Zorrie
Page 11
The next day she brought a fresh salad and fried chicken and heated up the leftover potatoes and pie. They sat as they had the day before, and dinner passed in much the same way, only this time Noah started in on his gesticulating and talking earlier in the proceedings and went on with it even longer. Like the day before, however, he did finish most of the large portions he served himself and didn’t forget to compliment and thank her. Zorrie had decided it would be all right if she ate while she listened and managed to get through her meal while it was all still hot. The barn had stopped smoking, and when her eyes fell on its jagged contours at stray moments during the meal, she found it didn’t bother her quite as much.
A good deal of what Noah said, she had heard him telling Hank the morning of the fire, the main difference now being that his remarks were tinged with what Zorrie took to be a mixture of outrage and disbelief that he had not, despite the gravity of his gesture, been taken away. Having heard him with Hank, Zorrie wasn’t surprised when he discussed his “own folly and goddamn madness,” but after a while his swearing began to wear on her, and on the third day that she made dinner for him, she used a break in his commentary to tell him she didn’t know about his assertions and confessions about wrapping straw around a piece of wire and setting a match to it like only a madman would, but there was no call to use ill-colored words.
The next day, over roast flank steak and wilted lettuce, he apologized to her for his language and thanked her for getting his dinner and listening to him.
“You go on and keep making speeches all you want if you think it’ll help you get through this patch,” she said.
“I wish it was just a patch, Zorrie,” he said.
“You’ll get through it, Noah Summers. I know you will.”
Hank checked in and seemed satisfied by the direction of things. He had driven by several times at night and twice in the early morning before sunrise and each time found everything quiet, the world of the Summers farm soft and still. Neighbors stopped by while she was there, but they didn’t stay longer than was required to, yes, drink a cup of coffee and, some of them, shake Noah’s hand. No one seemed to think it was strange that Zorrie was sitting in Noah’s kitchen in the middle of the day or working on his dishes. At church, Candy Wilson said it was good of Zorrie to have taken such an interest in Noah, that she would have done the same if she’d been as close to Ruby and Virgil as Zorrie had. Ralph Duff agreed. He said Noah needed company and human talk and good things on his table to set him right. After he’d lost Helen, his girls had prayed with him and made sure he kept his head above water, made sure he had what he needed so he didn’t drown.
“What do you two talk about?” Ernest Johnson asked.
“This and that,” Zorrie said.
Reverend Carter, who had lately begun to look permanently green around the gills and had more than a little trouble getting his voice to the back of the room when he was preaching, said she was acting in a Christian way and suggested she bring Noah along with her when she came next week. Zorrie said she would put the question to him if it seemed right, and Reverend Carter said that question was always right. The reverend had started to smell sour, like old clothes or silage that hadn’t settled. Zorrie had never liked how close he leaned when he talked, how the sharp movements of his hands seemed to form a barrier around a body that was difficult to break away from, but she told him she would see if it was something that felt appropriate to bring up.
She hurried home after church to heat up the green beans and ham she’d cooked that morning in the pressure cooker and slice up some cucumbers and onions. It was an unusually fresh day, with fine breezes and a warbler stringing its bright song across the yard. The light coming in through the window glazed the zinnias she’d brought over and set in the center of the table, reminding her of Ruby and that day in the bedroom with her hands. She had not intended to mention any of what Reverend Carter or any of them had said, but in the clean kitchen with good summer food on the table and a glass of iced tea in her hand, Zorrie found some of her warmth about church coming back. She had brought over apple pie, and as she spooned sour cream onto the slices she’d cut, she said she’d been enjoying the services lately and asked Noah if he’d ever given any thought to going up to Hillisburg on Sundays. Noah said he had not. Zorrie looked carefully at him to see if the question had bothered him, but he gave no outward sign that it had. After a moment, she asked him why not. Noah said, very simply, that it wasn’t a place for him. That it had been a comfort and refuge to his mother, and he appreciated that, but it was not a place he was going to go and pass time, on Sunday or otherwise.
