Nightwoods (8 page)

Luce had gotten well into the narrative when she realized that the sisters’ suicides were coming up soon. Editing on the fly, she told it so they turned into stars without having to die first. But they were still pursued across the sky from early autumn into spring by Orion and his dangling sword. The important point was that for an awfully long time, even before people thought up the story, Orion and the sisters have gone around and around, night after night, and he still hasn’t caught them, and he never will.

NEXT AFTERNOON
, the children disappeared. They had been sitting on the front porch playing the records and Luce was in the backyard feeding chickens and admiring the late-summer lushness of the woods all around. Poplar leaves already one degree off their highest pitch of green. And then she went into the garden and picked a few yellow squash for supper. More squash erupting than Luce and the kids could eat, and they all liked yellow squash an awful lot, especially tossed in cornmeal and fried crisp. They could eat it five days a week that way. And the other two days, stewed with green peppers and onions. Luce had six fat squash cradled in her arms and was setting them on the back porch when she realized she couldn’t hear the old songs anymore.

She found the porch empty and the Lodge too, best she could tell in a quick pass shouting their names. She ran down the lawn to the lake. Along the shore. Up the creek and over the ridge and back to the Lodge. Shouting all the time as she went. Red-faced and blowing air. Frantic and terrified.

Luce ran back to the house, but they hadn’t returned. She drank water from the spring dipper and walked the other way along the lakeshore and up the next creek and over the next ridge and back to the Lodge. Nothing. She was less frantic and more exhausted and shamed within herself, for she had let them go.

She had let her attention turn away for a moment, and suddenly they were nowhere. Bears and panthers out there in the mountains. Not to mention snakes. The children were capable of hiding behind a stout tree trunk and not making a move or drawing a breath while you walked ten feet away yelling your lungs out, calling their names to the world with evident desire to reunite with them.

Luce went back down by the lake, where they surely had no better sense than to drown themselves, and found them standing at the bank throwing rocks at each other. She ran and tried to hug and kiss them and they would not look her or each other in the eye. They stood stiff against her hugs with their necks twisted around, as if something mildly interesting was happening down the road.

Luce followed their eyes and saw rising above the treetops a shape of black smoke against the ash-colored sky. It might have looked more like a funnel or a mushroom, but in her mind it was an exact projection of old Stubblefield’s empty house, which stood on the other side of the ridge.

CHAPTER
  6

L
IGHT RAIN MISTED
west across the island. Cool for the season. The Atlantic olive drab, and either way you looked, a thin band of black seaweed wavered along the tideline into the distance like one long cursive sentence in a lost alphabet. Stubblefield put on a raincoat, glanced in the mirror, and wished somebody else looked back. Outside, he passed the rusty showerhead where end-of-summer beach tourists should have been washing off sand and salt. Except it had been rainy for so long that they all checked out and climbed into their station wagons and drove home.

Over the dune to the empty beach, and then he slogged north in wet sand just above the runout of waves. The past winter, locals had referred to Stubblefield as that man who walks at night. This summer, he had been that man who swims at night. But he wouldn’t be doing either in this weather. A few hundred yards farther, and he turned inland at the beach shop. Air mattresses and Frisbees and hula hoops. In the window, a Coppertone display with the little tan girl’s white ass uncovered by the dog tugging at her bikini bottom. A page taped to the inside of the door said,
Be back when the weather clears
.

Well, you could only hope. And Stubblefield really appreciated the casual attitude toward business. But at some point you quit counting on anything too far in the future.

He walked toward town. Past a lighthouse and the entrance to a historic fort. Lots of contention here, back in the past. Some progression of displacement involving Indians, Spaniards, English, and, lately, us. For better or worse. On down the sidewalk past a salt marsh, the high school, a hamburger joint, a church.

At the beginning of Centre Street, Stubblefield reached the milestone of the movie theater. An ordinary-looking small-town façade. But behind it, all was provisional, the building like a big Quonset hut, a corrugated metal barrel-vault. It leaked in the rain, and he believed he had seen bats, or at least big moths, flying through the projector beam and casting shadows on the screen. A half-sheet for a coming attraction:
The Defiant Ones
, with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier.

