Nightwoods (2 page)

The distance seemed shorter when Luce first got to the Lodge, due to a rowboat she found in one of the outbuildings. Town became only twenty minutes away. But the boat was rotting and loose-jointed, and on her first few trips across, she spent as much time bailing with a saucepan as rowing. And she was not much of a swimmer, at least not good enough to make it to either shore from the middle. She dragged the boat up onto the shoreline and let it dry for a few days, and then one evening at dusk, she poured a cup of kerosene on it and burned it. Flames rose chest-high, their reflections reaching across the still water toward town.

After that, when she had been alone for too many days, she walked the half mile to Stubblefield’s house, and the half mile farther to Maddie’s, and the mile farther to the little country store, where you could buy anything you wanted as long as it was bologna and light bread and milk, yellow cheese and potted meat, and every brand of soft drink and candy bar and packaged snack cake known to man. A four-mile round-trip just to sit in a chair outside the store for a half hour and drink a Cheerwine and eat a MoonPie and observe other human beings. She always carried a book, though, in case she needed to read a few pages to avoid unwanted conversation.

The past Fourth of July, Luce sat on the porch of the Lodge drinking precious brown liquor from the basement and watching tiny fireworks across the water. Bursts that must have filled the sky in town became bubbles of sparks about as big as a fuzzy dandelion at arm’s length. As they began fading to black, the distant boom and sizzle finally reached the Lodge. Friday nights in the fall, light from the football field glowed silver against the eastern sky. A faint sound like an outbreath when the home team scored a touchdown. Every Sunday morning, distant church bells from the Baptists and Methodists tinkled like ice cubes in a glass, and a saying of her mother’s always crossed Luce’s mind: thirst after righteousness. Which Lola used as a Sabbath toast, raising a tall Bloody Mary and a freshly lit Kool in the same hand only minutes after the bells woke her.

THE DAY THE CHILDREN
came was high summer, the sky thick with humidity and the surface of the lake flat and iron blue. On the far side, mountains layered above the town, hazing upward in shades of olive until they became lost in the pale gray sky. Luce watched the girl and boy climb out of the backseat of a chalky-white Ford sedan and stand together, square to the world. Not really glaring, but with a manner of looking at you and yet not at you. Predatory, with their eyes very much in the fronts of their faces and scoping their surroundings for whatever next prospect might present itself, but not wanting to spook anybody. Not yet. Foxes entering henhouses, was the way Luce saw it.

They sported new clothes the State had given them. A blue cotton print dress and white socks and white PF Flyers for the girl. A white cotton shirt and stiff new blue jeans and black socks and black PF Flyers for the boy. Both children had hair the color of a peanut shell, standing ragged on their heads as if the same person had done the cuts in a hurry, with only the littlest regard to gender.

Luce said, Hey there, you two twins.

The children didn’t say anything, nor even look at her or at each other.

—Hey, Luce said, a little louder. I’m talking to you.

Nothing.

Luce looked at their faces and saw slight concern for themselves or anybody else. They sent out expressions like they sure didn’t want you to mess with them, but maybe they wanted to mess with you. She went to the back of the car, where the man from the State was unloading a couple of cardboard boxes from the trunk. He set them on the ground and touched the smaller box with the toe of his loafer.

—Their clothes, he said. And that other one is your sister’s. Personal items.

Luce hardly glanced down from looking at the kids. She said, What’s the matter with them?

—Nothing much, the man said. He thumbed the wheel to a Zippo and lit a smoke and seemed tired from the long drive. Ten hours.

—Something’s the matter with them, Luce said.

—They’ve been through a bad patch.

—A what?

Luce stood and waited while the man took a drag or two, and then she broke in on his smoking and said, You’re the one that collects a salary from the State to do this job, but you can’t even talk straight. Bad patch.

The man said, One doctor thought they might be feebleminded. Another one said it’s just that they saw what they saw, and they’ve been yanked out of their lives and put in the Methodist Home for the time it took to sort things out. The father’s legal matters.

—He’s not their father. They’re orphans.

