Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [26]
The lawyer’s letter concluded with an unwelcome paragraph. A matter of various unpaid taxes and outstanding bills. And, yet, so little cash money left in the bank accounts. What to do? Please inform.
Stubblefield thought about it, all the shit of ownership. And then remembered his Stanback. He ordered another drink and washed down the healing envelope of bitter powder with the first sip.
FEATURING HIMSELF A BACKROADS, scenic-route guy, and the sun shining again, Stubblefield went indirect. A couple of days driving up the coast, stopping to eat or drink at beach joints and walk in the towns. Jekyll Island, Savannah, Beaufort, Charleston. All the beautiful old places very much like the beautiful place he had just left. Victorian houses, Spanish moss in live oaks, fishing boats at the docks in the afternoon, and waterside fishhouses frying up the day’s catch. The Atlantic changing shades by the hour, verdigris or slate or taupe. Those kinds of special colors.
At Sullivan’s Island, he walked through the dank fort where Poe served time in the Army. And then on to Isle of Palms, where everybody drove a station wagon full of kids in bathing suits, the back-end windows pressed tight with inflated beach balls and floats in shiny primary colors. He parked and swam parallel to the beach, on and on until he couldn’t do it anymore, and then he rested in the wet sand at the water’s edge and swam back.
He drove inland, past sunset through the sandy pine flats and rolling hills, thinking about the mountain lake and the big white frame house. Green trim around the windows and along the fascia boards, a rusting 5v galvanized roof. A deep porch all the way across the front, in whose shade he had turned a geared crank to produce ice cream on summer afternoons. The homeplace was a leftover from some dusty ancestor who bought great swaths of land at auction when the State sold off the Cherokee holdings back in the early eighteen-whatevers. Later, in the deeps of the Civil War past—or probably the Reconstruction, if somebody needed to get precise—his people had owned a whole quarter of a huge mountain. A pie shape of ragged landscape stretching point-first from the summit eastward. Thousands of acres, maybe tens of thousands. But, back then, steep land was worth about a nickel an acre, if you could find a buyer. Over the decades, though, it got a little more valuable, and eventually it did get sold, all but a few fragments, by old Stubblefield’s elder brother.
One year shortly before the Depression, the brother had taken an affection for mournful cowboy music. He was in his middle thirties, a dangerous time of life. Most afternoons from early spring to late fall, he sat on the porch of the farmhouse, lounging in a striped canvas campaign chair and drinking multiple shots of good Scotch. Reaching out periodically to crank the handle of a Victrola, spinning stacks of 78s. “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” “Red River Valley,” “Streets of Laredo.” If, someday, people could see by his outfit that he was a cowboy, his life would be a success. Then, without warning, he was gone, having quietly sold most of the mountain land for much less than it was worth. Decades later, old Stubblefield discovered his brother’s whereabouts and went to visit. He found a tall bowlegged white-haired man living in a little bungalow in downtown Rawlins, Wyoming. The brother’s life had been a great success. He wore Levi’s except to church and a John B. Stetson hat every day of