On down the street, the drugstore. A modern low brick-and-glass building, out of place among the Victorian mansions and nineteenth-century storefronts. Up near the front window, paperbacks in two spinning wire racks, comic books and magazines fanned on shallow shelves to display a teasing strip of their bright covers. A quick flip through
Hot Rod
, and then
Stag
. Each world no more or less fictive than the other. At the counter, Stubblefield bought an envelope of Stanback powders and a Jacksonville
Times-Union
. Walked out with the powders in his raincoat pocket, the newspaper folded under his arm as if it were the
Times
of Los Angeles or London or New York.

He strolled on in the rain to the monumental post office with the WPA mural on the lobby wall depicting conquistadores in crested helmets and Seminoles and palm trees. At the wall of little brass-doored cubbyholes, he twisted the knobs in the correct combination and pulled out his mail. Then down to the dock, the boats in for the day. Widely spaced raindrops pocked the stretch of intercoastal that separated the island from the mainland. Stubblefield bought a pound of shrimp, paying right across the gunwale of the boat. He held three sheets of classifieds out to the crewman, who scooped heaping double handfuls onto the paper and said, That look about like a pound to you?

—At the very least, Stubblefield said.

Some of the shrimp were still tail-kicking, antennae twitching, the little black eyes fading. Cockroaches of the sea, but nevertheless tasty. Later he would boil them with Old Bay and peel them and dip them in ketchup with enough lemon and horseradish to bring tears to the eyes and an expanding ache to the sinus. He folded the paper around the dying things, tucking the ends into a neat bundle, the paper already turning wet and grey when he stuffed the package down in his raincoat pocket and felt the shrimp move against his hip.

He checked the front page banner to be sure of the day—Tuesday—and stopped in for one quiet vodka tonic in the brown light of the bar near the docks. His deal was simple. Sunday and Monday, nothing. Friday and Saturday, three or four or so. But Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, only one while he read the paper and opened his mail. Afterward, no dawdling. Pay up and leave.

Stubblefield sipped his drink and tore the envelopes open. Bills, mostly. Including one for a telephone pole he’d knocked down somewhere on the Mississippi coast last year, totaling a lovely green Austin-Healey in the process. Four dollars a month to the phone company nearly forever. Then, a letter from a lawyer up in the mountains expressing condolences for the death of his grandfather and informing him of his inheritance. Various parcels of land, plus the farmhouse and outbuildings, the Wayah Lodge, and the historic tavern, remnant from stagecoach days.

All in sad neglect and disrepair. Those were the lawyer’s exact words.

Stubblefield imagined the corncrib he had played in as a boy melting into the dirt, the springhouse caving in, kudzu overwhelming the garden.

Farther down the page, and more positive, a mention of monthly rental income plus a percentage of net from the historic tavern. Now called the Roadhouse, according to the lawyer, and mainly a late-night sort of place featuring live music. But a potential liability despite its being the only profitable piece of the inheritance.

What Stubblefield read into the euphemisms was that the tavern, bought by his grandfather as a folly, like collecting eighteenth-century china or old black-powder firearms, had become an illegal bar in a dry county. Which made a fitting inheritance, since his grandfather never was the kind of hard-shelled man to deny himself or another the simple joy of a drink at the end of day.

From toddlerhood until he was eighteen, Stubblefield had spent every summer at the farm. He quit visiting after his grandmother died and it began to seem that his grandfather wanted to ride out the tail end of life with the fewest possible outside distractions or inconveniences. So, a summer being three months long, tot up the numbers. He figured he had spent approximately several years of his life up there in the wet green mountains. How lovely and unexpected to inherit all that familiar picturesque ruin. Still, Stubblefield felt guilty about not attending the funeral, even though nobody had thought to inform him until it was too late to make the long drive.

The lawyer’s letter concluded with an unwelcome paragraph. A matter of various unpaid taxes and outstanding bills. And, yet, so little cash money left in the bank accounts. What to do? Please inform.

Stubblefield thought about it, all the shit of ownership. And then remembered his Stanback. He ordered another drink and washed down the healing envelope of bitter powder with the first sip.

