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her admitting to the children that the attraction of fire was not lost on her in the least, the beauty and mystery and power of a strong blaze. Same type of thing with fire as with chickens, though. So easy to get things out of balance and suffer the consequences. Burn down the Lodge, and they’re all liable to find themselves sleeping on the ground in the woods.
    Luce took a hearthside galvanized bucket filled with thin splits of fat pine kindling out to the porch and emptied it on the floor. She and the children sat cross-legged around the jumble. On the fly, Luce made up a game like pick-up sticks in reverse. The goal was to lay the most complicated pattern of kindling—cones, squares, triangles, goofy pentangles, or whatever form sprang into your mind—just like building a fire, but no matches or flint and steel or bows. Rule one: if you burned your sticks, you lost. And if your complicated shape collapsed first in the delicate laying of pieces, you lost. If it held together into a perfect geometry, and you finished first, you won. In case of a tie, the structure with the most pieces won. Simple.
    She declared the prize to be either a fried bologna sandwich or a cereal bowl of vanilla wafers. Winner’s choice. Sharing optional. And,as an afterthought to the rules, if you decided to build something that looked like a little Abe Lincoln log cabin or a hay wagon or a hog pen or a ’57 Studebaker instead of a fire, you got extra credit.
    The children looked at the wood splits but didn’t touch them. They went to the porch rockers and rocked for the next two hours, looking glazed into the distance.
    THERE USED TO BE so much time and space in a day. Whenever Luce wanted, she’d walk down the road and check on Stubblefield. He was so lonesome for company after his wife died that every time Luce stopped by, he set a bottle of good Scotch on the kitchen table and killed a hen. She’d be there for hours listening to his tales of wild youth, and eating the crisp salty legs and breasts he dredged in cornmeal and fried in lard. Spending an entire afternoon that way suited Luce fine, because she was lonely too, but in a somewhat different way.
    Now, though, Stubblefield was dead and the children had come, and suddenly she couldn’t let up for an instant. The children rose with the sun, so Luce did too. Pay a moment’s attention to your own life, and they would burn the place down or run off to get lost in the woods or drowned in the lake. Watchfulness was something Luce had mostly applied to nothing but the natural world. Birds and leaves and weather. An occasional deer or bear or screaming panther. Distant lights in the sky at night moving contrary to the expected. And the sweetness of it was simple: the natural world would go on and on just fine whether you watched or not. Your existence was incidental. Nature didn’t require anything at all other than the bare minimum deal in return for life. Be born, die.
    Neither did the children care whether you watched their doings. But the catch was, they might be dead within the hour if you let up your attentions. Little pale damp lifeless bodies lying at the lakeshore or beside deep-woods streams. Peanut-colored wet hair swarped across blue foreheads.
    What a mess if the children found a way to die. What would youneed 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