshall Field’s. The pang made itself felt again in her stomach. It was for the deep water she had smelled but hadn’t glimpsed, she now understood. She didn’t get anything like the same feeling when she thought of Janie’s L, though she believed she might if she actually took a ride on it. I’ll give it a try another day, she thought, though she wasn’t sure whether she meant Chicago or the lake. An image of her aunt, making her hold out her hand so it could be struck with a spatula because she’d said she hoped it would be sunny the next day, floated up before her. It had not been sunny the next day. “Hope’ll lead you straight into the bushes. Look where hope led me,” her aunt had said. The hills of sand had been beautiful, so that was something. There was always something. Even when there wasn’t. In her mind’s eye she saw again the shape the grains had made as they flew from her fingers, then tried to imagine the shape Harold’s smoking plane might have made as it fell through the distant Dutch skies. Condensation had formed on the inside of the truck’s windshield, and she traced an arc that was either the sand or Harold or both. The L would roar without wavering over and over again through the air, she thought, and traced a great loop. But what shape would she make? She traced small ripples, then larger waves, then a spiral, then a well that was all sides and no bottom—like the one where Virgil’s words had gone or the place where Noah’s Opal now lived—but this made her shiver, so she rubbed it out. Suddenly she felt very tired. She ran a hand through all she had drawn, and then put the truck into drive again.
The following evening Ruby called Zorrie up and asked if she was done traipsing around the countryside. A few minutes later she knocked on the door and handed Zorrie a box containing a purple blanket and a jet-black puppy curled up and snoring so lightly that Zorrie thought maybe she was imagining it.
“Johnsons had a litter they were getting rid of, so I had Noah run over there and get you one,” Ruby said.
Zorrie looked at the box, then at Ruby.
“You need company,” Ruby said.
“I never had a dog.”
“Now you do.”
“We always had cats around.”
“Cats are different.”
“How?”
“Just different. There’s nothing spooky about a dog.”
“Well,” said Zorrie.
“It needs a name,” Ruby said.
Zorrie put a hand into the box and brushed her finger against a stomach the size of a large russet potato and tight as a balloon. The puppy blinked open an eye, shut it again as fast, curled up its spine, stretched out its paws, and recommenced snoring. Zorrie had just been reading an article about the benefits of switching over to a strict corn-beans-clover rotation and had been wondering if she should give up the ten acres she still put out in oats, which hadn’t done her much good for some years. She touched the puppy’s stomach again and then asked Ruby what it ate.
“Scraps and bread mush. More or less whatever you got.”
“How often?”
“Mornings and evenings, to get st
arted. You got any other questions, you can ask Noah—he had a dog.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“What are you going to call it?”
“Oats,” said Zorrie.
Zorrie invited Ruby in for a cup of hot cocoa, but Ruby said she had to get home and see what her men were getting themselves up to. She had just wanted to deliver the pup and give Zorrie something to think about that wasn’t more than a few weeks old. She said she understood Zorrie had been having trouble nights.
“Yes,” said Zorrie.
“I expect nights are the hardest when you’re living alone.”
“You talked to Noah.”
“He talked to me. Said you’d been having dreams, seeing things.”
“I never told him that. In fact I never got around to telling him anything at all.”
“Well, are you?
“Yes.”
“You ought to come over more. Come up to the house and visit. It’s not Chicago, but it’s not the inside of your four walls either. Neither one of us is any great shakes at reading, and that’s about the only thing that’ll keep Virgil in his chair of an evening. You get this Oats figured out, then come over and have supper with us and read. We’d all enjoy it.”
Oats slept a good deal, soiled the towels Zorrie spread out in a corner of the back porch, frequently tripped over her feet, ate with appetite, barked at everything, especially birds, displayed a predilection for fussing in Zorrie’s lap and chewing on her buttons, and just generally insinuated herself into a great amount of Zorrie’s time. Noah stopped by every few days to pick Oats up, cradle her against his chest, and let her lick his face. Zorrie said she didn’t necessarily like a dog that licked. Noah said, “Well, this here Oats is one that does.”
Zorrie started taking her supper with the Summerses on Thursdays. Ruby would serve entirely too much good food, and then they would go into the living room and Zorrie would read. It was true that Virgil, who throughout the meal would have stood up and started to wander off any number of times, never budged from his seat whenever she opened a book. He seemed, in fact, almost attentive when she read from one of his old stacks: the letters of John Adams or Montaigne’s essays or Herodotus or Cicero or Aeschylus. While Ruby perked up considerably when Zorrie took up the Bible and read passages from the Gospels or the Psalms, Virgil’s attention, such as it was, seemed at those moments to drop off, and more than once Zorrie was convinced that he had fallen asleep, that the words had returned to plummeting down their bottomless hole. For his part, Noah sat perched on a handmade wooden chair behind his parents and always listened with great focus to whatever Zorrie read.