Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [16]
When Maddie had finished four heaping batches of the strips, she salted them and dashed hot drops of green-pepper sauce on them, and then poured four tall glasses of cold buttermilk. Beads of condensation ran down and printed dark rings on the newspapers. Maddie and Luce and the children sat and started eating with their fingers.
Luce tried to guess the name of the meat. It was good. Crisp and greasy. Inside the brown crust, pure white as a shaving from a bar of Ivory soap. But it had little flavor of its own. Mainly a chewy texture.
—What? Luce asked.
—Spinal cord, Maddie said.
—Of what?
—Hog.
—Hum.
—Not many people bother to eat it anymore.
—It’s way better than I would have guessed, Luce said.
—Probably, if you breaded cardboard in cornmeal and fried it in lard, it would taste pretty good too.
Dolores and Frank downed their buttermilk and ate their share of fried spine clean down to the paper and then sat sniffing their fingertips, remembering a grand moment just passed.
—I like it when people like my cooking, Maddie said.
She got up and went rummaging among various boxes and bags in cupboards and dressers, looking for her fairy crosses. She collected them. Knew a secret spot, a runneled dirt bank deep in the woods. After a hard spring rain washed the crystals out of the ground, she could find as high as three perfect crosses out of the many X’s. She threw the X’s back to the ground because they were bad luck. She kept the crosses in a shoe box. But someday, she would let them go back to the wild, scatter them in the woods so they could become miracles again for future pilgrims.
When Maddie found the box, she dug around making a selection, and then gave Dolores and Frank two of the smaller ones, perfect and identical in the intersections of their angles. Also two shiny brown buckeyes from a tree struck by lightning and thus sacred.
Said, Carry them in your pockets for protection.
Then she brought out the main welcome gift she had bought on a recent rare trip to town. A child-sized straw cowboy hat, bright red. She set it on Frank’s head and said, Welcome to the lake. Luce could tell Maddie was awfully proud of the gift, but she also saw trouble written all over Dolores’s face. Luce said her thank-yous and hustled the children out the door and up the road toward home, thinking that a few weeks ago she would have made the same mistake. Not having children of her own, it had likely never occurred to Maddie that she’d better buy two hats.
Before they got much past the first bend, Dolores slapped the hat off Frank’s head, and then they rolled in the dirt. Luce, pretty hot, grabbed them by their collars and separated them and stood them on their feet. Then she took a slow breath and decided that for the rest of the afternoon, they each had to wear the hat exactly fifteen minutes. She mashed the hat on Dolores’s head and clicked her fingernail five times against her watch crystal. Said, Dolores, you have to wear the hat until three thirty-two, then Frank has to wear it. Don’t cross me on this.
Dolores took the hat off and tried to give it to Frank, who wouldn’t take it. Luce made her put it back on, and Dolores walked tragic and sad-hearted, dragging the toes of her sneakers in the dirt, her face down and shadowed by the brim. At five to go, Luce started counting off the minutes. Dolores’s mood suddenly brightened, and dread overwhelmed Frank. At the moment of transferring the hat, Dolores danced three happy steps.
Back at the Lodge, they sat in the porch rockers, sulled