Zorrie

by Laird Hunt

  “I gave her my record player. I wasn’t using it anymore. I don’t even know why I bought it in the first place.”

  “I bet she’ll like that.”

  “You think they’ll let her use it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Should I tell him? About going up there.”

  “Noah?”

  Zorrie nodded.

  Ruby picked out another blueberry and put it in her mouth. She chewed once or twice and then swallowed.

  “He already knows you went up there. He told me yesterday you were going to.”

  “Sometimes I just know things. I expect we all do, even if we most of us don’t pay it any mind,” Noah said when Zorrie saw him next. She had been cultivating in the west field and spotted him working out in his beans with a hoe. When Zorrie came over, he had thanked her for the blueberries and said he hoped she had enjoyed meeting his wife. She said she had. That she had hoped they could be friends. Noah said he imagined the experience of meeting Opal had thrown her some. Zorrie said it had a little at first, but then she had settled into it and had found Opal about as bright and pleasant as could be. Noah said that was nice to hear. He said it had been kind of Zorrie to make the trip, and he could understand her curiosity. Zorrie had known about Opal for a long time, and it made sense that she would want to go up and see her. Especially since she really wasn’t all that far away. That the distance had to do with cornfields and strips of dirt, not oceans. That oceans had nothing to do with it except in Noah’s head. In his head the distance grew ever greater with the years and not smaller, as he had once thought it might, and try as he might, he hadn’t figured out how to see his way to the other side. He had thought that one day time would have so salved the wound that he would almost be able to step out of his front door and straight in through the gates of Logansport. He had gone to see Opal once, soon after she had been taken, and his arrival and request for admittance had so upset her that he had promised to abide by her doctor’s advice and the restrictions her family had put in place and wait to return. Somehow he was waiting still. Time wasn’t doing what he had thought it would, what he thought, in truth, it had promised to. He smiled as he spoke, his smile bigger than Zorrie was used to seeing on his face, and it made her think of Opal’s own tiny smile and of her mouth with something off about it. Noah spoke, smiling all the time, his voice increasing in speed and volume, his smile growing farther and farther away from something meant to indicate pleasure, and Zorrie, who already was not feeling altogether settled about her visit, began to feel certain she’d made a mistake. When he paused, she started to explain that it had been about her old sick friend and glow-in-the-dark paint and being lonely, so lonely, and wanting to do something, offer some gift, but trailed off when she realized that all of that, even the loneliness, was only the smaller portion of why she had gone. They stood a moment, looking at each other, and then Noah spoke, his voice calm again.

  “Thank you for the blueberries, Zorrie. And thank you for taking some to Opal. She always liked them.”

  That fall saw the first in a series of uncommonly good harvests, which after several years had much of the community feeling more comfortable than they had in quite some time. Lester, who had started saving long before, used his share of the profits to buy a small farm near Boyleston that a cousin had put up for sale. Zorrie drove over with him one November morning and agreed that it was fine acreage. She gave him some of her tools and, since she had invested in a new machine the previous spring, let him buy her old tractor for next to nothing. He would still help her out, but now he’d have land of his own.

  Lester and Emma sold their house in Hillisburg and moved out to their farm the first week of December. Around Christmas they had a party, and everyone agreed they’d done a good job sprucing the place up. Zorrie helped string popcorn, ate a fair amount of it, cracked a few nuts, and sat by the fire. She had spoken to Marie the morning before and was feeling pleased about how well she had sounded despite the treatment she was undergoing, which had robbed her of her hair too. “Least they haven’t taken any of my ambulatory instruments!” Marie had said, and they both laughed. It felt good to laugh about something that wasn’t funny. Not funny at all. Emma had eggnog in a punch bowl on the sideboard, and the whole house smelled of nutmeg and good home-skimmed cream.

