Maddie looked up from tending her bubbling molasses and saw the children’s interest. She came over and said to Dolores, You can ride her, if you care to.
Maddie grabbed Dolores at the armpits and swung her onto the mare’s down-slung back. Dolores neither fighting Maddie’s touch nor falling numb and surrendering to some black personal hole down deep in herself. She sat on the mare’s back and grinned.
Frank, watching his sister, raised his arms to be lifted as well.
The two of them fit perfectly into the sway of the mare’s back. Dolores, in front, grabbed a handful of mane, and Frank squeezed his arms around Dolores’s waist and pressed his face against her back with his eyes closed at first, as if to feel only so much sensation all at once. Maddie gave the mare a pat, and the children went riding together around the circle like normal children would do, enjoying the view from higher up than they were used to, smelling wood smoke and burnt sugar and the pony herself and the manure trod into the dirt.
When the ride ended and Maddie set the children back on the ground, Dolores looked up at her, all open-faced.
Maddie said, Her name’s Sally, at least as long as I’ve had her.
Dolores nodded solemnly, like that name seemed perfect to her. She said, Sally Sally Sally. Then Frank said the name too, but just once.
THAT NIGHT AT BEDTIME, Luce said, Tell me something. What kind of weather suits you two best?
They stared at her as if she were a fool, and then they looked at each other. Neither of them said a word.
Luce said, I know you can talk. I heard it.
Nothing but blank faces from the kids.
—I’m the one that puts food on the table, Luce said. That’s not any kind of threat, simply a fact. It’s one of the things I do for you. I’m asking a question about weather. Do me a favor and answer, just because it would make me happy.
Wheels turned behind the dark eyes. Dolores finally said, very weary and put upon, as if the answer were obvious: Lightning.
—Good, Luce said. That’s a sort of weather. Now, Frank, your turn.
—Lightning.
—Still a good answer. So, Frank, next question. What’s your favorite color?
The boy turned his head to the side and did a little spitting thing like a smoker who rolls his own cigarettes getting a fleck of tobacco off his tongue.
Luce waited and waited.
She said, Frank, you’re being called on to name a color. There’s not a wrong answer, and nobody’s going to hold anything against you. So say one of them.
Without looking at Luce, Frank said, Black.
—Yes, that’s a color. And one of my favorites too.
—Fire color, Dolores said.
—Well, let’s call that red and orange and yellow. So good choices, and thank you both.
She touched them each lightly at the brow, just a graze of fingertips, and turned out the light near their bed and sat awhile in the dark, listening to the radio playing soft, enjoying the rare feeling of finishing a day knowing you’ve done about as good a job as you know how to do. Though with all that fire and lightning talk, maybe she’d better keep sleeping with one eye open.
WANTING TO KEEP language rolling forward, Luce figured bedtime stories would make a good starting point. She wished she had some family heirlooms to tell, but Luce had missed out on ancestors. No barking-mad great-grandfather to sit by the fireside of a frosty winter’s night passing down the folktales of their people, fishing his pink-and-white false teeth out of the bib pocket of his overalls so he could properly wheeze harmonica sound effects to a tale that involved a steam locomotive. As folkloric as it got for Luce were Lola’s Wild Turkey ravings and Lit’s bloody World War II stories.
Luce went scavenging through the lobby bookshelves and found a collection of violent Old World tales. Fe, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. She read them all, front to back, trying to imagine which ones Dolores and Frank might find useful. Share lessons children had learned for centuries regarding power and vulnerability. People got beaten and killed awfully cavalierly in the old stories. The fragility of the human body, all the threat and fear loose out there in the dark, and also sometimes in the daylight.
She started with “The Boy and the North Wind,” figuring that at the very least she might get them to say, “Beat, stick, beat” with her when it came around in the tale. It was a glorious moment, and who wouldn’t want to own such a stick and strike down stronger enemies? But Dolores and Frank paid no attention to it, or to the one about the princess who vowed not to smile for seven years.
