Free Nightwoods by Charles Frazier Page B

and the big white frame house. Green trim around the windows and along the fascia boards, a rusting 5v galvanized roof. A deep porch all the way across the front, in whose shade he had turned a geared crank to produce ice cream on summer afternoons. The homeplace was a leftover from some dusty ancestor who bought great swaths of land at auction when the State sold off the Cherokee holdings back in the early eighteen-whatevers. Later, in the deeps of the Civil War past—or probably the Reconstruction, if somebody needed to get precise—his people had owned a whole quarter of a huge mountain. A pie shape of ragged landscape stretching point-first from the summit eastward. Thousands of acres, maybe tens of thousands. But, back then, steep land was worth about a nickel an acre, if you could find a buyer. Over the decades, though, it got a little more valuable, and eventually it did get sold, all but a few fragments, by old Stubblefield’s elder brother.
    One year shortly before the Depression, the brother had taken an affection for mournful cowboy music. He was in his middle thirties, a dangerous time of life. Most afternoons from early spring to late fall, he sat on the porch of the farmhouse, lounging in a striped canvas campaign chair and drinking multiple shots of good Scotch. Reaching out periodically to crank the handle of a Victrola, spinning stacks of 78s. “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” “Red River Valley,” “Streets of Laredo.” If, someday, people could see by his outfit that he was a cowboy, his life would be a success. Then, without warning, he was gone, having quietly sold most of the mountain land for much less than it was worth. Decades later, old Stubblefield discovered his brother’s whereabouts and went to visit. He found a tall bowlegged white-haired man living in a little bungalow in downtown Rawlins, Wyoming. The brother’s life had been a great success. He wore Levi’s except to church and a John B. Stetson hat every day of the year, pale straw in summer and brown felt otherwise. Each of the many times Stubblefield had heard his grandfather tell the story, it concluded with the observation that his little grandson bore great resemblance to the cowboy. Which, until now, Stubblefield had taken as a compliment.
    NEXT MORNING, STUBBLEFIELD rounded the bend past the barn and the corncrib, both time-blanched and sagging toward earth.
    Sad disrepair, yes indeed.
    So he expected more sadness when the house came into view. But it never did. Where it should have been, a big empty space of air shaped itself in Stubblefield’s mind exactly like his grandparents’ house, except invisible. And below that, a black circle of ash and charcoal on the ground, surrounded by unmowed grass. A few burnt stubs of roof joists pitched at low angles to the sky. Century-old oak trees in the yard, their leaves scorched on the sides facing the empty space. Boxwoods all burned down to nubs beside eight sooty stone steps climbing to nowhere.
    Stubblefield parked in the j-hole by the gate and walked to the edge of the burn. He squatted and studied the circle where better than a century of life had happened, some of it his own. The ashes at the edge lay soft and light and pale. Every hint of breeze puffed up a mist of ash that seemed to Stubblefield like the contents of a cremation urn tossed to the wind. He reached deep to throw another fistful into the air, but drew his hand back fast and empty. Burnt. Still damn hot down in there. He quickstepped to the singed springhouse and soaked his hand in the cold clear water rising from deep underground flows.

CHAPTER   7
    L ATE DAYS OF SUMMER . A social occasion in a raw new clearing at the edge of town, the margin where everything turned to jungle and sloped steep to the high peaks. A couple dozen vehicles parked between the bulldozed ground and the road. Chevys and Fords mostly. A few outlier cars, like a low-slung Hudson coupe and a tiny pink-and-white Nash Metropolitan,