Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [112]
So if Bud ever writes his story, the moral is, Make it quick. No more than switching off the porch light before bed. Happy, happy, dead.
Then lie on the woods floor through winter, freezing and thawing. Rain and shine. In summer, a stand of Indian pipes growing pale and ominous like skin underwater from melted flesh. The sacred heart tattoo fading into the ground.
A wandering fisherman or hunter gets curious about a funnel of birds in the sky beyond the lakeshore. At the place where the spout touches down, he finds a dozen rumpled buzzards standing around hunch-shouldered, acting polite with one another. Nothing to get excited about, just another piece of work. Might as well take turns.
CHAPTER 5
STRINGS OF COLORED BULBS and greenery wind around the drooping wires crossing Main Street to hold up the three stoplights. Red, green, blue, and yellow streaks on the wet black pavement. When the Hawk passes underneath, the streaks slide up the hood and illuminate the beads of water on the windshield. Luce gets lost in childhood memories, that one magical year Lola and Lit roused themselves from their immersion in each other to go buy a couple of baby dolls to unwrap.
In the backseat, the children busy themselves with a new game where they shape three fingers of each hand into claws and interlock with the other and grapple. As soon as somebody gets hurt, game over. Luce’s rules. On WLAC, “Papa Ain’t No Santa Claus (Mama Ain’t No Christmas Tree)” drifts into “Merry Christmas Baby.”
THE METHODISTS EXCHANGE presents by way of a Santa in faded red flannel and dingy white fake fur. He sits in a metal folding chair in front of the decorated tree near the pulpit and pulls wrapped packages from his sack and draws folded strips of paper and calls out numbers. Odds and evens, boys and girls. One by one, children run down the sloped aisle between rows of pews to claim their prizes. It goes on and on. Now and then, a choir in blue robes sings one of the old songs. A pale brown-headed boy, small for his age, unable to wait any longer for his toy, shouts out, Don’t forget little Vincey.
Luce, sitting near the back, all of this new to her, likes to believe her children are nothing like a pair of copperheads amid a field of sweet brown mice. She reminds herself that it’s not just one or the other. There’s a range, and you can slide either way. The whole point of being here is to begin shaping a place in the world around them.
But Dolores and Frank don’t care about Santa or what’s in his sack. It’s the many burning, dripping candles in tall holders that fascinate them.
Soon Stubblefield has to make an end run around the pews to keep the smolder of burgundy drapes from spreading to burgundy carpet and oak pews and burgundy cushions. He stomps out the tinder, wadded-up copies of The Upper Room, the cover a colorful, cartoonish depiction of Baby Jesus in the manger. Barely averting sirens from the fire station, three blocks up.
—We’ll keep working on that, he whispers to Luce after he sits back down.
AS THEY LEAVE TOWN, Stubblefield drives around back of the sheriff’s office. The green pickup still sits in the parking lot where it was towed more than a month earlier, about the same time the sheriff tried questioning the kids, who sat before him like the Tar-Baby, saying nothing. When Luce took her turn, she told of a knife fight and a mysterious hole in the woods that nobody had ever heard of.
Many days later, when the coon hunters finally came down from the mountain to resume dreary daily life, their recollections of seeing Bud were vague and inconclusive. It was only for a few hours, and they had been impaired to a high degree. The best most of them could do was confirm that somebody showed up in the middle of the night and left in the morning while many still slept and the rest