Zorrie

by Laird Hunt

  “You goddamn tell them to come get me,” Noah said, coughing and retching and looking more frightening to Zorrie in his rage and hurt and madness than the jets of dark orange fire rushing up out of the ruined wood. “You tell them it’s goddamn time. I’m the one set this going and I’m the one that’s crazy and they better come and goddamn get me and goddamn take me away now.”

  Hank walked straight up to Noah, slapped him, then took him by the shoulders and shook him hard. Noah kept coughing and telling him to send for the hospital, that he was crazy, that they had to come, he’d set his own fire now, he’d waited long enough. Hank just stood there, half circles of sweat blooming out under his shoulder blades. After a time Noah, who did not stop talking, seemed to grow calmer, but Hank kept his hands on his shoulders. He stood there staring into Noah’s eyes, listening or not listening to everything Noah said, but either way not answering. He was still standing there when he told Zorrie, who had not moved either, that things were under control and she might just as well take Oats and go on home.

  “I can’t go,” she said.

  Hank said he wasn’t asking.

  As she pulled away, Oats scrabbling unhappily on the seat beside her, others arrived. Lester, who’d only stepped down from the Hillisburg volunteer fire department the year before, came up fast, parked in the side ditch, and jumped out of his truck. Some stayed in their cars. Candy Wilson sat at the wheel of her Lincoln, a fat hand over her mouth and upper lip, tears streaking her cheeks, large glasses reflecting bits of flame.

  The wind shifted midmorning, and what was left of the smoke moved out over the fields. The smell, though, stayed in the air, drifted in Zorrie’s hallways, hung over the kitchen table, even came out of the cupboard when Zorrie opened it to get a bowl. With the wind changed, it would have been easy for Zorrie to look out her side windows, over the emerald rows of new corn, and see the fire engines pulling away from what must now be a sodden, smoldering pile, but she did not look. Instead she sat in her chair, flipped through the pages of an atlas Harold had once purchased for her, and played at seeing how many countries and cities she could recognize. When she tired of that, she thumbed through garden supply catalogs and debated whether to place an order for a new shovel with a patented rubber handle or just run into town and buy one. Once or twice she felt a twist in her stomach and wondered if Noah was still talking and Hank was still standing there, with his hands on Noah’s shoulders, or if he had failed in absorbing all Noah had to say and Noah had gotten his wish, officials from the Logansport State Hospital coming to ferry him across the imaginary chasm to a bed down the hall from Opal’s, where, with the endorsement of the medical community, he could slide down under his own covers and shiver out the rest of his days.

  Lester stopped by that afternoon after he had gone home and showered. Zorrie brought out ice water and they stood under one of the hickories near the house. Lester said it had been about the worst barn fire he’d seen, and he’d seen some. The Summers barn, built by Ruby’s grandfather, had either been the biggest or one of the biggest in the county and had been crammed to the rafters with things that hadn’t been hesitant to burn. They’d salvaged a number of fine old tools and seen the sorry remains of just as many more. Lester said everyone over there knew the fire had been set, not least because Noah had kept up telling everyone who’d come up to him even after he’d quieted down that now, because of what he’d done, they’d have to take him away. Lester also said that Hank, who in addition to his peacekeeping duties was Johnson Township fire inspector, had said loud enough for everyone to hear, and with not a drop of humor in his voice, that even if it were a crime to set your own property on fire, which in this case it wasn’t, it was clear that faulty wiring was to blame.

  “He wanted them to take him to Opal,” Zorrie said. “To help him do what he can’t figure out how to get done on his own.”

  “That appears to be about the size of it,” said Lester, taking a sip of water and licking his lips. He swished the water around in his mouth, breathed loudly in through his nose, and said he couldn’t get rid of the smoke taste. Zorrie said she’d even tried gargling Listerine, that nothing had helped.

  Lester grimaced, rubbed his index finger across his front teeth. “There’s a piece of wall didn’t get burned. Sticking up out that mess. They put their names on it.”

  “Who did?”

