Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [89]
In front and out back, no children and no smoke signals rising in the near distance. She runs the lakeshore a couple of hundred yards in either direction and then back to the Lodge. Looks harder this time, calling their names as she checks the sleeping rooms of the second floor and down into the cellar and then up into the eaves, opening doors and saying their names in a tone that means business. She gives up and heads straight for Maddie’s place, running as long as she can and then walking.
But Maddie hasn’t seen them. They’re both thinking Bud but not exactly saying it. Maddie starts down the road to the phone at the country store to call the law, for whatever that’s worth. Luce goes back home, shouting for the children constantly. Alternately walking and jogging in the thin angular light of late fall, the lake blue with tiny waves breaking against the shore rocks.
EVERYTHING QUIET and empty up in the windowless, claustrophobic warren of servants’ quarters, the halls shoulder-wide, the rooms like closets, the tiered bunks narrow as coffins. They press together in the dark, as far under a bottom bunk as they can get. When everything stays quiet and empty for a long time, they come out wary and slip down the two flights of stairs and start packing for a long journey. They wrap a fist of matches in wax paper. The splits of fatwood kindling they’ve used for their game and a leather thong for making a fire bow, if it should come to that. They put great faith in their feel for the various materials necessary for fire, how to light them up. The difference between dry kindling on a clear day and damp kindling in a drizzle. How moisture fights you and wants material things to rot slow over long years, whereas you want them to blaze away right now.
They pack a red box of raisins, a cylinder of red-skinned bologna, and a yellow wedge of cheese. Canned peaches and green beans and okra and tomatoes. A jar of peanut butter. Flesh-colored sleeves of Ritz crackers and a jar of dark honey with a chunk of comb in it.
Also, out on the back porch, a red gallon of kerosene used for lighting the woodstove. Less than half full, a heavy slosh in the bottom of the can. Oh so dangerous, according to Luce. Keep away. But they take it anyhow.
Then to the smokehouse, the box of Lily’s things. Frank buries his face in one of the flat foxes from the stole and takes a long inbreath of Lily’s scent, and then puts it back in the box. It’s the bundles of dry tinder they’re needing. Finally, a pat of pockets to make sure the lightning buckeyes are on board.
They know to stay away from roads exposed to the world. Woods are the place for escapees. Each carrying a tow sack of goods, they walk over the ridge to Maddie’s place and sit still in the dead weeds outside the paddock and watch the windows of the house for movement. They sneak to the shed and get the bridle and scoop grain into their sacks, and open the gate and go in. Sally walks over to meet them, and when Dolores holds out the bridle, Sally puts her head down and takes the bit of her own accord and Dolores slips the headstall over her ears and buckles the throatlatch. Using the fence rails like a ladder, they mount up and fit themselves into the curve of Sally’s back and ride out the gate.
Their only idea about where to go is farther away from people, deeper into the mountains, up to the highest peaks. So they look where they want to go and grip Sally with their legs. She steps out eager, ears forward. They enter the edge of pines and fade into shadows.
IT’S NOT UNTIL after a few beers in the dim calm of the pool hall that Bud begins lining his thoughts into proper order. He let himself lose the picture in his mind of who he wants to be. And way back then, in the children’s memory, is somebody he’d like to forget, even if they haven’t. One sure thing: getting puking scared