Nightwoods (4 page)

Afterward the fights diminished somewhat but did not stop entirely, for Lily would not say where the money went. It was like a partial truce. Except strange days began unfolding when Lily was stupid enough to leave Bud alone with the children, and it became an issue for him to explain bruises and red marks.

Even with all her provocation, Bud would never have stabbed Lily if she hadn’t come home unexpected one day. An especially bad moment for her to walk in without knocking. All of a sudden she was shouting, I’ll fucking kill you if it’s the last fucking thing I do.

And those would be her final words on that subject or any other, since she died in the fight that followed. Blood almost black against the white kitchen linoleum, and Bud gripping a black-handled butcher knife whetted keen to the point of invisibility along the curved edge of the blade. A siren wailing faint in the distance due to a neighbor’s phone call out of weariness from the frequent racket. The two children standing in the doorway to the dining room, looking dead-eyed at the scene.

CHAPTER
  3

M
OTHER. WHAT A VAGUE CONCEPT
. Luce had never wanted to be one and hadn’t seen hers since sometime around third grade. She remembered Lola rarely, but almost always in a pretty summer dress. Pink polka dots or shimmery lime green. A full skirt, and sunburned freckled breasts swelling above a tight bodice. Sometimes Lola smelled like lipstick and sometimes she smelled like Scotch and sometimes she smelled like the damp moss that grew along creek banks. Her hair changed colors several times a year, like leaves on deciduous trees, which, when Luce first learned the word in fifth grade, she thought meant man-eating trees.

On a bad day, Lola would slap fire out of you at the least provocation. Such as you and your little sister having a row in the backseat of the car. Lola didn’t worry over fine layers of justice. She would reach her arm behind her and smack blind at whichever child and whatever part she could reach. Leave red finger marks on your bare legs and arms and faces. All the time driving and smoking with her free hand and shouting about what sorry little bitches she had made. Then five miles later, as soon as you quit bawling, she would pull over and hug until all the breath huffed out your mouth. Lola would ignore you for days, and then she would be right in your face needing your attention. It was still confusing to Luce which one was worse.

When Luce felt charitable, she thought maybe Lola’s tragedy was that she lived in the wrong place or had married far too young to the wrong man. Or maybe it was simple, like her beauty, a condition of existence for the people around her to deal with while Lola sailed off carefree toward a blue horizon. But did that need to include having a loud sobbing childhood fight with Lily, wholly your own fault, yet both of you get smacked equally? Lola, barely more than a teenager herself, saying, I’ll give you something to cry about.

Lola’s only nugget of wisdom to her little daughters was
Never cry, never ever
. So, in the future, if somebody came to Luce wanting to know what to carve on Lola’s tombstone, those four words would be it.

LUCE’S THREE-YEAR
anniversary at the Lodge was coming up in the fall, and all that time, she had hardly missed any of the modern world. It pressed so hard against you, like somebody standing in front of you screaming and jumping up and down to misdirect your thoughts. Let it all go and it fades away, similar to when you ignore run-of-the-mill ghosts. All they become is an updraft feeling. Nothing urgent. Just smoke as it begins to draw up a cold flue.

What good does the world do you? That was the question Luce had asked herself for three years, and the answer she had arrived at was simple. A distressingly large portion of the world doesn’t do you any good whatsoever. In fact, it does you bad. Casts static between your ears, drowns out who you truly are. So she tried to cull daily reality pretty harsh, retaining just landscape and weather and animals and the late-night radio.

Luce was fairly sure about all that, but she wasn’t a preacher. Pushing her ideas onto the children held no appeal. Early days, she did try to talk with them, though. Just doing her job as caretaker, asking pertinent questions about their favorite things. She got no answers and realized that they couldn’t or wouldn’t talk, but unlike the deaf woman in town, who made every possible effort of gesture and facial expression to bridge the gap, the children wouldn’t hardly look your way. When Luce tried getting them to speak by pointing and saying the names of things that fell to hand—water, door, hen, beech tree, moon—they looked at her finger. Or if not that, then they looked impatiently into the distance like she was the crazy one. Sometimes she got the feeling they knew more than they let on, and other times she doubted she would ever be able to reason with them.

