The Caretaker of Lorne Field

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.”