Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [62]
WHEN STUBBLEFIELD ASKED if Luce got lonely—living mostly outside of communication with the world, no phone, wasps nesting in the mailbox—Luce said sure she got lonely, but there had been many reimbursements. Animals, for example. Amazing that anything as big as deer and bear survived the bloodthirsty bygones when we snuffed out everything else of size. Bison gone before 1800, elk not long after, wolves before 1900, and panthers shortly after World War I. Dates verified by Maddie and old Stubblefield and other elders. No more left in these mountains or anywhere else for at least a thousand miles. Complete erasure. Except Luce, out walking at sunrise one morning last fall, saw something at the upper end of old Stubblefield’s hay field, something big and pale moving against the dark of the wood’s edge. It went along the fence line, and its sand-colored body and long tail didn’t lack much of reaching from post to post, which Luce later paced off to be eight feet. And the animal moved like no big dun-colored dog or deer ever did. It went smooth and low and soft-footed in the long grass that in the dawn light was close to the color of the cat. If she had not been alone, she would never have seen the panther or felt the hope it spread into the world like rings around the splash of a rock thrown into a still lake.
When Stubblefield came back around to the topic of loneliness, Luce got insistent about the reimbursements. A great deal of pleasure to be found in the growth of vegetables. And in the fall, birds passing over in waves, their calls singing of distance and other landscapes and the weird tones of Maddie’s folklore songs from back in an older America. Or a younger one, depending on your perspective. Also, the sadness and bravery of new doomed sprouts growing from dead blighted chestnut trees. At night, you could walk outside and look anywhere except straight across the lake to the town and not see a light, just shapes of black mountains against the charcoal sky and the brilliant stars overhead. Except sometimes in summer when fishermen went out on the lake in their little boats and shined big flashlights into the water to draw bass. Plus, recently, the hateful satellites whizzing over, marring the constellations.
And the obvious freedom of living alone could not to be discounted. Sample days from Luce’s pre-children life included summer afternoons swinging in an army-surplus jungle hammock she had bought for a dollar fifty. It smelled of mildew and had a canvas roof and mosquito-netting sidewalls. She strung it between two hemlocks, and it was like a pup tent levitating. Inside, she could float and look out at the garden and the woods, all misty through the netting, and read books from the lobby shelves. Seventeen by Booth Tarkington. Volumes of the outdated Britannica. The usual afternoon temperate-rainforest shower fell on the hammock roof and then passed and the sun came back out. Come autumn, build a late-afternoon campfire in the yard and sit in a striped canvas campaign chair and watch the night come on and drink a scant glass of the old important liquor from the basement. Watch the sun and moon and planets fall one after another down the same curved path to the horizon.
Stubblefield said, So you’re happy out walking alone at dawn seeing extinct animals? What about before that? Two in the morning kind of lonely?
Luce said that was pretty bad, no denying it. Sometimes, maybe she felt like a piece of her that used to be there was gone. But she had figured out a shape that days needed to take so that she hardly noticed whether she was happy or not. Keeping your mind on every day as it came was part of it. The garden, the chickens, firewood, cooking. The four seasons. Late summer, the last small watermelons and tired tomato plants putting out just one or two smallish fruits before shutting down for good. Then pumpkins turning bright, and the last apples in the old orchard little and misshapen but sharp and clean-tasting, with just the right balance of sweet and