Eventually, though, by trial and error, Luce hit a rich vein. For a full two weeks, all the children wanted to hear at bedtime was “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” Luce used suitably different voices for the small, medium, and large goats. For the troll, she spoke in a quiet menacing growl. She did sound effects of the goats trip-trapping on the bridge, and she was especially convincing when the big goat roared that he would use his horns to poke the troll’s eyes out his ears, and his hooves to stomp the troll to bits, body and bones.
The children quivered and drew the quilt up to their noses, and Luce could feel them squirming toward her, their feet reaching under the covers to touch her hip where she sat on the edge of the bed. When the big goat laid the troll low, they drew a deep breath and let it out slow. By the third night, she had them joining her to shout the final lines. Snip, snap, snout. This tale’s told out.
CHAPTER 4
STUBBLEFIELD COULDN’T HELP HIMSELF. After he met Luce, every few days he drove the nostalgic dead-end road and parked below the Lodge. Ostensibly, he came to swim from the little patch of beach his grandfather had made for him one yesteryear, just because he was working on a swimming merit badge. A dozen truckloads of brilliant white sand dumped over the red clay at the water’s edge. All that summer, Stubblefield had spent most afternoons there, sunning and training and reading. He had dreamed of swimming all the way to town. The lake was supposed to be a mile wide at this point, which hadn’t seemed insurmountable back then.
It looked a lot more distant now, though. And not enough warm days left to get in shape. Stubblefield contented himself with trying to go a hundred yards farther up the shoreline each day. Afterward, lie in the sun until his trunks dried, then put his clothes back on. Go up and knock on the door, the real reason for coming. Visit a few minutes with Luce, if she was home. Stay until she got edgy and then leave.
One day, as he came out of the water, he looked toward the Lodge and thought he saw Luce watching him from one of the tall dining room windows. Just a dim shape behind the glass. Still calf-deep, he bent forward and took a low bow. When he looked up, though, the window was empty.
Later, no answer to his knock on the door. He scribbled a note and left it stuck in the crack of the screen door. Nothing clever, just Hi, S. An effort to display interest in their free lonesome circumscribed lives.
And he was truly interested. Otherwise, he’d sell all his holdings, despite the theoretical ag-lease potential. Dump the whole mess at fire-sale prices and buy a red Healey and throw the top away. Just use the tonneau and go tropical and live on Sanibel or Key Largo and wear shorts and flip-flops every day of the year and eat a lot of grouper until the money ran out.
At least, that’s what he would have done anytime previous. Go pursue what his Florida friends liked to call his rich inner life. Always saying it with a cutting edge of irony. But here was this lovely troubling woman Stubblefield had felt all kinds of idiotic things for at seventeen. Hard at the moment to let those go and move on. Though that’s certainly what smart people would do.
If he were one of those, Stubblefield would have worked harder to keep his former fiancée happy. And now he would be wearing a navy blazer with gold buttons, selling Coupe de Villes on the island and waiting for her father to hurry up and die so he’d be running the dealership. Or would that be Coupes de Ville?
Also, look at Luce, a young hermit. And look too at what he had l
earned about her messed-up family. Mother, a long-gone runaway. Father, a crazy-ass violent lawman. Sister, a murder victim. Niece and nephew, pyromaniac part-time mutes who had burned his homeplace to the ground.
What would smart people do?
Run away, that’s what.
But Stubblefield went to Maddie and tried to buy her mare to please Luce, since she’d gone on and on about how the pony had made the children so calm and undestructive for a minute or two and had caused them to speak a few words.
LUCE WORKED THE SLING blade in rampant weeds growing beside the thread of water running from the spring. The children sat cross-legged on the back porch with a colorful indented circle of Chinese checkers between them. The game was percussive. They moved their marbles rapidly and banged them down on the hollow metal board without clear relation to each other, so that they appeared to be playing their own individual games simultaneously rather than playing against each other to a common conclusion, a winner and a loser.