  Candy Wilson sat and visited with Zorrie for a stretch. She’d had back surgery over the summer and still wasn’t comfortable sitting without the special pillow she’d left at home. She also hadn’t gotten used to the idea of cutting down and couldn’t resist eating more than her share of the heavily iced angel cookies Phyllis Dunn had brought. There was a pair of girls chasing up and down the stairs, and after a time Emma called them over for a present. Zorrie watched them tear their way into a pair of matching harmonicas, which, upon the instructions of some adult Zorrie couldn’t see, they walked around the room showing to all who had come. There was something about the half-jaunty, half-shy way they went around the room, holding up their instruments and making breathy first attempts at blowing through them, that reminded Zorrie of her own long-ago Christmases.

  Her aunt had been wildly deficient as a maternal substitute, but she had never missed out celebrating Christmas. Zorrie always had a stocking filled with fruit, nuts, and maybe a top or a whistle waiting for her when she woke the morning of the twenty-fifth. Sometimes there had even been a tree, hung with glass balls and garlanded with popcorn and tinsel, and when she was small Zorrie had enjoyed nothing more, when her aunt wasn’t around, than lying on the floor beneath it and gazing up through its fragrant boughs. Once, when her aunt had come in unexpectedly and caught her at it, she had surprised Zorrie more than she had ever been surprised in her life by lying right down next to her. After they had both lain there unspeaking under the tree for some good while her aunt had said, “I can see why you do this. It’s peaceful and it’s pretty.” As the little girls sped giggling and already blowing credible scales past Zorrie, who refrained from importuning them any more than by smiling and nodding, her thoughts turned from the rare good memory of her aunt to Mr. Thomas. Mr. Thomas had also been an avowed enthusiast of Christmas, and more than once on snowy December days before the winter break, he had told stories about what he called German Christmas. In German Christmas, Santa Claus wore green trimmed with pure gold instead of red with white fur and had wings so he didn’t need any reindeer to help him fly around the world. In German Christmas everyone got the same number of presents, and it didn’t matter how you’d behaved as long as you hadn’t robbed any banks or killed anyone.

  When Noah sat down next to Zorrie, after the girls had been released to go back to racing up and down the stairs, she said, “Have you ever heard about how they used to do Christmas over in Germany? My old teacher in school liked to tell us about it. He went down to Evansville and, far as I know at least, never came back, and I have always been sorry about that.”

  Noah didn’t respond. He sat with one hand on each of his knees, his back straight, his eyes looking out over the room.

  “Did you get some eggnog?” Zorrie asked.

  “Ruby is sick,” Noah said.

  Zorrie’s smile slid off her face and fell into her lap. She swallowed hard and looked over at him. Just then Reverend Carter came by. He had lately taken to coughing quite a bit and had lost a good deal of weight. When asked about it, he would only spread his hands, palms upward, shrug, and look at the sky. He was drinking coffee that wasn’t just coffee. He nodded briefly at Noah but engaged Zorrie, so it was some time before she could ask, “How sick?”

  “Well, Zorrie, if there was an Oats to it, she more than likely wouldn’t come visiting much longer.”

  Zorrie walked down first thing the next morning with a bouquet of dried roses, zinnias, and chrysanthemums. Noah gave her a big blue mason jar to put them in, and she followed him upstairs. Ruby’s color wasn’t good, and the whites of her eyes looked gray. She was lying under three blankets and had a hot water bottle on her
stomach.

  “It’s for my hands,” she said. “I can’t keep them warm. Noah fills it for me. Holds them too sometimes. Thank you for the flowers. You don’t get a nice dried bouquet anymore.”

  Noah pointed at a red armchair pulled up next to the bed. Zorrie sat and asked Ruby if she was comfortable. Ruby said she was not, but that her discomfort had nothing to do with her cold hands or the quality of the care she was receiving.

  They sat without speaking, the morning light spilling a shaft through the east window that was filled with slowly whirling dust motes, a good kind of glow. Some of the warm, dust-filled light fell across Ruby’s legs, and Zorrie was tempted to reach her hand out to it. She said as much, and Ruby told her to go on, said the light was pretty this morning and she’d had the same thought more than once.

  Zorrie looked at Ruby. “If we helped, could you lean forward?”

