Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [4]
—Pay well?
—I get to live here and grow a garden and pick the orchard. And I get a stipend.
—A stipend? he said.
—That’s what they call it when your pay’s so small they’re embarrassed to call it anything else. Except the old man died. The owner. So right now the stipend is sort of on hold.
—Children can get expensive, the man said. Food and clothes and all.
—I don’t guess any money goes with them? Luce said.
—Maybe the grandparents could help out?
—No, they couldn’t.
—Then, I don’t know. If you could find help with the children, you could move into town and get a better job.
—Yeah, big if.
—Well, the man said.
—So, probably I’ll make do. Don’t you and the government go worrying too much about us after you get in the car and drive back down to the capital city.
—Do you have electricity and plumbing?
—Is that a requirement? Luce said.
The man shrugged his shoulders.
Luce tipped her thumb toward the off-plumb crucifix power pole at the road and the black swagged wires leading to a white ceramic fixture under the porch eave.
—It’s not been the nineteenth century around here for several years, she said.
The man drew his last drag and flipped the butt away, like it wasn’t trash at all, it having had such intimate relations with his breath for a few moments. The smoking butt glanced off a pine tree and landed in brown needles.
Luce went over and picked it up by its flesh-tone filter and dropped it into the red dirt of the drive and crushed it out with her shoe. She wiped her thumb and forefinger on the thigh of her jeans three times, which was probably once or twice too many.
The man said, You probably wouldn’t believe how little I get paid to do this goddamn job.
—I probably might, Luce said.
THAT NIGHT, JUST UNTIL she figured out how to live alongside children in the Lodge, Luce pulled another daybed from the sleeping porch and put it on the other side of the fireplace from hers. Radio playing low, the children slept pretty well, tired from the long day, but Luce lay hovering at the edge of sleep through three DJs.
The shape of long peaceful days prior to the children kept rolling in, and she guessed it would be naïve to believe that wouldn’t change. Days when she had her own life to herself to go walking down the road, free and easy. Though, truthfully, despite all its many joys, life without wheels had a few drawbacks. Hitchhiking, you placed more hope in other people than they would generally bear. You walked and walked and nothing much changed. You had to be attentive to avoid boredom. But for your efforts, there were reimbursments. Elder people and all their hard-earned peculiarities to visit along the way.
In particular, Maddie, living in her own world like it had remained 1898 on and on forever. Or, to be generous, maybe 1917. Her age was indeterminate, as long as you started with old and worked up from there. Her house sat back from the road, and by late summer, flowers grew thick in the yard. Coneflowers and gladiolus and black-eyed Susans and goosenecks all tangled together. In the fall, hot red peppers and brown leather britches drying on lines of cotton twine drooping from the porch posts. Maddie mostly stayed in her country kitchen, with its wood cook stove and dinner table and fireplace, the stones sooted from fifty thousand hearth fires mostly lit by women long dead. The main touches of the current century were a few light bulbs swinging on braided cords from the ceiling.
Maddie wore flower-print cotton dresses all year round and topped them off with pilled cardigan sweaters in the cool months, and she might have been tall and willowy when she was young, before time compressed her into herself, thickening and shortening and bending year by year until all you could see of the young woman she had been were her quick blue eyes, faded almost to the color of steel. Some days she’d be in a mood. All she wanted to use were the sorts of words she’d grown up hearing. Yonward and thither. Hither. Sward. On a really bad day, half of what she