Nightwoods Read Online Free PDF Page B

dinner.
    So much more produce than we could ever eat by ourselves, Luce said. Yet the garden keeps on making stuff, whether it’s wanted or not. Squash and cantaloupes collapsing where they lay. The sad internal structure of a rotting tomato haunting your dreams. If you didn’t learn the art of canning, you’d better get comfortable living with the guilt of wastage. Which reminded Luce of a day long ago when she and Lily were home alone and somehow broke the kitchen faucet. A fat stream of water splashed into the sink. They could not turn it off, no matter how hard they twisted the handle. Childhood panic. Lily reached a glass to Luce and said, Don’t just stand there, start drinking.
    Which led Luce to ask the kids, So, what do you remember about Lily? I’ve got so many stories like that one. I remember a lot.
    The children wandered deeper into the garden and didn’t seem to hear a word of Luce’s ramble. But at least they weren’t trying to light the cornstalks on fire. The girl scrunched her cheeks and brows to hold two cherry tomatoes like red eyes for a few seconds, and the boy looked like he was trying to decide whether it was scary or funny. He picked up a fallen beefsteak tomato and splattered it against her shoulder and she retaliated. More playful than violent, so Luce even lobbed a couple herself.
    The day they visited the orchards up the hillside, Luce explained that trees behaved more rationally than vegetables. Slow and careful. These had been let go for decades, and the limbs had grown crisscrossed and shaggy with dun-colored moss and lichen, yet they still made about as many fuzzy peaches in summer and bright speckled apples in fall as she could eat, whether fresh or dried in brown leathery rings or canned. Even without pruning and fertilizing, the elderly trees would probably go on for at least one person’s little lifetime, offering themselves forward against the uncertain future with grim persistence.
    The children walked straight down the old rows, the girl first and the boy right behind. At the end of the orchard, they continued the line into the random woods until Luce ran ahead and waved her arms, herding them back to the Lodge.
    On a drizzly day toward the end of the week, Luce walked them in the woods, making water the topic of her ramble. It’s what makes life so rampant around here, she said. The children kept leaving the crooked trail and diving straight into wet brush and tall weeds until they were soaked, and Luce kept shooing them back to the path, all the time explaining how most years, you got eighty or ninety inches. A hundred is not at all remarkable in a temperate rain forest. All the moons from spring to early fall, everything plumps with water. Think jungle, and then go a degree onward in the direction of a deep green world so wet you could wring it out like a dishrag if you could get a good grip on either end of it. Giant hemlocks and sycamores and tulip trees. Rhododendrons. Moss and ferns. Understory too thick to see more than twenty feet into the woods, until killing frosts reveal the bones of the place. A steamy greenhouse of plants and creatures. Flip any rock or dead log, and myriad beings go crawling down individual vectors toward the darkness they crave. Sit in a yellow sunbeam, and the damp air around you thickens with myriad beings dancing up into the daylight they love. Life likes the wet and rewards it. Archaic forms incompatible with the modern world persist here. Hellbenders, deep in the creek beds. Panthers, high on the ridges. Even dead blighted chestnuts resurrect themselves out of the black forest floor, refusing to accept the terms of their extinction. Hope incarnate. All, Luce explained, due to moisture. Some summer days, the air carried so much of it you couldn’t strike a paper match. Briefly, Luce entertained the idea that maybe a fascination with fire was fine here. A harmless oddity, like a family streak.
    But, really, it wouldn’t do. So the next