  Ruby narrowed her eyes and smiled. She looked at Noah, who nodded and took his hands out of his pockets. She said, “I suppose I’m not quite coffin-fill yet.”

  Zorrie and Noah put a hand each behind Ruby’s back and, when she was ready, pressed softly forward as Ruby held out her arms, fingers outstretched, so that for a minute it looked like the rest of the room was submerged in dark and it was only that shimmering band of sun to interrupt the long night. Ruby held her hands up to the wrists for a long moment in the deep yellow light, then sighed and, with their help, leaned back again.

  “Those were about the prettiest pair of hands I ever saw,” Zorrie said.

  “Thank you for that, Zorrie,” Ruby said.

  “Yes, thank you, Zorrie Underwood,” Noah said.

  Ruby passed in her bed on a sunny day in early January, “very gentle,” as Noah put it. There was a viewing at Frye’s in Frankfort, and everyone agreed she looked beautiful in her green suit and silver cross. Zorrie squeezed Noah’s arm after she went past the coffin, then stood out in the snow as they lowered Ruby into the frozen earth the next day. Ruby’s coffin was deep brown, not white, but it looked comfortable, and she hoped Ruby’s rest beneath the earth would be as soothing as it had seemed to her, when she thought about it, Janie’s must be. Noah held his arms fixed at his sides and couldn’t keep his eyes off the hole as the minister spoke. There was a lunch in the church basement afterward. Noah ate nothing and kept looking out the window in the direction of the cemetery. At one point he stood up from the table, walked up the steps, stood outside in the snow for a time, then came back down, his eyes watery, his cheeks red. Zorrie wondered if word had been gotten to Opal and suppressed an urge to go over and sit by him. When people came forward to put their hand on his shoulder and speak, he listened with great attention and then pressed his lips together and nodded his head.

  A deep silence fell over the Summerses’ house after Ruby’s death. Zorrie tried to stop by every day at first, but Noah often wasn’t home and didn’t always come to the door when she knew he was. On warmer days Zorrie took walks along the lane with Oats in hopes of spotting him out in the barnyard, but either her timing was off or he wasn’t around. She pictured him, in his grief, sitting alone in the cold house under the painting of blue cornflowers. Her own dark times over the days and years flapped like witch moths before her eyes then, and the distance between her heart and Noah’s seemed smaller. Grief seemed to constitute a kind of connective membrane, not a divide, and the “fragile film of the present” felt strengthened, not threatened, by the past. Tears, it struck her—even ones that spilled out of your mouth or off a table—formed a fretwork the wingless could learn to walk over, if there had been enough of them and you tried. She wondered if Noah had long since intuited something like this, that it was the very reason he had remained so close in feeling to Opal even when he had let the less than forty miles that separated them become something so large.

  Zorrie mentioned none of this of course when she did see Noah, yanking up a fence post, working on his truck, buying groceries in town. Instead they spoke of the weather or the respective merits of whichever product one or the other of them was considering buying. Zorrie did not bring up Ruby, nor Virgil for that matter, and Noah mentioned neither of them. He seemed on these occasions to be calm and self-possessed, but Zorrie suspected that there was plenty going on in the “cave behind his eyes.”

  In fact, one afternoon in early May when Zorrie was out on the lane with Oats, she spotted Noah standing by his barn with his back to her. She was about to call out a greeting to him when she realized that his shoulders were curled, that he was shaking slightly and had his face in his hands. Zorrie was torn between rushing toward him and moving on. She moved on. When she saw him again, on her way back, he spotted her as he came out of the barn and waved and called out to Oats.

  That night she sat up late with Oats snoring at her feet and thought about caves. She had spoken that afternoon to Marie, and though her old friend had sounded as cheerful as ever, and they had found more than one thing to laugh about, there had been a crack or two in Marie’s voice that Zorrie had found troubling, as if some huge hole might open up under her and suck her in. Zorrie had recently watched a television program on the great caves in southern Indiana and Kentucky, their vaulted halls lit by electric lamps, their walls glittering with metals and minerals with beautiful names. There were underground rivers that ran through some of the caves, and passages you had to crawl through if you wished to visit them. These caves had been partially inhabited by the Indians—learning that had made Zorrie think even more than she had already been thinking about her visit to Logansport—and were cousins in a way to the caves in France that had been painted on tens of thousands of years before. Many of the chambers were strewn with the bones of animals and bore the remains of fires lit by hands dead five hundred years. When the electric lights were switched off, the caves with all their wonders went back to the darkness that was their natural state.

