The Lost Country

by William Gay

  You might pull that dress down, he said mildly. I reckon we’ve all seen one. We all know what one looks like.

  Speak for yourself, Pearl said, but she tugged her skirt down.

  He looked away.

  Looky here, looky here, Pug said.

  He had a streaming water bucket from which he dealt up three dripping brown bottles of beer, one to each.

  Well now, Edgewater said.

  I had em down in that old cistern, Pug said. They ort to be cool enough to drink.

  The evocative power of the beer caused Pug to reminisce. He’d been in the invasion of Normandy and so luckless he’d made the Battle of the Bulge as well and he recounted to Edgewater such strange and bloody carnage and on a scale so confusing and mindnumbing that Edgewater had a thought for the outward limits of human endurance. He wondered if he would have been capable of these things and without meaning to he wondered it aloud.

  I guess by God if it was the only thing to do you’d do it.

  Edgewater remained silent. He’d known at one time the only thing to do was go home but he hadn’t done that. Start looking for a scrap of lumber to rebuild burned bridges. He’d come already most of the distance, it was the last mile that was turning out to be hard. Once it had seemed easy to undo things, to unsay things. To forgive things said and done to him. But deeds and words had a permanence he hadn’t been aware of and it was easy to become distracted by life in its infinite and beguiling variety.

  Pug set his empty bottle aside. Well that’s it for me, he said. I’m wore out and mornin comes early around here.

  How wore out are you? Pearl said.

  I’m pretty wore out. Bindlestaff, there’s a blanket there in the front room. Just go on back when you’re ready.

  Wore out, wore out, Pearl said softly to no one.

  There was the creak of bedsprings inside the house then silence. Edgewater became conscious of the rasping wall of frogs from the slough, as if they’d all thousands of them suddenly thought of something to say.

  He’s always too wore out to do anything, Pearl said.

  Edgewater didn’t say anything. She smoked one and studied the worn leather of his shoes.

  He’s mean to me too.

  How’s he mean to you?

  One night he got drunk and throwed the only good pair of shoes I had in the slough.

  After she’d gone in he sat for a time just listening, the croaking of the frogs diminished by the enormous silence of the night. A pale sliver of moon had risen, the bottom edge poised to cup water, a dry barren moon. By its meager light the fields of cotton looked silver, a vast expanse faintly luminous, like St. Elmo’s fire at sea. Earlier there were lights from other shanties but they had gone down to darkness now, and he could see the moment it happened, the face leaned to the lampglobe and the harsh expulsion of breath and the sudden darkness that smells of kerosene and the slow creak of the bedsprings, and the murmurs, the whispers, all over the sleeping land, demurred, passions spent and passions spurned in the temporary dark while the earth tilts inexorably toward the waiting sun. As if he’d be clarified in the crucible of crazed austerity, made whole by the innocence of love, or at least cauterized wherever the bleeding was coming from. The nights were never long enough, the night would not replace what the day had stolen. In all their beds in all their shotgun shacks they lay burled against the quilts in agonized crucifixion, their troubled dreams biased by the enormous tug of gravity from the invisible and lost country they had come from.

  He awoke deep in the night and dreamed he heard some sounds beyond the normal sounds, the call of the nightbirds, the incessant cheep of frogs from the vast water. Goddamn mosquitoes, he said, slapping. They were all about his ears. The voice came again, Pug’s, a murmurous chorus from Pearl, wheedling, placating.

  I’ll kill him, Pug said. Edgewater felt a disquiet, wondered if the threat was general or specific. He fancied other voices, up and down the levee, faint and faraway, from the coal oil scented yellow shacks. Voices seeking entry, seeking egress. Seeking excitement, seeking peace of mind. Seeking anything to make the night rock easier by.

  I ever catch you with another son of a bitch like I done that time I’ll cut his fucking throat with this very knife, Pug said.

  I won’t do it no more, Daddy, came her voice pleading faint from the outskirts of death.

  He pulled the blanket about him, felt the cool wood of the porch, watched pale stars through a rent in the tin.

