Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [60]
Stubblefield decided to play interviewer. Out walking the children or sitting on the porch, he drew fragments of Luce’s past from her with surprising delicacy, at least surprising to him. He watched and listened closely, asked questions only up to a line beyond which he sensed she’d spook away from him. Mostly, she had to be coaxed, and then sometimes she didn’t. He felt like a Depression-era WPA writer interviewing a reticent ninety-year-old about the great flood of 1873 and, at the same time, some half-folkloric riverboat race where a boiler blew and dozens were scalded to death by the steam. Get a little bit of one story and then a little bit of the other, and never be entirely sure how much to believe of either.
WHEN STUBBLEFIELD ASKED why Luce had taken the job at the Lodge, she said she wanted to get far from town, and the lake was beautiful. Old Stubblefield had been kind to her and an interesting man to work for, if you could call what she did work.
And that would have ended it if Stubblefield hadn’t kept probing. When he returned to the topic, she said she took the job at a point where she was of a mind to get over thinking about hopes and fears and desires. They didn’t help a bit when it came to voyaging safely through a day. Just live every one as it came and not let people intrude on you. Shut up and hope everybody else did the same. Strive for whole uneventful weeks where the weather was about all that changed. She pointed out that weather was plenty interesting to watch as it passed over you, and it had entertained people for many thousands of years. And not just immediate weather but also the larger movements of the seasons. You had to learn how to feel the long flow and not get hung up on the day-to-day. Big swellings and recedings, upturned and downturned sweeps linked in slow rhythms built from millions of tiny parts—animal, vegetable, mineral—not just temperature and length of daylight. For example, the way a rhododendron changed throughout the year, month by month. She claimed she had observed and learned nearly a hundred such parts of the local world. She said, Imagine holding every bit of it in your head at one time, this whole place, down to what the salamanders are doing every month of the four seasons. She put the bunched tips of her fingers to each temple and said, Boom. Then spread her fingers and lifted her hands in a gesture of explosion.
WHEN STUBBLEFIELD ASKED about vanity—Luce’s cheerleader beauty-contest days—she was surprisingly forthcoming. Right now she was about as pretty as she cared to be, considering that being pretty drew little but trouble. She wore no makeup, ever, and went many happy days in a row without glancing in a mirror. She cut her own hair, both for economy and preference. When it grew much below her shoulders, she whacked the ends off. She said, It looks just fine that way. Not fashionable, but with an actual style, mainly from it not mattering what you think looks good right this second in the history of hairdos.
When Luce did look in the mirror, she thought she might still be sort of pretty, if you went by what most people thought was pretty. And if that’s the way you went, you had your own problems. It wasn’t like being pretty was an accomplishment, and it would go away in time. So it would be a mistake to get too hung up on it. At which point she looked Stubblefield in the eye.
As for clothes, only two stores in town sold women’s apparel, little of which she could afford. The sewing shop—with its bolts of cascading fabric stacked one above another almost to the ceiling, its bins of translucent Butterick and Simplicity patterns folded in their tight envelopes with optimistic pastel illustrations of wasp-waisted women, its notions case filled with dimpled thimbles