Under the hemlock, everything lies dark and quiet. Needles not rustling in the breeze like leaves, just a hissing in the air. Around the trunk, a circle of shadow denser than other shadows. Listen hard and you hear a sound like the ticking of many wristwatches, the fall of dead needles, building in tiny increments a deep thousand-year bed to kill weaker things that try to grow underneath.
Bud can’t help it, he wants to watch. He cups his palms in his lap, and counts how many times he breathes until they fill with blood. Then, reach for the sky again.
It doesn’t even hurt much, but his thumbs no longer work right. His fingers hardly move. They’re like flippers. He swipes the bloody fingertips under each eye, marking his face like a high school football player on a Friday night. Works his necklace over his head and tries to throw it off into the woods, but his hands don’t cooperate, and it goes only six feet and falls into the bed of hemlock needles. That’s good enough. Ten thousand years from now, what a mystery for somebody to find a fossil shark tooth at the foot of a mountain.
Bud sits a long time studying his bleeding. When he decides it might be slowing down some, he walks until he comes to a creek. Plunges his hands into the cold clear water and watches tendrils of blood flow downstream, trailing away across smooth mica-flecked stones. Eventually, you can’t tell blood from water, but what beautiful shapes it makes before it disappears.
Fresh from the creek, the edges of the cuts are clean and chalk white. Look deep down, though, and the details get as messy as an anatomy chart before they fill and overflow with blood again.
Moss grows dense on the creek bank. Bud peels two patches of it from the ground like scabs and puts them back to back and presses his palms hard against this green poultice.
He waits for something good to happen. And in an attempt at sympathetic magic, he tries to think back to a pure moment in his life. Cleanliness and innocence is what he’s trolling the past for. Being at the beach when he was a kid, maybe. The end of the day. Tired and sunburned and salty from the water. Or, better yet, this sweet, round-faced girl at the end of a teenage date. September. Sitting in the driveway of her house, the engine off and key switched to Alt. The radio glowing on the dash. And yet, neither of them at all in the mood for groping. Just talking and laughing. Her face open and sweet. Bud remembers washing the car that afternoon, whisk-brooming the interior. Remembers fog in the air that night, a whole sequence of songs on the radio, but he can’t remember the girl’s name. Yet he thinks maybe he should have married her. Her big smile and small teeth. Deep happiness elusive as always.
His hands come away from the compress of moss still bloody. But maybe the optimistic word in regard to the state of his cuts would be weeping rather than flowing. Possibly, death has taken a step back.
How to get the fuck out of here, Bud wonders.
He unfolds the cornmeal map with some difficulty and spreads it across the bloody lap of his pants. It’s like a child scribbled random lines with a crayon. He could be anywhere amid this useless landscape rising all around. No matter how hard he studies the old boys’ markings, the map and the world remain irreconcilable.
DOLORES AND FRANK sidle wary around the hole. Sally side-passes off in the woods, a dark shape far back in the hemlock shade. Exactly matching their movement, but at a farther circumference.
Not wanting to spook them, Luce doesn’t run to the kids. That old wisdom Stubblefield taught her. Don’t chase it, and it will come back. She waits by the fire. Kneels down and puts her hands out to the warmth. Pushing back hurt mama feelings, like what they were running away from was her and she ought to feel upset about it. They got scared and took off into the woods. Nothing but natural. Pretty much what she would have done. Had done.
Dolores and Frank ease their way around the circle and stand near the fire. No hugs. Certainly no tears. Sally stops at the edge of trees, bobbing her head. Impatient.
Luce, trying to sound like everything is fine, says, Go get your pony and let’s head on home.
Luce doesn’t try to lead Sally. She follows close behind, the razor closed in her palm with her thumb on the hook to flick it open fast. Listening deep into the woods and looking for any movement. When the trail becomes wide enough, she walks alongside Sally. Tells the children, I was so worried. It must have been … She starts to say terrifying but settles on a different word. Cold, she says.
Dolores talks about the swapping of the hat, the lighting of the great dead balsam. And Frank tries to say something about dawn and the ice in the trees. His arms rise, and he flutters his hands. Luce can translate only a few fragments, but it’s like some of her important music. You can’t make out most of the words, but the message is clear.