  At last he slept.

  The day in abeyance, the troubled waters of sleep lapping at the improvised bedposts, trying to belong he felt at once a kinship and a distance. In his counterfeit sackcloth, his imitation ashes. This respite from the dumbshow a wary pageant where inept actors can never remember their lines, cannot improvise or even remember their motivation. And Edgewater the worst of them, the worst of the lot. Easing through like a sneak thief, an agent provocateur, taking things that would not even be missed. A glance, a word, a memory, a moment that no one else notices. It might have been lost save that I have replevied it as salvaged raw material, to build myself. What do you want me to be? I’ll construct a self from all these plundered lives, a prism from this broken glass, I’ll be you but not quite, a distorted replica of what you see when you lean toward the mirror, when your reflection leans toward you in the glass. I’ll steal your shadow and reflection and warp it to my purpose and steal away under cover of darkness and move on unnoticed with only the spurious credentials of my blistered palms, even your gatekeeper was sleeping at the watch. I passed her blind eyes unnoticed, she was dead with her patching in her lap.

  When he went in he could hear their coarse heavy breathing. He took up the blanket and went with it toward a doorway that was just a rectangle opening onto Stygian blackness. A struck match showed him a floor of bare earth, a few rotten planks laid across it like a wooden pallet. The match glittered red in the eyes of a huge rat regarding him from the corner. Gray and scaly-tailed and avaricious-looking, the rat seemed determined, even outraged at this intrusion and appeared intent on contesting him for territorial rights of this domain. Edgewater blew out the match and threw it at the rat and went with his blanket back to the porch.

  He slept cold and woke before daylight with the blanket wrapped around himself like a shroud. There was no going back to sleep and he rose and built a fire in the kitchen range and put on a pot of water and rummaged around until he found the coffee. When it was done he sat on the edge of the porch sipping a cup of it and watched the skies incrementally lighten. The stars beginning to vanish, winking out one by one as if they were streaking away into remoter corners of the known universe, disappearing into unknowable distances.

  In midweek the rain began and it settled in with an air of permanence as if it would never cease. At noon on Saturday the Diamond T equipped with wooden sideboards and roofed with tarpaulin made its way along the backroads and wagon lanes, stopping before each of the sharecropper shanties. Family by family they clambered aboard until at length they were crowded in like upright sardines or refugees packed for some uncertain but dire destination. The adults had a restrained air about them, they wore their Sunday best, clean shirt and overalls and even a necktie or two and the felt fedoras old farmers affect. They nodded with an unaccustomed dignity to their neighbors, saying, Hidy, looks like it may blow up a little rain here after a while.

  The children were in a more festive mood of barely contained glee as if bound for a carnival and already in, then hearing a distant calliope, they had to be constantly called down by their mothers. When the truck was finally loaded it climbed the levee and headed east toward Tiptonville, with a trail of smoke rising behind it.

  The truck parked by the tie yard below the railroad track and they clambered off, the men assisting the children and the ladies down from the high truck bed. They stood for a moment wordless, the men pulling their hats lower, brushing dust from clothes, the women running last-minute combs through their hair, damp handkerchiefs to the
faces of their children.

  I’ll be leavin at nine thirty sharp, rain or shine, Hobart said. Hobart was the driver and there was an air of authority about him. If you ain’t here at nine thirty I’ll figure you ain’t goin or you got another way back. Just remember it’s bettern fifteen mile to the farm.

  Hot damn, Bindlestaff, Pug said. Let’s see if we can find us a dry place and get up a pill game. Drink us a cold one or three.

  They played pool at a place called Dixie Billiards for an hour or so but Edgewater kept glancing through the rainblurred glass at such commerce as was passing in the street and at length he drained his beer bottle and hung his cue in the wooden rack.

  I’m going to walk around a bit, he said. See what this place has got in it.

  I know what you’re up to, Pug said.

  Edgewater just grinned and shook his head.

  Be a killin, Pug called as he was opening the door. That old woman totes a little snubnosed pistol in her drawers.

