Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [67]
But she couldn’t dismiss easily his light touch with her. No pushing or pressing, none of that herding and corralling bullshit, unlike any of her old boyfriends. And maybe who you fell for and who you eventually loved wasn’t rational, no matter how hard you tried to list pros and cons and sum the results. You couldn’t think your way through it, not all the way. Maybe just the scent of somebody carried more weight than everything else put together. She remembered watching him swim. Surprised by how much more at ease he was in the water than on land. Suddenly graceful. The movements of his arms and back and legs, the long muscles under the skin, looked effortless, almost languid. But measure his speed by landmarks along the shoreline, and he was flying.
THE KIDS. They were such a hard fact, at least in their physical presence. No matter how much Stubblefield tried to send out sensitive feelers, hoping to connect with them somehow, and thus become essential to Luce, he failed. All his waves of hope kept being met with mighty currents of dark undertow, and his first concrete attempt at making a connection was a total bust.
Stubblefield tried to engage them in basic conversation. Just chattering, really. Something about how you’re not from here and neither am I. We’re all three here because of ancestors. So this place is strange and familiar at the same time, but in a way, maybe this is where we belong, at least for now. The children eased away toward safe space. Not running or backing off, just sidling slow and retreating steady. No direct eye contact, but always keeping him in their peripheral view.
The next time Stubblefield came to the Lodge, he had devoted some time to thinking. How it was mostly by nouns that the kids reached into the world and touched it provisionally, like a tap with the tip of one finger. So, touch back with equal delicacy. When he got out of the car, the children were squatting on the porch, knees to chins, playing the kindling game. Didn’t even look up. Stubblefield climbed the steps and set an unopened cellophane sleeve of cookies down near their competing shapes of imaginary fire. He said, Fig Newton. Didn’t say another word or wait for a reaction. He walked through the screen door and let the spring slam it behind him. Cool as cool could be.
When he saw them again, it was raining. The trunks of hemlocks streaked vertical black, and the lake flat and dark. The children rocked so hard in the porch chairs that on the backswing they banged the knobs at the tops of the spindles against the siding behind them. And going forward, they held the ends of the arm rails white-knuckled until the chairs almost stood on the tips of the runners and nearly flung them off the porch and into the boxwoods. Their heeling and pitching was both asynchronous and rhythmic in the banging against the siding and the rattling of the curved runners against the cupped floorboards. A percussion song. At the bottom of the steps, Stubblefield said, Good rocking, and made a little one-finger eyebrow salute. Dolores and Frank let up, and by the time he climbed to the porch, they had slowed down enough to salute back, though if you were in a critical frame of mind, the way they did it might have seemed ironic, if not sarcastic. Which suited Stubblefield fine. All he wanted right now was for his existence in their lives to be acknowledged. He wasn’t planning on going anywhere. With luck, they’d have to deal with each other’s peculiarities for a long time.
Next visit, the children were playing in the yard. They both had pie pans, identically black from many excursions into the oven. A rich history of peach and rhubarb and blackberry and apple and pecan and sweet potato and pumpkin pies dating to the previous century. Separately, the children explored the joys to be had from banging the pans against various hard objects. Spinning them away with the sweep of hand and wrist and arm. Watching them float briefly on air and sink to the grass, becoming a circle of shadow set into