Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [52]
The children quivered and drew the quilt up to their noses, and Luce could feel them squirming toward her, their feet reaching under the covers to touch her hip where she sat on the edge of the bed. When the big goat laid the troll low, they drew a deep breath and let it out slow. By the third night, she had them joining her to shout the final lines. Snip, snap, snout. This tale’s told out.
CHAPTER 4
STUBBLEFIELD COULDN’T HELP HIMSELF. After he met Luce, every few days he drove the nostalgic dead-end road and parked below the Lodge. Ostensibly, he came to swim from the little patch of beach his grandfather had made for him one yesteryear, just because he was working on a swimming merit badge. A dozen truckloads of brilliant white sand dumped over the red clay at the water’s edge. All that summer, Stubblefield had spent most afternoons there, sunning and training and reading. He had dreamed of swimming all the way to town. The lake was supposed to be a mile wide at this point, which hadn’t seemed insurmountable back then.
It looked a lot more distant now, though. And not enough warm days left to get in shape. Stubblefield contented himself with trying to go a hundred yards farther up the shoreline each day. Afterward, lie in the sun until his trunks dried, then put his clothes back on. Go up and knock on the door, the real reason for coming. Visit a few minutes with Luce, if she was home. Stay until she got edgy and then leave.
One day, as he came out of the water, he looked toward the Lodge and thought he saw Luce watching him from one of the tall dining room windows. Just a dim shape behind the glass. Still calf-deep, he bent forward and took a low bow. When he looked up, though, the window was empty.
Later, no answer to his knock on the door. He scribbled a note and left it stuck in the crack of the screen door. Nothing clever, just Hi, S. An effort to display interest in their free lonesome circumscribed lives.
And he was truly interested. Otherwise, he’d sell all his holdings, despite the theoretical ag-lease potential. Dump the whole mess at fire-sale prices and buy a red Healey and throw the top away. Just use the tonneau and go tropical and live on Sanibel or Key Largo and wear shorts and flip-flops every day of the year and eat a lot of grouper until the money ran out.
At least, that’s what he would have done anytime previous. Go pursue what his Florida friends liked to call his rich inner life. Always saying it with a cutting edge of irony. But here was this lovely troubling woman Stubblefield had felt all kinds of idiotic things for at seventeen. Hard at the moment to let those go and move on. Though that’s certainly what smart people would do.
If he were one of those, Stubblefield would have worked harder to keep his former fiancée happy. And now he would be wearing a navy blazer with gold buttons, selling Coupe de Villes on the island and waiting for her father to hurry up and die so he’d be running the dealership. Or would that be Coupes de Ville?
Also, look at Luce, a young hermit. And look too at what he had learned about her messed-up family. Mother, a long-gone runaway. Father, a crazy-ass violent lawman. Sister, a murder victim. Niece and nephew, pyromaniac part-time mutes who had burned his homeplace to the ground.
What would smart people do?
Run away, that’s what.
But Stubblefield went to Maddie and tried to buy her mare to please Luce, since she’d gone on and on about how the pony had made the children so calm and undestructive for a minute or two and had caused them to speak a few words.
LUCE WORKED THE SLING blade in rampant weeds growing beside the thread of water running from the spring. The children sat cross-legged on the back porch with a colorful indented circle of Chinese checkers between them. The game was percussive.