Zorrie by Laird Hunt

Author:Laird Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

It took Zorrie so little time—barely more than a few hours, and no getting turned around—to reach Ottawa that after she had passed its outskirts, it seemed as though it wasn’t just the miles but the decades that had been gobbled up by her Ford and that she should head for the abandoned barn and get ready to start thinking about sleeping on old straw and how she would best present herself for a job she desperately needed but knew nothing about. That none of them had really known anything about. This is what she thought when, the late afternoon of the day after the phone had rung, she stood beside Marie in front of Janie’s grave in the Saint Columba Cemetery. The light gray stone had been planted in the earth so recently that, although Janie had been put into the ground nearly a year before, it still wore a dark collar of ruffled earth. Marie, who had detailed the difficult circumstances of Janie’s death on the phone, now told Zorrie about the graveside service and the large group of brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews and children and friends who had gathered to say their farewells, and about the warm rain that had drizzled down like sweet syrup while the minister spoke, and the rainbow that had arisen as they were all walking back to their cars. She said that because of how bad things had been for Janie at the end, there had been no viewing, but it had been a pretty white coffin, the one in which she was now sleeping below their feet, just about as pretty as Janie had been when Zorrie had known her now long ago. Marie put her hand on the crenellated top of Janie’s marker and closed her eyes a minute, then opened them and pointed out across the cemetery in the direction of the graves of the other girls whose bones were now glowing beneath the earth. It was said that the Luna powder stopped its shimmering after a while, but Marie didn’t fully believe it.

“Maybe up here we stop seeing it, but not down there, down there they’re all still lit up,” she said.

They drove then to a café near the courthouse and sipped watery coffee and picked at slices of rhubarb pie as they filled each other in about some of the bend and twist of their lives. Marie said they had often worried that Zorrie wouldn’t be able to find her way, that even her beloved Indiana wouldn’t help her climb up out of the hurt that anyone with eyes could see had had a hold on her back then.

“Truth is, I did more of the worrying,” she said, tapping with her fork at the side of her cup. “Janie said she thought you’d make it through. That you’d keep finding things worth finding. And look at you, driving your own truck and running your own farm. You’ve had a life. How right she was.”

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