Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [99]
In the cave of a hollow tree, the children crowd together. Right at their feet, the fire they lit at dark needs constant attention. They judge their sticks and limbs to be skimpy for lasting the entire night, and they begin rationing early on. Still snowing hard enough to discourage them from leaving their tree to hunt more wood in the dark. They feed the fire only the least amount to keep it alive.
Close by the fire, Sally locks her knees and sleeps standing. The outer hair of her winter coat lies on her back like a thatched roof. Underneath, a thick layer like boiled wool, so snowmelt runs down her sides and drips off her belly without soaking through. In her time, she’s lived through many such nights. Miserable and shivering, icicles hanging in her mane and tail. But she’s always been standing come sunrise.
Same for the children. They are not tender babes. They have experienced considerable pain. Cold is more like discomfort, one more thing to take. Shut down, let your breath become shallow, and wait for it to be over. Then go on. No tears, no wishes.
They feed their little fire with twigs hardly bigger than pencils and lean against each other, not thinking forward or backward. Let the night play out, and go on in the morning. Keep running. But it isn’t the Lodge and Luce they’re running from. The Lodge was a fine weird place to live. And Luce was a little bit like Lily, what they still remember. But they don’t expect mama love. What they need is everything even and smooth. Not love or hate, pleasure or pain, hope or fear, safety or danger. Nobody kissing your cheek at bedtime till you tingle with pleasure in your stomach, and nobody making you bleed. Accept one and you have to accept the other, that’s the deal. You can’t control everything that happens. All you control is your mind. Make it like the lake on a still day. Don’t react any more than you can help, not to outsiders. Trust only the two of you all the way. Hoard up your love for each other and state your rage by way of things that want to burn.
And that had been working pretty well for them, until Bud erupted out of nowhere. Then they broke all the rules. Reacted big, let themselves get scared again. But not just scared. That was no big deal. Fear was every moment. Constant as breath, no matter how hard you tried to tamp it down. What they did was panic. And that was way outside the boundaries of the deal.
BUD FAILS TO ANNOUNCE his presence. Stumbles trembling straight into camp from the dark. Lucky not to get shot. Hunters have many stories of beasts and ghosts that haunt the woods at night, hungry for human blood. As it is, they are mostly too drunk to shoot. So when Bud arrives, one of them raises a toast with his jelly glass.
Nobody gets at all worried about Bud’s closeness to death, or even offers a dry blanket. Sit by the fire and take a cup of coffee or a drink of white liquor, is all the concern they muster.
Whereas Bud is convinced he is neck-deep in a life-or-death survival kind of night, here is this clutch of hoary men, on the same mountain in the same weather, yet occupying a whole different reality from his. They’re having a party. Cozy as hell in the killing weather. An enormous blaze from chain-sawed lengths of resinous fir and hickory and oak. A brown tarp stretched between tree trunks to keep them dry if the snow falls too heavy, but for now they sit out in the open, some of them in shirtsleeves, and let the heat of the big fire sizzle it away before it ever reaches them.
Around the fire, the world draws down to a small beautiful circle.