Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [108]
But he wanted us to bleed. The flow of blood, a red bleeding heart. That is beautiful.
CHAPTER 4
AT THE FIRST SUSPICION OF DAWN, Luce takes off alone. The earth and the lake and the sky still grade only slight shades of color apart. Bare November trees pitching in the wind against a charcoal sky, and the lake charcoal too, with little waves breaking against the shore rocks. Maddie and Stubblefield dozing at the kitchen table.
Alongside the trail, the lush growth of summer droops over, dead brown. The tops of giant hemlocks disappear in fog, and their roots probe deep in the moisture below the creek banks. Galax leaves, transformed by frost, shine glossy maroon.
She has slept once in the past three days, and Stubblefield even less. He’s taken an hour now and then, leaned against her on the front seat of the car somewhere way up a fire road. The afternoon and evening of horrible weather—rain falling hard, ashy sideways streaks of rain in the headlight beams—they drove into the mountains until the roads got so rough they dragged the muffler off the Hawk and figured the oil pan would be next. By the time they returned to the Lodge, she was too tired to argue when he put her to sleep. When she woke, early that morning, the rain had become big wet flakes of snow, melting as they hit the ground, but by the time the sun was up over the eastern ridges, the clouds were breaking apart. More empty searching that whole day, but with the sky blue and the high peaks white all morning with snow. Searching in the car and on foot, knocking on farmhouse doors and asking the same question over and over. Driving to check the phone at the store every few hours. All the time, trying to hold a positive picture in her mind and entertain imaginary hope. By late afternoon, sundogs and bare trees.
Now, walking in the cold fog, Luce doesn’t even try to track the children. Short of a dropped sweater, all trace of them will have been erased by rain and snow. So she walks with nothing at all in her mind and tries to feel which way they might have gone. But she isn’t the least bit telepathic; no vibrations reach her other than the general shimmer of sleeplessness.
Many turnings present themselves, plenty of opportunities for choosing one faint passage over another. These mountains are no wilderness. They have been lived in for thousands of years. Many old nobodies, long gone to earth, left their marks on the land, subtle or not. Gameways stretching back beyond buffalo days to a distant ice age became Indian trails, little foot-wide hunting paths and broad valley trails linking towns, each with its pyramid. Roads broad enough for helmeted Spaniards and their horses and scores of pigs and captives to make twenty miles a day in their traverse through here. Two hundred years farther on, many paths for horny colonial merchants and botanists and preachers coming to the highlands to make money and mixed-blood babies. And then American soldiers burning the villages so that the townhouses at the tops of the pyramids became nothing more than a layer of charcoal. Some of those same roads became exile trails for the Cherokee, endless trails for the many who never reached the end. On the same mule tracks and wagon roads, the deluded greyboys traveled to war. Then, sunken logging roads and skid paths from the end of the previous century, and narrow-gauge rail beds from the early clear-cut years of this century. Everywhere Luce looks, the ground lies webbed with lines of passage, a maze for the children to get lost inside and never come out.
Numb and hopeless, Luce walks in the direction of the black hole. At the trail tree, she sees hoofprints and starts running. When she gets to the dry ridge of hickory and locust, she smells smoke in