by Laird Hunt
It was certainly the case that between these evenings and the antics of her new charge, Zorrie found herself dwelling less, and soon there were no more nightmares and apparitions. If she sometimes turned to sad memories of the winter evenings she and Harold had read to each other, or thought of her failure even at the simple task of driving north, she found the feelings tempered by thoughts of the Summerses’ living room—with its neat furniture, the painting of deep-blue cornflowers above the fireplace, and the long-since-broken barometer next to the pie safe—by Ruby and Virgil and Noah, by the blanket of good silence that surrounded her as she read. Handwritten into the margin of Virgil’s copy of Montaigne, next to the dog-eared opening of the essay on sadness, were the words “The fragile film of the present must be buttressed against the past,” and Zorrie found herself turning to this page, just to let her eyes run over it, every time she picked up the book. When Noah asked Zorrie why she did this, Zorrie said it reminded her of something her old teacher had liked to cite, only she liked Virgil’s—if it was Virgil’s—twist to it better. Ruby said the note had indeed been written by Virgil and that it certainly sounded like something he would come up with. Noah agreed. He said Virgil had read the essay to him again and again during his bad spells after Opal had been taken, not least, Noah supposed, because it contained a line by Virgil’s namesake: “And grief at long hard last breaks a way for the voice.” Noah said that in truth he had always been partial to the next citation, by Petrarch: “He who can say how he burns, burns little.”
“I like that very much,” said Zorrie. “Do you suppose it’s true?”
“Maybe it depends on how you’re burning,” Noah said.
“Let’s not talk too much about burning,” Ruby said with a shiver.
Zorrie wondered aloud if Montaigne really had been as free from sadness as he claimed, and Noah said he highly doubted it, but wished he could ask Virgil, who seemed, at that moment, to be listening to something off in the distance while staring straight through the south wall.
“That there man is my sadness,” said Ruby, who then shifted in her seat and remarked that it was all handsome notions, but if they didn’t mind she’d just as soon converse about something else.
Warmer weather came, and Oats spent her days defending the territory. She’d bark at anything that moved and worked at developing her growl. After a time she seemed to have made her peace with the birds, but squirrels were another matter entirely. If a squirrel set foot on any part of the yard, Oats was after it like one of the furies of old. It seemed to Zorrie that she spent a good deal longer than was necessary standing at the base of trees, her feet set wide, ears pulled back, barking. Whenever the coast was clear, which it was more and more as the squirrels took their business out to the woods, Oats would snuffle around in the bushes, chase butterflies, or nap with a fair amount of rolling and whining on the piece of red carpet Zorrie had set out by the back door. Generally, when Zorrie came back from the fields at noon or in the evening, Oats would run out to the end of the lane to greet her, and when Zorrie got out of the truck, she’d jump up and leave paw prints on her overalls and see how many times her tongue could make significant contact with Zorrie’s face.
With summer, though, Oats took to wandering. Zorrie saw and heard her barking all over the farm and surrounding fields. Sometimes she wouldn’t turn up for her supper, and more often than not when she did, she’d be filthy and covered in burs. One evening Ethel Duff, who lived near Pickard, drove over with Oats in the back seat of her Ford. At church, Candy Wilson announced that she’d spotted Zorrie’s “young criminal” eyeballing her chickens.
“There’s people who’ll shoot a roaming dog, even if they know who it belongs to,” Reverend Carter said, with just a touch too much endorsement of the idea in his tone.
Zorrie consulted Lester, who counseled a firm hand in all matters related to domestic animals, and took a book on raising dogs out of the library. This book stressed the importance, for character, of pedigree. Fred Johnson told Zorrie that Oats’s father was a pointer-mix hellion who’d drifted through more than once. The mother, she could inspect for herself. This mother had some beagle to her and, apart from an undeniable malodorous quality that fortunately hadn’t manifested in the daughter, was personable enough to wag her tail and nuzzle Zorrie’s hand, though she didn’t display a tremendous amount of alacrity when Fred called on her to perform a trick about “shaking paws.”
“She bark at squirrels?” Zorrie asked.
“I’ve seen the father at that. But this one does like to wander. That’s the beagle facet. She made it over to Tipton once. Fortunately, I’d put the tags on her. She’s cooled off somewhat now that she’s older.”
“I have to wait until Oats is older for her to stop running around the countryside?”
“Well, every dog’s a different customer, but if she keeps it up, I understand they have a college or some such over at Frankfort that’s supposed to help their comportment.”
“College?” said Zorrie.
But when the mailman said he’d seen Oats halfway to Scircleville carrying what looked like the leftovers of a rabbit in her mouth, she stopped by Barb’s Dog College and took a brochure.
“Escort her in here,” said Barb. “We’ll get her trained up.”
Barb gave a whistle, and a Great Dane the size of a donkey came in and sat politely.
“This individual was formerly a cushion chewer,” she said. “Now this individual is not. We got guaranteed results.”
Zorrie likely would have enrolled Oats (or at the least taken Candy Wilson’s suggestion that she get some more fencing, or a good long piece of rope), if, apparently as she was wandering back by the ditch, Oats hadn’t made the acquaintance of Virgil.