Luce’s first impulse was to be grateful and keep her own mouth shut. Continue running the Lodge like a monastery under a vow of silence. She was used to quiet. But that resolution lasted only a couple of days, and then there was a second dead rooster, and Luce figured that even if she wasn’t a preacher, she’d better try to be a teacher.

Maybe these city kids had never seen live chickens before. Didn’t realize the direct relationship between the living birds and a fried drumstick or two ecstatic bites of deviled egg, rich with mayonnaise and pickle relish and paprika, which they hoovered up like they’d never had it before, which maybe they hadn’t. Luce had learned by observation that the children liked to eat, and they didn’t seem to discriminate too much. They liked fragrant cabbage, boiled grey as wet newspapers. Thick slabs of fried bologna cut from a long red stalk down at the little country store. Kohlrabi doused with vinegar so pungent it would bring tears to your eyes. Stewed tomatoes and okra, stringing slime behind when you spooned it out of the pot. Or if Luce didn’t feel the least bit like fooling with cookery, sliced tomatoes on light bread with a thick smear of Duke’s. Whatever you set in front of the children, they’d put their heads down and eat with the air of hungry bird dogs.

So, on a hazy late-July morning, Luce took them out to search the henhouse for eggs, the first lesson of the week, devoted to how we get our food. The wonder of a perfect fresh shit-smeared egg was not lost on Luce, and she aimed to share it. Even before they stepped through the door, she filled the air with words like a docent. She explained the economics of chickens, talking to the children as if they had sense and hoping that a few words might get through.

First point, they really liked fried chicken and stewed chicken, didn’t they? Second point, Luce couldn’t afford to go to town and buy chicken from the grocery, and right now, only a few eating-sized chickens roamed the yard. Luce counted them out. Seven. Thus, if you go around killing chickens for entertainment, it’s not only a mean thing to do and liable to come back around on you in the future as bad luck and trouble, but it will leave all three of them without fried or stewed or roasted chicken for quite some time.

Maybe Luce was a little fragmented in the delivery, but the lesson was simple. Manage chickens carefully, you’ll have eggs most of the time and chicken meat some of the time. Manage poorly, and there will be no more chickens or eggs at all.

The children walked around in the dim brown light of the henhouse and looked on the dusty ledges and in the nesting boxes. The girl found the first egg. She held it cupped in her palm and studied it. Then she smashed her other fist against it and smeared the mess on her brother’s face. Immediately, he hit her hard in the stomach and they both started howling at the tops of their lungs without ever pausing in their fighting, which was vicious. They rolled on the packed dirt floor amid the black-and-white chicken droppings and the little white pinfeathers. Luce watched them, and it reminded her of snakes fighting. Real cold, like they were not even very angry at each other, just acting under some shared compulsion as incomprehensible as sex or madness. Luce finally stepped in and snatched them each by the backs of their shirts like they had handles and held them apart.

Many people would council putting the rod to them until the importance of obedience made an impression. That, or lock them up in a dark closet for a few hours until they fell out blinking into the sunlight and did as they were told. Maybe the children had it coming, but if those correctives were applied to her, Luce would just get meaner and more hardheaded. The one angry switching was bad enough, and she’d sworn she wouldn’t do it again, for their sake and for hers. So that none of them would have to go around feeling bad all day, or maybe forever.

For the next lesson, Luce took the children out back to the kitchen garden, with its deer fence of leaned and weathered palings. The morning fog had not fully burned away, and dew still beaded on the tomato leaves. The sun was a faint pale disk, the light flat and grey. The children stood shivering with their arms crossed on their chests. Their faces pale and puffy-eyed, and their hair in points, like they had just rolled out of bed. Luce gave them each a cherry tomato folded in a basil leaf, which they seemed to like. They started making their own, and Luce began filling the air with vegetable lore, learned mostly from Maddie. Luce explained that she planted like Cherokee people did. One corn kernel and two beans to a hill. The cornstalk makes the trellis for the bean vines to grow up, and some magic love between corn and beans keeps them from stripping the good out of the soil, so you can keep on using the same plot of ground a long time. And, of course, squash and melons grow well between corn and beans.

