CHAPTER 6
STUBBLEFIELD COULDN’T BELIEVE HIS LIFE. It felt like wiring into some science-fiction time machine or downing a new drug and being jolted back to a lost highlight of life where you’d failed badly. But now you’ve been given an unexpected second chance. This time be bolder, smarter, funnier, wiser, not a teenage fool, cramped on all sides by pride and shame and fear. Be better all around, knowing more of life and having read more books and listened to more music. Yet how to connect seventeen to the unexpected now?
Stubblefield decided to play interviewer. Out walking the children or sitting on the porch, he drew fragments of Luce’s past from her with surprising delicacy, at least surprising to him. He watched and listened closely, asked questions only up to a line beyond which he sensed she’d spook away from him. Mostly, she had to be coaxed, and then sometimes she didn’t. He felt like a Depression-era WPA writer interviewing a reticent ninety-year-old about the great flood of 1873 and, at the same time, some half-folkloric riverboat race where a boiler blew and dozens were scalded to death by the steam. Get a little bit of one story and then a little bit of the other, and never be entirely sure how much to believe of either.
WHEN STUBBLEFIELD ASKED why Luce had taken the job at the Lodge, she said she wanted to get far from town, and the lake was beautiful. Old Stubblefield had been kind to her and an interesting man to work for, if you could call what she did work.
And that would have ended it if Stubblefield hadn’t kept probing. When he returned to the topic, she said she took the job at a point where she was of a mind to get over thinking about hopes and fears and desires. They didn’t help a bit when it came to voyaging safely through a day. Just live every one as it came and not let people intrude on you. Shut up and hope everybody else did the same. Strive for whole uneventful weeks where the weather was about all that changed. She pointed out that weather was plenty interesting to watch as it passed over you, and it had entertained people for many thousands of years. And not just immediate weather but also the larger movements of the seasons. You had to learn how to feel the long flow and not get hung up on the day-to-day. Big swellings and recedings, upturned and downturned sweeps linked in slow rhythms built from millions of tiny parts—animal, vegetable, mineral—not just temperature and length of daylight. For example, the way a rhododendron changed throughout the year, month by month. She claimed she had observed and learned nearly a hundred such parts of the local world. She said, Imagine holding every bit of it in your head at one time, this whole place, down to what the salamanders are doing every month of the four seasons. She put the bunched tips of her fingers to each temple and said, Boom. Then spread her fingers and lifted her hands in a gesture of explosion.
WHEN STUBBLEFIELD ASKED about vanity—Luce’s cheerleader beauty-contest days—she was surprisingly forthcoming. Right now she was about as pretty as she cared to be, considering that being pretty drew little but trouble. She wore no makeup, ever, and went many happy days in a row without glancing in a mirror. She cut her own hair, both for economy and preference. When it grew much below her shoulders, she whacked the ends off. She said, It looks just fine that way. Not fashionable, but with an actual style, mainly from it not mattering what you think looks good right this second in the history of hairdos.
When Luce did look in the mirror, she thought she might still be sort of pretty, if you went by what most people thought was pretty. And if that’s the way you went, you had your own problems. It wasn’t like being pretty was an accomplishment, and it would go away in time. So it would be a mistake to get too hung up on it. At which point she looked Stubblefield in the eye.
As for clothes, only two stores in town sold women’s apparel, little of which she could afford. The sewing shop—with its bolts of cascading fabric stacked one above another almost to the ceiling, its bins of translucent Butterick and Simplicity patterns folded in their tight envelopes with optimistic pastel illustrations of wasp-waisted women, its notions case filled with dimpled thimbles and bright needles ranked precise behind the cellophane windows of their packets, each one piercing the matte black paper twice—might as well not exist as far as Luce was concerned. Sewing a button back on was all the seamstress she ever cared to be.
So, with scant money, she wore confusing clothes, owned for years. In summer, she alternated her jeans and loafers with pink or black pedal pushers and white or blue button-down oxford shirts and white Keds or scuffed Capezios from her life before the Lodge. Come fall, baggy turtlenecks and pointed black ankle boots. Everything always clean and pressed crisp, so you didn’t know whether she had a couple of such outfits or a dozen. Which to Stubblefield sounded nothing but delightful. He imagined that her change of attire happened on a schedule determined by what the trees were doing or some other minute cyclic marker of one season giving way to the next. The flowering of ironweed or a specific downward pitch of evening sunlight.
IN REGARD TO ECONOMICS, all Luce cared to say was that she got by. Didn’t care to talk about money any more than religion or politics. Eventually, though, Stubblefield got her talking about her stipend and its limitations. What a nice touch of old Stubblefield’s to use that delicate term, she said. She became enthusiastic telling how she sometimes supplemented her cash by selling worked flints and clay pipe bowls turned up in plowed fields in the spring and after heavy rains year-round. Bird points and spearheads and scrapers from an earlier world. Down in the bowl of a good pipe, you could often see a crust of burnt tobacco and imagine some original inhabitant taking a smoke at the end of day. The roadside tourist shops bought them, along with ginseng roots. They sold the artifacts to tourists, and the roots mostly got shipped around the world to China, as had been the case for a couple of centuries. For gentleman problems, Luce explained.
