Nightwoods by Charles Frazier Read Free Book Online

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 hatoff 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