Nightwoods (7 page)

On the happy side of things, they forgot bad emotions of their own almost immediately. Not that they came running to hug you around the knees shortly after some violent moment. Asking forgiveness, even by way of facial expression, was not a possibility. More like, they invested no feeling at all in what had happened and expected you to do the same. Let it go. No apologies.
Repent
was a lost word in their lexicon. They did what they did, and moved forward despite whatever trail of ashes they left behind. And Luce wondered if maybe that was what they had to teach her. No looking back. Life goes one way only, and whatever opinions you hold about the past have nothing to do with anything but your own damn weakness. Nothing changes what already happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don’t.

A simple enough lesson, yet hard for Luce to learn. She couldn’t make her thoughts stop running back into the past, craving to be happy about something long gone, feeling sad or shameful for things she should have done differently. If the children came to harm under her care, she would not be able to let it go and move on. Not ever. Guilt would haunt her to her deathbed. It’s what she would be thinking about instead of teaspoons or moon phases or birds. Living life unfettered by the past would be splendid, but she couldn’t do it. She didn’t even really like the children, much less love them. But she loved Lily and would raise her children and not be trash. And her own parents came directly to mind at that point in her thinking.

Apart from Lola’s bitter slaps, benign neglect had been about the worst of it during Luce’s childhood. And that had its reimbursements. Mainly, limitless freedom, even at age five. Who wouldn’t wish for that at any age? Out roaming without anyone calling your name way on into moonlit evening, if that’s what you wanted. Maybe a hug or a tone of concern in a parental voice now and again would have been helpful, but on the other hand, Luce had never been laid into by an angry grown man when she was five or six.

Her parents were too busy with each other to pay much attention to her one way or the other. That was a few years before Lola disappeared, when her father had just returned from the war, back when most days involved empty Blue Ribbon cans and Wild Turkey bottles rolling on the living room floor and the radio too loud and her parents hollering at each other and sometimes snatching at each other’s persons under the influence of great conflicting emotions.

In short, Luce suffered few adult requirements against her until the State dictated that she must go to school. By then, she had been free-range for nearly seven years. The first day of first grade was not bad at all, a certain joy to be had in milling about confused with the other children as the buses emptied. Overseen by a stern tall lady teacher in flashing metal glasses and dressed all in brown with a sprig of violets on her lapel. In the morning, they sat at desks and drew pictures with fragrant new crayons and sang songs, a few of which Luce already knew from when her father came home late at night in a good mood. “Camptown Races” and “Buffalo Gals.” Dinner was some kind of soft grey breaded meat and mashed potatoes drenched in white gravy, with green beans that squeaked when you bit them. And all the yeast rolls and butter you could eat. Good food.

But for all that, even though Luce had sat in careful concentration all day to determine exactly what school was all about, when the three o’clock bell rang, she’d seen all she needed to see. The confinement was intolerable. One little room all day long. Everybody breathing the same tired air together. As the teacher began lining children up for the buses, Luce felt compelled to announce her judgment of school to all in attendance.

—Just so you know, I’ll not be back.

For a while afterward—as if that one day fell into the same category of frequency as a total eclipse of the sun, possibly a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence—Luce went back to doing what she did before school burst into unwelcome existence. Play with homebody Lily in the mornings. Then, in the afternoon, solo walks in the woods to watch the change of plants and their colors as the season drove forward toward fall. Study odd bugs and flowers. Throw rocks in the creek. Look at whatever birds and animals and reptiles presented themselves to her, and also the way weather goes always different from moment to moment and day-to-day, and the bigger circle-shaped repeated patterns of season and year. See whether or not she could smell squirrels in the trees on damp days.

Put to it, her parents would have said they did indeed care whether Luce attended school. Sure they did. It was just that fights and hangovers and sweet makeups intervened. In the specific misery of day-to-day life, they couldn’t wake up at six in the dawn and give a great shit whether she went that one particular day or not. But one day leads to another, and so on. No way around it. It’s that merciless thing that time does. And then suddenly the leaves are falling off the trees and it’s October. A tall man in a Harris Tweed overcoat and a tie comes knocking at the door to set matters right.

