The Caretaker of Lorne Field

Chapter 13

The following morning Jack Durkin’s lawyer nudged him awake from a morphine-induced sleep to tell him about the deal being offered. Durkin refused. “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t accept it,” he said irritably. “There ain’t no body. The Aukowies saw to that.”

His lawyer hunched over and stared at his hands. “Well, I guess that answers that,” he said. “Anyway, the state’s psychiatrist is going to be evaluating you-”

“I told you, I ain’t crazy!”

“I understand that, but the state has the right to order this, so I’m asking that you cooperate with her. Oh, by the way, I have good news for you.” He tried to grin, but it didn’t stick and slid off his face like a fried egg from a well-buttered frying pan. He lowered his eyes from Durkin’s hollow ones and stared back at his hands tapping out a drum beat on his knees. “I got a call from my mom this morning. We had our first frost of the season last night. The world should be safe.”

“Don’t treat me like an idiot,” Durkin said, his voice trembling. “I know you don’t believe a word I’ve been telling you about the Aukowies. But you drive out there yourself and you’ll see. Frost or no frost, they should be five feet tall by now, and somethin’ has to be done about them.”

Goldman continued to stare at his hands. “I drove out to Lorne Field last night. Mr. Durkin, there was nothing growing there.”

“That don’t make sense.”

“The fire you set scorched the ground and covered it with ash. With those conditions, probably nothing will grow out there for a while.” Goldman forced his lopsided grin as he peeked back up at Durkin. “Think of it this way, Mr. Durkin. You beat the Aukowies.”

Durkin looked confused as he met his lawyer’s eyes. “They ain’t weeds,” he muttered. “They don’t grow there. That’s just where they choose to come out of the ground.”

“Well, Mr. Durkin, I don’t know what to tell you except that the Aukowies are gone. You won.”

Goldman got up to leave and Durkin stopped him to ask whether he contacted Jeanette Thompson yet about getting back his contract and the Book of Aukowies. Goldman told him he’d do it later that week, then nodded, his lopsided grin fixed in place as he left the room.

Durkin lay in bed troubled by the lawyer’s visit. It didn’t make sense that the Aukowies would’ve stopped coming out of Lorne Field days before the first frost. They’d never done that before, and he couldn’t imagine why they were doing it now. If they could’ve been wiped out as easily as by setting the field on fire, it would’ve been done over three hundred years ago. Earlier, really, ’cause an Indian tribe had weeded the field for God knows how many years before the responsibility fell on the town, and then on the Durkin family. It just made no sense that they’d be gone. Everything in the contract was written for a reason, and he couldn’t help feeling unsettled wondering what had happened to the Aukowies.

It was hours later when the state’s psychiatrist came to talk to him. She was a small, owlish-looking woman in her early forties, but there was a gentleness and quietness to her that Durkin appreciated. Still, he didn’t think it was fair for her to be evaluating him while he was doped up on morphine and worrying about the Aukowies, and he told her so. He mostly ignored her questions, not that she asked many. After waiting several minutes for him to respond to her last question, she smiled gently at him and told him he wasn’t being fair himself and that she was told he was willing to cooperate with her. She spoke in a soft lisp, and the sound of it made him drowsy.

“I still don’t think you should be talking to me until I’m off the morphine,” he complained.

She smiled at that. “Jack, rest assured that your being on pain medication won’t have any effect on my evaluation.” She paused for a moment before continuing again in her soft lisp. “I am curious about something,” she said. “It seems to me that you’re the only person in your town who believes that these weeds are monsters. Is that true?”

“I never said they’re monsters,” Durkin muttered indignantly. “Monsters are unknown imaginary things. Aukowies have been well documented.”

“Excuse me for my mistake. Are you the only person from your town who believes Aukowies grow out of Lorne Field?”

“Used to be the whole town believed that.”

“But how about now?”

Durkin’s jaw muscles hardened as he thought about it. “My son, Bert, believed it,” he said finally. “He came down to the field the day he died to help me with my weeding. He could see their faces. He told me he could hear the cries they made when I killed them.”

The psychiatrist nodded gently. She pulled her chair closer to Durkin’s bed so she could hold his hand with both of hers. He didn’t fight it, just turned his head away from her, his lips pressing into two thin bloodless lines.

“Do you think your son might’ve been telling you that to please you?”

“No, Bert believed it. I could tell. He wasn’t humoring me.”

“Maybe he made himself believe it as a way to please you?”

“It wasn’t just Bert,” Durkin said. “Hank Thompson told me he believed it, too. He told me how he snuck down to Lorne Field when he was a kid and watched my grandpa weeding the field. He heard the Aukowies scream when they died. He told me how he was afraid his ears were going to start bleeding from the noise.”

The psychiatrist patted Durkin’s hand. He kept his stare fixed on the opposite wall.

“Jack, as you said before, when Mr. Thompson was younger everyone in your town believed in these creatures. Naturally, Mr. Thompson would be predisposed to believe in them also. He knew he was supposed to hear them scream, so he heard them. This type of behavior is really the basis of group hysteria. Think of how a cult works. Everyone knows they’re expected to believe, so they try hard to, and in the end they do believe, regardless of how irrational the beliefs are.”

“I thought cults used brainwashing,” Durkin muttered.

“That is all part of the psychology behind brainwashing,” she said. “Think of what your town underwent for several hundred years as collective brainwashing.”

Durkin shook his head slowly, his eyes still fixed on the opposite wall. “I know what I’ve been seeing my whole life,” he said.

“Jack, think about it. The two most important male role models in your life were your father and grandfather. They both believed in these weeds being creatures, so you had to make yourself believe. You were going to see what you had to see and hear what you had to hear.”

“It ain’t like that,” he said. “No, that ain’t it. It don’t explain why no animal, bird or insect goes anywhere near that field. It don’t explain what I saw those Aukowies do to my son, Lester, or to Dan Wolcott.”

“It does, Jack, if you think about it honestly. With everyone else in town doubting the existence of these creatures, you needed to believe, Jack. You needed to create those memories so you could continue to believe.”

The muscles along Durkin’s mouth and jaw bunched up as he shook his head. The psychiatrist waited patiently for him to speak. When he didn’t she gently patted his hand again.

“What if Dan Wolcott’s body still exists?” she asked.

“It don’t. I saw what the Aukowies did to him.”

“But what if it does? According to your statement, you waited forty minutes after Dan Wolcott stepped into the field before you set fire to his jeep. What if you used those forty minutes to drive his body somewhere?”

He shrugged. “If that happened, then I guess I’m crazy.”

“Why don’t I try to find out?”

Durkin looked back at her, his eyes staring unfocused into the distance. He nodded glumly.

When the psychiatrist met later with McGrale and Goldman, she explained to them how she couldn’t hypnotize Durkin.

“I thought I had him under,” she told them. “But I guess I couldn’t get him under deep enough.” Sighing, she added, “Not everybody can be hypnotized.”

“What makes you think you couldn’t get him under deep enough?” McGrale asked.

“Because I couldn’t tap into his unconscious. I was stuck in his false memories of watching the victim being torn apart by the weeds, and then with him spending the next forty minutes trying to figure out how to deal with the weeds. I couldn’t budge him away from the field. I couldn’t get him to remember what he did with the victim’s body.”

“Would additional hypnotherapy sessions work?” McGrale asked.

“Not in my professional opinion, no. He either can’t be hypnotized and is faking, or the false memories are locked in too tightly.”

McGrale rubbed his jaw. Goldman asked whether she’d support his client being declared incompetent.

“Absolutely not. He’s lucid and, outside of his fantasies about those weeds, quite rational. I would oppose any attempt to do so.”

“How about whether he’s criminally insane?” McGrale asked, a pained look spreading over his face.

“He could be. He does believe these weeds are monsters. I have no doubt about that, and it’s possible he murdered and disposed of the victim without any conscious awareness of it for no other reason than to erase self-doubts he may have been having about the true nature of those weeds. It’s equally possible that this could be a calculated act to convince others of the existence of these monsters. This is a man who badly needs other people to believe this. The lack of respect he has been receiving in his Caretaker role has been devastating for him, especially since he feels as if he has been sacrificing his life for the world’s sake. For that reason, and because I find it curious that his only supporters are both dead, I’m leaning more towards the latter explanation.”