  “They did. Says ‘Noah and Opal Summers.’ She must of wrote it.”

  “He can write.”

  “I’ve seen his writing. Kind of hard to read. This was neat and didn’t look like it took a week to set down.”

  Zorrie tried to remember where she had been when Opal was living at the Summerses’. Was she still at her aunt’s? Had Ottawa already come and gone? It bothered her that she couldn’t immediately recall. She had been young, certainly. Young but heading toward her life. Heading toward Gus and Bessie and Harold with his green eyes and strong hands. Heading toward Noah and his sorrow and all these years now living on this farm alone.

  Lester drained the remaining water in his glass, crunched an ice cube, and looked at her. “You all right, Zorrie? Hank said you were out there a while this morning. There’s nothing simple about seeing a thing like that.”

  A jay landed on one of the hickory’s lower branches. It took two quick steps sideways, pecked at its right wing, let out a screech, and flew off out of sight. Zorrie nodded. Nothing simple at all, she thought, seeing Hank holding Noah, Oats running wildly, the firemen hollering at each other, water pouring through the smoke and steam and flames.

  Lester shoved a hand into his pocket, sucked another ice cube into his mouth, and shook his head. “He thinks you burn your barn down and jump around and they come and it just works that way. Everyone knows Noah has his troubles, but the variety of crazy where you go off forever isn’t one of them.”

  Hank Dunn, who rolled up not long after Lester had left to see how Zorrie was coming in the wake of the morning’s “grotesqueries,” concurred. He said that even if Noah had some indisputable strange to him, there was still a great deal too much reason in his behavior to make anyone want to get the white jackets on the phone. What he had done was stupid and better than halfway criminal, but also had a logic to it if you gave it a close look. Opal’s family didn’t want him up in Logansport and had arranged things to make sure he stayed away, so he’d thought maybe now that Ruby wasn’t around to upset, he could hurdle over that impediment by pulling out a matchbook of his own. But that was where the scenarios diverged. He hadn’t sat down in the middle of the barn the way Opal had sat down in the middle of the house she had set on fire. They had both wanted their fires to take them away, but his was the only one in which, according to the plan, its igniter was supposed to end up alive.

  “All right,” said Zorrie. “But why didn’t he years ago just go up there and sign her out and bring her home and find some way to take care of her here? Ruby would have helped. We all would. What does it matter what her family had to say about it? She’s his wife.”

  Hank took off his hat and wiped at some of the grime and sweat he hadn’t yet got fully cleaned off his brow. “But that’s just it,” he said after sucking in a deep breath. “That’s the whole burnt biscuit, Zorrie. She isn’t.”

  “Isn’t what?”

  “His wife.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “They were never married.”

  “They aren’t married?”

  “Not in the legal sense. And they weren’t together anything like long enough for common law. When they met, Opal was an adult ward of her family—or I forget what the term was—had spent half her teenage years in that place where she’s now lived out most of her life. All they had was an arrangement.”

  “You mean they were engaged?”

  “They called it a trial run. Her family was just happy to have her kind of trouble off their hands, for good they hoped, and Virgil was forward-thinking and persuasive enough with his references to the unorthodox practi
ces of the ancients, I suppose, that Ruby went along with it. I can’t even remember why, beyond friendship, they told me. I wasn’t but a deputy who liked to listen to Virgil talk back then. They reckoned they’d see if it made sense to get the preacher and the courthouse involved at the end of a year.”

  “I’d forgotten it was less than a year.”

  “It was Virgil called Logansport—because if he hadn’t, my office would have had to—when Noah just about didn’t come back out of that house of theirs with her in his arms. Her family took the reins on keeping Noah away after that.”

  “And everyone knows this?”

  “If everyone is me and now you, then everyone does. As far as folks around here were concerned, they got married right and proper over where she was from.”

  Whether by design or chance they had both turned away from the direction of the smoke and ruin and stood now facing south across the clear fields toward Indianapolis. Zorrie put the backs of her hands on her hips.