Also, as a cash crop, she had tried growing a patch of tobacco, but her allotment was so small you could nearly spit across it. The government said that’s all she could grow, and sent a man and a boy around with a spool of measuring tape to enforce its area down to the square foot. After a summer of work, she barely broke even, and after that she gave up on commercial agriculture. During fishing season, anglers sometimes stopped by the Lodge to buy rock bait, stick bait, nightcrawlers.
Stubblefield learned, to his confusion, that Luce had limited use for cash money. Most of what it bought she didn’t want. She was happy without modern conveniences, her desires being mostly impractical and lacking monetary value.
Luce said, What I want most is the ability to whistle the song of every bird in the area.
At which point Stubblefield thought he detected humor going on at his expense.
He said, What about television? That’s something money can buy. You might like Paladin. He can be really dry too.
Luce said, I’ve got radio.
Besides, she told him, you start wanting things too much and you need more and more money. She said she tried as much as possible to live free from the bad idea of money. Otherwise, when you took a job, you inevitably sold your time to someone who valued it lowly. Luce, however, valued her time highly. Luce had it all figured out. Live out of sight from the bullshit of everyday commerce. Use money as little as possible.
But the children threatened Luce’s economics. They would need shoes and clothes, and they went through food faster than a pair of bear dogs. Her garden wouldn’t hold up three cold months under their hunger. By deep winter, the root cellar would be cleaned out of potatoes and cabbages and turnips and acorn squash, and all the colorful mason jars of tomatoes and green beans would empty out and be clear shapes of air lined on a shelf.
When the children went to school, then what? The State said they had to go, but Luce worried that they might harm the other students. She worried about them being cooped up inside a yellow bus for the long ride into town. All that gasoline in the tank. They were getting better, but maybe not fast enough.
WHEN STUBBLEFIELD ASKED if Luce got lonely—living mostly outside of communication with the world, no phone
, wasps nesting in the mailbox—Luce said sure she got lonely, but there had been many reimbursements. Animals, for example. Amazing that anything as big as deer and bear survived the bloodthirsty bygones when we snuffed out everything else of size. Bison gone before 1800, elk not long after, wolves before 1900, and panthers shortly after World War I. Dates verified by Maddie and old Stubblefield and other elders. No more left in these mountains or anywhere else for at least a thousand miles. Complete erasure. Except Luce, out walking at sunrise one morning last fall, saw something at the upper end of old Stubblefield’s hay field, something big and pale moving against the dark of the wood’s edge. It went along the fence line, and its sand-colored body and long tail didn’t lack much of reaching from post to post, which Luce later paced off to be eight feet. And the animal moved like no big dun-colored dog or deer ever did. It went smooth and low and soft-footed in the long grass that in the dawn light was close to the color of the cat. If she had not been alone, she would never have seen the panther or felt the hope it spread into the world like rings around the splash of a rock thrown into a still lake.
When Stubblefield came back around to the topic of loneliness, Luce got insistent about the reimbursements. A great deal of pleasure to be found in the growth of vegetables. And in the fall, birds passing over in waves, their calls singing of distance and other landscapes and the weird tones of Maddie’s folklore songs from back in an older America. Or a younger one, depending on your perspective. Also, the sadness and bravery of new doomed sprouts growing from dead blighted chestnut trees. At night, you could walk outside and look anywhere except straight across the lake to the town and not see a light, just shapes of black mountains against the charcoal sky and the brilliant stars overhead. Except sometimes in summer when fishermen went out on the lake in their little boats and shined big flashlights into the water to draw bass. Plus, recently, the hateful satellites whizzing over, marring the constellations.
And the obvious freedom of living alone could not to be discounted. Sample days from Luce’s pre-children life included summer afternoons swinging in an army-surplus jungle hammock she had bought for a dollar fifty. It smelled of mildew and had a canvas roof and mosquito-netting sidewalls. She strung it between two hemlocks, and it was like a pup tent levitating. Inside, she could float and look out at the garden and the woods, all misty through the netting, and read books from the lobby shelves. Seventeen by Booth Tarkington. Volumes of the outdated Britannica. The usual afternoon temperate-rainforest shower fell on the hammock roof and then passed and the sun came back out. Come autumn, build a late-afternoon campfire in the yard and sit in a striped canvas campaign chair and watch the night come on and drink a scant glass of the old important liquor from the basement. Watch the sun and moon and planets fall one after another down the same curved path to the horizon.
Stubblefield said, So you’re happy out walking alone at dawn seeing extinct animals? What about before that? Two in the morning kind of lonely?
Luce said that was pretty bad, no denying it. Sometimes, maybe she felt like a piece of her that used to be there was gone. But she had figured out a shape that days needed to take so that she hardly noticed whether she was happy or not. Keeping your mind on every day as it came was part of it. The garden, the chickens, firewood, cooking. The four seasons. Late summer, the last small watermelons and tired tomato plants putting out just one or two smallish fruits before shutting down for good. Then pumpkins turning bright, and the last apples in the old orchard little and misshapen but sharp and clean-tasting, with just the right balance of sweet and tart to be good either as eating apples or cooking apples. Autumn collards still small and reaching for the slanted light, and waiting for the first frost to come into their own.
