Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [55]
Stubblefield said, Yeah, well. So you probably knew the cowboy, then?
—I remember him. We were in school together. He was a couple of years older. Wouldn’t strike a lick at a snake. Grew up and sat around all day listening to records and drinking. Entertaining as hell in a conversation, but you couldn’t count on him for one damn thing. Ask him the time of day, you better look up and check the sun for confirmation.
—My grandfather always said I was a lot like him.
Maddie studied Stubblefield, as if for the first time. Said, You look something alike. He was a tall good-looking fool too.
Luce bumped Maddie with her shoulder. In a whisper, Luce said, Go easy.
Maddie turned to Luce and started to say something, but she read Luce’s face and stopped. Instead she turned back to Stubblefield, and in the same whisper said, If you’re not careful with her, you’ll answer to me.
STUBBLEFIELD DROVE SLOW down a single-lane farm road. On either side, three strands of rusty barbwire drooped between grey locust posts, enclosing weedy pastures in need of cows. He hooked past an unused barn and parked near the back door of a big farmhouse from the previous century. Carved ornaments in the angles of the gables and white paint flaking big as butterfly wings on the clapboards. He started to open his door, and Luce said, No. Either sit here or drive around for thirty minutes.
Stubblefield turned his hands up. Whatever. No hurt feelings.
Not much of a date anyway, since Luce just needed a ride. Though, on the way to pick her up, Stubblefield had stopped at a roadside stand and bought a jar of honey and presented it to her after they dropped the kids off at Maddie’s. Saying, Correct me if I am wrong, but I think this was on the list of acceptables.
Luce had held the jar to the light and studied the legs and wings suspended in the nearly coffee-colored goo, and the pale comb lurking barely visible through the murk. At which point Stubblefield said, I’m starting to think it looks like the cat-head baby in the carnival freak show, floating in the jar of dirty formaldehyde.
—Yeah, maybe. But thanks anyway.
Now Luce wondered about herself. An afternoon without the kids, and all she wanted to do was visit her old primary school teachers. She could tell Stubblefield wondered why. But he seemed to sense how anxious she was and went along without question. He felt under the seat and randomly pulled out one book from the several. Franny and Zooey, with a linty butterscotch Life Saver sticking to the white cover.
—Take your time, he said.
Luce climbed three steps to the back door and tapped her middle knuckle twice on the frame of the screen door and disappeared inside the dim kitchen.
The teachers were angular bright-eyed sisters of a certain age, wielding sharp intellects. Each deeply read in the smart dead Englishmen of past centuries and also a very select few of the elders among American penmen.
While most of their fellow teachers went by Miss, leaving the impression that teachers swore a vow against men as powerful as any nun’s, these three rebels were all Mrs. Among themselves, they had figured out how to go about marriage so as to accomplish the least damage. The husbands lived two hours away, in directions that thirded the compass like a generously cut pie, and none of the men ever visited except on the rarest of occasions, as if a demilitarized zone that they dare not enter had been drawn with a protractor around the women at its center. Nobody even knew exactly what kinds of jobs these men did. On Friday afternoons at three o’clock, the sisters got in their Hudsons, which differed only in color, and drove to their husbands for the weekend. Slightly longer stretches of time for the major holidays, and a couple or three weeks in the summertime. They had no children of their own but had spent decades with the children of others.
Luce was shown into the parlor by one sister while another charged the percolator with