  “Why, Hank?”

  “Why did they think that?”

  “No, why are you telling me this?”

  Hank shrugged, cleared his throat, spat to the side, and then apologized for spitting. For a time he got interested in some smudge on the side of his shirt, and then he scratched a while at his bare forearm. When he spoke again, his voice came out quiet and slow.

  “Because the way I see it, our friend down the road is about out of angels, Zorrie. He needs people who care about him more than a handshake on Sunday. People who’ll stick around longer than the time it takes to slurp down a cup of coffee.”

  “Like you and me, you mean.”

  “Like you especially, is what I was thinking.”

  “I see.”

  Zorrie took in a breath through her nose and shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Her neck was sore, like she’d slept wrong on it, and her shirt felt stickier against her back than she liked. Oats, who wasn’t over being agitated, went trotting across the yard and plunged with a bark into some rogue horseweed that had thus far escaped Zorrie’s scythe. When Hank spoke again, he looked her in the eye.

  “I hope it’s all right that I’m speaking plain. When I brought up the subject before, back when I used to come calling, it was disappointment doing some of the talking. I won’t deny that. It’s the truth. This time it derives from necessity.”

  Zorrie kept her eyes locked on Hank’s and put a hand to her cheek. She was pleased to note that she hadn’t blushed. Thought maybe the heat of the morning’s inferno had stolen off her own and hoped it was slow in coming back.

  “We need to watch over him for a minute,” Hank said. “We need to watch him close. He’s going to get himself thrown in jail, not into a straitjacket, or just ruin himself if he pulls another trick like this one. I don’t think he’s got but the one fire in him, and I told him I believed that, this morning, somewhere up on a dozen times, but I don’t know how well he heard me.”

  “You had just slapped him.”

  “And he had just burned his own barn down.”

  “So you want me to go down there and knock on his door and repeat the message? Tell him the one fire is all he gets?”

  “Something like that,” said Hank. “I don’t know what would be best. I expect the first part of that equation would be enough.”

  Zorrie wasn’t so sure. Didn’t know what just putting her knuckles on his door would accomplish. Couldn’t imagine what her version of grabbing Noah hard and telling him he had to put away the matchbooks forever would look like. She did her best to make her mind fill up with the previous night’s cool dirt, but the fact of the fire and the fact that Noah and Opal had never been officially married and the fact that her heart was hammering so loudly it was making her feel sick kept the soft, cool dirt from coalescing. She thought about it all too much to too little purpose for far too much of the night, and the next morning she got up early and made a pie. Somewhere after midnight, when she had come to the conclusion that arriving with the makings of a decent meal would be the least worst approach she could take, she had settled on using some of the cherries from the deep freeze, but in the morning light the red showing through the clear plastic looked too bright for the circumstances, so she pitted and chopped up white peaches, measured out sugar, flour, and cinnamon, stirred it all up, and poured it into her crust. Then she peeled and sliced potatoes, working carefully because she had cut herself twice in the past week, once fairly deeply. She liked the way the old blade moved through the tight, grainy texture of the potatoes, the settling whack it made on the board, the film of starchy moisture on the old, dark metal, on the tips of her fingers, on the knuckles of her sturdy hand. When she was finished, she set the slices in a glass dish, sprinkled salt and pepper on them, poured in some milk and dollops of lard, and covered the whole thing with shredded Colby cheese. Then she went out to the garden, cut off a head of lettuce, pulled some radishes and carrots, dug up a sweet onion, and, doing her best to ignore the smell of smoke that was still everywhere, picked two good-looking beefsteak tomatoes. She washed and sliced these things, set them next to the sink, then changed, took her keys, and ran into town.

  When she got back, she put ground ham in a bowl, tore up some bread, cracked eggs, and mixed it all together. She spooned in salt, dried thyme, and garlic powder, put the mixture into a deep pan, and looked at the clock. When she had it all in the oven, she went upstairs to take a bath.