McGrale stood up, walked around his desk to where Goldman was sitting hunched over, and clapped the younger attorney solidly on the shoulder.

“Well, counsellor,” he said. “For better or worse we’ll be bringing this three-ring circus to the courtroom. Charges will be filed tomorrow.”

That night Goldman visited Durkin to tell him about the arraignment hearing the next day and also that he went to see Jeanette Thompson, but that she claimed she never saw either the contract or book, and doubted whether they even existed. The news devastated Durkin. He sank back into his hospital bed an old man. Goldman was going to ask him for names of anyone else who might’ve ever seen either of those items, more to satisfy his own curiosity than anything else, but one look at Durkin and he knew it would be worse than beating an already whipped dog.

The next day Durkin was taken to the District Court in an ambulance and wheeled into the courthouse with a blanket covering the lower part of his body. The reporters and photographers lined up outside pressed towards him, but he stared blindly ahead and gave them no notice. Inside the courtroom he was charged with manslaughter in the first degree and remanded without bail. When the trial date was set for April tenth, Durkin grabbed Goldman by his oversized suit jacket and pulled him close.

“That’s too late,” he croaked frantically. “That’s going to be at least two weeks after spring thaw. If the Aukowies are left alone for that long-”

“Please, Mr. Durkin, let go of my suit,” Goldman whispered, grimacing. “And don’t worry about the Aukowies. If they’re what you say they are it will only help our case.”

“Help our case? You don’t understand a thing. If they get too big there ain’t nothin’ anyone can do about them.”

“I’ll be checking on them everyday, Mr. Durkin, don’t worry. Please, let go of my suit.”

Durkin noticed people in the courtroom staring at him. He let go of Goldman’s suit jacket, his face flushing a deep red. As he was wheeled out, he caught sight of Lydia sitting in the courtroom watching him. Lester, also. In the back row was Jeanette Thompson looking at him as if he were a bug. He pretended not to see any of them.

A week later Durkin was fitted with a prosthetic foot and, after another two weeks of physical therapy, was brought back to a cell in the County Jail. It was December second when Goldman visited him, telling him he had some good news. Lester had recanted his earlier testimony and was now saying that the Aukowies bit off his thumb.

“So they believe me?” Durkin said, excitement rising cautiously in his eyes. “They goin’ to let me out of here and give me my old Caretaker job back?”

“Well, no. People are looking at this as a son trying to help his father. It won’t have any impact on the manslaughter charges against you for Sheriff Wolcott, but it will force them to drop the aggravated assault charges against you for your son’s injury. As much as they’d like to, they can’t proceed with a trial without your son’s testimony.”

Durkin sat back on his jail cot, his face deflating. “That’s all you got for me?”

“Well, no.” Goldman’s lopsided grin grew large as he took a manila folder out of his briefcase. “I found a copy of your Caretaker’s contract and the Book of Aukowies. Thought you’d like to see it.”

Durkin’s eyes filled with tears as he flipped through each page. When he looked up at Goldman, his leathery face was on the verge of crumbling.

“How’d you get this?” he asked.

“I talked with your wife earlier today. She told me that a lawyer she saw a while back made this copy, so I saw him and he gave it to me. Hope you don’t mind, but I made a copy for myself. Fascinating reading, by the way. I’m planning to use it for our case.”

Durkin shook his head while rubbing a hand across his eyes. He wiped his hand off on his shirt and held it out to his attorney, who only hesitated for a moment before taking it.

“I don’t know why this means so much to me anymore, but it does,” Jack Durkin said. “Thanks.”

Goldman nodded solemnly and left the Caretaker alone with his contract and book.

Lydia visited the next day. Both of them stared stonily at each other until Lydia broke the ice, telling Durkin that she couldn’t stomach the idea of seeing him until Lester told the truth about him not cutting off his son’s thumb.

“Don’t think for a second I believe any of that Aukowie nonsense,” she said. “But I accept that it happened because of an accident.”

“How are you, Lydia?”

