Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [50]
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A BLUE-SKY SEPTEMBER DAY, color in some of the trees, especially poplar and dogwood. Luce and the children walked past the edge of what was once a cornfield, but now the lovely hopeful processes of plant succession had transformed it into a Brer Rabbit briar patch. The arcing canes etched a tangled geometry where bright migrant finches, yellow and black, darted for the last drupelets of withered blackberries. In a cleared space about the size of a stage, a pony mare harnessed to a long pole paced a circle centered on a simple machine made mostly of wood, a mill designed for crushing cane to make molasses. A nearly forgotten folkways practice from the past, but not an irretrievable past. Short of poisoning all life or blowing it up, people could keep doing it on and on, if they wanted to. Like when you’re on the wrong road, you turn around and go back.
Luce believed that the children could learn something here. A calmness. Some seasonal lesson about time flowing forward pretty steady, and this day connected to all the others, and the years connected too. Not every day needing to stand all by itself and be its own apocalypse.
Maddie wore a broad-brimmed man’s hat and tended a slow fire of wood coals under a big three-legged iron cauldron of simmering cane squeezings. She sat on an upturned stub of log with her shanks crossed and her boots unlaced, and when Luce and the children arrived, she tipped her face out of the shadow of her hat brim and winked a pale eye at them. She scraped at a raw split cane with a pocketknife and then licked the white marrow off the blade. When the pony came around at less than the necessary pace, Maddie tapped her with a long stick, a gentle reminder of the job they were doing together. The air sweet with the smell of the crushed stalks heaped in bright yellow piles and the boiling molasses syrup and wood smoke. No sound in the immediate world rose louder than the grinding of the cane press, and it so muffled as not to obscure the shuffle of the mare’s feet in the dirt and the occasional pop of the hickory fire.
Normally, the children would have offered a lot of emotion back at the fire, but the mare drew their attention so strong that they ignored everything else. And, Luce hoped, not because it was occasionally being struck with a stick.
The pony was a stocky elderly Welsh cob, dusty black and already growing her winter shag, even before the first frost. She was descended from pit ponies, bred to pull mine carts, but was several New World generations beyond that ancestral brutality—being lowered by a belly strap down into a horrible dark shaft to live a brief life beyond the light of day. Her nose was pink as a rose petal over yellow teeth nubbed from cribbing. Pale patches at hip bones and shoulders where her hair was worn down almost to the hide by time and work. She sported a wide barrel and a deep neck, and her back swagged low between her shoulders and her hips. Her expression struck Luce like she held no illusions, having seen it all. Yet her ears aimed forward, alert and hopeful for the next significant thing to appear, even though right then, walking in a circle, she just kept seeing the same old scenery come back around every thirty seconds.
Maddie looked up from tending her bubbling molasses and saw the children’s interest. She came over and said to Dolores, You can ride her, if you care to.
Maddie grabbed Dolores at the armpits and swung her onto the mare’s down-slung back. Dolores neither fighting Maddie’s touch nor falling numb and surrendering to some black personal hole down deep in herself. She sat on the mare’s back and grinned.
Frank, watching his sister, raised his arms to be lifted as well.
The two of them fit perfectly into the sway of the mare’s back. Dolores, in front, grabbed a handful of mane, and Frank squeezed his arms around Dolores’s waist and pressed his face against her back with his eyes closed at first, as if to feel only so much sensation all at once. Maddie gave the mare