  She had intended to no more than glance at the remains of the barn, but when she pulled into Noah’s driveway, the sight of the plumes of smoke still lifting bleakly up out of the charred black ruin drew her over in spite of her resolve. She stood at the edge of what the day before had been the big white doors and was now like the black border of a bad thought. At some point the back wall had given out, and part of the roof had fallen over and crushed what hadn’t been burned of Noah’s garden. A few smoke-blackened corn stalks had escaped the collapse and shivered a little, like there might still be some point to such efforts, in the sun and breeze. Much of the surroundings had been trampled. There were tire tracks everywhere and boot marks in the mud surrounding the ruin. The smell, which she had earlier just caught the edges of, was the worst. It made her think of being locked up and forgotten in an old coal cellar or in a similar place where hope was no longer and never again would be. She could see the part of the wall that had survived the fire, but one of the firemen or Noah had stacked some boards up against it and obscured the writing there.

  Having knocked once, she stood outside Noah’s side door no more than five seconds before he opened it. He did not seem at all surprised to see her and helped her get the food out of her truck and into the kitchen. He set the table while she unloaded the hot dishes, then the two of them sat down in the places they’d taken when she’d come down on Thursday nights. Zorrie had always liked sitting with a view out the big double windows, but now, finding herself looking out past the spirea, beyond the oaks, to an ugly corner of the burned barn, she wished she’d chosen another seat. Still, when Noah asked if maybe she wouldn’t be more comfortable on the other side of the table, out of the sun, she thanked him but said she’d sit where she always had, if that was all right.

  Noah took large helpings of everything, ate with appetite, and complimented the food. Zorrie nodded and ate lightly and stole glances at him, trying to decide if he looked different to her after what he had done, and after what she now knew. Really he just looked like a somewhat shinier version of his normal self. There was a decent bruise on his left cheek where Hank had hit him, but he had bathed and washed his hair and had on a clean gray shirt under his overalls. It looked like he had taken extra care with his hands. Yesterday they had been almost black from the wrists down, as if he had plunged them into a barrel of soot. Today, though, when he lifted his glass of lemonade, his rough fingernails glistened and the dark pink flesh of his scars picked up the overhead light.

  After Noah had had a second slice of ham loaf, over which he’d dr
izzled a fair amount of the sauce that had collected in the bottom of the pan, Zorrie cleared the table and brought out a couple of Ruby’s small plates for pie. When she asked Noah how big a piece she ought to cut for him, he didn’t answer, just stared at the cabinets. She swallowed and asked again, and when still he didn’t answer, she cut off a medium-sized slice, set it on a plate in front of him, scooped up the crust and chunks of caramelized peach that had stayed stubbornly behind, and set that on the plate too. Then she cut herself a small slice and took a drink of lemonade. She lifted her fork, brought it down through the crust, touched against the peach mixture inside and brought it up again, then set it down on the table when he started talking. While he talked, his eyes flashing, his nostrils slightly flared, she folded her hands in front of her and, as she had pictured herself doing all morning, looked straight at him without saying anything, like Hank had. When after several minutes he paused, she nodded, said, “All right,” took up her fork, brought it down through the crust and peaches, lifted it to her mouth, and let her lips close. She chewed and nodded and then set her fork next to her plate and folded her hands again.

  “That’s fine pie if I do say it myself,” she said.

  Noah, who seemed to have sworn himself quiet for a minute, took a deep breath, looked at his plate, then off at the cabinets, then at his plate again. Zorrie leaned her head to the left and gazed out the window. There was a light breeze lifting the spirea and a few sweat bees hanging stubbornly in the air. She let her eyes sweep past the oak to the black ruin and then brought them to the spirea again. Then she took another bite and chewed. Noah lifted his fork and tapped at the pie. He started to say something but stopped and instead took a bite himself. He chewed and swallowed and took another bite and gave a compliment. Zorrie looked at him. He smiled and then started talking again.

  When Hank called her that afternoon to see if she had paid her visit, she said she had, but that there hadn’t been any angel wings involved in any of it. She had just listened to him swear until he was sworn out.