—It took time to figure that kind of thing out. We got used to certain wording.

—And Johnson? Luce said.

—The trial’s coming up, and they’ll convict him. Sit him in the big wood chair with the straps and drop the tablet in the bucket. It fizzes up, and pretty soon he chokes out. Immediate family gets an invitation.

—To watch?

—There’s a thick glass porthole, tinged like a fishbowl full of dirty water. If there’s a crowd, you have to take turns. It’s the size of a dinner plate. Pretty much one at a time.

—Count me in, Luce said.

She watched the children rove wordless about the yard in front of the Lodge. Going slow, but in some purposeful pattern, assessing the space like a pair of water witches looking for the right spot to dig a well.

—And that bad patch, Luce said. That’s all that’s the matter with them?

—All we know.

The man looked around at the relict lodge and the lake and the town across the water, hazy through the humidity, identifiable mainly as a distant low geometric break in the uniformity of green woods. A couple of steeples, arrowheads aimed at heaven, rose above the tiny red brick store buildings and the white houses sloping up from Main Street. Whichever other direction you looked, mountains and forests and lake.

The man waved his cigarette in two circles to encompass all the lonesome beauty and decay. He said, To look at it, you wouldn’t think it would take so long to get from town to here.

—It’s a long lake.

—Yeah. And all these twisting dirt roads.

—Well, Luce said.

The man said, Beyond here, what? Nothing?

—The road goes on a few miles, but this is the last place anybody lives.

The man looked at the blanched wood sign hanging from two rusty chains above the steps to the porch.
WAYAH LODGE
.

He said, Indian?

—Cherokee. Means wolf.

—I don’t know anything about your finances, the man said. Luce looked him in the eye and tried to express nothing at all.

—This place doesn’t take tourists anymore?

Luce said, It stopped sometime around the Great Depression or the Second World War. I’m caretaker.

—Pay well?

—I get to live here and grow a garden and pick the orchard. And I get a stipend.

—A stipend? he said.

—That’s what they call it when your pay’s so small they’re embarrassed to call it anything else. Except the old man died. The owner. So right now the stipend is sort of on hold.

—Children can get expensive, the man said. Food and clothes and all.

—I don’t guess any money goes with them? Luce said.

—Maybe the grandparents could help out?

—No, they couldn’t.

—Then, I don’t know. If you could find help with the children, you could move into town and get a better job.

—Yeah, big if.

—Well, the man said.

—So, probably I’ll make do. Don’t you and the government go worrying too much about us after you get in the car and drive back down to the capital city.

—Do you have electricity and plumbing?

—Is that a requirement? Luce said.

The man shrugged his shoulders.

Luce tipped her thumb toward the off-plumb crucifix power pole at the road and the black swagged wires leading to a white ceramic fixture under the porch eave.

—It’s not been the nineteenth century around here for several years, she said.

The man drew his last drag and flipped the butt away, like it wasn’t trash at all, it having had such intimate relations with his breath for a few moments. The smoking butt glanced off a pine tree and landed in brown needles.

Luce went over and picked it up by its flesh-tone filter and dropped it into the red dirt of the drive and crushed it out with her shoe. She wiped her thumb and forefinger on the thigh of her jeans three times, which was probably once or twice too many.

The man said, You probably wouldn’t believe how little I get paid to do this goddamn job.

—I probably might, Luce said.

THAT NIGHT, JUST UNTIL
she figured out how to live alongside children in the Lodge, Luce pulled another daybed from the sleeping porch and put it on the other side of the fireplace from hers. Radio playing low, the children slept pretty well, tired from the long day, but Luce lay hovering at the edge of sleep through three DJs.

The shape of long peaceful days prior to the children kept rolling in, and she guessed it would be naïve to believe that wouldn’t change. Days when she had her own life to herself to go walking down the road, free and easy. Though, truthfully, despite all its many joys, life without wheels had a few drawbacks. Hitchhiking, you placed more hope in other people than they would generally bear. You walked and walked and nothing much changed. You had to be attentive to avoid boredom. But for your efforts, there were reimbursments. Elder people and all their hard-earned peculiarities to visit along the way.

