What a mess if the children found a way to die. What would you need to do? Probably, walk to the store and call the sheriff’s office. Afterward, start dealing with the horrors of law and mortuary. Stubby little caskets fitted into abbreviated holes backhoed into the ground. Order a stone.
And that wasn’t exactly idle daydreaming, either. The children were worse than horses in their ability to harm themselves against the most benign elements of their physical world. The girl tore off the bail to a little zinc bucket and pierced the wing of her nostril with it, apparently experimenting to see how far she could run it up into the cavities of her head. The wound bled like the fountain of life itself until Luce stanched it with a press of pigeon moss. Then, as if bleeding were a contest, the boy cut a triangular gash at his hairline on the edge of the smokehouse tin roof. He stood hollering, with blood running down his face and dripping off his chin onto his white shirt. Blood on the point of the roof, which was ten feet above the ground and the boy was not much better than three feet high. The only ladder on the place was six feet tall. None of the arithmetic worked out. You could drive yourself crazy trying to figure the angles. What a damn needy world Luce suddenly occupied. A pair of suicidal old men would be easier to caretake than these two youngsters.
Still, Luce held firm to the belief that quiet and solitude were good for you, offering peace, or at least hope for peace. Mainly because people were what they were and you couldn’t change them. Most of the time, they couldn’t change themselves, even if they were desperate to be somebody different from who they were. So, best keep your distance. Nevertheless, here were these little children who didn’t remind her in any helpful nostalgic way of sweet Lily.
Most nights Luce couldn’t even be sure they would sleep until daylight. They wandered, part nocturnal in their comings and goings, sharing the habits of raccoons and house cats. By morning she’d have to hunt for them like hen eggs. Find one balled up in a nest of quilts on the sleeping porch and the other laid out like a corpse at a viewing beneath a hunt board in the dining room. Had to start locking the doors at night instead of only latching the screens.
It was hard not to think about giving the children back to the State. Luce wondered sometimes if they would even notice. As long as they had things to tear up or set afire and nobody to disagree with them, they seemed content. They particularly liked being outdoors. It was one of their major opinions. On stormy afternoons, when lightning forked from black clouds, they would sit together and look out a window, their gloom about Luce keeping them inside expressed by the droop of their posture.
They had come with names. Dolores and Frank. Luce had probably once known that but had forgotten, since in letters Lily always referred to them simply as her babies. And, yes, Luce owned, they were pretty messed up. But to put matters in perspective, she thought back to people she’d had to share her daily world with. In comparison, how messed up were the children really? Lots of human beings got through the day a bunch more messed up than Dolores and Frank. They weren’t criminals or drunks. Being uncommunicative and taking an interest in fire were neither crimes nor sins, just inconvenient. And Luce didn’t have to love them. She just had to take care of them.
These days, around noon, Luce began counting the hours until bedtime. Lights out, children asleep. Think your own thoughts and listen to WLAC. John R. and Gene Nobles with their wondrous music and offers of a hundred baby chicks delivered C.O.D. to the P.O. in no more than a few days at a price too low to be believed. Luce had been tempted to order a boxful of chickens, but pictured a hundred yellow fluffs of life packed like ping-pong balls, dying one by one, hour by hour, waiting for her to come pick them up. Open the lid, and the survivors would be looking up into the light, necks stretched and yearning, and sort of treading water above the dead ones, whose nearly whole view of life on earth was the black inside of a cardboard box. So she had taken a pass on the fabulous and depressing chicken deal.
The music, though, was brilliant and beautiful, bright and wild, opening deep into her heart. It strove upward toward some indefinable, or perhaps unmentionable, light. Even exhausted from a long day with the kids, Luce would stay up late as she could, listening until she finally fell asleep.