She says, Next time, you have to take me with you.
——
BARE WOODS STRETCH ENDLESS, the night sky cold and deep with stars. The Dipper slides down toward the treetops and everything coming up after it is nothing but random. The stars have shapes that mean something if you know the code, but Big Dipper is it for Bud.
Out here, the deadly shit seeking your blood and meat is not confined to snakes and bears and weather. Other forces resent your presence too. Ghosts of long-gone wolves and buffalo and Indians and pioneers, dead in the service of implacable history. If you stop and camp early, while it’s still daylight—claim your space, plant your flag, build your fire—you push them back into the past. But alone in the dark, the minute you sit your ass down they circle close around. Lie on the ground, and the cold seeps up as they try to equalize your temperature with theirs. Get quiet, and you hear the voices. A few words in English, but mostly other languages. The ones that came before the Indians. Words the long-gone animals thought to one another. Words flowing against you. Wishing you ill. Yet, somehow, all gentle as an outbreath. Mumbles and sighs.
And their vehicles of communication? Creek water over rocks, wind flowing through bare trees and across dead leaves. And that’s exactly what the old speakers want you to be. Dead in the ground, exactly like them.
At some point, stars wheeling through the tree limbs and the voices humming around him, Bud makes up a short story. Maybe, some future day when he has a minute, he’ll write it up. Send it to one of his magazines. Won’t take up much space.
Fellow takes a walk in the beautiful mountains. Pick any season you want, with its many details. Colors, for example. The world is full of colors, even in winter.
Fellow trips on a small rock. Falls forward. Busts his head open on a larger rock. And then what happens? Think ripe cantaloupe. All that tangled mess spilling out into the daylight.
Boom. The whole world goes away, never to return. Black peace. Happy ending.
At least, if you think about it in the context of all the common ways to check out. All that screaming final shit in hospitals. Deluded people in white clothes watching the dying and feeling superior, like they’re immune to death forever. But still awfully interested in the process. Like these hillbilly mountaineers watching some deer they just shot blink its last vision of the world while its blood soaks the leaves.
So if Bud ever writes his story, the moral is, Make it quick. No more than switching off the porch light before bed. Happy, happy, dead.
Then lie on the woods floor through winter, freezing and thawing. Rain and shine. In summer, a stand of Indian pipes growing pale and ominous like skin underwater from melted flesh. The sacred heart tattoo fading into the ground.
A wandering fisherman or hunter gets curious about a funnel of birds in the sky beyond the lakeshore. At the place where the spout touches down, he finds a dozen rumpled buzzards standing around hunch-shouldered, acting polite with one another. Nothing to get excited about, just another piece of work. Might as well take turns.
CHAPTER 5
STRINGS OF COLORED BULBS and greenery wind around the drooping wires crossing Main Street to hold up the three stoplights. Red, green, blue, and yellow streaks on the wet black pavement. When the Hawk passes underneath, the streaks slide u
p the hood and illuminate the beads of water on the windshield. Luce gets lost in childhood memories, that one magical year Lola and Lit roused themselves from their immersion in each other to go buy a couple of baby dolls to unwrap.
In the backseat, the children busy themselves with a new game where they shape three fingers of each hand into claws and interlock with the other and grapple. As soon as somebody gets hurt, game over. Luce’s rules. On WLAC, “Papa Ain’t No Santa Claus (Mama Ain’t No Christmas Tree)” drifts into “Merry Christmas Baby.”
THE METHODISTS EXCHANGE presents by way of a Santa in faded red flannel and dingy white fake fur. He sits in a metal folding chair in front of the decorated tree near the pulpit and pulls wrapped packages from his sack and draws folded strips of paper and calls out numbers. Odds and evens, boys and girls. One by one, children run down the sloped aisle between rows of pews to claim their prizes. It goes on and on. Now and then, a choir in blue robes sings one of the old songs. A pale brown-headed boy, small for his age, unable to wait any longer for his toy, shouts out, Don’t forget little Vincey.