Stubblefield came around the side of the Lodge from his car. Said, right off, I talked to Maddie.
Luce stopped slinging. She squared off against Stubblefield, her jeans stained green to the knee with weed bits.
—What for? she said.
—Because I like her and want to get to know her better and wish I’d known her when I was a kid. And because of that Sally horse you told me about.
Luce said, She’s a pony.
—I thought that meant a young horse.
—Of course you did.
—Point is, I was trying to buy her for you. For the kids, really.
Luce turned away and started swinging the scallop-edged blade in the ragweed and jewelweed like it was either that or yell at him. As far as Stubblefield was concerned, there was entirely too much whacking around here.
—It seemed like a way I could be helpful, he said.
Luce stopped what she was doing and looked at him, all tight and pursed up. Tired around the eyes.
She said, You don’t be buying me things. No gifts at all. Not even a box of candy or a jar of honey.
Stubblefield wanted to ask, Why so pissed off? Instead, he turned his palms up in the universal gesture of What the hell have I done now? Luce had been all alight with enthusiasm by the calm interest the children had shown in the horse and, especially, by the single word Dolores and Frank had uttered. Sally, Sally, Sally. So why not let him buy the horse? Or pony, apparently. It seemed like a good thing. A help. Old worn-out pony ought to cost next to nothing. A lot of people would give one to you, if you promised to feed it and not sell it to become dog food or steaks for Frenchmen. But clearly, he’d thought wrong all the way around. Maybe what he needed was a pocket-sized list of rules in minuscule print to consult moment by moment.
Maybe a little bitter in his tone, Stubblefield said, Well, whatever. Maddie wouldn’t sell Sally at any price.
Luce said, Oh, was I rude?
Stubblefield looked for a word. Not vehement. And passionate was out of the question. He said, Emphatic?
Luce made a slight expression. A hint of eye roll or twitch of mouth. She said, Mr. Polite.
Stubblefield said, Would sharp or curt have been better? Or ungracious?
As soon as the words left his mouth, Stubblefield wished he could pull them back, like he expected to be tossed on his ear from his own property. Instead, Luce looked off to the side, clearly struggling to keep her face blank, not laugh. He saw her take a deep breath.
She said, Let’s leave it that maybe a jar of honey would be fine, but that’s the upper limit. Flowers, if you pick them yourself. But no ponies, no jewelry.
—Well, Stubblefield said, Maddie told me the kids can ride every day if they want to, but they have to come to her place to do it. I think she’s lonely and would like having them around. And you too.
—Better that way, Luce said.
—Hey, Stubblefield said to the world at large. How about let’s go ride that Sally pony?
Two pair of dark eyes cut everywhere around the porch and yard except Stubblefield’s direction.
—We walking or driving? Stubblefield said.
The children glanced toward the Hawk, and then away.
Luce said, Let’s walk. It’s nice out, and they’re always happier if they’re worn out at the end of the day. Me too.
On the way down the two-track dirt road, the children ran ahead. Stubblefield and Luce walked on either side of the weedy middle hump. Stubblefield said, So, a jar of honey and maybe, someday in the future, a movie? A ticket, a bag of popcorn, and a Coke. Nothing more.
—That’s not what I said. But possibly. If Maddie could keep the children for a few hours.
—Saturday night’s a double feature. Creature from the Black Lagoon and something involving a big spider or lizard.
—I used to live beside the theater. I’ve seen all the monster movies.
—A week from Friday, Light in the Piazza.
—I liked that book. So, maybe.
SALLY STOOD THREE-LEGGED, getting a hind hoof picked. When Maddie finished, she knocked the crud against a fence rail and rose from her stoop, grunting deep from her diaphragm like an old man lifting from his armchair. Dolores and Frank crowded so close around Sally that they nearly got their feet stepped on. They held brushes, impatient to start grooming.
