Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [85]
But if she had taken her father’s gift as it was intended and carried it on her person at all times, Luce could have cut Mr. Stewart’s throat. Blood leaping into the air and covering his white shirtfront and tweed lapels. Horny, thrusting Mr. Stewart trying fruitlessly to suck air through a windpipe hanging out his neck like the end of a garden hose. Lay him wide open.
So, in retrospect, maybe Lit had known a thing or two after all. It was one of those timeless patterns. Children rediscover their parents’ wisdom when they finally become adults themselves. If wisdom is the right word for going relentlessly armed with a blade honed so microscopically keen that when you cut somebody, they never stop bleeding.
STUBBLEFIELD WAS THE owner of a nostalgic pistol. Early days after the fire, he had looked around the outbuildings of the old place for something to remember it by. In the smokehouse, he’d found his grandfather’s .32–20 rusting in a wooden box along with other tools. The head of a hand axe, an awl, various sizes of chisels, a plane. All Stubblefield remembered the pistol ever being used for was shooting snakes in the yard and weasels or foxes trying to kill the chickens. So it made sense that it had ended up in the toolbox. His grandfather hadn’t made a symbol of manhood out of it, and it wasn’t fancy. No nickel and pearl, merely a plain Colt, all the blue gone and the grip chipped. But, of course, it was the pistol and not the plane that Stubblefield decided to take with him as a memento. He had cleaned it and oiled it and displayed it beside his record player, like a smart-ass objet d’art. Now Stubblefield went to the Western Auto to see if they carried .32–20 loads.
Man behind the counter said, Sure we do. Old boys up the coves still use them. So Stubblefield bought a box of Remingtons, and then on the way out the door changed his mind and bought three more.
—What you planning, going to war? the man behind the counter said.
Back at his cottage, Stubblefield decided to move in at the Lodge whether Luce liked it or not. He grabbed up the essentials. Some clothes for the cold weather to come, the record player, Kind of Blue, the pistol.
When he got to the Lodge and began unpacking his things from the trunk of the Hawk, there wasn’t any discussion. Even the kids helped carry a load.
That night, they all slept together in the main room. The children on their bed near the fire. Stubblefield and Luce half-reclined on a settle with their feet on an ottoman, Stubblefield’s good hand in her hair. The fire burning low and the radio low too, so they could hear sounds from outside. The pistol within reach and the doors locked.
FIRST A DAY OF blowing cold and even a skift of snow high on the peaks as the front arrived. Then a clear cold night followed by a morning where, even two hours after dawn, real shadows gone, strange frost-shadows cast crazy brilliant interpretations of the angles of Lodge and smokehouse and springhouse glittering across the lawn. By late afternoon, the day had become warm enough to sit on the porch in the weathered rockers.
Luce poured two glasses of red wine from a basement bottle with a mildewed French label. Old and awfully good and autumnal in the November sundown with brown frost-bit apples still hanging from bare limbs in the orchard and a fingernail radius of yellow moon following the sun to the horizon. Leaves covered the grass. Something yet trilled in the woods, a final katydid or frog. A bite in the air, and not a cloud in the sky. Bands of soft color glowed above the westward peaks. Peach and apricot and sepia, fading in pretty degrees to blue and finally indigo straight up. Expressed as art, the colors would lay on canvas entirely unnatural and sentimental, and yet they were a genuine manifestation