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Authors: Charles Frazier
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holding up a curved meerschaum pipe with wizened bearded elf faces carved on the yellowed bowl. It was like a small saxophone. The children didn’t particularly look, but they didn’t not look either. They were liking the dusty clutter of the Lodge’s upper floors, and the pilfering.
Docent Luce had taken them exploring, digging into leather trunks left in attic spaces under the eaves and in storage closets. Foretime lost-and-found stuff like tarnished silver-and-ebony brooches the women thought so little of that they left them strewn in the bureau drawers. Tan floppy-thighed jodhpurs and black boots with rusting eyelets threaded with rotting laces. Which suggested that rich people must have come costumed to the mountains back then.
They found a gramophone with a brass horn shaped like a morning glory blossom and a stack of records in brown paper sleeves. There was still a record on the platter, and Luce blew the dust away and turned the crank and lowered the needle. From the brass cone a man’svoice sang “Pucker Up Your Lips, Miss Lindy,” the sound scratchy and thin. The children focused on watching the record spin and the needle ride the groove. They sprawled on their sides on the floorboards with their heads propped on their hands and seemed relaxed and soothed by the crackling music, ghostly from the past. When three or four notes of the chorus came back around, they’d hum along faintly, blank-faced.
Luce went through the entire stack of records, being the DJ. She played Peg Leg Howell, King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke. A tiny orchestra wheezing away at “The Ride of the Valkyries.” Then some rube duet singing about corn husking, which Luce knew for a fact was no fun at all and tore your hands up, but the rubes seemed to be having a good time making up a happy fantasy about it. Yodelers and blues screamers from soon after World War I, and crooners going back beyond raccoon-coat days, an age lit entirely by the light of the silvery moon. And finally, Jimmie Rodgers’s “T.B. Blues.” It was the only song out of the whole bunch that Luce knew anything particular about, so she explained that Rodgers had lived nearby once upon a time, and then died of tuberculosis, but nevertheless sounded awfully jaunty and belligerent singing about it.
When all the records had been played, both sides, she carried the player and records and a maroon leather album of photographs downstairs.
The photographs were from a summer long ago, and that night after the children had gone to sleep, Luce looked at them carefully, one by one. The corners of the pictures were affixed to the black pages with little scalloped black paper triangles, the glue licked by dead tongues. In the pictures, the Lodge looked nearly new. World War I wasn’t even close to happening yet. A whole different world, but occupying this same space right here. A picture of five girls in high-necked white dresses sitting on the front steps drying their long, shampooed hair in the sun. Two girls dozing together in a hammock with books spread open across their narrow waists and their tapered fingers trailing unconscious from the bindings. Girls batting shuttlecocks acrossa net on the lawn, skirts to their ankles and ribboned hats on their heads. Girls paddling canoes on the lake. Whiskered men in striped summer suits smoking cigars on the porch after dinner. A lovely grown woman walking across the lawn in a pale summer dress, the hem skimming the grass, her dark hair bunned off her neck and her face blurred by the motion of turning to look at the camera as the shutter clicked.
CLEAR AND MOONLESS , an hour before sunrise. The children woke and rattled around the lobby. Sliding a mica-shade lamp two inches to the left, a rust-colored piece of pottery four inches to the right. Reordering the Britannicas by some system less obvious than the alphabet. The kinds of things they did when they were hungry or bored. Luce eventually quit pretending to sleep, but she’d be
Docent Luce had taken them exploring, digging into leather trunks left in attic spaces under the eaves and in storage closets. Foretime lost-and-found stuff like tarnished silver-and-ebony brooches the women thought so little of that they left them strewn in the bureau drawers. Tan floppy-thighed jodhpurs and black boots with rusting eyelets threaded with rotting laces. Which suggested that rich people must have come costumed to the mountains back then.
They found a gramophone with a brass horn shaped like a morning glory blossom and a stack of records in brown paper sleeves. There was still a record on the platter, and Luce blew the dust away and turned the crank and lowered the needle. From the brass cone a man’svoice sang “Pucker Up Your Lips, Miss Lindy,” the sound scratchy and thin. The children focused on watching the record spin and the needle ride the groove. They sprawled on their sides on the floorboards with their heads propped on their hands and seemed relaxed and soothed by the crackling music, ghostly from the past. When three or four notes of the chorus came back around, they’d hum along faintly, blank-faced.
Luce went through the entire stack of records, being the DJ. She played Peg Leg Howell, King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke. A tiny orchestra wheezing away at “The Ride of the Valkyries.” Then some rube duet singing about corn husking, which Luce knew for a fact was no fun at all and tore your hands up, but the rubes seemed to be having a good time making up a happy fantasy about it. Yodelers and blues screamers from soon after World War I, and crooners going back beyond raccoon-coat days, an age lit entirely by the light of the silvery moon. And finally, Jimmie Rodgers’s “T.B. Blues.” It was the only song out of the whole bunch that Luce knew anything particular about, so she explained that Rodgers had lived nearby once upon a time, and then died of tuberculosis, but nevertheless sounded awfully jaunty and belligerent singing about it.
When all the records had been played, both sides, she carried the player and records and a maroon leather album of photographs downstairs.
The photographs were from a summer long ago, and that night after the children had gone to sleep, Luce looked at them carefully, one by one. The corners of the pictures were affixed to the black pages with little scalloped black paper triangles, the glue licked by dead tongues. In the pictures, the Lodge looked nearly new. World War I wasn’t even close to happening yet. A whole different world, but occupying this same space right here. A picture of five girls in high-necked white dresses sitting on the front steps drying their long, shampooed hair in the sun. Two girls dozing together in a hammock with books spread open across their narrow waists and their tapered fingers trailing unconscious from the bindings. Girls batting shuttlecocks acrossa net on the lawn, skirts to their ankles and ribboned hats on their heads. Girls paddling canoes on the lake. Whiskered men in striped summer suits smoking cigars on the porch after dinner. A lovely grown woman walking across the lawn in a pale summer dress, the hem skimming the grass, her dark hair bunned off her neck and her face blurred by the motion of turning to look at the camera as the shutter clicked.
CLEAR AND MOONLESS , an hour before sunrise. The children woke and rattled around the lobby. Sliding a mica-shade lamp two inches to the left, a rust-colored piece of pottery four inches to the right. Reordering the Britannicas by some system less obvious than the alphabet. The kinds of things they did when they were hungry or bored. Luce eventually quit pretending to sleep, but she’d be
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