Maddie couldn’t convince them to go with the lay of hair. They scrubbed at Sally’s sides like scraping a wall for painting. With less provocation, for two decades, Sally had nipped many purple bruises into the arms and thighs and necks and scalps of farriers and vets and even people getting too insistent about putting a blanket on her for a frigid night. But she stood still for the children, lowering her head, ears up.
Maddie called out to Luce and Stubblefield on the porch: If all you are is ignorant, Sally gives you a pass.
As they groomed, Maddie sang “Back in the Saddle Again.” Mostly joking with herself, barely louder than a hum. But the second time the chorus rolled around, Dolores and Frank came in very faintly on the Whoopi-ty-aye-ohs. Voices thin and high like ordinary children’s, except their pitch was perfect.
Maddie stopped and said, Didn’t know you two could sing.
They both shut up and worked the brushes.
Sally switched her tail at them when they came in range of her hindquarters. Swept so lightly across the face by Sally’s thin tail, the children almost danced with the sensation. Frank’s hands rose above his shoulders, fluttering like bird wings, as if the power of flight could be the only possible enhancement to the moment.
When Maddie figured Sally couldn’t take much more grooming, she swung the children up by their armpits and put the reins in Dolores’s hands and said slowly, one word at a time, Don’t pull on these. Let ’em droop. Look where you want to go and squeeze with your legs. She’ll go that way, if she feels like it. Curve with the fence, so look left.
Dolores looked at Maddie and then turned her head to the right like she was trying to see what was over her shoulder, which was Frank.
Maddie said, Other left.
Dolores kept looking over her shoulder at Frank, and Maddie snapped her fingers to get Dolores’s attention and made a leftward-curving motion with her hand.
Dolores looked where she needed to, and Frank touched Sally’s sides with his heels. At a slow walk, she went forward, following the fence line of the paddock.
Maddie unhooked the gate chain and went to the porch and very deliberately sat in the space between Stubblefield and Luce, knees drawn up nearly to her chin and the skirt of her cotton print dress stretched tight between the bony joints. They all watched the children ride with high interest. Goldenrod and joe-pye weed and ironweed rose above the top boards of the fence, and the autumn colors of their blooms worked well with one another and with the dry blue sky.
The children came back around to the gate, and when Sally started to slow down, Frank gave her a nudge to keep her moving. She made a slight effort toward a jog, but when the children start
ed bouncing she settled back to an eager walk, with her ears forward. And around they went. It was a great success. Like Dolores and Frank might quit being little glum reavers out to wreck their world.
Luce said, That’s a happy sight.
Maddie witnessed a rare occurrence, Luce’s unedited smiling face. Then Maddie looked at Stubblefield, who was looking at Luce and smiling too.
—How long have you known her? Maddie asked Stubblefield.
—Couple or three weeks, Luce said real quick. She held up three fingers. Preemptive in case Stubblefield wanted to start talking about his teenage memories.
Maddie said, Three whole weeks? Her tone was actorish, pitched to an audience not currently in attendance except inside her head, and meant to convey, at minimum, a couple of things at the same time.
—Yup, Stubblefield said.
Maddie said, I’ve known your family way back. When I was a little girl, I knew a Stubblefield who still had a minié ball in his leg from Antietam. Old beardy man that liked to get you to touch his scar and feel that ball move around under your finger.
Stubblefield said, Yeah, well. So you probably knew the cowboy, then?
—I remember him. We were in school together. He was a couple of years older. Wouldn’t strike a lick at a snake. Grew up and sat around all day listening to records and drinking. Entertaining as hell in a conversation, but you couldn’t count on him for one damn thing. Ask him the time of day, you better look up and check the sun for confirmation.
—My grandfather always said I was a lot like him.
Maddie studied Stubblefield, as if for the first time. Said, You look something alike. He was a tall good-looking fool too.
Luce bumped Maddie with her shoulder. In a whisper, Luce said, Go easy.
Maddie turned to Luce and started to say something, but she read Luce’s face and stopped. Instead she turned back to Stubblefield, and in the same whisper said, If you’re not careful with her, you’ll answer to me.