WHEN SHE AND LILY were little girls, not quite a year apart, Luce was the wanderer. At six, her last year of perfect freedom, she explored the lake town without restraint. If some shade-tree mechanic’s feet stuck out from underneath a jacked-up Nash getting a new clutch, Luce would soon have her head under the car, studying the dark miraculous complication of greasy parts. She once sort of borrowed without permission a frontier clothes iron from an elderly woman living in a log cabin. The kind of iron with a space inside that was meant to be filled with hot fire coals. It fascinated her. Some simple forgotten relic of the past that could be made to work again. Luce carried the iron around until she found a house with a fire going. It was muggy June at the time, and it took a fair amount of walking and knocking on screen doors. And then she managed to burn a red second-degree triangle into her thigh that would leave a faint permanent mark, now visible only when she had a tan.
Probably that same day, Lily had been content to stay home and count her toes. She liked being safe inside. She could sit all morning dressing and undressing a frizzy-haired baby doll with only two outfits and just one blue eye that would open all the way. Lily liked naps and vanilla wafers.
So, anyone back then paying attention to the two girls—which was nobody—would have predicted that Lily would never leave the lake town. Someday way in the blue-haired future, she would rest in the hillside cemetery with a view across the water toward the Lodge and the mountains beyond. Luce would be the one to take off into the wide world at the first opportunity, probably with some man, the first of several husbands. Be buried in Anchorage or La Paz or whatever distant city you cared to name.
But Lily was the one who disappeared. A couple of weeks after her high school graduation, she bought a bus ticket with savings from her carhop job. No word of her whereabouts for months. Not like there was a mother at home to worry about her, and their father was busy or else figured, you get out of school, you’re on your own.
Luce stayed home. No money for more school, and no precedent for it. Nobody in her family had ever darkened the doors of any college. Also, she held some underlying suspicion that people were about the same wherever you went, but lots of places were way less beautiful than right here.
She took various jobs. Counter work at the drugstore and the post office. A brief stint as secretary for the town’s insurance agent. She quit at the drop of a hat if she felt the least slighted. The amazing power of saying kiss my ass and walking out the door. She dated the kinds of local guys her age who had family businesses to inherit someday. Son of the dry cleaner. Son of the dime store owner. Two of four redneck brothers who stood to inherit the paving business that got all the road contracts in this whole backwater of the State. She had a pretty serious thing for a while with a doctor’s son who had been off to UVA and wanted to become something or other that he couldn’t quite put into words, a teacher or philosopher or entrepreneur nudging the world in a better direction. His claim to fame, other than not wearing socks with his Weejuns, was that for an entire semester he had lived in the dorm room right next to the one Poe had occupied. It seemed like real love for a whole summer, and then he went back to graduate school. By Thanksgiving the letters, in both directions, had dwindled to nothing.
Everything else lasted about two months and then either blew up or fizzled away. Luce decided she lacked passion, which was a word she hated. Ask her what she craved, and she’d get a little frantic about things like books, the woods, music. Plants and the seasons. Also freedom. Not being bought and sold by some idiot employer, not having the moments of her days valued in fractions of a dollar by somebody other than herself.
——
LUCE, WITH DOLORES and Frank drifting and wavering along ahead of her—kites in the wind, hen and chicks—stopped by
one day to let them meet Maddie. They found her busy at the stove, frying thin strips of something dredged in cornmeal. The black iron skillet crackled and spit, and the room smelled of good food sputtering in yellow pork fat. Hickory fire so hot little wispy circles of blue flame escaped around the cast-iron stove lids. Dolores and Frank crowded close, and Maddie had to sweep her forearm against their bony chests to move them a safe distance back. When a batch of strips browned, Maddie lifted them out of the lard with a slotted spoon and cast them onto layers of newspaper covering the kitchen table.
Luce couldn’t help but read anything put before her, and an ad on one page caught her eye. A simple graphic pair of round spectacles from an optometrist named Finklestein. Above the ad, little boxes of tiny print with estimates of weather in the near future and the past month’s rainfall amount in inches, and all the fascinating business about moon phases and where Venus and Mars and Saturn and Jupiter would be in the night sky on whatever day this yellow sheet commemorated. Luce looked to the top of the page for the date, and she would have been twelve.
When Maddie had finished four heaping batches of the strips, she salted them and dashed hot drops of green-pepper sauce on them, and then poured four tall glasses of cold buttermilk. Beads of condensation ran down and printed dark rings on the newspapers. Maddie and Luce and the children sat and started eating with their fingers.
