Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [61]
So, with scant money, she wore confusing clothes, owned for years. In summer, she alternated her jeans and loafers with pink or black pedal pushers and white or blue button-down oxford shirts and white Keds or scuffed Capezios from her life before the Lodge. Come fall, baggy turtlenecks and pointed black ankle boots. Everything always clean and pressed crisp, so you didn’t know whether she had a couple of such outfits or a dozen. Which to Stubblefield sounded nothing but delightful. He imagined that her change of attire happened on a schedule determined by what the trees were doing or some other minute cyclic marker of one season giving way to the next. The flowering of ironweed or a specific downward pitch of evening sunlight.
IN REGARD TO ECONOMICS, all Luce cared to say was that she got by. Didn’t care to talk about money any more than religion or politics. Eventually, though, Stubblefield got her talking about her stipend and its limitations. What a nice touch of old Stubblefield’s to use that delicate term, she said. She became enthusiastic telling how she sometimes supplemented her cash by selling worked flints and clay pipe bowls turned up in plowed fields in the spring and after heavy rains year-round. Bird points and spearheads and scrapers from an earlier world. Down in the bowl of a good pipe, you could often see a crust of burnt tobacco and imagine some original inhabitant taking a smoke at the end of day. The roadside tourist shops bought them, along with ginseng roots. They sold the artifacts to tourists, and the roots mostly got shipped around the world to China, as had been the case for a couple of centuries. For gentleman problems, Luce explained.
Also, as a cash crop, she had tried growing a patch of tobacco, but her allotment was so small you could nearly spit across it. The government said that’s all she could grow, and sent a man and a boy around with a spool of measuring tape to enforce its area down to the square foot. After a summer of work, she barely broke even, and after that she gave up on commercial agriculture. During fishing season, anglers sometimes stopped by the Lodge to buy rock bait, stick bait, nightcrawlers.
Stubblefield learned, to his confusion, that Luce had limited use for cash money. Most of what it bought she didn’t want. She was happy without modern conveniences, her desires being mostly impractical and lacking monetary value.
Luce said, What I want most is the ability to whistle the song of every bird in the area.
At which point Stubblefield thought he detected humor going on at his expense.
He said, What about television? That’s something money can buy. You might like Paladin. He can be really dry too.
Luce said, I’ve got radio.
Besides, she told him, you start wanting things too much and you need more and more money. She said she tried as much as possible to live free from the bad idea of money. Otherwise, when you took a job, you inevitably sold your time to someone who valued it lowly. Luce, however, valued her time highly. Luce had it all figured out. Live out of sight from the bullshit of everyday commerce. Use money as little as possible.
But the children threatened Luce’s economics. They would need shoes and clothes, and they went through food faster than a pair of bear dogs. Her garden wouldn’t hold up three cold months under their hunger. By deep winter, the root cellar would be cleaned out of potatoes and cabbages and turnips and acorn squash, and all the colorful mason jars of tomatoes and green beans would empty out and be clear shapes of air lined on a shelf.
When the children went to school, then what? The State said they had to go, but Luce worried that they might harm the other students. She worried about them being cooped up inside a yellow bus for the long ride into town. All that gasoline in the tank.