In particular, Maddie, living in her own world like it had remained 1898 on and on forever. Or, to be generous, maybe 1917. Her age was indeterminate, as long as you started with old and worked up from there. Her house sat back from the road, and by late summer, flowers grew thick in the yard. Coneflowers and gladiolus and black-eyed Susans and goosenecks all tangled together. In the fall, hot red peppers and brown leather britches drying on lines of cotton twine drooping from the porch posts. Maddie mostly stayed in her country kitchen, with its wood cook stove and dinner table and fireplace, the stones sooted from fifty thousand hearth fires mostly lit by women long dead. The main touches of the current century were a few light bulbs swinging on braided cords from the ceiling.

Maddie wore flower-print cotton dresses all year round and topped them off with pilled cardigan sweaters in the cool months, and she might have been tall and willowy when she was young, before time compressed her into herself, thickening and shortening and bending year by year until all you could see of the young woman she had been were her quick blue eyes, faded almost to the color of steel. Some days she’d be in a mood. All she wanted to use were the sorts of words she’d grown up hearing.
Yonward
and
thither. Hither. Sward
. On a really bad day, half of what she said, you had to figure by context. Early on, Luce viewed Maddie’s homeplace as mostly imaginary, life still circling around hog killings, oil lamps, fetching water, outhouses, and all that other old business. Until Luce realized that these days, her life was a lot like that too.

When Luce stopped for a visit, Maddie would give her a drink of cold spring water from a dented ladle and sing her a song. Maddie knew many ancient ballads about girls getting in trouble and being murdered by the men who had lately so much wanted to get up on them. She warbled and keened at an extreme pitch of emotion unattainable by the young, and the verses of the songs went on and on toward a receding conclusion. They were dark-night songs. Knocked-up girls got stabbed or shot or hit in the head, and then buried in the cold ground or thrown into the black deep river. Pretty Polly. Little Omie Wise. Go down, go down, you Knoxville Girl. Sometimes reproduction did not even factor into the narrative. The man snuffed the girl out because he could not own her, a killing offense if the girl’s opinions ran counter to his urges. In the ballads, love and murder and possession fit tight against one another as an outgrown wedding band on a swollen finger.

Back then, Luce had thought Maddie’s songs were only interesting antiques, but her sister had proved their abiding truth when she came up against Johnny Johnson. Their feelings ran so hot at the start that it must have been sad to watch, though awfully compelling to read about in Lily’s occasional letters, where new love’s bells jangled like a fire engine’s. Lily’s spirit neediness expressed itself raw as a kerosene blaze in the material world.
Love, love, love
. That’s how she described those few months of desire. Each letter signed in a looping hand:
Love, Lily
.

Now Luce lay awake in the dark, knowing Maddie’s murder ballads addressed exactly that situation, and taught that the flame of urgent coupling burned hottest against the woman, no matter how romantic and high and heartsick the anguish of the man might be pitched in retrospect. Luce pictured the killer of Omie Wise through a porthole of dirty green water. A noose around his neck and a trapdoor about to open into a black hole beneath his feet. Oh, what longing and regret he then felt. But too late. And also forever too late for Lily to learn that raging passion predicts nothing but a mess of bad news for everybody.

Luce kept trying to sleep, but hundreds of thousands of katydids or locusts or other screeching insects broadcast a high-voltage buzz into the summer night. She got up and turned on one dim mica lamp and went to an oak cabinet taller than she was and took out a cigar box. The children slept on, and Luce sat inside the circle of gold light, the box in her lap, riffling through Lily’s letters from the past few years. Lavender or green or hot pink ink in big happy cursive on coordinating pastel stationery.

Luce opened envelopes at random, reading until she reached a sentence where it became impossible not to criticize Lily’s fatal hope and trust in other people. Everybody Lily met was so wonderful, and the shiny future stretched forever. Every page held evidence against her. Luce never made it all the way through any of the letters before she returned them to Lily’s precise folds.