Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [5]
When Luce stopped for a visit, Maddie would give her a drink of cold spring water from a dented ladle and sing her a song. Maddie knew many ancient ballads about girls getting in trouble and being murdered by the men who had lately so much wanted to get up on them. She warbled and keened at an extreme pitch of emotion unattainable by the young, and the verses of the songs went on and on toward a receding conclusion. They were dark-night songs. Knocked-up girls got stabbed or shot or hit in the head, and then buried in the cold ground or thrown into the black deep river. Pretty Polly. Little Omie Wise. Go down, go down, you Knoxville Girl. Sometimes reproduction did not even factor into the narrative. The man snuffed the girl out because he could not own her, a killing offense if the girl’s opinions ran counter to his urges. In the ballads, love and murder and possession fit tight against one another as an outgrown wedding band on a swollen finger.
Back then, Luce had thought Maddie’s songs were only interesting antiques, but her sister had proved their abiding truth when she came up against Johnny Johnson. Their feelings ran so hot at the start that it must have been sad to watch, though awfully compelling to read about in Lily’s occasional letters, where new love’s bells jangled like a fire engine’s. Lily’s spirit neediness expressed itself raw as a kerosene blaze in the material world. Love, love, love. That’s how she described those few months of desire. Each letter signed in a looping hand: Love, Lily.
Now Luce lay awake in the dark, knowing Maddie’s murder ballads addressed exactly that situation, and taught that the flame of urgent coupling burned hottest against the woman, no matter how romantic and high and heartsick the anguish of the man might be pitched in retrospect. Luce pictured the killer of Omie Wise through a porthole of dirty green water. A noose around his neck and a trapdoor about to open into a black hole beneath his feet. Oh, what longing and regret he then felt. But too late. And also forever too late for Lily to learn that raging passion predicts nothing but a mess of bad news for everybody.
Luce kept trying to sleep, but hundreds of thousands of katydids or locusts or other screeching insects broadcast a high-voltage buzz into the summer night. She got up and turned on one dim mica lamp and went to an oak cabinet taller than she was and took out a cigar box. The children slept on, and Luce sat inside the circle of gold light, the box in her lap, riffling through Lily’s letters from the past few years. Lavender or green or hot pink ink in big happy cursive on coordinating pastel stationery.
Luce opened envelopes at random, reading until she reached a sentence where it became impossible not to criticize Lily’s fatal hope and trust in other people. Everybody Lily met was so wonderful, and the shiny future stretched forever. Every page held evidence against her. Luce never made it all the way through any of the letters before she returned them to Lily’s precise folds.
Luce decided not to read them again until she could appreciate them more. Some far day when she had become a better person and could feel something besides stinging anger that her beautiful, gentle sister had not protected herself more carefully against a world of threat.
CHAPTER 2
BUD WAS A HANDSOME MAN, at least in the retrograde style of the expired southern fifties he still loved so much. High cheekbones, sideburns, upturned collars, and a forelock shaped into a perfect comma down his forehead with a two-fingered swipe of Royal Crown pomade. Bud was nobody’s real name. Sometime in youth, a deluded soul had considered him a friend and dubbed him Buddy Buster.
He had a criminal record by the time he was barely a teenager, caught shoplifting a