FEATURING HIMSELF A BACKROADS
, scenic-route guy, and the sun shining again, Stubblefield went indirect. A couple of days driving up the coast, stopping to eat or drink at beach joints and walk in the towns. Jekyll Island, Savannah, Beaufort, Charleston. All the beautiful old places very much like the beautiful place he had just left. Victorian houses, Spanish moss in live oaks, fishing boats at the docks in the afternoon, and waterside fishhouses frying up the day’s catch. The Atlantic changing shades by the hour, verdigris or slate or taupe. Those kinds of special colors.

At Sullivan’s Island, he walked through the dank fort where Poe served time in the Army. And then on to Isle of Palms, where everybody drove a station wagon full of kids in bathing suits, the back-end windows pressed tight with inflated beach balls and floats in shiny primary colors. He parked and swam parallel to the beach, on and on until he couldn’t do it anymore, and then he rested in the wet sand at the water’s edge and swam back.

He drove inland, past sunset through the sandy pine flats and rolling hills, thinking about the mountain lake and the big white frame house. Green trim around the windows and along the fascia boards, a rusting 5v galvanized roof. A deep porch all the way across the front, in whose shade he had turned a geared crank to produce ice cream on summer afternoons. The homeplace was a leftover from some dusty ancestor who bought great swaths of land at auction when the State sold off the Cherokee holdings back in the early eighteen-whatevers. Later, in the deeps of the Civil War past—or probably the Reconstruction, if somebody needed to get precise—his people had owned a whole quarter of a huge mountain. A pie shape of ragged landscape stretching point-first from the summit eastward. Thousands of acres, maybe tens of thousands. But, back then, steep land was worth about a nickel an acre, if you could find a buyer. Over the decades, though, it got a little more valuable, and eventually it did get sold, all but a few fragments, by old Stubblefield’s elder brother.

One year shortly before the Depression, the brother had taken an affection for mournful cowboy music. He was in his middle thirties, a dangerous time of life. Most afternoons from early spring to late fall, he sat on the porch of the farmhouse, lounging in a striped canvas campaign chair and drinking multiple shots of good Scotch. Reaching out periodically to crank the handle of a Victrola, spinning stacks of 78s. “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” “Red River Valley,” “Streets of Laredo.” If, someday, people could see by his outfit that he was a cowboy, his life would be a success. Then, without warning, he was gone, having quietly sold most of the mountain land for much less than it was worth. Decades later, old Stubblefield discovered his brother’s whereabouts and went to visit. He found a tall bowlegged white-haired man living in a little bungalow in downtown Rawlins, Wyoming. The brother’s life had been a great success. He wore Levi’s except to church and a John B. Stetson hat every day of the year, pale straw in summer and brown felt otherwise. Each of the many times Stubblefield had heard his grandfather tell the story, it concluded with the observation that his little grandson bore great resemblance to the cowboy. Which, until now, Stubblefield had taken as a compliment.

NEXT MORNING, STUBBLEFIELD
rounded the bend past the barn and the corncrib, both time-blanched and sagging toward earth.

Sad disrepair, yes indeed.

So he expected more sadness when the house came into view. But it never did. Where it should have been, a big empty space of air shaped itself in Stubblefield’s mind exactly like his grandparents’ house, except invisible. And below that, a black circle of ash and charcoal on the ground, surrounded by unmowed grass. A few burnt stubs of roof joists pitched at low angles to the sky. Century-old oak trees in the yard, their leaves scorched on the sides facing the empty space. Boxwoods all burned down to nubs beside eight sooty stone steps climbing to nowhere.

Stubblefield parked in the j-hole by the gate and walked to the edge of the burn. He squatted and studied the circle where better than a century of life had happened, some of it his own. The ashes at the edge lay soft and light and pale. Every hint of breeze puffed up a mist of ash that seemed to Stubblefield like the contents of a cremation urn tossed to the wind. He reached deep to throw another fistful into the air, but drew his hand back fast and empty. Burnt. Still damn hot down in there. He quickstepped to the singed springhouse and soaked his hand in the cold clear water rising from deep underground flows.