CONCERNING HER CHILDHOOD, all Luce wanted to talk about was a lanky dark-haired girl named Myrtle from tribal land across the nearest ridge from town. The girl spoke almost nothing but Cherokee. They were both free to wander, and sometimes they met at the ridgeline. Luce would have been happy to sit with her all day, smiling and hardly saying a word, making whole villages out of sticks in the dirt of the woods floor. But Myrtle could stay only so long before she needed to head home to help shuck corn or shell peas or whatever other chore the season dictated. The only English the girl knew was the phrase Get, damn hogs. Useful mainly when the neighbors’ hogs got loose in the garden. But also a lot of fun to shout on random occasions.
Stubblefield asked what it was like after Lola left, and Luce said, Better. She remembered that some people in town speculated pretty urgently, with no evidence whatsoever, that Lit had killed Lola and buried her up on the mountain. And of course kids heard it from their parents and couldn’t get enough of talking about it at school. When Luce went home confused and full of questions, Lit didn’t sugarcoat it. He told third-grade Luce and second-grade Lily that their mother had run off with a man from Shithole, Florida, and that the man had soon dumped her, so probably Lola was walking the streets of Tampa.
Young Luce had been out west as far as the county seat, twenty miles away, but except for having a marble courthouse with a green copper dome, it was not noticeably different than the lake town, except that it had two of everything. Even two barbershops with identical red-and-white poles spiraling to infinity inside glass cylinders. Yet, sadly, only one library per town. Even with the doubling, walking the streets took a matter of minutes. Up one side and down the other, a few blocks each way, and then you were done. So it was not clear to young Luce what walking the streets of Tampa might mean.
However, one of several benefits from her mother’s absence came immediately. Lit seemed somewhat less high-pitched every day. He quit drinking liquor and switched to beer and mostly confined himself to one or two on workdays. Also the house rested a whole lot quieter without all the quarreling. Lola couldn’t hardly scramble an egg, so the food didn’t change noticeably. Luce and Lily mainly lived off bologna-and-cheese sandwiches and boiled hot dogs except when Lit brought home sirloins and fried them up in a skillet with sliced potatoes.
—Did you miss anything about her? Stubblefield said.
—No. And that’s my last word, no matter how many times you ask.
Except when Stubblefield tried again, Luce said she remembered something from way back in childhood. Lily being sick. Colic or cholera or something. Lily wailing and Lola holding her, walking the living room floor back and forth, saying, Baby, baby, baby.
Stubblefield said, So a sweet memory?
—Yeah, sweet. I was scared that Lily was so sick she might die and leave me by myself with them. I started crying and Lola put Lily on the sofa and grabbed me by the wrist and yanked me to the kitchen and backed me against the refrigerator. Bent down right in my face, yelling about how weak I was. Didn’t even take the cigarette out of the corner of her mouth. I remember how it glowed and wagged up and down while she yelled.
AT SOME POINT, Stubblefield wondered how much he was really learning about Luce. She would talk freely about dress patterns, the daily details of gardening, his grandfather. But Stubblefield kept feeling like he was watching a cardsharp shuffle the deck, all the fine subtle movements to misdirect your attention, and at the end, a reassuring spread of hands to hide the pit opening under her life.
Stubblefield liked to read mountaineering books about Hillary and Smythe and Mallory. There was a term that expressed how high you were, how far the drop below your feet, how bad the weather. All the cumulative danger of the world you had entered. The word was exposure. At some far degree, if you lose a glove, you lose your hand. You fall, you die. Stubblefield became convinced that Luce was pretty badly exposed. But if she believed she had succeeded in paring her life down to essentials and reimbursements, he needed to figure out which category he might best fit himself into.
CHAPTER 7
TAKE PINBALL, FOR EXAMPLE. Especially on a wood-rail Gottlieb Cyclone or Harbor Lites table. Night after night, Lit’s reflexes allowed him to play a single quarter on and on until he got bored.
His touch against the spring to launch the chrome ball into play was art. After that, carefully judged nudges and checks with hands and hips and knees guided the ball in regard to bumpers and kickers and chutes without tilting the table. Flipper work too subtle to comprehend. You could go to college and study mechanical engineering and physics for ten years and not understand it.
Psychic and saintly was the way Bud viewed it. The air disturbed by a leaf falling to the parking lot played a role in how Lit’s fingers twitched. Each second, Lit did two dozen different things at once, attending fully to the present moment but with a disinterested look on his face. Every machine in the county displayed his high score.
Tonight went the usual way. Lights flashing behind the backglass, bells ringing, numbers in their hundreds of thousands and free games spinning the wheels until Lit wanted beer. Usually that was when he collected his money. Instead, he handed the table over to Bud. Said, Keep it warm for me, I’m coming back.
Before Lit finished his second can, Bud had burned through all the accumulated credits. Every penny of a thirty-five-dollar cash-out thrown away.
Before the machine finished dying its loud sad death, Lit was out the door.
Bud caught him in the parking lot. Lit already in the cruiser with the engine rumbling and the lights on.