She told the children how you can think about history one way, that it took thousands of years for people to figure all this out by tedious trial and error, generation by generation. Or you can think that some old woman just got lucky one summer and shared the wealth. Either way, though, you have to be vigilant about hoeing and suckering and those kinds of tedious jobs. Otherwise, by August you end up with green life running wild, vegetables to your shoulders and weeds to your knees in the aisles. Copperheads twisting through stalks and vines so that you have to take a shotgun with you to gather dinner.

So much more produce than we could ever eat by ourselves, Luce said. Yet the garden keeps on making stuff, whether it’s wanted or not. Squash and cantaloupes collapsing where they lay. The sad internal structure of a rotting tomato haunting your dreams. If you didn’t learn the art of canning, you’d better get comfortable living with the guilt of wastage. Which reminded Luce of a day long ago when she and Lily were home alone and somehow broke the kitchen faucet. A fat stream of water splashed into the sink. They could not turn it off, no matter how hard they twisted the handle. Childhood panic. Lily reached a glass to Luce and said, Don’t just stand there, start drinking.

Which led Luce to ask the kids, So, what do you remember about Lily? I’ve got so many stories like that one. I remember a lot.

The children wandered deeper into the garden and didn’t seem to hear a word of Luce’s ramble. But at least they weren’t trying to light the cornstalks on fire. The girl scrunched her cheeks and brows to hold two cherry tomatoes like red eyes for a few seconds, and the boy looked like he was trying to decide whether it was scary or funny. He picked up a fallen beefsteak tomato and splattered it against her shoulder and she retaliated. More playful than violent, so Luce even lobbed a couple herself.

The day they visited the orchards up the hillside, Luce explained that trees behaved more rationally than vegetables. Slow and careful. These had been let go for decades, and the limbs had grown crisscrossed and shaggy with dun-colored moss and lichen, yet they still made about as many fuzzy peaches in summer and bright speckled apples in fall as she could eat, whether fresh or dried in brown leathery rings or canned. Even without pruning and fertilizing, the elderly trees would probably go on for at least one person’s little lifetime, offering themselves forward against the uncertain future with grim persistence.

The children walked straight down the old rows, the girl first and the boy right behind. At the end of the orchard, they continued the line into the random woods until Luce ran ahead and waved her arms, herding them back to the Lodge.

On a drizzly day toward the end of the week, Luce walked them in the woods, making water the topic of her ramble. It’s what makes life so rampant around here, she said. The children kept leaving the crooked trail and diving straight into wet brush and tall weeds until they were soaked, and Luce kept shooing them back to the path, all the time explaining how most years, you got eighty or ninety inches. A hundred is not at all remarkable in a temperate rain forest. All the moons from spring to early fall, everything plumps with water. Think jungle, and then go a degree onward in the direction of a deep green world so wet you could wring it out like a dishrag if you could get a good grip on either end of it. Giant hemlocks and sycamores and tulip trees. Rhododendrons. Moss and ferns. Understory too thick to see more than twenty feet into the woods, until killing frosts reveal the bones of the place. A steamy greenhouse of plants and creatures. Flip any rock or dead log, and myriad beings go crawling down individual vectors toward the darkness they crave. Sit in a yellow sunbeam, and the damp air around you thickens with myriad beings dancing up into the daylight they love. Life likes the wet and rewards it. Archaic forms incompatible with the modern world persist here. Hellbenders, deep in the creek beds. Panthers, high on the ridges. Even dead blighted chestnuts resurrect themselves out of the black forest floor, refusing to accept the terms of their extinction. Hope incarnate. All, Luce explained, due to moisture. Some summer days, the air carried so much of it you couldn’t strike a paper match. Briefly, Luce entertained the idea that maybe a fascination with fire was fine here. A harmless oddity, like a family streak.