Aware that she had stepped into areas that weren’t necessarily hers to step into, not least just a week after Noah had set his own barn on fire in hopes of being hauled off to the state hospital, and less than three days since he had started to settle down, Zorrie would have left it at that, but Noah seemed inclined to expound. He noted that Virgil had never thought much of church, but that he had gone until his last years to please Ruby. Neither one of them had insisted that Noah go once he was an adult, so he had stopped. He had observed holidays and on those occasions had never declined to bow his head at the right times and had recited lines of scripture for Ruby her last days, but he lacked the call. He thought there was plenty out there, and allowed that maybe some of it was even eternal, but he wasn’t sure any of it needed a name and so many little houses built on its behalf in the countryside out of wood or stone.
Zorrie turned over what Noah had said for the better part of the afternoon as she and Lester hauled some of the previous year’s grain up to the elevator, and then as she weeded her zinnias. What she thought about, primarily, was whether or not she too had come to lack the call, and if her enthusiasm for it today had been due more to the weather and her excitement about spending another noon meal with Noah. It was certainly the case that in her early days and years with Harold she had had plenty of feeling, had sensed there was something extra, surely divine, in almost everything she did. She looked back at the many hours of praying she had done in the period after Harold’s death with gratitude, fondness even, and she certainly did not feel any regret for all the years, even when her enthusiasm had been cut considerably, that she had attended Sunday services. But as she thought about it in the light of her conversation with Noah, she wasn’t sure where, or what, the feeling at the heart of it had been.
Without bringing Noah up, she put some of this to Lester that evening as they were looking over the beans. He said that was more Emma’s department than his, but he supposed you either had yourself squared away about it or you didn’t. He had never much pondered the heaven or hell aspect, but thought that as a reliable outlet for the deeper sentiments there was much about lifting up your voice and bending your head to recommend.
That evening, after a small supper of tomato soup, celery, and crackers, Zorrie sat with Oats and wondered if the feeling, such as it was, was something that took more easily in the young and the old, and that the average person in the middle had to fly some of her years with just the wings of old habit to keep her from crashing. Looking at it this way, she saw the feeling as something that had grown cool but not cold, that there was a center to it that could get encouraged to life again. This encouragement, it seemed to her, ought though to come directly from upstairs and not from other people, and it bothered her that she had brought it up to Noah, that he might think she was after him about it. Maybe there was some feeling in him somewhere and maybe there wasn’t, but it wasn’t up to her or anyone else to go poking for it and applying bellows in any place but themselves.
She apologized to him the next day. He said there wasn’t anything to apologize for. She insisted. He said that the soul was the most valuable thing about a person, that, as Virgil had said, friends and family made up a symphony of souls, and that was something that should always be treated as precious, though not necessarily discussed. Life, Virgil had said, was a good deal about discouragement and fear, and th
e soul, which was the true heart of humankind whether you looked at it Christian or otherwise, needed a good deal of comforting some way or other if it was expected to soldier on. Zorrie said that, nevertheless, she wasn’t proud to have come to his table like a truck-stop preacher and tried to talk to him about getting to a church he knew better than she did and for many more years.
“I think,” said Noah, “that the important thing to me about it this second is you coming every day to this table at all.”
Zorrie couldn’t sleep that night. She tossed and jumped like a strip of bacon in hot grease and more than once rolled her sheets into a rope. She kept getting up and going down to sit on the porch with Oats, who just snored and acted otherwise unimpressed, even when Zorrie nudged her and asked if she thought Noah had meant anything by what he’d said. Oats paid no more attention a moment later when Zorrie told her it didn’t matter anyway because she didn’t want to know, that she was the crazy one for letting her thoughts keep moving that way. She stood up and pressed her face against the screen and looked as well as she could into the eyes of a carpenter moth who’d set up shop for the night there. She stood and stared at it, wondering what went on over the long nights in its mind, which was small to her but large to it, until she tapped the screen and realized it was dead.