  Edgewater just waved onehanded and let the door fall to behind him.

  He crossed the aisles of the five and dime, eyeing the binned merchandise. Eyed himself by sober girls in cool green lisle. The old woman was fingering bolted rolls of cloth with her back to him and at first he didn’t see the girl. Then passing up another aisle he saw her studying costume jewelry, cheap corded earrings and gaudy bracelets of plastic and colored glass. A salesgirl was watching as if Iva Mae might be planning a major jewelry heist.

  Hey, Edgewater said.

  The girl turned. Hey. I wondered where you’d got off to.

  Looking for you for the last hour. I’ve been in every café in town. You want to go get a hamburger or something?

  I don’t know.

  Let me pay for that thing you’re holding and let’s go.

  You want to buy it for me?

  Sure.

  I’d have to ask Grandma about going to eat with you. She don’t like you.

  She doesn’t know me. Let’s leave before she does.

  She knows you well enough. She thinks you’re trying to get me off to myself.

  I guess I sort of am.

  And, you know, do things to me. Are you?

  What kind of things?

  You know.

  Right now I’m just trying to buy you a bracelet and a hamburger, Edgewater said.

  I’ll have to tell Grandma. She’ll think I’m lost.

  Hellfire. This town isn’t big enough to get lost in.

  But the old woman had some arcane sense perhaps subconsciously attuned to Edgewater and his ilk and she’d approached silent as a plague. She seemed not to move in the customary manner but to glide as if her feet did not quite touch the floor or if she were equipped with tiny ballbearinged wheels that propelled her about.

  He just wanted to buy me a hamburger, Iva Mae said.

  Hamburger nothin, the old woman said. I’ll just bet he did.

  As she hustled the girl toward the cash register the girl looked back over her shoulder. We’ll be at the show after a while, she called.

  No we won’t, Grandmother said.

  Edgewater bought a hamburger and fries in a place called the Eatmore Café and put them in a grease-splattered bag and a sixpack of Falstaff he picked up at the pool hall and went below the railroad track where the truck was parked. He climbed up inside and sat with his feet hanging over the tailgate then clambered up and adjusted the tarpaulin forward and reseated himself in the dry and ate listening to the mesmeric patter of rain on the canvas, eyes looking at nothing, thinking no thoughts at all.

  When he was full, a lean smokecolored hound appeared below Edgewater’s feet. The dog looked at him expectantly as if he’d had news there was to be food left over and Edgewater tossed him half the hamburger. The dog caught it in its razorous jaws and swallowed twice and waited to see if more was forthcoming. That’s it, Edgewater said. The dog eased beneath the truck and vanished.

  Edgewater drank beer and leaned against the wooden frame of the tailgate. He closed his eyes. He could hear nothing from the town but he guessed later there would be reveling, confrontations in the alleys, honor would be impugned, honor defended. Southern women would be drunkenly insulted, brass knuckles would rattle on the barroom floor, the red lights of the police.

  As if in rehearsal an ambulance crossed the railroad tracks briefly airborne and lit rocking on its shocks and streaked eastward lights winding, siren already beginning to wail, speedometer in a fast steady climb into the red. Trouble in the hinterlands, the citizenry are restless, there is disquiet on the land. Something is amongst us and must be contained. Almost immediately a black and white cruiser followed, the revolving dome light pulsing arterial red into the blowing rain. He thought this the strangest of trades, this laying on of order onto chaos. To sweep up the broken glass, hose away the blood. Haul away the smoking wreck whose speed had altered its shape to accommodate the shape to that of the concrete bridge abutment. To saw into warped and jammed car doors, sparks flying beyond the safety glasses, watch his arm there. Take stealing peeks into hell, eavesdropping on their telephone lines. A little preparatory licensed course and they can move through nightmares with impunity, nothing is posted to them, there is no such things as trespass. Sewing up the wounded, closing the eyes of the dead. Reassembling the scattered and bloody pieces of the puzzle, does this go here or here?