  Zorrie tried to imagine what it would be like to have the lights switched off when you were miles from the entrance, for the world around you to go as dark as it was indecipherable. She closed her eyes and thought about the lights getting switched off when she was lost in thought in her own “cave.” She kept them closed even when she started, ever so slightly, to panic. After a time, though, it seemed to her that the dim halls and passageways of her mind, which were lately always too loud and too hot, began to fill with soft, cool, silencing dirt. It occurred to her then that it was silence and not grief that connected them, that would keep them forever connected, the living and the dead—her, Noah, Opal, Harold, Janie, Marie, her parents, maybe the whole world, and that this was not such a bad thing, especially if every now and then there was a little Buddy Holly or June Carter Cash playing away off somewhere in the background.

  V

  Our hands touch, our bodies burst into fire

  Zorrie woke at dawn and smelled smoke before she’d made it halfway down the stairs. Oats barked once when she got to the kitchen and went straight for the back door. Zorrie stepped outside, saw red through the trees, heard sirens in the distance, and ran for her keys.

  She arrived just after the fire trucks and made sure she pulled well off the driveway so any others could get by. There were two trucks, one from Kempton, one from Hillisburg, and an ambulance. When she saw its doors fly open, her breath went and her heart started hammering again, even though it had slowed when she saw it was Noah’s barn, not his house, that was burning. One of the firemen ran over to the house and banged on the door with a gloved hand. Zorrie put her fist to her mouth, bit into it hard, started forward, then stopped when she started to feel faint. But then she heard a shout muffled by the snarled roar of the fire and saw Noah over by Ruby’s greenhouses, holding a bale of straw. His forearms were smeared with black, his nostrils flared, his eyes looked too large for his head. Oats, who had come across the woods, broke from the lane, skirted the barn, and dashed toward him, barking wildly. Noah lifted the bale over his head and flung it toward the blaze. It fell short but still burst into
flame. The fireman who had been banging on the door made a signal to the EMTs and started for Noah. Zorrie put her fist back to her mouth and followed him.

  Noah had inhaled smoke and couldn’t stop coughing. He answered in the negative when asked if there was any livestock or explosive material in the barn, but refused to let himself be examined by the ambulance crew. Whenever they approached, he would flail his arms, fists bunched, and between fits of coughing yell that he was crazy, that they couldn’t touch him unless they planned on taking him up to Logansport and locking him the hell away. One of them, Frank Wright’s boy Jeff, put an arm on Noah’s back and was hit so hard Zorrie heard him mention restraint and sedation to his partner. Oats had gone mostly quiet when Zorrie came over. She sat off to the side growling and whining and looking from the thick jets of water trained on the roof and backside of the barn, where the flames, fifteen feet high in places, were worst, to Noah, Zorrie, and the two calm but frustrated men.

  Hank arrived just after a third fire truck had pulled up, took a quick survey of the scene, and pulled the medics aside. A moment later they went over to their ambulance and drove away. Zorrie, who had found herself unable to speak since she got close to Noah and saw the crazed look in his eyes, walked quickly over to Hank, leaned close, and said, “It might have been best if you’d have let them give him something. He’s not right.”

  Hank looked at Noah, who was staring straight at him with his tongue partway out of his mouth, blackened fingers digging hard into his own arm. “I know it, Zorrie. But we got a mess here. It’s the county pays their salaries, and even if they’re good boys, under the circumstances I thought it best they vacate expeditiously.”

  The image of Noah coming out of the huge barn the night before and calling to Oats presented itself to her. She started to speak, but Hank was walking over to him.