The Caretaker of Lorne Field

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.

Chapter 14

Spring thaw occurred on March twentieth the next year. Every day after, Goldman came to see Jack Durkin to tell him nothing was growing on Lorne Field. That the place was still as desolate as the moon. He seemed disappointed, almost as if he was hoping to see monsters there, or maybe for some reason he didn’t want to accept a solution as mundane as Durkin just being insane.

During the months leading up to his trial, Durkin hoped that Wolcott’s body would be found. If that happened, then he could accept that he was in fact insane and at least be assured that the world would be safe. But as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t shake a growing uneasiness that his memories were real. That he was not brainwashed. That he was not the victim of collective hysteria. That he didn’t have the psychotic breakdowns that his psychiatrist insisted he did. That the Aukowies were real, and that his violations of the contract had irrevocably altered the equation with them. He couldn’t shake his uneasiness that burning them alive was the final straw and that they were no longer playing by the rules that the contract governed.

Everything in that contract is written for a reason, his pa used to tell him. You have to cherish it, treat is as the most sacred document on the planet…

Instead he had violated it. Over and over again. If the Aukowies were real, how could burning one generation stop all those other generations from pushing their way up? If they were real, then somehow he had damned the world… If they were just weeds, then none of it mattered.

He prayed that they were just weeds. As much as he didn’t want to be insane, he prayed that he was. He wondered whether someone insane would feel as he did.

During those winter months, Durkin read every book he could get his hands on. His lawyer helped him by bringing in stacks of books every time he visited. Homer, Steinbeck, Twain, Plato, Dickens, Shakespeare, Milton, Cervantes-he found himself particularly drawn to Don Quixote. But it was Dante’s Divine Comedy that made him tremble as he read it. As a kid he never bothered to read books, since he knew from the start what was planned for him, and later, after he became Caretaker, he was either too tired during the months between spring thaw and first frost, or simply needed to rest during the winter months to regain his strength. Now, though, he read insatiably and continuously as if he were trying to squeeze in a lifetime of reading. Even though Lydia’s book made the New York Times bestseller’s list, his lawyer never brought it, and he never asked for it.

Eventually his trial came. His lawyer had blown up drawings from the Book of Aukowies to postersize and introduced them as evidence to show the jury how Durkin had been indoctrinated in support of his temporary insanity defense.