The man didn’t talk to her parents beyond about three exchanges of questions and answers before he saw how things stood, how young they were, particularly Lola. He’d seen it all before. He pulled little first-grade Luce aside and leaned down and looked her in the face. He asked her in a low voice if she wanted to grow up to be like her parents. Even then she knew to blow air out her nose and say, Not hardly.

—Then you need to go to school every day, the man said. He squeezed her shoulders and looked her in the eye and said, You go, whatever it takes. I’ll push them, and I’ve got the law on my side. But there will still be days where it will be up to you. And next year, you’ll have to help your sister.

So thereafter Luce attended, whether her parents had yet roused themselves of a morning or not. Some nights, to save time and signify her resolve, Luce would go ahead and dress for the next day before she went to bed. And waking wasn’t a problem. Anybody can turn out the lights and think a time in their head when they want to get up and do it. They only have to try. Luce could already reach the stovetop, and it is no mystery to make a pot of especially good oatmeal if nobody stands over you worrying about whether you’re wasting too much brown sugar and butter.

The lady schoolteacher with the flashing glasses turned out to know a valuable thing or two, such as how to teach you to read. Though she had her faults, like everybody else. For example, how she chose to deal with a pale quiet country girl in a faded flower-print cotton dress who had never seen ice cream before. Thinking to take it home to share with her little brother, the girl carried her dessert ice-cream sandwich from the lunchroom back to class and put it beneath her desk, where it melted all over her books and papers and made a thick muddy puddle on the wood floor. What that mistake got her was grabbed by her upper arm and marched out to the hallway. Everybody became quiet. And then bam, bam, bam. The long paddle was an inch thick and had twelve holes bored in it.

In addition to the regular paddlings, there were horrific arithmetic flash-card battles where half the class stood on one side of the room and the other half on the other. The teacher went down the lines calling for answers, pitting side against side, holding up big white cards with heavy black number problems on them, either plus or minus, depending on what area of ignorance she decided to probe. You got one wrong, you sat down in shame. The last one standing was the winner, though Luce was not alone in wondering what you won other than a feeling of glowing superiority. And further, you were culled into reading circles called Red Birds, Blue Birds, Yellow Birds, and Black Birds. In no particular order. Except it was obvious, even to a bunch of first graders, what the order really was. And discovering that little deception was, in itself, a valuable lesson about authority to tuck away for future use. Even though Luce was never anything but a Red Bird.

In recompense for such moments of terror, there were lots of framed pictures hung around the room to admire at your leisure. Pale stunned Washington, with his strange white side hair, and sad wise Abe, with his weary, baggy eyes and patchy beard like a bum. Also, Blue Boy, who would have been stomped into a mudhole at recess if he’d shown up with even a trace of the attitude he expressed on his smug face, not to mention that outfit. The State provided many free storybooks, especially the ones concerning Jack climbing the beanstalk and the Pied Piper leading the children away to a happy land inside a mountain. There was also a record player and stack of records, including a set of 78s with an accompanying picture booklet telling the compelling story of Peter and the Wolf. Though you could play them only on rainy days when recess was impossible and the class was half crazy by midmorning from the physical pressures of confinement.

Also in the category of reimbursements was this: sometimes the teacher had about all she could take of education and would request that the students read quietly while she went up the hall to have a smoke in the lounge. In her absence, everybody went wild. The deep country boys, the ones from kerosene-lit cabins way up some dark holler, would dance on the teacher’s desk just to show it could be done. Little rebel boys three feet tall in blue jeans with cuffs turned up nearly to their knees so they’d be able to wear them for a few years. And too, if you’re counting happy moments, once a month they all marched quietly in a line down the hill through a stand of dark pines to the town library, where each one got to check out two books all their own for two entire weeks.

Yet, as much as she began to enjoy school, Luce figured that she must never forget the main lesson she was learning, which was very simple. The way they get you is, you trade your freedoms for entertainment.