“I-I’m good,” she stammered, surprised at the question. “I got a nice apartment. Lester’s with me now. If you can believe it, some idiot publisher from New York is paying me a ton of money to write a book. Guess what it’s going to be called?”

“I don’t know.”

“The Caretaker’s Wife.” She took a heavy breath and added, “This business with Daniel is getting me invitations on all these shows to promote it. I’m on Oprah next week, and Letterman the week after, if you can believe it.”

“Hard to picture.”

“Ain’t it?” She sniffed, dry-eyed, and tried to smile, but it broke. “Jack, why don’t you tell them what you did to Daniel’s body? Your lawyer told me if you do you’ll only have to serve ten years.”

“I wish I could,” Durkin said, showing only a bare trace of a smile. “The problem is I’m telling it the way I remember it. What do you think of my lawyer?”

“He seems smart.”

“You think so? To me, he’s just a kid who can’t even look me in the eye. I think he’s afraid of me.” Durkin laughed at that. “I only got one foot and he’s afraid of me. Thinks I’m crazy. He’s having me see a psychiatrist now who’s trying to convince me I’m crazy, too. According to him I killed Dan and hid his body without knowing it, that I did it so I could ‘continue living in my fantasy-world concerning the Aukowies’. Maybe he’s right.”

“All those years alone in that field were bound to drive you crazy,” she said. “Ain’t entirely your fault. I guess I could’ve been better to you.”

“No, you couldn’t’ve. I’m sorry I married you, Lydia.”

She stared hotly at him, her jaw dropping open. “Why, you old fool! Here I am trying to be nice to you-”

“I didn’t mean it that way. I mean because I married you only because of the contract. I needed to marry someone. But I didn’t love you. And I know you didn’t love me. I stole that from you. Because of me you never had a chance to marry someone out of love, and I’m sorry. But I did grow to care about you, even though we could barely tolerate each other.”

Tears leaked from Lydia’s eyes. She turned away trying to hide it. “No doubt about it,” she said. “You have gone completely crazy.”

“God, I hope so. I’m praying every day that I’m insane. It’s the only chance the world has.”

“Don’t worry, you’re crazy,” she said. She paused to wipe a thin hand across her eyes. “Is it okay if Lester visits you? He’d really like to.”

“I’d like that, too. And Lydia, I’m so sorry about Bert.”

She bit her lip and nodded, fighting back her tears.

“Lester’s waiting in the car,” she said. “I’ll send him in here to see you. You take care, you old fool.”

Hiding her face from him, she rushed out of the visitor’s area.

Lester wore a despondent look as he entered the room, his hands shoved deep in his pockets. He nodded towards his father, kicking at the floor as he walked over to his chair.

“I’m sorry, dad,” he said.

“I know, son.”

“I’m sorry for throwing those tomatoes at you.”

“Were you the one who hit me square in the nose?”

Lester nodded solemnly.

“You have a good arm. You almost knocked me to the ground.”

“I’m sorry, dad.”

“No more sorries, okay?”

Lester shook his head. “I still got to say how sorry I am for telling people you cut off my thumb.”

“It’s over, Lester.”

“I’m still so sorry. You lost our house because of that. And everything else that happened… to you… to Bert… It was all my fault. I just couldn’t remember anything about what happened to me, and when they asked me to say those things I went along because I didn’t want to be Caretaker. I’m so sorry, dad.”

“So you don’t remember Aukowies biting off your thumb?”

Lester shook his head.

“You just said that to help me out?”

“Yeah.”

“Son, come closer.”

Lester wiped a hand under his nose and hesitantly stepped forward. Jack Durkin grabbed him and hugged his son close to his chest. He let go only when he realized Lester was struggling to maintain his composure and would be bawling soon.

“Okay, son,” he said, “you better go back out with your ma. Take good care of her, okay?”

Lester nodded morosely, his mouth forming a tiny circle on his pale face. Durkin watched him leave and wondered why he was so disappointed. If Lester had truly seen the Aukowies bite off his thumb, then the world was damned. As it was, there was still a glimmer of hope his psychiatrist’s angle on it was right-that the Aukowies existed only in his mind. At least he could hope for the best.