Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [66]
Stubblefield acted like he hadn’t heard those last bits and said, Seeing James Brown would be like going to church and speaking in tongues. But I don’t want to quarrel about it.
—Oh, did I miss something? Luce said. Should I get out my diary? October ninth. Our first quarrel. I am devastated.
IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS, having passed on the spectacular dates, Luce tried to think of reimbursements. Breathe an autumn afternoon’s crisp breath, tilt your face up to yellow sunshine, observe ragged blue mountains lying in five folds to the sky, receive the faint daily joy that’s offered. Such as, for a couple of weeks, a tortoise with bright yellow concentric rectangles on its brown shell had walked west to east across the lawn shortly after dawn. Or that during the same period, wild hen turkeys, usually five, had come at dusk and launched themselves, one by one, into a big oak down by the lake, where they roosted to keep away from night dangers, especially all the predatory mammals that liked to eat them. And though Luce fell into that category, she wished this particular bunch luck, no matter how good one of them might taste roasted in a hickory-fired oven, with six strips of bacon draped over the breast and an apple, an orange, and an onion shoved up inside the cavity.
Perfect attendance, that was the goal. Try to get enough quiet so your mind lined up right, and you found out new things about yourself. The Gulf and James Brown would, no doubt, be splendid and powerful. Climactic experiences. And staying home with Dolores and Frank would be frustrating and confining and inconclusive. To little effect beyond the awful dailyness of life. The dismal failures and rare moments of minor victory. And it wasn’t even as if love factored much. Luce didn’t expect to love the children, and she sure didn’t expect them to love her ever. That was a lot to ask in either direction. But there was something she was feeling toward them, and it had to do with their survival. Damaged and scathed, they sure were. But they had lived through a ruinous encroachment. And, yet, they hadn’t become withered and tender children. They could be little fierce savages when they wanted to. Much of the time, they didn’t give two shits for your particular world and could endure pain, whether yours or theirs, as stoic as an Apache. And when they saw an opportunity, they avenged themselves against the reality they occupied. Strike a match and score a point toward getting even. Some days they seemed nearly fatal and exhausted as elderly Geronimo photographed in his later years, blank-faced but still watchful out of beady sharp eyes. Whatever feeling Luce was starting to have toward Dolores and Frank, she hadn’t yet figured out the name for. But it resided in the same family as respect.
Still, those dates would have been grand. And really, for short periods, Maddie made a perfect babysitter. Cocked and loaded every day of her life, the double-barrel always close. A plaited blackjack and chrome pistol in her purse. Armed and fierce and ready to charge the jaws of death to save little ones. Plus, she was isolate enough in her thinking to find Dolores and Frank lovable.
Even without the dates, Stubblefield had begun making it clearer every day that he was in for the long run, if that’s what Luce wanted. The kids didn’t spook him, and he didn’t spook them. He hadn’t fled from her life, which probably he should have done. At which point, Luce spun off briefly, wondering what defects he must have to be so interested in her. And none of it really mattered. She was too overwhelmed with the newness and strangeness of the kids, her life suddenly feeling out of control every day, and the responsibility likely to be hers from now on. So, bad timing when it came to romance.
Something about Stubblefield, though, kept working at her. Just flashes at night, lying half awake. The planes of his face, the angles of his eyes. Maybe simple geometry could explain the unwelcome attraction. Too, so much of her late-night music