Read Nightwoods for Free Online Page B

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 herhigh 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