Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [113]
For the sheriff, it was simple. Lost kids happily found. Some guy in town for a couple or three months decides to move on. The truck and the money remain a puzzler, but the truck is worn out and people get in a hurry and forget things. As for Lit, with his many enemies, maybe he’d had it coming for a long time.
BACK AT THE LODGE, Luce leads the children upstairs. Past 202, Maddie’s room when she cares to use it. Sometimes she’s there as high as three nights a week, and sometimes she checks out for eight or ten days at a time. No plans. You see her when you see her. Tonight, you don’t. But probably midmorning tomorrow she’ll show up with a bowl of festive holiday collards and gifts of fruit and hard candy.
The children have 203, and Luce tucks Dolores and Frank into bed under a deep pile of quilts. She reads the one about the heifer hide and the one about the goats. And for this particular night, she summarizes as best she can the poem with all the reindeer names, though she has to make up three of them on the fly. She concludes the storytelling with the one line she remembers exactly. Away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
As soon as she closes the door, Luce immediately begins planning ahead to next October. A docent walk in an abandoned field on a dry afternoon, weeds shoulder-high and some locusts and pines starting to come in. The subject will be all that hopeful business of forest reclaiming its place, the sequence of plants from bare ground to cove hardwood forest. She’ll break off a stem of dried bull thistle for the children to admire the structure of its flower. Then hold it up to her mouth and say the magic words. Draw a deep chestful of breath and blow the down into the world to fly away with the air and fall to earth.
Downstairs, Stubblefield sits reading, the radio faint and the fire burning old and slow. The .32–20 on the end table. Luce sits next to him on the settle and leans against his shoulder and reads his book. Something about beatniks climbing mountains. Outside, a noise. Probably a limb falling from one of the old oaks. Stubblefield doesn’t look up from the book but moves his right hand to the arm of the settle, a foot from the pistol.
Doors locked, weapons close. But every day that passes, Bud’s presence fades. Nothing but a feeling. No telling for sure whether he is still going or long gone. Fled into the distance or absorbed into the landscape, which does not punish or reward but cleanses all bones equally.
For Annie
Also by CHARLES FRAZIER
COLD MOUNTAIN
THIRTEEN MOONS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHARLES FRAZIER grew up in the mountains of North Carolina. Cold Mountain, his highly acclaimed first novel, was an international bestseller and won the National Book Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His second novel, Thirteen Moons, was a New York Times bestseller and named a best book of the year by the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch.