Nightwoods (17 page)

STUBBLEFIELD DROVE SLOW
down a single-lane farm road. On either side, three strands of rusty barbwire drooped between grey locust posts, enclosing weedy pastures in need of cows. He hooked past an unused barn and parked near the back door of a big farmhouse from the previous century. Carved ornaments in the angles of the gables and white paint flaking big as butterfly wings on the clapboards. He started to open his door, and Luce said, No. Either sit here or drive around for thirty minutes.

Stubblefield turned his hands up. Whatever. No hurt feelings.

Not much of a date anyway, since Luce just needed a ride. Though, on the way to pick her up, Stubblefield had stopped at a roadside stand and bought a jar of honey and presented it to her after they dropped the kids off at Maddie’s. Saying, Correct me if I am wrong, but I think this was on the list of acceptables.

Luce had held the jar to the light and studied the legs and wings suspended in the nearly coffee-colored goo, and the pale comb lurking barely visible through the murk. At which point Stubblefield said, I’m starting to think it looks like the cat-head baby in the carnival freak show, floating in the jar of dirty formaldehyde.

—Yeah, maybe. But thanks anyway.

Now Luce wondered about herself. An afternoon without the kids, and all she wanted to do was visit her old primary school teachers. She could tell Stubblefield wondered why. But he seemed to sense how anxious she was and went along without question. He felt under the seat and randomly pulled out one book from the several.
Franny and Zooey
, with a linty butterscotch Life Saver sticking to the white cover.

—Take your time, he said.

Luce climbed three steps to the back door and tapped her middle knuckle twice on the frame of the screen door and disappeared inside the dim kitchen.

The teachers were angular bright-eyed sisters of a certain age, wielding sharp intellects. Each deeply read in the smart dead Englishmen of past centuries and also a very select few of the elders among American penmen.

While most of their fellow teachers went by Miss, leaving the impression that teachers swore a vow against men as powerful as any nun’s, these three rebels were all Mrs. Among themselves, they had figured out how to go about marriage so as to accomplish the least damage. The husbands lived two hours away, in directions that thirded the compass like a generously cut pie, and none of the men ever visited except on the rarest of occasions, as if a demilitarized zone that they dare not enter had been drawn with a protractor around the women at its center. Nobody even knew exactly what kinds of jobs these men did. On Friday afternoons at three o’clock, the sisters got in their Hudsons, which differed only in color, and drove to their husbands for the weekend. Slightly longer stretches of time for the major holidays, and a couple or three weeks in the summertime. They had no children of their own but had spent decades with the children of others.

Luce was shown into the parlor by one sister while another charged the percolator with grounds and set it to boil on the stove. The third sister, the youngest, already sat in the parlor near a window, reading. Luce hadn’t been there since childhood, and yet not even the placement of the candy jar on the mantel had changed. The kind of place where antimacassars draped the backrests of purple velvet chairs, the seat cushions buffed to a pale silver nub by many decades of buttocks dating back nearly to the Grant administration. Bookcases everywhere, filled with leather Miltons and Burnses and Tennysons inscribed on the endpapers with the beautiful looping handwriting of dead people. One of the sisters could recite “Thanatopsis” all the way through without missing a word, and another could do “Snowbound,” and the youngest could declaim “The Masque of the Red Death” with utter conviction, though it was not even a poem at all, and thus she was suspected of paraphrasing. So, imagine the festive evenings of January, a crackling fire and a big bowl of popcorn cooked with a strip of bacon.

Luce had all three of the sisters for classes in the early grades, and because of their family resemblance, they blended together in her memory. Also, because they all three praised her extravagantly and urged her forward in life like no adults had ever done before or since. Each one of them had held her tight by the shoulders at the end of the year and looked into her eyes and said, You can be whatever you want to be.

Strange, now, to find herself grown up and face-to-face with them again, being who she had become.

When the coffee was ready, the sisters rowed themselves opposite Luce on the settee. Each one downing half a cup at one go and then firing up a smoke. Three different brands.