Luce, sitting near the back, all of this new to her, likes to believe her children are nothing like a pair of copperheads amid a field of sweet brown mice. She reminds herself that it’s not just one or the other. There’s a range, and you can slide either way. The whole point of being here is to begin shaping a place in the world around them.
But Dolores and Frank don’t care about Santa or what’s in his sack. It’s the many burning, dripping candles in tall holders that fascinate them.
Soon Stubblefield has to make an end run around the pews to keep the smolder of burgundy drapes from spreading to burgundy carpet and oak pews and burgundy cushions. He stomps out the tinder, wadded-up copies of The Upper Room, the cover a colorful, cartoonish depiction of Baby Jesus in the manger. Barely averting sirens from the fire station, three blocks up.
—We’ll keep working on that, he whispers to Luce after he sits back down.
AS THEY LEAVE TOWN, Stubblefield drives around back of the sheriff’s office. The green pickup still sits in the parking lot where it was towed more than a month earlier, about the same time the sheriff tried questioning the kids, who sat before him like the Tar-Baby, saying nothing. When Luce took her turn, she told of a knife fight and a mysterious hole in the woods that nobody had ever heard of.
Many days later, when the coon hunters finally came down from the mountain to resume dreary daily life, their recollections of seeing Bud were vague and inconclusive. It was only for a few hours, and they had been impaired to a high degree. The best most of them could do was confirm that somebody showed up in the middle of the night and left in the morning while many still slept and the rest were hungover and hadn’t even finished their first cup of coffee. Only old Jones made a firm identification, but, of course, he might hold a grudge. The search of Bud’s rented bungalow had yielded only a few money rolls, a bootlegger’s notebook, and a long ribbon of dirty bandage.
For the sheriff, it was simple. Lost kids happily found. Some guy in town for a couple or three months decides to move on. The truck and the money remain a puzzler, but the truck is worn out and people get in a hurry and forget things. As for Lit, with his many enemies, maybe he’d had it coming for a long time.
BACK AT THE LODGE, Luce leads the children upstairs. Past 202, Maddie’s room when she cares to use it. Sometimes she’s there as high as three nights a week, and sometimes she checks out for eight or ten days at a time. No plans. You see her when you see her. Tonight, you don’t. But probably midmorning tomorrow she’ll show up with a bowl of festive holiday collards and gifts of fruit and hard candy.
The children have 203, and Luce tucks Dolores and Frank into bed under a deep pile of quilts. She reads the one about the heifer hide and the one about the goats. And for this particular night, she summarizes as best she can the poem with all the reindeer names, though she has to make up three of them on the fly. She concludes the storytelling with the one line she remembers exactly. Away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
As soon as she closes the door, Luce immediately begins planning ahead to next October. A docent walk in an abandoned field on a dry afternoon, weeds shoulder-high and some locusts and pines starting to come in. The subject will be all that hopeful business of forest reclaiming its place, the sequence of plants from bare ground to cove hardwood forest. She’ll break off a stem of dried bull thistle for the children to admire the structure of its flower. Then hold it up to her mouth and say the magic words. Draw a deep chestful of breath and blow the down into the world to fly away with the air and fall to earth.
Downstairs, Stubblefield sits reading, the radio faint and the fire burning old and slow. The .32–20 on the end table. Luce sits next to him on the settle and leans against his shoulder and reads his book. Something about beatniks climbing mountains. Outside, a noise. Probably a limb falling from one of the old oaks. Stubblefield doesn’t look up from the book but moves his right hand to the arm of the settle, a foot from the pistol.
Doors locked, weapons close. But every day that passes, Bud’s presence fades. Nothing but a feeling. No telling for sure whether he is still going or long gone. Fled into the distance or absorbed into the landscape, which does not punish or reward but cleanses all bones equally.
For Annie
Also by CHARLES FRAZIER
COLD MOUNTAIN
THIRTEEN MOONS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHARLES FRAZIER grew up in the mountains of North Carolina. Cold Mountain, his highly acclaimed first novel, was an international bestseller and won the National Book Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His second novel, Thirteen Moons, was a New York Times bestseller and named a best book of the year by the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Charles Frazier, Nightwoods
(Series: # )
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