Nightwoods Read Online Free PDF

like a docent. She explained the economics of chickens, talking to the children as if they had sense and hoping that a few words might get through.
    First point, they really liked fried chicken and stewed chicken, didn’t they? Second point, Luce couldn’t afford to go to town and buy chicken from the grocery, and right now, only a few eating-sized chickens roamed the yard. Luce counted them out. Seven. Thus, if you go around killing chickens for entertainment, it’s not only a mean thing to do and liable to come back around on you in the future as bad luck and trouble, but it will leave all three of them without fried or stewed or roasted chicken for quite some time.
    Maybe Luce was a little fragmented in the delivery, but the lesson was simple. Manage chickens carefully, you’ll have eggs most of the time and chicken meat some of the time. Manage poorly, and there will be no more chickens or eggs at all.
    The children walked around in the dim brown light of the henhouse and looked on the dusty ledges and in the nesting boxes. The girl found the first egg. She held it cupped in her palm and studied it. Then she smashed her other fist against it and smeared the mess on her brother’s face. Immediately, he hit her hard in the stomach and they both started howling at the tops of their lungs without ever pausing in their fighting, which was vicious. They rolled on the packed dirt floor amid the black-and-white chicken droppings and the little white pinfeathers. Luce watched them, and it reminded her of snakes fighting. Real cold, like they were not even very angry at each other, just acting under some shared compulsion as incomprehensible as sex or madness. Luce finally stepped in and snatched them each by the backs of their shirts like they had handles and held them apart.
    Many people would council putting the rod to them until the importance of obedience made an impression. That, or lock them up in a dark closet for a few hours until they fell out blinking into the sunlight and did as they were told. Maybe the children had it coming, but if those correctives were applied to her, Luce would just get meaner and more hardheaded. The one angry switching was bad enough, and she’d sworn she wouldn’t do it again, for their sake and for hers. So that none of them would have to go around feeling bad all day, or maybe forever.
    For the next lesson, Luce took the children out back to the kitchen garden, with its deer fence of leaned and weathered palings. The morning fog had not fully burned away, and dew still beaded on the tomato leaves. The sun was a faint pale disk, the light flat and grey. The children stood shivering with their arms crossed on their chests. Their faces pale and puffy-eyed, and their hair in points, like they had just rolled out of bed. Luce gave them each a cherry tomato folded in a basil leaf, which they seemed to like. They started making their own, and Luce began filling the air with vegetable lore, learned mostly from Maddie. Luce explained that she planted like Cherokee people did. One corn kernel and two beans to a hill. The cornstalk makes the trellis for the bean vines to grow up, and some magic love between corn and beans keeps them from stripping the good out of the soil, so you can keep on using the same plot of ground a long time. And, of course, squash and melons grow well between corn and beans.
    She told the children how you can think about history one way, that it took thousands of years for people to figure all this out by tedious trial and error, generation by generation. Or you can think that some old woman just got lucky one summer and shared the wealth. Either way, though, you have to be vigilant about hoeing and suckering and those kinds of tedious jobs. Otherwise, by August you end up with green life running wild, vegetables to your shoulders and weeds to your knees in the aisles. Copperheads twisting through stalks and vines so that you have to take a shotgun with you to gather