Nightwoods (5 page)

But, really, it wouldn’t do. So the next day’s lesson began with her admitting to the children that the attraction of fire was not lost on her in the least, the beauty and mystery and power of a strong blaze. Same type of thing with fire as with chickens, though. So easy to get things out of balance and suffer the consequences. Burn down the Lodge, and they’re all liable to find themselves sleeping on the ground in the woods.

Luce took a hearthside galvanized bucket filled with thin splits of fat pine kindling out to the porch and emptied it on the floor. She and the children sat cross-legged around the jumble. On the fly, Luce made up a game like pick-up sticks in reverse. The goal was to lay the most complicated pattern of kindling—cones, squares, triangles, goofy pentangles, or whatever form sprang into your mind—just like building a fire, but no matches or flint and steel or bows. Rule one: if you burned your sticks, you lost. And if your complicated shape collapsed first in the delicate laying of pieces, you lost. If it held together into a perfect geometry, and you finished first, you won. In case of a tie, the structure with the most pieces won. Simple.

She declared the prize to be either a fried bologna sandwich or a cereal bowl of vanilla wafers. Winner’s choice. Sharing optional. And, as an afterthought to the rules, if you decided to build something that looked like a little Abe Lincoln log cabin or a hay wagon or a hog pen or a ’57 Studebaker instead of a fire, you got extra credit.

The children looked at the wood splits but didn’t touch them. They went to the porch rockers and rocked for the next two hours, looking glazed into the distance.

THERE USED TO BE
so much time and space in a day. Whenever Luce wanted, she’d walk down the road and check on Stubblefield. He was so lonesome for company after his wife died that every time Luce stopped by, he set a bottle of good Scotch on the kitchen table and killed a hen. She’d be there for hours listening to his tales of wild youth, and eating the crisp salty legs and breasts he dredged in cornmeal and fried in lard. Spending an entire afternoon that way suited Luce fine, because she was lonely too, but in a somewhat different way.

Now, though, Stubblefield was dead and the children had come, and suddenly she couldn’t let up for an instant. The children rose with the sun, so Luce did too. Pay a moment’s attention to your own life, and they would burn the place down or run off to get lost in the woods or drowned in the lake. Watchfulness was something Luce had mostly applied to nothing but the natural world. Birds and leaves and weather. An occasional deer or bear or screaming panther. Distant lights in the sky at night moving contrary to the expected. And the sweetness of it was simple: the natural world would go on and on just fine whether you watched or not. Your existence was incidental. Nature didn’t require anything at all other than the bare minimum deal in return for life. Be born, die.

Neither did the children care whether you watched their doings. But the catch was, they might be dead within the hour if you let up your attentions. Little pale damp lifeless bodies lying at the lakeshore or beside deep-woods streams. Peanut-colored wet hair swarped across blue foreheads.

What a mess if the children found a way to die. What would you need to do? Probably, walk to the store and call the sheriff’s office. Afterward, start dealing with the horrors of law and mortuary. Stubby little caskets fitted into abbreviated holes backhoed into the ground. Order a stone.

And that wasn’t exactly idle daydreaming, either. The children were worse than horses in their ability to harm themselves against the most benign elements of their physical world. The girl tore off the bail to a little zinc bucket and pierced the wing of her nostril with it, apparently experimenting to see how far she could run it up into the cavities of her head. The wound bled like the fountain of life itself until Luce stanched it with a press of pigeon moss. Then, as if bleeding were a contest, the boy cut a triangular gash at his hairline on the edge of the smokehouse tin roof. He stood hollering, with blood running down his face and dripping off his chin onto his white shirt. Blood on the point of the roof, which was ten feet above the ground and the boy was not much better than three feet high. The only ladder on the place was six feet tall. None of the arithmetic worked out. You could drive yourself crazy trying to figure the angles. What a damn needy world Luce suddenly occupied. A pair of suicidal old men would be easier to caretake than these two youngsters.

