Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [106]
It hits Bud funny. All those thick slack cylinders of malignant meat. His insides twist up. He thinks he’s going to retch. He bends over, but when he does, his sight goes grey except for shimmering particles of light. He sort of sits, sort of falls over. The long machete blade strikes stone like ringing a bell.
At the sound, a few snakes jump like they’ve been shot. They squirt off over the rocks and down into cracks and off the lips of overhangs. And those forerunners spook the rest of them, and like cattle stampeding, they disappear. An awful fog blowing away, like they were never there at all.
Bud tries to walk on, watching his step. But that doesn’t work so good. He gets all wiggly in regard to the plane of the trail. Sits down and draws his thoughts together, trying to get to the point where he can reason again.
THE BED TO A NARROW-GAUGE railway, new slim trees growing where steam engines hauled out monster trees that were saplings in the time before white people. The trail falls contrary to water running down the same slopes. Water tries to go with gravity, straight as possible. The trail follows contours. Not steep, but dropping steady on and on, finding the easy way down. It’s all sidehill. The feel of the woods changes over the course of the afternoon. No balsams, more laurels and galax. All those names Luce likes so much.
Sally holds stronger opinions than previous about their pace and which way they go when they get to a turning. Dolores and Frank shift about on her back until they’re facing each other, and they play an intricate game of finger signals and coordinated hand slapping. A trailside observer would have trouble figuring the rules and how points are scored and what might be called a good play and what an infraction. The game goes on until the usual conclusion. Somebody hits too hard and the other one retaliates. They shift around, back to back, and ignore each other and watch the passing world for a while, Dolores looking at what’s ahead and Frank watching their past spool away behind.
In the west above the high peaks, bands of afternoon light start building in the clear sky. Platinum, bronze.
Way deep in the afternoon, camp time, they see a place they know. An older bent tree with a pointing nose. They get insistent, and Sally gives in and turns where there is no trail. The sun falls low, and the light in the dead brown leaves is momentarily etched and golden. Shadows stretch long across the ground.
An hour later, indigo twilight, and some big yellow planet falls slowly through the treetops. They have a fire near the edge of the hole, the stump to a toppled hickory as the backlog. A pile of downfall scrounged from the woods, and the blaze as tall as themselves. Dry sticks of hemlock for immediate gratification, mixed with bigger limbs of hardwoods for longevity. The light rises upward with the smoke. Down inside the hole, not a glint off the surface of the black water.
Later, the major lights of the night sky shine crisp in the dry air. Long over their quarrel, Dolores and Frank sit cross-legged under the same blanket and eat a jar of stewed tomatoes and the last sleeve of crackers. For dessert, most of a jar of apple butter, dark with brown sugar, but no bread to spread it on. They sing some more songs, learned from Maddie and the crank record player and the big radio. “Knoxville Girl.” “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.” “Try Me.”
They count the Seven Sisters like Luce taught them, and they say words to each other. Some are common words, and some are of their own devising. But they are like wary people in a foreign country where a language they know imperfectly holds sway. They hide what they do know, except from each other. Whatever anybody says, stay blank. They don’t talk about where they are. They’re right here