Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [57]
The eldest sister said, It won’t ever go away.
The middle sister, Luce’s first-grade teacher with the flashing glasses and violets pinned to her lapel, leaned to set her empty cup into its saucer. She said, Luce, when you were a little girl, you weren’t afraid of anything. It’s what first caught my attention about you. Probably because I never have been that way. First day of school every year, even now, I look out at those little faces, every one needing something from me, and I start feeling like I can’t breathe thinking about the hundred and eighty days ahead. I’ve learned to remember there will be good days and bad days. For me and for them. Many rivers to cross between fall and spring.
WHEN LUCE GOT BACK out to the car, Stubblefield held up his book. He said, Forty pages, and I’m feeling calm and melancholy. Like meditating, if I had the time to stick with it.
Inside the car, Luce felt her mood lighten a shade or two. She believed she wanted to ride a little more, take back roads and stretch the trip home even longer than it was.
—The kids will be fine with Maddie, Luce said. Something about the way she talks to them, same tone she uses with Sally. Like everybody is all fine and serene, and nobody requires anything from you except to enjoy a big dinner together. Today was going to be white bean soup with lots of ham, and a skillet of cornbread.
Stubblefield drove below the dam and followed the river through the valley. The farm country beginning to wrap up operations for the summer, cornstalks waiting to be cut for fodder and broad tobacco leaves bundled and hanging upside down in open barns to dry, waiting for auction. Long rows of cabbages, the dusty green outer leaves veined like the back of an old man’s hand. Beyond the fields, wooded slopes pitched upward to the ridges and peaks, the foliage shading toward yellow and orange and red.
Luce looked at Stubblefield and then back out the window. She said, I’m trying to help the children get better if they can. They were learning to talk when they were two or three. Lily wrote me letters about the words they knew. They stopped, and now they’re starting again. I read to them, take them for walks and try to teach them about where they are. Flowers and history. Music. I try not to feel sorry for them. They don’t seem to want it, and I think it would be bad for them. Start feeling sorry and coddling them and having no expectations, they’ll be like this forever. And maybe they will be anyway. They’ve killed a couple of roosters, which for a little child is a pretty fierce undertaking. Go look at a big rooster and picture being about three feet tall with one of those wild bastards standing chest-high, spreading his neck feathers and glaring and hooking his yellow beak at you. They’ll flog you, claw you, peck your face. I don’t really know how they did it with no weapons except maybe sticks.
—So, you admire them? Stubblefield said.
—I’m just making a point about them improving. After that incident at the corner of the Lodge, which was mainly a singe, they’ve been better about setting fires.
—You counting my grandparents’ farmhouse in there, or what?
—That’s a possibility, not a fact, Luce said.
—Sort of a dark charcoal-grey area?
—Well, if you want to get sarcastic about it, of course they did it. I just didn’t witness it. And you’ve been swell about that, by the way.
—Glad you noticed.
When they made the turn onto the dirt road that led around the back side of the lake, Luce reached over and took Stubblefield’s hand for a moment and held it and then gave it back to him, like an experiment by a thirteen-year-old girl on a first date. And Luce hoped he had enough sense not to make anything of it, except within himself.
CHAPTER 5
GREY-DARK, AND LIT HAD already pulled on the headlights when a spotted hog scooted across the road, traveling low to the ground at desperate speed, streaming black blood from a head wound. At the white line on the far side of the pavement, its joints buckled and it fell forward in a long skid