“It’s James. He’ll hear what you have to say”
Jorie takes the phone. She feels cold standing in the middle of this strange office, in a town she never knew existed before this summer.
“Go ahead. He’ll talk,” Nancy urges.
“Hello,” Jorie says uncertainly.
There is deep silence on the other end of the line. Jorie can almost feel how conflicted James Morris is and how close he is to hanging up on her. Why shouldn’t he greet this call with mistrust? Who in this town, or any other, can assure him that people are worthy of a moment of his time? It’s the hour when the town offices are growing busier. The motor vehicle department is at the end of the hall and already a line of customers has gathered. Several people call out a greeting to Nancy as they walk past the office of records.
“I know you don’t know me,” Jorie forces herself to go on, “but I’m related to someone who was involved in your sister’s case.”
Silence again, and then after what seems like forever, a man speaks. “Are you referring to the murderer?” James Morris has a raspy voice, and he speaks so softly Jorie has to jam her ear up to the receiver in order to hear. “You think I should talk to you because you know my sister’s murderer? Let me guess—you want to tell me what a good man he is. You want to tell me I should forgive what I don’t understand. But the way I see it, if I listen to you, I’ll have everyone who ever knew him in Massachusetts knocking on my door to plead his case. So, no, I don’t think so.”
“You won’t have everyone. You’ll just have me.” Jorie can hear James Morris breathing. “He’s my husband.”
There, she has said it, the nightmare sentence she’s been dreading so, and with these words released she is melting, like green ice in the shallows of a pond, like crystals evaporating into flame. Before long, little blisters will rise on her tongue, the price, perhaps, for speaking the truth; she’ll have to stop at the water fountain in the hallway for a long, cold drink.
“Your husband?” James Morris says. “And you want to come out here and talk to me?”
Nancy Kerr pretends to be busy with some files, but Jorie can tell she’s listening in to Jorie’s part of the conversation. How could a woman who’s been raised in this town not be interested in this turn of events? When a second phone line rings, Nancy doesn’t bother to answer. Instead, she lets the machine pick up.
“I very much want to talk to you,” Jorie tells him. “Please.”
She has actually broken into a sweat talking to this man, James Morris, and it doesn’t help that town hall isn’t air-conditioned. She’s close to begging for something she’s not even certain she wants. All the same, she knows if she misses this opportunity to go out to the Morris farm, she’ll never be sure of what she feels. If she doesn’t walk along the same roads, breathe the same air, how can she ever understand what happened that night?
She has come hundreds of miles not to look for a way to pardon Ethan or to condone what he’s done, but to see if she can find a way to live with what’s happened. That’s what James Morris doesn’t understand; it’s not so much his forgiveness she’s searching for, it’s her own.
“I won’t take up much of your time. I promise.”
James Morris surprises her when he responds. “Sure, you can come out here.” Maybe he wants to get a good look at her: the woman who’s spent all these years with the man who killed his sister. He must be standing near a window or out on a porch as he speaks to her, for Jorie can hear the chirrup of birdsong through the receiver. It’s a mesmerizing sound, a chorus from heaven, sweetness from the skies up above. “But just so you know, you’re not going to like what you find.”
Jorie takes down the directions, and when she hands the phone to Nancy Kerr, she’s shaking. “Thank you. He never would have agreed to see me if you hadn’t called him.”
“Don’t be so quick to thank me,” Nancy warns. “And don’t think just because he’s going to see you he’ll be nice to you, because James Morris isn’t especially nice. Not anymore. And especially not to you.”
Jorie heads out to her parked rental car, left in the sunshine and hot as blazes, the steering wheel burning her fingertips as soon as it’s touched. She opens the windows, then follows James Morris’s directions, west on Main Street until the turnoff at Greenway Road and then left on Route 12. On her way out of town, she passes a block of stores and then a more residential section of the village, lanes of pretty brick homes surrounded by hedges of azaleas. As she drives along, Joric is thinking about Rachel Morris and the birthmark at the base of her spine. Rachel must have taken this same road a thousand times or more; she must have ridden her bike through the leafy shadows cast by the sweet gum trees and stopped to grab handfuls of fruit from the stands of wild cherries that grow here in such abundance. Surely, she bought her shampoo in the pharmacy on Main Street and ordered vanilla Cokes and French fries with vinegar at Duke’s Diner on Greenway Road, where the crullers are fresh every morning and the menu hasn’t changed for the past fifteen years.
Once again, Jorie has the feeling of having dropped off the face of the earth as she’s known it. only to surface in another time, as if this deserted road is a tunnel leading back through the years. She is engulfed in the heat, dizzy with it. She has always thought herself to be a compassionate person, as sure of right and wrong as she is of herself, but now she’s not so certain. The person she’s always assumed she was would not be driving on this road in Maryland all alone, passing huge osprey nests balanced on telephone poles, heading farther into the countryside as scores of fish crows soar through the sky. After she passes a wrecking shop and a market and a tiny post office, she spies the turnoff James Morris has told her about—a swampy stretch ofpickerelweed and brackish water that was once a swimming hole with exceedingly warm temperatures. Now, the shallows are clogged with water parsnip and mallow; some mallow roses are blooming, pink and sweet as they manage to grow through the wool grass. No one goes swimming here anymore, and they haven’t for years; these days, people worry about bacteria and leeches, they take into account factors no one used to even consider when diving into the murky depths of a natural pool that was so hot steam rose from the surface of the water and clouds formed only inches above the ground.
Jorie takes the turnoff and rides along until she finds the dirt road leading to the farm. The strain of her engine startles a covey of woodcocks in the thickets of dogwood and sweet pepper bush when she passes by. As the birds flap into the sky, prattling, Jorie feels a chill go through her, even though the temperature is hovering above ninety. Her heart is like one of those birds, easily startled, too quick for her own blood. She can see the white house, unpainted for the past several years, the black shutters sagging at odd angles. All she wants is the tiniest shred of information that will allow her to believe in her husband. At first, she'd been convinced that Ethan’s confession was intended to cover up someone else’s crime. Surely he must have a brother on a chain gang, or a cousin gone wrong, perhaps a best friend he’d vowed to protect on that August night so long ago.
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, hundred
s 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 belicved 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.
Blue Diary Page 18