Luce tried to guess the name of the meat. It was good. Crisp and greasy. Inside the brown crust, pure white as a shaving from a bar of Ivory soap. But it had little flavor of its own. Mainly a chewy texture.
—What? Luce asked.
—Spinal cord, Maddie said.
—Of what?
—Hog.
—Hum.
—Not many people bother to eat it anymore.
—It’s way better than I would have guessed, Luce said.
—Probably, if you breaded cardboard in cornmeal and fried it in lard, it would taste pretty good too.
Dolores and Frank downed their buttermilk and ate their share of fried spine clean down to the paper and then sat sniffing their fingertips, remembering a grand moment just passed.
—I like it when people like my cooking, Maddie said.
She got up and went rummaging among various boxes and bags in cupboards and dressers, looking for her fairy crosses. She collected them. Knew a secret spot, a runneled dirt bank deep in the woods. After a hard spring rain washed the crystals out of the ground, she could find as high as three perfect crosses out of the many X’s. She threw the X’s back to the ground because they were bad luck. She kept the crosses in a shoe box. But someday, she would let them go back to the wild, scatter them in the woods so they could become miracles again for future pilgrims.
When Maddie found the box, she dug around making a selection, and then gave Dolores and Frank two of the smaller ones, perfect and identical in the intersections of their angles. Also two shiny brown buckeyes from a tree struck by lightning and thus sacred.
Said, Carry them in your pockets for protection.
Then she brought out the main welcome gift she had bought on a recent rare trip to town. A child-sized straw cowboy hat, bright red. She set it on Frank’s head and said, Welcome to the lake. Luce could tell Maddie was awfully proud of the gift, but she also saw trouble written all over Dolores’s face. Luce said her thank-yous and hustled the children out the door and up the road toward home, thinking that a few weeks ago she would have made the same mistake. Not having children of her own, it had likely never occurred to Maddie that she’d better buy two hats.
Before they got much past the first bend, Dolores slapped the hat off Frank’s head, and then they rolled in the dirt. Luce, pretty hot, grabbed them by their collars and separated them and stood them on their feet. Then she took a slow breath and decided that for the rest of the afternoon, they each had to wear the hat exactly fifteen minutes. She mashed the hat on Dolores’s head and clicked her fingernail five times against her watch crystal. Said, Dolores, you have to wear the hat until three thirty-two, then Frank has to wear it. Don’t cross me on this.
Dolores took the hat off and tried to give it to Frank, who wouldn’t take it. Luce made her put it back on, and Dolores walked tragic and sad-hearted, dragging the toes of her sneakers in the dirt, her face down and shadowed by the brim. At five to go, Luce started counting off the minutes. Dolores’s mood suddenly brightened, and dread overwhelmed Frank. At the moment of transferring the hat, Dolores danced three happy steps.
Back at the Lodge, they sat in the porch rockers, sulled up and sad, rocking slow. Partway through the walk home, it had quit mattering anymore who wore the hat. All the joy had drained out of it.
Luce sat with her feet dangling over the porch edge, looking at the blue lake and the green mountains, keeping time and enforcing the exchanges. Trying to hide how delighted she was to find that the children understood and actually complied with her totally arbitrary rules, an important skill for living in the world with other people. Unless you retreated to your own private wilderness. Except there was no wilderness.
Arbitrarily, Luce decided that one more exchange would finish making the point, and afterward, she gave the children the choice of what to do with the hat. They carried it to the cook stove and used a piece of kindling to stuff it down an eye onto the bed of coals. The straw flamed up yellow through the open hole for a few seconds and then was gone for good.
CHAPTER 4
BUD’S LAWYER WAS A SMART and ruthless old white-haired bastard. Drove a new black Coupe de Ville, and had gotten drunk with every governor back into the late twenties, regardless of political party. He’d taken Bud’s case only because he figured one way or the other, he’d end up with Lily’s house to sell. Said to Bud, right at the outset, Not a great deal of money in a little two-bedroom bungalow, but sadly the modern world has become largely a matter of volume.