—
LOOK AT THIS
, Luce said, holding up a curved meerschaum pipe with wizened bearded elf faces carved on the yellowed bowl. It was like a small saxophone. The children didn’t particularly look, but they didn’t not look either. They were liking the dusty clutter of the Lodge’s upper floors, and the pilfering.

Docent Luce had taken them exploring, digging into leather trunks left in attic spaces under the eaves and in storage closets. Foretime lost-and-found stuff like tarnished silver-and-ebony brooches the women thought so little of that they left them strewn in the bureau drawers. Tan floppy-thighed jodhpurs and black boots with rusting eyelets threaded with rotting laces. Which suggested that rich people must have come costumed to the mountains back then.

They found a gramophone with a brass horn shaped like a morning glory blossom and a stack of records in brown paper sleeves. There was still a record on the platter, and Luce blew the dust away and turned the crank and lowered the needle. From the brass cone a man’s voice sang “Pucker Up Your Lips, Miss Lindy,” the sound scratchy and thin. The children focused on watching the record spin and the needle ride the groove. They sprawled on their sides on the floorboards with their heads propped on their hands and seemed relaxed and soothed by the crackling music, ghostly from the past. When three or four notes of the chorus came back around, they’d hum along faintly, blank-faced.

Luce went through the entire stack of records, being the DJ. She played Peg Leg Howell, King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke. A tiny orchestra wheezing away at “The Ride of the Valkyries.” Then some rube duet singing about corn husking, which Luce knew for a fact was no fun at all and tore your hands up, but the rubes seemed to be having a good time making up a happy fantasy about it. Yodelers and blues screamers from soon after World War I, and crooners going back beyond raccoon-coat days, an age lit entirely by the light of the silvery moon. And finally, Jimmie Rodgers’s “T.B. Blues.” It was the only song out of the whole bunch that Luce knew anything particular about, so she explained that Rodgers had lived nearby once upon a time, and then died of tuberculosis, but nevertheless sounded awfully jaunty and belligerent singing about it.

When all the records had been played, both sides, she carried the player and records and a maroon leather album of photographs downstairs.

The photographs were from a summer long ago, and that night after the children had gone to sleep, Luce looked at them carefully, one by one. The corners of the pictures were affixed to the black pages with little scalloped black paper triangles, the glue licked by dead tongues. In the pictures, the Lodge looked nearly new. World War I wasn’t even close to happening yet. A whole different world, but occupying this same space right here. A picture of five girls in high-necked white dresses sitting on the front steps drying their long, shampooed hair in the sun. Two girls dozing together in a hammock with books spread open across their narrow waists and their tapered fingers trailing unconscious from the bindings. Girls batting shuttlecocks across a net on the lawn, skirts to their ankles and ribboned hats on their heads. Girls paddling canoes on the lake. Whiskered men in striped summer suits smoking cigars on the porch after dinner. A lovely grown woman walking across the lawn in a pale summer dress, the hem skimming the grass, her dark hair bunned off her neck and her face blurred by the motion of turning to look at the camera as the shutter clicked.

CLEAR AND MOONLESS
, an hour before sunrise. The children woke and rattled around the lobby. Sliding a mica-shade lamp two inches to the left, a rust-colored piece of pottery four inches to the right. Reordering the Britannicas by some system less obvious than the alphabet. The kinds of things they did when they were hungry or bored. Luce eventually quit pretending to sleep, but she’d be damned if she was going to set the precedent of cooking before the sun came up.

She took the children out into the dark dewy yard and pointed at groups of stars. Particularly Orion, visible briefly before dawn for a few weeks during late summer like a portent of winter. When Dolores and Frank both looked at Luce’s finger instead of the sky, she moved behind them and aimed their eyes with her hands against the sides of their heads.

Just talking, figuring maybe a word now and then might register, she said, There, rising just above the ridge. Broad shoulders, narrow waist. The Hunter. He’s chasing that little patch of stars up ahead of him. The Seven Sisters. People with good eyesight can count them. Twenty-ten. Everybody else sees a few lights shining through haze. There’s a story goes with them.