Free Nightwoods by Charles Frazier Page A

for one quiet vodka tonic in the brown light of the bar near the docks. His deal was simple. Sunday and Monday, nothing. Friday and Saturday, three or four or so. But Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, only one while he read the paper and opened his mail. Afterward, no dawdling. Pay up and leave.
    Stubblefield sipped his drink and tore the envelopes open. Bills, mostly. Including one for a telephone pole he’d knocked down somewhere on the Mississippi coast last year, totaling a lovely green Austin-Healey in the process. Four dollars a month to the phone company nearly forever. Then, a letter from a lawyer up in the mountains expressing condolences for the death of his grandfather and informing him of his inheritance. Various parcels of land, plus the farmhouse and outbuildings, the Wayah Lodge, and the historic tavern, remnant from stagecoach days.
    All in sad neglect and disrepair. Those were the lawyer’s exact words.
    Stubblefield imagined the corncrib he had played in as a boy melting into the dirt, the springhouse caving in, kudzu overwhelming the garden.
    Farther down the page, and more positive, a mention of monthly rental income plus a percentage of net from the historic tavern. Now called the Roadhouse, according to the lawyer, and mainly a late-night sort of place featuring live music. But a potential liability despite its being the only profitable piece of the inheritance.
    What Stubblefield read into the euphemisms was that the tavern, bought by his grandfather as a folly, like collecting eighteenth-century china or old black-powder firearms, had become an illegal bar in a dry county. Which made a fitting inheritance, since his grandfather never was the kind of hard-shelled man to deny himself or another the simple joy of a drink at the end of day.
    From toddlerhood until he was eighteen, Stubblefield had spent every summer at the farm. He quit visiting after his grandmother died and it began to seem that his grandfather wanted to ride out the tail end of life with the fewest possible outside distractions or inconveniences. So, a summer being three months long, tot up the numbers. He figured he had spent approximately several years of his life up there in the wet green mountains. How lovely and unexpected to inherit all that familiar picturesque ruin. Still, Stubblefield felt guilty about not attending the funeral, even though nobody had thought to inform him until it was too late to make the long drive.
    The lawyer’s letter concluded with an unwelcome paragraph. A matter of various unpaid taxes and outstanding bills. And, yet, so little cash money left in the bank accounts. What to do? Please inform.
    Stubblefield thought about it, all the shit of ownership. And then remembered his Stanback. He ordered another drink and washed down the healing envelope of bitter powder with the first sip.
    FEATURING HIMSELF A BACKROADS , scenic-route guy, and the sun shining again, Stubblefield went indirect. A couple of days driving up the coast, stopping to eat or drink at beach joints and walk in the towns. Jekyll Island, Savannah, Beaufort, Charleston. All the beautiful old places very much like the beautiful place he had just left. Victorian houses, Spanish moss in live oaks, fishing boats at the docks in the afternoon, and waterside fishhouses frying up the day’s catch. The Atlantic changing shades by the hour, verdigris or slate or taupe. Those kinds of special colors.
    At Sullivan’s Island, he walked through the dank fort where Poe served time in the Army. And then on to Isle of Palms, where everybody drove a station wagon full of kids in bathing suits, the back-end windows pressed tight with inflated beach balls and floats in shiny primary colors. He parked and swam parallel to the beach, on and on until he couldn’t do it anymore, and then he rested in the wet sand at the water’s edge and swam back.
    He drove inland, past sunset through the sandy pine flats and rolling hills, thinking about the mountain lake