The unaccustomed caffeine came on like a vibration in Luce’s back teeth and frizzed static into her thoughts.

She blurted out some of what she’d come prepared to say. I’ve been thinking a lot about when I was in school, and about the care of children. Lily’s girl and boy live with me now. My mother wasn’t a model for anything but crazy. And it’s not like I’m thinking back and trying to force any of you into being sweet ladies. You had hard expectations. If we were called upon, you made us step up and answer for ourselves. These children aren’t easy.

The eldest sister cracked two notes of smoker’s laughter, indistinguishable from a TB cough. Said, You want us to tell you how to be a mother? If so, you’ve come to the wrong place.

And then they started talking all at once, lapping over one another and completing one another’s sentences as they had done for half a century. Their tone like an argument, except they were all arguing the same point.

The jist was, there’s a big difference between teacher and mother. A teacher has six hours a day for nine months of one year. And thirty children to deal with at a time. You do your best, and you expect the same of them. Then you pass them to the next grade and hope to do better with another bunch.

—How analogous is that to your situation? the younger sister said.

Luce felt like she had fallen back into one of the brutal flash-card battles. She said, Not at all?

—Wrong answer, the eldest said. Or at least incomplete.

Luce revised. She said, Not analogous, except for the part about doing your best and expecting them to do theirs?

—Yes, the youngest said.

The middle sister said, Still a quick learner.

Luce started to say her thanks and leave. But then she said, Well, that’s all fine, but not much help when I get up mornings not knowing where to start. Or when I go to bed afraid I’ve failed them. They fight with each other and set fire to things and kill chickens. Sometimes they’re mean, but mostly they’re scared of the whole world. There’s something wrong with them, and I think Lily’s husband damaged them. They won’t let me give them baths. They don’t like to touch or be touched. I can’t tell if they can be fixed. Or, if they can, how much.

The youngest sister said, You think we’ve never come up against a child some man had been using because they’re the only thing in his world weaker than he is? And not have any way to prove it?

The eldest sister said, It won’t ever go away.

The middle sister, Luce’s first-grade teacher with the flashing glasses and violets pinned to her lapel, leaned to set her empty cup into its saucer. She said, Luce, when you were a little girl, you weren’t afraid of anything. It’s what first caught my attention about you. Probably because I never have been that way. First day of school every year, even now, I look out at those little faces, every one needing something from me, and I start feeling like I can’t breathe thinking about the hundred and eighty days ahead. I’ve learned to remember there will be good days and bad days. For me and for them. Many rivers to cross between fall and spring.

WHEN LUCE GOT BACK
out to the car, Stubblefield held up his book. He said, Forty pages, and I’m feeling calm and melancholy. Like meditating, if I had the time to stick with it.

Inside the car, Luce felt her mood lighten a shade or two. She believed she wanted to ride a little more, take back roads and stretch the trip home even longer than it was.

—The kids will be fine with Maddie, Luce said. Something about the way she talks to them, same tone she uses with Sally. Like everybody is all fine and serene, and nobody requires anything from you except to enjoy a big dinner together. Today was going to be white bean soup with lots of ham, and a skillet of cornbread.

Stubblefield drove below the dam and followed the river through the valley. The farm country beginning to wrap up operations for the summer, cornstalks waiting to be cut for fodder and broad tobacco leaves bundled and hanging upside down in open barns to dry, waiting for auction. Long rows of cabbages, the dusty green outer leaves veined like the back of an old man’s hand. Beyond the fields, wooded slopes pitched upward to the ridges and peaks, the foliage shading toward yellow and orange and red.

Luce looked at Stubblefield and then back out the window. She said, I’m trying to help the children get better if they can. They were learning to talk when they were two or three. Lily wrote me letters about the words they knew. They stopped, and now they’re starting again. I read to them, take them for walks and try to teach them about where they are. Flowers and history. Music. I try not to feel sorry for them. They don’t seem to want it, and I think it would be bad for them. Start feeling sorry and coddling them and having no expectations, they’ll be like this forever. And maybe they will be anyway. They’ve killed a couple of roosters, which for a little child is a pretty fierce undertaking. Go look at a big rooster and picture being about three feet tall with one of those wild bastards standing chest-high, spreading his neck feathers and glaring and hooking his yellow beak at you. They’ll flog you, claw you, peck your face. I don’t really know how they did it with no weapons except maybe sticks.