There was a wind rising. The crickets got tired or disturbed and stopped their scratching. Every now and then a bat winged past. She didn’t know if it was just the one or two or several of them. She’d put in a Japanese maple some years before, and she could see it at the border of the service light, bending this way and that. Looking out into the yard from the porch, she thought of Harold and fireflies and felt guilty for a moment. Then she asked herself aloud what exactly she thought there was all these years later to feel guilty for.
Sometime after midnight the storm that had been threatening since that afternoon broke hard, and lightning flashed out over the fields. Zorrie knew it was silly, and maybe even inappropriate, but when the thunder smashed its way down through the dark wet air, she couldn’t help feeling it had something to do with what she had been thinking about. Noah had barely said Opal’s name since the fire. He had told her how much it meant to have her there. He had said that. It was true.
It was still raining the next day at noon. Zorrie sat straight-backed with her elbows on the Summerses’ table and pulled up bites of tenderloin that she had taken considerable time and care over but didn’t seem to have any flavor worth getting excited about. If she looked as tired as she was, she resembled something Oats had dragged around the yard by the neck, but Noah hadn’t made any comment about it. In fact, he offered little comment about anything beyond the positive qualities of the meal and the poor state of the weather and certainly did not repeat what he had said about being glad she was with him. Not that she had expected him to. Later in the night she had told herself that she had probably just heard the first and last such pronouncement Noah was likely to make, and that he had almost certainly not meant it the way she had taken it. Still. Hank had seen it. Had been seeing it for a good long while now. It was her he’d called on to help keep watch. Not Candy Wilson. Not Lester. Not any of the others who would have done it if he’d asked, though more or less grudgingly. Hank had seen that gaze of hers going down the lane. Maybe he’d spotted some coming back her way too. She looked at Noah over her crossed silverware and off to the side of her glass and to the left of the blue paper napkin she held half crumpled in her hand, and she couldn’t get herself to believe that there wasn’t ever going to be any chance. Somehow, and she knew there was an improbable alchemy at work even as she sat there picking at her tenderloin, this got translated into there was some chance, and then, later that afternoon, after she had gotten home and was tugging half-heartedly at the scrub-weed crowding out her carrots, that chance didn’t have anything to do with it and she had to act.
Only she didn’t know what to do. Over the next few days, she kept getting Noah his dinner and sitting with him, both of them saying very little. Once he had a kind of relapse that took him in the middle of the hamburgers over to the window to stare at the wreck of the barn. As he stood there, shaking his head and muttering, she imagined trying out some of the phrasings she’d come up with in her bed or out on the front porch or standing in line to pay for meat in town. She had made whole speeches in her head about how love had come to her in a late-night vision as a blanket made of whispered words that would keep you warm forever, like radium had been supposed to. The promise of love and whispered words was true, while radium was false, she had said to herself, and she had felt it deeply, but there at Noah’s table the idea of saying such things aloud left her feeling aghast, like she would either burst out laughing hysterically or start to cry. When Noah sat back down and excused himself for getting agitated again, she felt a little like—though she had said nothing at all—she’d already played her hand and learned it was a bad one, that she should have just folded, and she couldn’t speak at all. Sitting there, she saw herself as a kind of charlatan, a scheming opportunist who had seen an advantage in a situation that a decent person wouldn’t take. Never mind if—as Zorrie had put it to herself—Noah’s act had been one of desperation, a kind of last gasp meant to exorcise the whispers of a feeling grown too tenuous to maintain. Blueberry-eyed Opal had once sat at this table, and she was still out there with her caves and dirt mounds, an hour’s drive away, perhaps spinning records if the player Zorrie herself gave her had held up, or sitting down to a lunch of her own.
She thought these things, but looking at Noah, whose own eyes were calming, turning gentle and a little distant again—this man who, she had begun allowing herself to think openly, she had at least halfway loved since she had seen him standing beside a bonfire all those years before—she set objections aside and went back to running through the simpler part of her prepared phrasings. “Noah Summers, Noah dear, Noah darling …” When Noah cleared his throat and remarked that it looked like the sun was going to come out, she smiled, opened her mouth, slammed it back shut, nodded, and smiled again.
