Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [21]
—Just so you know, I’ll not be back.
For a while afterward—as if that one day fell into the same category of frequency as a total eclipse of the sun, possibly a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence—Luce went back to doing what she did before school burst into unwelcome existence. Play with homebody Lily in the mornings. Then, in the afternoon, solo walks in the woods to watch the change of plants and their colors as the season drove forward toward fall. Study odd bugs and flowers. Throw rocks in the creek. Look at whatever birds and animals and reptiles presented themselves to her, and also the way weather goes always different from moment to moment and day-to-day, and the bigger circle-shaped repeated patterns of season and year. See whether or not she could smell squirrels in the trees on damp days.
Put to it, her parents would have said they did indeed care whether Luce attended school. Sure they did. It was just that fights and hangovers and sweet makeups intervened. In the specific misery of day-to-day life, they couldn’t wake up at six in the dawn and give a great shit whether she went that one particular day or not. But one day leads to another, and so on. No way around it. It’s that merciless thing that time does. And then suddenly the leaves are falling off the trees and it’s October. A tall man in a Harris Tweed overcoat and a tie comes knocking at the door to set matters right.
The man didn’t talk to her parents beyond about three exchanges of questions and answers before he saw how things stood, how young they were, particularly Lola. He’d seen it all before. He pulled little first-grade Luce aside and leaned down and looked her in the face. He asked her in a low voice if she wanted to grow up to be like her parents. Even then she knew to blow air out her nose and say, Not hardly.
—Then you need to go to school every day, the man said. He squeezed her shoulders and looked her in the eye and said, You go, whatever it takes. I’ll push them, and I’ve got the law on my side. But there will still be days where it will be up to you. And next year, you’ll have to help your sister.
So thereafter Luce attended, whether her parents had yet roused themselves of a morning or not. Some nights, to save time and signify her resolve, Luce would go ahead and dress for the next day before she went to bed. And waking wasn’t a problem. Anybody can turn out the lights and think a time in their head when they want to get up and do it. They only have to try. Luce could already reach the stovetop, and it is no mystery to make a pot of especially good oatmeal if nobody stands over you worrying about whether you’re wasting too much brown sugar and butter.
The lady schoolteacher with the flashing glasses turned out to know a valuable thing or two, such as how to teach you to read. Though she had her faults, like everybody else. For example, how she chose to deal with a pale quiet country girl in a faded flower-print cotton dress who had never seen ice cream before. Thinking to take it home to share with her little brother, the girl carried her dessert ice-cream sandwich from the lunchroom back to class and put it beneath her desk, where it melted all over her books and papers and made a thick muddy puddle on the wood floor. What that mistake got her was grabbed by her upper arm and marched out to the hallway. Everybody became quiet. And then bam, bam, bam. The long paddle was an inch thick and had twelve holes bored in it.
In addition to the regular paddlings, there were horrific arithmetic flash-card battles where half the class stood on one side of the room and the other half on the other. The teacher went down the lines calling for answers, pitting side against side, holding up big white cards with