Ruby told Zorrie about it as they ate wilted lettuce together one Thursday evening. She’d gone out looking for Virgil on Monday and found the pair of them sitting in some tall grass under a maple near the ditch. When she got Virgil up and started walking him back, Oats had come along and hadn’t left when Ruby sat Virgil down in his chair by the side door. She had just sat there quietly until her suppertime, then got up, licked Virgil’s hand, and headed home.
“The next morning,” Ruby said, “she was waiting by his chair. And she’s spent the day with him ever since.”
“I hope she’s not causing any trouble,” said Zorrie.
“No, and I’ll tell you something else, he doesn’t get up to his own tricks when she’s around. Or anyway, fewer tricks let’s say.”
Ruby crossed her arms, and Noah leaned forward. “I found them this afternoon out by that hickory tree where we talked that time,” he said.
“What were they doing?”
“Just sitting.”
All three of them looked over at Virgil, who was spooning wilted lettuce with at best moderate success toward his mouth. Noah got up, went over to the window, and then came back and nodded.
“She’s out there right now, lying by the chair.”
Once or twice the next week, Zorrie drove by the Summerses’ during the day and saw Oats curled up in the shade next to Virgil. When the following Thursday Ruby confirmed that she hadn’t missed a day, Zorrie stopped worrying. As they walked home together after Zorrie had put Ruby, Virgil, and, she suspected, even Noah to sleep reading from a book on the life of James Whitcomb Riley, which had included long selections of his verse, Zorrie pulled a piece of ham loaf she’d saved in a napkin from her pocket, gave it to Oats with a pat, and said there’d be more if she kept behaving herself.
Oats became such a fixture at the Summerses’ side door during the daytime that when she didn’t appear one morning in late September, Ruby went as far as the lane calling for her, and so did not see Virgil, who had gotten out of his chair and gone back into the house, take his last breath and fall over in the kitchen. It was Noah, she told Zorrie the next evening as they sat together in the Summerses’ kitchen, who had found him. After Ruby had given up calling Oats (who as far as Zorrie c
ould tell had spent the day sitting quietly on her red mat at home), she had gotten distracted by some weeds fringing her squash and had come back to find Noah cradling his dead father’s head in his arms.
“It was hard to tell which one of them was quieter,” Ruby said. Noah hadn’t left his room since the ambulance had come the day before and taken Virgil away. He needed to eat or at least drink something. She knew he didn’t have any water up there. Zorrie said she expected Noah was deeply upset, and that this was his way of tending to it. Ruby said that he hadn’t been too upset to get up to some of his foolishness before the ambulance had arrived. Zorrie raised an eyebrow and looked at her. Ruby pointed at the carpet by the door to the washroom where Virgil had fallen, and said she still had more scrubbing to do. Zorrie tilted her head and could see the borders of a faint white oval on the green carpet. The space inside the oval looked so small she couldn’t quite believe it had gone all the way around Virgil.
“I’d of put a stop to it if I wasn’t sure it was something the two of them cooked up at some point. You know the kind of things Virgil liked to read, and a lot of those things got communicated into Noah’s head. A ring of lime powder around his father. My glory. It was probably something to do with some old battle procedure or similar monkey business. I don’t know what all he’ll get up to when I’m gone.”
Zorrie took Ruby’s hand, put her arm around her shoulder, and held her until she had quieted. Then she went upstairs and knocked on Noah’s door. There was a silence, and Zorrie knocked again.
“You in there?” she asked.
“I am, Zorrie Underwood,” said Noah, his voice slightly muffled by the door.
“Your mother’s upset and could use some company. I’ve been down there with her.”
“Thank you.”
“And I expect you could use something to eat. She said you haven’t been out of this room since yesterday. Can I bring you up a plate and a glass of water?”
Noah didn’t answer. Zorrie leaned closer to the door. She had never been in his room, had never given much thought to his having one. Her mind offered up a strangely vivid series of images—a simple chair by a small window, a poster bed under the eaves, a closet hung with clean shirts, a large, scarred hand aswim in yellow lamplight—as she leaned her cheek against the cool wood. When Noah spoke again, Zorrie realized that either the room was very small or he was standing very close to her.
“She knew,” Noah said. “That dog of yours. She had it figured.”
“Well,” said Zorrie. “I expect she did.”
“I didn’t. Didn’t have any idea about it. I didn’t know until he had hit the floor. I heard it from the barn.”
“Well,” said Zorrie.
“There was a dead moth on the eave, and it shook and thumped while I was looking at it, and I knew he was dead.”
Zorrie couldn’t quite tell from Noah’s voice, which seemed both deeper and tighter to her than usual, if he was crying or not. She decided he was.
“The green mark,” Noah said.
“What?” Zorrie said.
“He told me a long time ago he’d show me the green mark before it was over, and he did.”
“What does the green mark mean?”
“I don’t know. Death, I suppose. Life, mystery. Mostly mystery.”
Zorrie saw again the faint oval on the green carpet and shivered. Small as it had been, it seemed linked in her mind to the gigantic lake, lost in mist, that she hadn’t been able to get her eyes on. She thought of Noah standing at the edge of the field years before, holding a letter in his hand and talking about whirlwinds in his head. She thought of him standing with a saw in his hand, talking about falling and falling, and she thought about Virgil lying somewhere in Frankfort, waiting to be lowered into the ground. She thought about Harold falling through the sky and Opal sitting in an ice bath and Mrs. Thomas eating carrot stubs out of her hand. She thought of Noah standing over the fire at the Fourth of July picnic, thought of his long arms in the red light, thought of Oats and her red carpet, thought of Noah, crying no more than two feet away from her, thought of her arms going out like they had for Ruby, thought, I am thinking more than I need to, and I ought to get home.
“Anyway, I wanted to let you know your mother could use your company,” she said, pulling her ear away from the door.
“Thank you, Zorrie. It was a service. I’ll get down there before long.”
“Are you going to be all right?”
Noah didn’t answer. Zorrie turned, took a step, heard the door opening behind her, stopped.
“You ought to have this,” Noah said, his voice even deeper and tighter than it had seemed hidden behind the inch or so of door. He was standing barely lit by the hall light, holding out the tattered copy of Montaigne with both hands. Zorrie didn’t move. The room behind him was dark, cavelike. The air that had come out with him smelled of lemons and shoe polish. Zorrie could see traces of wet in the pale creases on Noah’s cheeks.
“You know I can’t take that. That’s yours and Ruby’s.”
“What was ours fell over into his green mark. Just like your Harold fell into his. Ruby’s been saying she wanted you to have it. And I’ve figured for a while Virgil would have wanted it to be yours.”
Zorrie pictured Harold hitting green water, his burned and broken plane sinking down through the green dark. To drift or settle? To rise? To have his bones gnawed by small, sharp mouths? By the fragile film of the present? Of the past? Which was it? Weren’t you supposed to be able to read a message once it had been sent? She shivered and shook her head, but reached forward, took the book the way it was offered, with both her hands. Their fingers didn’t touch but came very close. She asked again if Noah was going to be all right, and again Noah didn’t answer, just thanked her, wiped his forearm across his cheek, and wished her good night. A few minutes later, hurrying away from the house with the green roof down the green lane toward the green woods and home, with nothing but unanswerable mysteries alongside her, Zorrie decided it would have been strange if he had.
Oats was waiting for her under the forsythia bush. Zorrie brought her into the kitchen and gave her half a burned pork chop left over from lunch and poured herself a glass of milk. Some of the milk slopped over the edge of the glass when she set it down on the counter. She started to get a cloth, but stopped, lifted the glass, and took a drink. Oats licked her lips, lifted her ears, and whined. Zorrie gave her the rest of the pork chop, took another drink, said, “Hush now,” wondered who, exactly, she was saying it to, opened the copy of Virgil’s Montaigne, read a moment, closed it, and then stood there a long time, staring down at her hands.
IV
this Palace seems light as a cloud set for a moment in the sky
Seasons of flood, of fine weather, of fair harvest, of drought. September storms in the late 1950s took down two of Zorrie’s white oaks so she put in pawpaws, and when those didn’t make it she settled on maple and hickory and watched with pleasure as they began to grow sturdy and make their shapes in the air. She had the flu one year, three colds the next, and then wasn’t sick the following two. On balance, the farm did well enough to make it worth investing in a second grain bin. Her old truck gave up the ghost, so she got herself a new one. After the county forced her to slaughter her few remaining hogs because of a swine virus that was making the rounds, she stopped raising stock. It had been one thing to kill those brave, smart creatures for their meat, but quite another to tractor-shove their shot carcasses into the earth. There were other compensations, though. She had put out butterfly bushes, and the air filled up. Wrens and robins and downy woodpeckers fell in love with her woods. A great blue heron began regularly stalking the waters of the ditch where it spread and deepened into the gravel pit. She found so many four-leaf clovers, she wore herself out cutting slips of waxed paper to press them in. Nobody at church or in town ever said no to slipping one into their purse or wallet, and Lester made a show of wearing the two she had given him in his hatband. M
eanwhile, her ever-expanding garden flourished. She harvested far more than she could consume and, when she wasn’t “handing out the luck,” as Candy Wilson put it, got into the habit of sharing most of what she had canned and frozen with her neighbors, especially the less fortunate ones. Her big jars of ham and green beans were particularly welcome, as were her dill pickles. Everyone thought she had the recipe down just right.
One spring Sheriff Hank Dunn, who had been a few years ahead of Harold at school and had attended his memorial service at Hillisburg, took to paying Zorrie visits in the evening. The first time he came, it was to ask her to sign a petition on safety procedures being circulated by the volunteer fire department. The second time, three days later, it was to provide her with an update as well as supplementary information because he was just driving by. After he had left, Zorrie wasn’t quite sure what she thought about his visit, much less his suggestion that he come by again the following week, but she did note that she had been bothered the whole time they stood out by his cruiser that she had been wearing a pair of filthy overalls and rubber field boots. The next time he came, she had on a pair of jeans and a clean yellow windbreaker, and the week after that, she paused a moment in front of the mirror before she walked out across the yard to greet him.