Blue Diary (24 page)

Now that he's given testimony and recounted facts no one save the guilty party could know, she's still convinced there's an answer. There must be an explanation for what happened, some strange set of circumstances that led him astray Drugs, perhaps, or alcohol: a dire phase of the moon, the drought-scarred season, the rising temperatures, any of these factors might have been at play. Or perhaps it was the girl who was at fault; she may have egged him on, tricked him, teased him until he had no other choice but to respond. This girl may have possessed a violent nature. She may have spat in his face, tried to scratch his eyes out, left him no choice. Such things happened, didn't they? Good men were trapped when they least expected it. they were ambushed and set upon, with end results they never could have imagined.

There is a reason for what has happened, there must at least be that, and that is why Jorie has come here and why she brings the rental car to a stop in this red dirt driveway, hundreds of miles from home. James Morris is waiting for her on the porch. He doesn't get up when she parks and steps out, not even when his dog, a lanky cross between a bulldog and a shepherd, comes racing up, barking and showing its teeth. For a minute Jorie truly thinks she might faint. It's the heat, the sunlight, the growling dog; it's the look on James Morris's face and the last several weeks of her life, rewinding in her head like a movie she's been forced to watch too many times. Jorie places one hand on the burning hood of the car to steady herself. The air out here is thick, salt-laced from the marshes that surround the farm.

“Mr. Morris?” Jorie calls.

James Morris whistles, and the dog goes trotting to him. Morris stands then; he pats his dog as he watches Jorie approach. He is younger than Jorie had expected him to be, and Jorie is surprised when she understands: he was Rachel's younger brother, not much more than ten when it happened. Not so very far from Collie's age.

“Nancy must have told you I don't like visitors,” James Morris says. “Well, she was right about that. I don't.”

“I appreciate you taking the time to see me.” Jorie holds one hand over her eyes. Although she can't quite make out his expression, she can see he's a good-looking man in his twenties, blond and tall, with a narrow thoughtful face. He wears old jeans and a gray tee-shirt stained with sweat. I led been working outside when the phone rang, cutting down some of the foxtail grass that always encroaches upon his fields. Jorie suddenly understands why she'd heard birdsong through the telephone wires when she'd called earlier from town hall. Though they are usually territorial, there are hundreds of red-winged blackbirds perched in the cypress trees, and hundreds more swoop across the cornfield beyond the house. James Morris had been working with a scythe earlier, and when clouds of mosquitoes rose from the shorn grass, huge flocks of birds had come to dine upon them. Even now, the sky is aflutter with black wings; the birds are unsettled and feeding wildly, as if they might never again be offered a meal such as the one set before them in the white-hot air of the morning.

“This probably isn't very smart of you.” James Morris is looking at Jorie closely He has pale eyes, like Collie's, and like Collie he's not easily read. “What if I wanted the man who killed Rachel to know what it felt like to lose somebody? What if I shot you right now?”

Morris comes down the porch steps. He might have a gun with him at this very moment, but Jorie doesn't turn and run. She looks right back at him. He's a big man. Close up, he's even taller than Jorie would have guessed when she first got out of her rental car, maybe six two, but on the night when it happened, he probably wouldn't have come up to Jorie's shoulder. Perhaps she should be afraid of him, but she's afraid of something else entirely. She's afraid of the way it might be possible for her to feel inside if she doesn't find the answers she needs.

“I don't think you're going to shoot me,” she says calmly

“Oh?” James Morris almost smiles. “But we already know you're a bad judge of character. I'm guessing you didn't know about what happened here when you married your husband.”

“I still don't know what I need to. That's why I came to talk to you.”

They stare at each other across the heat waves that separate them. James Morris hasn't trusted anyone since the time he was ten, but Jorie is new to this, and there's an innocence about her that makes Morris want to shake her and wake her up.
Come on, girl,
he wants to say. What does it mean to you that you trust a complete stranger more than you do the man
you're
married
to?

“You want to see where they found the truck?” he asks instead. “You know, without that truck we never would have found your husband. His ID was left in the glove compartment, and they took the photo off his license. Want to see the place?”

Jorie nods. She has been prepared for James Morris to tell her to get off his property, to turn tail and run back to Massachusetts as fast as she can. Instead, he's opening up to her and Jorie has already decided she will agree to see anything he offers to show her, no matter where it might lead. She follows James through the cornfield with the dog racing ahead, cutting a path through the green husks. She could be anywhere on this earth, lost to everyone who's ever known her, so far from home she might never again find her way back. It so hot out beyond the shadows of the sweet gum trees that a person could easily confuse what is real and what's imagined, thrown off by the floating scrim of heat waves and the sea of green. For an instant, Jorie isn't sure of what's in front of her eyes—a black angel, a man tied to a tree—but as they grow closer she realizes it's only an old pole once used for a scarecrow The pole has a metal whirligig attached, set out to scare away grackles and swamp sparrows and crows. James stops and the shadow of the pole slides across his face in a single dark bar. His dog leans against his leg and looks up at its master, anxious to walk on.

“After that night, kids around here said the scarecrow had done it. They said hed come alive in the middle of the night and walked through this field and climbed in through Rachel's window. And then hed done all those horrible things. You know why they thought that?”

Jorie shakes her head. She doesn't want to look at him, but she forces herself to meet his eyes. He's an extremely handsome man, she sees that now, one who hasn't had any life to speak of. He lived here with his parents until theyd died, and after that he never for a moment thought of going anywhere else.

“They thought it was the scarecrow because no one could believe anyone human could do the things that had been done to Rachel.”