  Once long ago his father had shaken him awake in the night. Get up. The unfeatured black shape looming over him, the face shown in his mind rather than his eyes told by familiarity, by the countless times he had seen it, every day of his life, the black shape just a widebrimmed silhouette.

  Where are we going?

  Just shut up. Don’t wake your momma.

  They went through the woods. The woods silver as in a dream. Ebony where the moonlight didn’t fall, the light streaking away like chrome, like electric on the dewy upturned leaves, the world turned down until reduced to its elemental black and silver, the trees dim and ancient engravings. His feet were wet, his jeans soaked to the knees.

  After what seemed hours they stopped to rest. They were on a hillside overlooking the farm of a man named Crouch. They were very close. Wet tin roof, a barn, windows dark with sleep. Edgewater could see the German Shepherd chained to the clothesline. Hear the chain shirling as the dog walked back and forth the length of the line like a sentry at his post.

  Son of a bitch beat me, the father said. Eight days work clearing new ground and the son of a bitch refused to pay me. Not couldn’t pay me, just flat out refused.

  Then law him, Edgewater said.

  He carries the law folded up in his pocketbook. I was goin to take it out in hide and his old woman called the law on me. On me. I got a little hide but nowhere near eight days’ worth.

  Edgewater could smell his father. The smell of sweet chewing tobacco, the vaguely wetanimal smell of the hat, the smell of his anger like the smell of metal heated bluewhite in a forge, dipped in water to set the temper.

  That dog, Edgewater said but his father brushed him with contempt.

  That dog won’t even bark.

  Why?

  Because it don’t want its throat cut, his father said.

  They came down the slope into the barnlot. The slope below the house was littered with tins of food. Crouch went with women other than his wife and she used to go into rages. He’d attempt placation with largess, exotic things to tempt her, bags and boxes of food from the grocery store. She’d stand on the back porch and hurl it can after can down the hillside, where the weather unlabeled it and then it lay gleaming like jewels, the older cans already rusting. Reckon any of it’s fit to eat? he’d asked once, and thought for a moment his father was going to hit him. But the hand upraised to slap finally lowered like a weapon that moved of its own weary volition. Likely it’s all tinpoisoned, he said.

  What he was after was a turning plow. I priced one of these at Grimes’s Hardware, he said. It’s about the same as what he owes me.

  W
hat do you want with a turning plow?

  You may have to help me here. This son of a bitch is like lifting the world.

  At last he had it hoisted, the crook of the plow on his shoulder, the point over his chest, the handle upraised into the air. Goddamn, he said.

  We’ll have to double up on it, Edgewater said.

  I can do it.

  Back into the woods. They wound back the way they’d come, turned down a fading road grown kneehigh in brush to an old houseplace the father knew about. They came out in an old plum orchard grown rank and mutant and stopped to rest, the father squatting beneath the weight of the plow as if afraid he’d never get it hoisted again, the enormous point resting against his heart, a rat squatting there in the halfdark with the plowhandles rising above his head like huge curving horns he looked like some weary beast so aberrant he was outside the world’s dominion, beyond the pale, forced to haunt the very perimeters of a land that would not have him.

  You want me to help you with it?

  You may have to brace me when I get up.

  There was a well covered over with halfrotted chestnut boards. He lowered the plow and stood breathing hard. This is rougher than clearing the goddamn new ground, he said.

  He cleared away the debris. Edgewater looked down the handhewn sides. Slick wet earth, glistening rock around the throat. A moon trapped at its bottom, the water gleaming like quicksilver.

  Help me line her up here.

  The plow went skittering down the sides, there was an enormous splash when it struck bottom.

  Well now, the father said. That’s better. I’m even with him now.

  I believe I was goin to steal something I’d pick something a little easier to carry, Edgewater said.

  His father was in a better mood now. I priced all that junk. This was the only thing that balanced it out. Evening up always takes a big weight off you.

  Edgewater hadn’t known he slept but someone had him by the foot shaking him awake. He opened his eyes to a cop, a police car beyond him gleaming in the rain, lights flashing, garbled electronic voices from the scanner.