Nightwoods by Charles Frazier Read Free Book Online Page A

mashed the hat on Dolores’s head and clicked her fingernail five times against her watch crystal. Said, Dolores, you have to wear the hat until three thirty-two, then Frank has to wear it. Don’t cross me on this.
    Dolores took the hat off and tried to give it to Frank, who wouldn’t take it. Luce made her put it back on, and Dolores walked tragic and sad-hearted, dragging the toes of her sneakers in the dirt, her face down and shadowed by the brim. At five to go, Luce started counting off the minutes. Dolores’s mood suddenly brightened, and dread overwhelmed Frank. At the moment of transferring the hat, Dolores danced three happy steps.
    Back at the Lodge, they sat in the porch rockers, sulled up and sad, rocking slow. Partway through the walk home, it had quit mattering anymore who wore the hat. All the joy had drained out of it.
    Luce sat with her feet dangling over the porch edge, looking at the blue lake and the green mountains, keeping time and enforcing the exchanges. Trying to hide how delighted she was to find that the children understood and actually complied with her totally arbitrary rules, an important skill for living in the world with other people. Unless you retreated to your own private wilderness. Except there was no wilderness.
    Arbitrarily, Luce decided that one more exchange would finish making the point, and afterward, she gave the children the choice of what to do with the hat. They carried it to the cook stove and used a piece of kindling to stuff it down an eye onto the bed of coals. The straw flamed up yellow through the open hole for a few seconds and then was gone for good.

CHAPTER   4
    B UD’S LAWYER WAS A SMART and ruthless old white-haired bastard. Drove a new black Coupe de Ville, and had gotten drunk with every governor back into the late twenties, regardless of political party. He’d taken Bud’s case only because he figured one way or the other, he’d end up with Lily’s house to sell. Said to Bud, right at the outset, Not a great deal of money in a little two-bedroom bungalow, but sadly the modern world has become largely a matter of volume.
    The State’s man was so fresh out of law school that he still went back to campus for parties thrown by friends who had not yet graduated. He seemed stunned to find himself in court. During the course of a morning, Bud’s lawyer convinced the jury of men that Lily had been little better than a whore. All in all, they inferred, she probably deserved killing, at least within the shadow of a doubt the old lawyer had laid out as a confusing yet binding covenant between God and man regarding the administration of justice on earth. Case in point, Lily had conceived not one but two children by another man. Also, hypothetical boyfriends were alluded to vividly and with only a hesitant objection from the boy lawyer, who seemed crushed when the judge ruled against him. When it came to the murder weapon, the old lawyer asked a simple, compelling question: If you live in a house, aren’t your fingerprints on everything, including the knives? Crazy dope-addict killers wearing gloves could never be ruled out. And, further, the only possible eyewitnesses, when questioned by police detectives, had not testified to his client’s guilt in any way.
    The old lawyer failed to mention that the witnesses were children who either could not or would not utter a single word or even acknowledge they had been asked a question. When the State’s man went into those inconvenient facts, the old lawyer pulled out a doctor’s report labeling the children as feebleminded. After that, the State’s man sat quiet, like he knew he was taking a beating and just wanted it to be over.
    Three days later, Bud walked out the courthouse doors. Hardly two o’clock, humid and hot and the sky dull white, still wearing his grey trial suit the lawyer had bought for him, and carrying a paper poke with his clothes and effects from when he was arrested. Outside, an elder woman sat on