The State’s man was so fresh out of law school that he still went back to campus for parties thrown by friends who had not yet graduated. He seemed stunned to find himself in court. During the course of a morning, Bud’s lawyer convinced the jury of men that Lily had been little better than a whore. All in all, they inferred, she probably deserved killing, at least within the shadow of a doubt the old lawyer had laid out as a confusing yet binding covenant between God and man regarding the administration of justice on earth. Case in point, Lily had conceived not one but two children by another man. Also, hypothetical boyfriends were alluded to vividly and with only a hesitant objection from the boy lawyer, who seemed crushed when the judge ruled against him. When it came to the murder weapon, the old lawyer asked a simple, compelling question: If you live in a house, aren’t your fingerprints on everything, including the knives? Crazy dope-addict killers wearing gloves could never be ruled out. And, further, the only possible eyewitnesses, when questioned by police detectives, had not testified to his client’s guilt in any way.
The old lawyer failed to mention that the witnesses were children who either could not or would not utter a single word or even acknowledge they had been asked a question. When the State’s man went into those inconvenient facts, the old lawyer pulled out a doctor’s report labeling the children as feebleminded. After that, the State’s man sat quiet, like he knew he was taking a beating and just wanted it to be over.
Three days later, Bud walked out the courthouse doors. Hardly two o’clock, humid and hot and the sky dull white, still wearing his grey trial suit the lawyer had bought for him, and carrying a paper poke with his clothes and effects from when he was arrested. Outside, an elder woman sat on a bench feeding peanuts to pigeons, and when a group of them took to the air their wing beats were like muffled applause.
Many high feelings rushed through Bud. Mainly he felt giddy disbelief over his impossible good fortune at the hands of the justice system. What a grand idea democracy is, where every fool who can’t get out of jury duty gets to have his opinion counted. Especially the two fools who held out and voted not guilty. And the
judge didn’t even ask for a bond while the prosecution decided when and if to retry. He just said, Don’t leave the state, son. Also the splendid matter of the little retard bastards keeping their jaws shut. Though, of course, the lawyer had to piss on Bud’s parade by reminding him that even if they don’t retry soon, there’s no limitation on murder charges. Ninety years old, they can drag you out of your sickbed and have another go at you.
And then, a more forward-looking early thought. Where was his goddamn money? Where else but with the mute witness kids?
Bud walked down the street to the bank and checked Lily’s account balance. It was exactly what he’d guessed it would be. He zeroed it out, which only bought him a beat-up Remington revolver and one box of shells at a pawnshop. Only enough left over for a club sandwich and a Coke at the Woolworth’s counter.
Homeless and penniless, but armed and pondering deeply, he wandered the streets of the capital city. The lawyer already had papers for the house, so about all Bud could claim were the furnishings. Flea-market shit. Selling scratched chifforobes and stained mattresses was not how he cared to spend time. He knew Lily had family up in a hillbilly mountain town. Minus a mother who’d had the sense to fly away many years earlier to places unknown. So, nothing left here worth fooling with. But he had a damn hoard somewhere. Dusky dark, Bud hot-wired a new Chevy coupe and took off west.
THAT FIRST NIGHT, in a thunderstorm, Bud hit two filling stations, one right after the other, for the day’s receipts. Pretty simple transactions, when it’s just you and one guy at the register, and you’re the one waving the gun. Afterward, Bud kept driving west on slick black roads for a couple of hours, and checked into a linoleum-floor motel in time to flop on the plaid bedspread and watch The Twilight Zone. Next morning, he did two more filling stations and a country store. Fifty miles onward, he drove the Chevy down a red dirt road and pushed it over a steep clay bank into a brown river. He knew enough about sinking cars from teenage joyriding to roll the windows down and open the trunk and hood. The car bobbed briefly, and then went all the way under, nothing but fat bubbles breaking the surface of the water. A rainbow sheen of gas trailing with the current. Reluctantly, Bud pitched the Remington and the unused ammo to midstream. Then, figuring you can’t be too careful, he pulled out the red bandanna he had worn over his face for the stickups, cowboy-movie-bandit style. He knotted it around a rock and threw it into the river and walked on to the nearest town.