Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [19]
So it was a welcome moment when Bud crossed a low gap and dropped toward a lakeside town, streetlights and neon glowing ahead. At the edge of town, a giant towering sign cast a distorted image of itself onto the wet pavement. Twisted tubes in pink and lavender and yellow outlined an Indian wearing a feather headdress, and underneath, flowing blue letters spelled out the title of the place. CHIEF MOTEL.
Bud checked in, and the room had a surprise television, though when he turned it on, he found only one snowy station featuring a man in a gas station uniform guessing the weather. Then an old melancholy Wolfman movie, to which Bud fell asleep and dreamed one of his favorite innocent clarifying dreams involving Jesus’s blood bathing the world and making it fresh and clean. It was like the picture on the paint can, except it was blood pouring over the North Pole and dripping off the equator.
Bud woke late morning with a feeling of certainty about his future. He swung his feet to the floor and sat up and said aloud, I don’t know when, but I do know how. Then he started reflecting. In a minute, with less conviction, he said, Maybe I don’t know how, but I do know where.
CHAPTER 5
LUCE DIDN’T CLAIM ANY UNDERSTANDING of young children, or even one useful bit of knowledge about them, and though Maddie had plenty of opinions to share, they were largely theoretical. Luce couldn’t even look back to her own childhood and remember anything practical in regard to child care. She wondered if Lily’s children had even pushed out their baby teeth. When did they stop doing that? She was like her father in degree of ignorance. He used to say that when Luce was born, the first time he saw her, she was asleep. He asked the nurse how old they had to be for their eyes to open.
Luce did know that if Dolores and Frank were able to go to school, they would immediately take the common childhood diseases one right after the other. Measles, mumps, chicken pox. What a mess that would be. They were pretty, and that’s about all they had going for them. Speckled and lumpy and scabby wasn’t much to look forward to.
As an experiment, Luce tried to teach the kids to count, get them to number their fingers, say their age. No dice. Bedtime, she tried to play Little Piggies with them, adding numerals to the old rhyme for educational purposes. This biggest one went to market. This number two little piggy stayed home.
But the children attended poorly and found no delight in having their toes handled. In fact, just the opposite. They drew their feet from her fingers and pushed them under the covers and scooted close together, shoulder to shoulder, ready to flee inside themselves if Luce insisted on continuing with the game.
The first time Luce tried to take their clothes off to help them bathe was a bad day. They cried bleak, silent tears. They could bawl like calves or wail like beagles when they were frustrated or mad, but this was something else. She stopped undressing them immediately, but they went off into their own heads, dazed, and stayed there for hours.
She found, though, that if allowed to undress themselves, they didn’t mind being buck naked outdoors. Pour a pail of chill spring water over them in the backyard while they soaped themselves, and all was okay. But it was still muggy August. Come a November morn, frost white on the ground, then what? A pair of children could get to smelling pretty high over the course of the cold months, was Luce’s guess. But mainly she began thinking about how bad their bad patch must have been for them to go down so deep where fear and pain couldn’t reach.
AFTER THE BATH INCIDENT, Luce never saw the children cry again. It was not a channel they used to communicate. They expressed their feelings in ways besides whimpering and chin quivering and their eyes watering