Still, Luce held firm to the belief that quiet and solitude were good for you, offering peace, or at least hope for peace. Mainly because people were what they were and you couldn’t change them. Most of the time, they couldn’t change themselves, even if they were desperate to be somebody different from who they were. So, best keep your distance. Nevertheless, here were these little children who didn’t remind her in any helpful nostalgic way of sweet Lily.

Most nights Luce couldn’t even be sure they would sleep until daylight. They wandered, part nocturnal in their comings and goings, sharing the habits of raccoons and house cats. By morning she’d have to hunt for them like hen eggs. Find one balled up in a nest of quilts on the sleeping porch and the other laid out like a corpse at a viewing beneath a hunt board in the dining room. Had to start locking the doors at night instead of only latching the screens.

It was hard not to think about giving the children back to the State. Luce wondered sometimes if they would even notice. As long as they had things to tear up or set afire and nobody to disagree with them, they seemed content. They particularly liked being outdoors. It was one of their major opinions. On stormy afternoons, when lightning forked from black clouds, they would sit together and look out a window, their gloom about Luce keeping them inside expressed by the droop of their posture.

They had come with names. Dolores and Frank. Luce had probably once known that but had forgotten, since in letters Lily always referred to them simply as her babies. And, yes, Luce owned, they were pretty messed up. But to put matters in perspective, she thought back to people she’d had to share her daily world with. In comparison, how messed up were the children really? Lots of human beings got through the day a bunch more messed up than Dolores and Frank. They weren’t criminals or drunks. Being uncommunicative and taking an interest in fire were neither crimes nor sins, just inconvenient. And Luce didn’t have to love them. She just had to take care of them.

These days, around noon, Luce began counting the hours until bedtime. Lights out, children asleep. Think your own thoughts and listen to WLAC. John R. and Gene Nobles with their wondrous music and offers of a hundred baby chicks delivered C.O.D. to the P.O. in no more than a few days at a price too low to be believed. Luce had been tempted to order a boxful of chickens, but pictured a hundred yellow fluffs of life packed like ping-pong balls, dying one by one, hour by hour, waiting for her to come pick them up. Open the lid, and the survivors would be looking up into the light, necks stretched and yearning, and sort of treading water above the dead ones, whose nearly whole view of life on earth was the black inside of a cardboard box. So she had taken a pass on the fabulous and depressing chicken deal.

The music, though, was brilliant and beautiful, bright and wild, opening deep into her heart. It strove upward toward some indefinable, or perhaps unmentionable, light. Even exhausted from a long day with the kids, Luce would stay up late as she could, listening until she finally fell asleep.

WHEN SHE AND LILY
were little girls, not quite a year apart, Luce was the wanderer. At six, her last year of perfect freedom, she explored the lake town without restraint. If some shade-tree mechanic’s feet stuck out from underneath a jacked-up Nash getting a new clutch, Luce would soon have her head under the car, studying the dark miraculous complication of greasy parts. She once sort of borrowed without permission a frontier clothes iron from an elderly woman living in a log cabin. The kind of iron with a space inside that was meant to be filled with hot fire coals. It fascinated her. Some simple forgotten relic of the past that could be made to work again. Luce carried the iron around until she found a house with a fire going. It was muggy June at the time, and it took a fair amount of walking and knocking on screen doors. And then she managed to burn a red second-degree triangle into her thigh that would leave a faint permanent mark, now visible only when she had a tan.

Probably that same day, Lily had been content to stay home and count her toes. She liked being safe inside. She could sit all morning dressing and undressing a frizzy-haired baby doll with only two outfits and just one blue eye that would open all the way. Lily liked naps and vanilla wafers.

So, anyone back then paying attention to the two girls—which was nobody—would have predicted that Lily would never leave the lake town. Someday way in the blue-haired future, she would rest in the hillside cemetery with a view across the water toward the Lodge and the mountains beyond. Luce would be the one to take off into the wide world at the first opportunity, probably with some man, the first of several husbands. Be buried in Anchorage or La Paz or whatever distant city you cared to name.

But Lily was the one who disappeared. A couple of weeks after her high school graduation, she bought a bus ticket with savings from her carhop job. No word of her whereabouts for months. Not like there was a mother at home to worry about her, and their father was busy or else figured, you get out of school, you’re on your own.

Luce stayed home. No money for more school, and no precedent for it. Nobody in her family had ever darkened the doors of any college. Also, she held some underlying suspicion that people were about the same wherever you went, but lots of places were way less beautiful than right here.

She took various jobs. Counter work at the drugstore and the post office. A brief stint as secretary for the town’s insurance agent. She quit at the drop of a hat if she felt the least slighted. The amazing power of saying kiss my ass and walking out the door. She dated the kinds of local guys her age who had family businesses to inherit someday. Son of the dry cleaner. Son of the dime store owner. Two of four redneck brothers who stood to inherit the paving business that got all the road contracts in this whole backwater of the State. She had a pretty serious thing for a while with a doctor’s son who had been off to UVA and wanted to become something or other that he couldn’t quite put into words, a teacher or philosopher or entrepreneur nudging the world in a better direction. His claim to fame, other than not wearing socks with his Weejuns, was that for an entire semester he had lived in the dorm room right next to the one Poe had occupied. It seemed like real love for a whole summer, and then he went back to graduate school. By Thanksgiving the letters, in both directions, had dwindled to nothing.

Everything else lasted about two months and then either blew up or fizzled away. Luce decided she lacked passion, which was a word she hated. Ask her what she craved, and she’d get a little frantic about things like books, the woods, music. Plants and the seasons. Also freedom. Not being bought and sold by some idiot employer, not having the moments of her days valued in fractions of a dollar by somebody other than herself.

——

LUCE, WITH DOLORES
and Frank drifting and wavering along ahead of her—kites in the wind, hen and chicks—stopped by one day to let them meet Maddie. They found her busy at the stove, frying thin strips of something dredged in cornmeal. The black iron skillet crackled and spit, and the room smelled of good food sputtering in yellow pork fat. Hickory fire so hot little wispy circles of blue flame escaped around the cast-iron stove lids. Dolores and Frank crowded close, and Maddie had to sweep her forearm against their bony chests to move them a safe distance back. When a batch of strips browned, Maddie lifted them out of the lard with a slotted spoon and cast them onto layers of newspaper covering the kitchen table.

Luce couldn’t help but read anything put before her, and an ad on one page caught her eye. A simple graphic pair of round spectacles from an optometrist named Finklestein. Above the ad, little boxes of tiny print with estimates of weather in the near future and the past month’s rainfall amount in inches, and all the fascinating business about moon phases and where Venus and Mars and Saturn and Jupiter would be in the night sky on whatever day this yellow sheet commemorated. Luce looked to the top of the page for the date, and she would have been twelve.

When Maddie had finished four heaping batches of the strips, she salted them and dashed hot drops of green-pepper sauce on them, and then poured four tall glasses of cold buttermilk. Beads of condensation ran down and printed dark rings on the newspapers. Maddie and Luce and the children sat and started eating with their fingers.

Luce tried to guess the name of the meat. It was good. Crisp and greasy. Inside the brown crust, pure white as a shaving from a bar of Ivory soap. But it had little flavor of its own. Mainly a chewy texture.

—What? Luce asked.

—Spinal cord, Maddie said.

—Of what?

—Hog.

—Hum.

—Not many people bother to eat it anymore.

—It’s way better than I would have guessed, Luce said.

—Probably, if you breaded cardboard in cornmeal and fried it in lard, it would taste pretty good too.

Dolores and Frank downed their buttermilk and ate their share of fried spine clean down to the paper and then sat sniffing their fingertips, remembering a grand moment just passed.

—I like it when people like my cooking, Maddie said.

She got up and went rummaging among various boxes and bags in cupboards and dressers, looking for her fairy crosses. She collected them. Knew a secret spot, a runneled dirt bank deep in the woods. After a hard spring rain washed the crystals out of the ground, she could find as high as three perfect crosses out of the many X’s. She threw the X’s back to the ground because they were bad luck. She kept the crosses in a shoe box. But someday, she would let them go back to the wild, scatter them in the woods so they could become miracles again for future pilgrims.