The sun did come out. The forecast called for yet another storm, but for a few hours the clouds dissipated or took themselves elsewhere, and the sky looked in the interval like a child’s bright rendering of summer, with numerous small birds singing across it and a huge, warm sun. Zorrie squinted up as she walked home and thought that this sky and clear light must mean something, or ought to if it didn’t. Though they hadn’t spoken in some while, she picked up the phone and called Marie in Ottawa, but there was no answer. She turned quiet loops around the front porch and kitchen for a time, wondering if Marie’s failure to pick up the phone in turn might be a sign. She wondered if she ought to dig out Virgil’s old Montaigne, see if she could find any augury in it, or maybe see if she could remember an odd or an even number of world capitals, which might tell her something, then abruptly decided she had grown tired of herself, bone-weary of her mooning and hesitations. She was a fifty-six-year-old widow and making herself sick, and it had all gone on too long. At a loss, she bent her head and said a prayer to ask for guidance. Then she said another, more loudly this time, about her need to know what was going to be what one way or another. That it was time now. She stood still a moment with her fists clenched and eyes closed to see if she would hear or feel something that might be an answer. The house was quiet and a little warm. Somewhere out in the yard a woodpecker started knocking after grubs, and a minute later a truck went by. “I don’t know what that means,” she said aloud to the boxes of CoCo Wheats and Saltines she opened her eyes to. She went outside, sat down on the back steps, wrapped her arms around her knees, called Oats over to her, and did not move for the better part of an hour. Then she went upstairs, pulled out a light blue cotton dress, and put it on.
Noah wasn’t in the house. She checked in the garden and found only a small rabbit, sweat bees, and a busy swirl of blue and yellow butterflies. Not sure where he might be, she went out to the edge of the field where, before
he had set his barn on fire, he had carefully lined up his Cub tractor, push mower, rototiller, and wagon. She couldn’t see over the corn, so she climbed up onto the tractor and stood there awkwardly with her hand over her eyes. Off in the distance over at Duff’s, someone was towing a load of hay or straw. What looked like it might be a hawk was holding its position in the air over the gravel pit, and big heavy clouds were gathering to the south around Indianapolis. She stood there for quite some time, not really looking, just waiting. Then she heard hammering out by the old corn crib where Ruby had kept her pots and garden tools and climbed down. “All right,” she said to herself as she brushed off and straightened her dress. She went and stood with her arms folded under the gnarled branches of a crab-apple tree she knew Noah would have to walk by if he came back to the house when he was done.
Well before dawn, when the fresh storm had settled into heavy rain, she pulled the truck out and drove it past the dark Summers house, east along 28 as far as the Kempton turnoff, then north through town, where the rain beat off the roofs of cars, deepened puddles on the asphalt, and fell in thick streams past the ornamental trees and porch lights with their fancy globes. She kept heading north for a time, skirted a cemetery she’d always thought was pretty and had always meant to stop in and visit, then rode along flat houseless roads that had only the beans and corn and occasional summer wheat growing up along their borders to distinguish them. She drove fast at first, leaning up over the steering wheel, her tires skidding and crunching the wet gravel, but after a while she felt foolish and more conspicuous than she liked, even if it was still so early, and she eased off. Her thought had been to ride around in the dark and rain near home until she could wake up and think straight or at least start to think, but she had run through Forest, past Gus and Bessie’s house and the church that had long since stopped having any particular meaning besides pale memories for her, looking gray and lonely in the drenched half-light, and still her mind wasn’t offering her anything like help. So after a while she dropped down onto Division Road and took it west, then headed up over around Rossville, past the corner where Mr. Thomas’s schoolhouse had stood until someone had knocked it down for its brick and chimney stone, and along a stretch of road that had once led to her aunt’s house and now led nowhere in particular because it too had been knocked down, its foundation dug up and soybeans planted over it. As she drove, she held her teeth clenched tight, and held them clenched long after she’d registered that doing so was not accomplishing anything at all.