James Morris's life might have taken him anywhere, to a place where the well water didn't taste like salt, a town where no one even knew what a blackbird looked like. The women in Holden have given up on him, and they shake their heads when they think of what might have been. They used to bring him suppers of baked ham and beans, they'd stop in on Saturday nights with homemade pies or six-packs of beer, but even though James Morris was always polite, he clearly had no interest in any of them. Something had stopped for him a long time ago. Their lives had gone forward, but his had come to a halt, in shades of gray, as if he were living in a snapshot, frozen in place. He didn't even notice the blackbirds swooping above them; they ate crumbs from his hands, they rode on his shoulders, pecking at bits of grain caught in the seams of his clothes, and still he pays them no mind.

James Morris has spent years trying not to think, and that's the way he's managed to rise from his bed every day. He's a man who stays clear of town, unless he needs provisions; he goes to the bank and the post office once a month, more than enough as far as he's concerned. A few summers ago he sold a parcel of land to a neighbor, so he has some money in reserve, and he does well enough with his cornfields to pay the taxes and the utility bills. When it comes right down to it, there wasn't much he wanted. Unless you count going backward in time. Oh, if only he could wake up and be ten years old all over again on a splendid summer morning. If only the most unusual thing that was about to happen was that he'd finally manage to dive into Hell's Pond from the highest branch of the big sweet gum tree that grew on the shore until lightning struck a few years back, cleaving the giant trunk in two.

James Morris is looking into the distance, and from the expression on his face, Jorie can picture the boy he once was. Keeping himself away from other people the way he has, James Morris has maintained a sort of purity of spirit, despite everything that happened that night.

“There was another reason folks around here said the scarecrow had done it. Its clothes were gone. Of course, someone had stolen them and left his own bloody clothes behind, but no one could convince anyone around here of that. Not for quite a while. It got so most people who grew up in this county wouldn't go out at night, especially the ones living on farms. A week or so after the funeral, my father burned the scarecrow. He doused it with so much gasoline, he nearly set fire to all our fields, but he didn't care.”

After that, James confides, there wasn't a farm anywhere near Holden where scarecrows were set out in the fields, and that true today. Fifteen years after it happened, some people still swear that scarecrows can walk on hot summer nights, they can slip into houses while people are sleeping, they wait by the roadside in order to trap children and turn them into blackbirds. Maybe that's the reason this area seems overrun by birds; there, in the distance, Jorie watches as clouds of blackbirds form a dark horizon, whirling back and forth across the white heat.

“They've still got those bloody clothes down at the district attorney's office,” James Morris says, “and something tells me when they finish running the tests they're doing now, the DNA is not going to belong to any scarecrow. But when I was a kid, I really believed it. I couldn't sleep until my father burnt the damned thing, and even then I kept dreaming about it. Every night it was walking through the fields, coming for Rachel.” He turns to Jorie, his face wary, as it has been for all these years. “Is that what you came here to hear? You want to see firsthand how our lives were ruined? You want to hear how he raped her and killed her and left the clothes on the ground for any ten-year-old boy to find?”

Jorie can feel how dry her throat is, like paper or parchment, aflame with grief and guilt. James Morris is being cruel, he wants to hurt her, but so what? He has a right to do so. He had been the first one up that next morning; he'd gone into the field with his old dog Cobalt, who been dead twelve years now. He didn't know what the pile of clothes was covered with until he'd already stopped to pick up the shirt. and by then it was too late. He had blood on his hands, and it burned him, it stained him right through his fingertips, through his flesh, and he knew that no matter what he did, it would never wash away.

He should have called for his father. He should have screamed until the neighbors on the other side of Route 12 could hear him. Instead, he ran in the opposite direction, and he sat in the woods crying, until Cobalt found him. By then, Rachel had been taken away. In a matter of hours, on a perfect summer day, the house where they lived had become completely empty, even though there were still three people living inside.

“I want to hear whatever you want to tell me,” Jorie tells James Morris. “I'm trying to understand.”

He laughs at the notion. It's not so much that he doesn't believe her, it's that he knows what she wants is impossible. All the same, he leads her down to the place where Hell's Pond used to be, the mucky inlet Jorie spied on her drive in. This is where the truck had been found when the water was drained as a way to stop the spread of mosquitoes.

“He must have parked down here, and afterward he decided to roll the truck into the pond so no one could find a trace of him.”

Jorie crouches down. The shallows are thick with smarnveed and needle rush. King rails nest here, along with mallards and those swamp sparrows that always sound like women crying when they call to each other, It's cool in the shadows at the edge of the water and everything smells like earth and salt. The air is tinged green, and little fish swim through the few pools that are left, each one drying up in the heat of the day, evaporating by the second.

“Those were her favorite flowers.” James Morris nods to a ring of rose mallow, luminous and pink in the brackish water. “She used to put on my father's high boots and tromp through the mud and get a whole basket of them, and our house would be full of them. I told her there were rice rats out there, but that didn't stop her. She was the kind of girl who was always better at everything than everyone else was. Dancing, climbing trees, even using my father's shotgun. She had twenty-twenty vision. She could see things nobody else could.”

When they turn back, they don't speak as they follow the path their footprints have made. Joric is thinking of baskets of mallows. She is thinking of a girl pulling on her father's old green boots. The more she imagines this, the more her head hurts, until it is pounding. At the turnoff, they leave the path through the woods and head back through the field. As they make their way through the tall grass, the dog flushes some woodcocks out from the reeds and runs off barking. James whistles through his teeth. “Hey, Fergus,” he calls, and the dog comes racing back, its tongue lolling out of its mouth. James Morris reaches down and pats the dog's head, and in that moment Jorie sees the man in all his loneliness. Right then she knows that she is walking beside a shattered individual who has never gotten beyond that terrible day. James Morris might as well still be ten years old for all the good being a man will do him. For an instant, as they traverse the cornfield, Jorie feels like holding his hand.