—So, you admire them? Stubblefield said.

—I’m just making a point about them improving. After that incident at the corner of the Lodge, which was mainly a singe, they’ve been better about setting fires.

—You counting my grandparents’ farmhouse in there, or what?

—That’s a possibility, not a fact, Luce said.

—Sort of a dark charcoal-grey area?

—Well, if you want to get sarcastic about it, of course they did it. I just didn’t witness it. And you’ve been swell about that, by the way.

—Glad you noticed.

When they made the turn onto the dirt road that led around the back side of the lake, Luce reached over and took Stubblefield’s hand for a moment and held it and then gave it back to him, like an experiment by a thirteen-year-old girl on a first date. And Luce hoped he had enough sense not to make anything of it, except within himself.

CHAPTER
  5

G
REY-DARK, AND LIT HAD
already pulled on the headlights when a spotted hog scooted across the road, traveling low to the ground at desperate speed, streaming black blood from a head wound. At the white line on the far side of the pavement, its joints buckled and it fell forward in a long skid into the weeds.

Bud said, The hell?

Lit braked and got out. Off in the distance, men whooped like greyboys before Pickett’s Charge and other epic misjudgments.

Lit looked at the slumped animal. An escapee from a slaughtering. Had to be. No longer hog, but not yet transformed into pork.

Bud opened his door to get out, but Lit said, Sit still. This won’t take but a minute.

Lit reached through the open door and cut the lights to the black-and-white but left the engine idling. Set his beer on the roof and rattled in a box of rusty tools in the trunk and drew out a hand axe. He went to the hog and prodded it with his foot. Nothing but dead flab.

Drunks off in the woods hollered nearer, saying, They damn, and other expressions of utter amazement.

Lit worked with the axe like limbing a felled tree to section and split. But only so far as to free the hams. Fuck that other peasant food. Tripe, ears, fatback, and snout. And all that headcheese mess. He carried the hams by their two feet and swung them and the dripping maniac axe into the trunk and drove on with the lights out, leaving the hillbillies to sort out the mystery for themselves when they arrived momentarily to claim their runaway hog.

Around the first curve, Lit hit the gas, and the forgotten half-full bottle fell back across the trunk and to the pavement, shattering with spewing concussion. Bud held his empty out the window and lofted it back over the car to join its fellow in festive breakage.

NIGHT DRIVING. THIS NIGHT
, like so many lately, drinking long-necks and listening to the radio, sharing their dope and their hopes and dreams. The dashboard lights casting green shadows on their faces and Luckies drooping from their lips, except when they flicked ash out the windows.

They rode a long way from town. Way out. Not a light to be seen in the indigo night but their own yellow headlights and the tiny white orbs of the heavens, which, because of a fortunate mixture of pills, took on a slight pinwheel effect when they looked up through the windshield for longer than a glance. Lit drove quick, steering with the wrist of his right hand over the wheel and his left elbow resting on the windowsill. Chill damp mountain air streaming in, but balanced by the blast of heat from the firewall. The first fallen yellow poplar leaves resting like upturned hands on the dark pavement.

The narrow road climbed alongside a white-water creek toward a gap, twisting in correspondence with the path of the water. One turn coming hard after the other in a rhythm of shifting car weight, the performance springs and shocks of the cruiser crouching only slightly on the inside and hardly lifting on the outside. No more than a shoulder shrug one way or the other. They crossed narrow one-lane wooden bridges, the timbers painted metallic silver to give the reassuring impression of steel girders. Passed through tunnels of trees vaulting overhead, and the road so slim that two cars meeting would have to scoot over with their right wheels into the grass. But at this time of night, that was mostly theoretical.