The Lost Country

by William Gay

  An old album yielded up portraits of folks, unknown to him, men stiffly posed, standing perversely among plowshares and squinting into the sun in Sunday best. Little girls self-conscious in lace and crinoline, flowered hair, eyes a little frightened, the eye of the camera fixed with a wary and distrustful stare. A world of pictures, old faded images from out of time lost and unmounted by those who mourned themselves as well. A graveyard cleaning. Women in long dresses looking up from rakes or hoes, a hand raised to hair lifted by winds that blew out of spring long shuttled down endless and irrevocable corridors of time. A banquet table from a length of woven wire stretched between two trees. A backdrop of graves, always the graves, the living attendant and respectful to the dead, guilt at still being among the living, a throwback to old cultures long layered under the sand. Others, a young girl and boy, hands clasped, faces bright. Tomorrow a promise and not a threat. Children playing by the selfsame creek that fronted his house, perhaps this same couple’s children in later years, kneedeep in water, mouths open, he could very nearly hear their shouts of laughter. Others more somber still. A heavyset woman lay serene on her deathbed, eyes closed, brow unruffled, hands clasped, unreal, a swollen mockup left by tricksters in her stead. A preponderance of dead babies in funeral wraps in diminutive caskets, banks of carnations. Here one saved, pressed. It powdered under his delicate touch, gave forth a musty smell of ancient doom. Death must have dogged their tracks, camped at night somewhere in the bottomland, must have worked this place on the shores. An age of morbidity without apology.

  Other souvenirs kept from happier times, no less poignant. A young man in uniform and tam, brown belt, cropped hair, a brave smile. Affixed to the bottom of the picture was a stick of spearmint gum, hard and odorless, someone had written on it: JIM. Whatever happened to you, Jim? We all remember old Jim, he went to the wars. Where did you go, Jim? What did you see? What befell you? Did the French girls smile sweetly with their eyes or did you get blown apart in Belleau Woods? Did the birds pick bloody scraps of you from the shattered trees and did you die a hero’s death across waters or did you die in debt and consumptive on a hardscrabble Horn? Did they close you into an insane asylum where strangers grudgingly saw to your wants or did you die rich and fawned over, was your will contested? She saved your gum, Jim. She must have liked you. Did you ever get any of that?

  He heard her call him, looked up and out the sun-lacquered window. More accustomed to this fragile sepia world of silent people than to these bright colors and harsh sounds, dim through the faded curtains, through a lace scrollwork of shadows. He folded the album and laid it back in the pasteboard box and went out.

  He took stock of what money he had accumulated and he decided to lay in winter stores. He bought a barrel of flour and a stand of lard. He bought sugar and coffee and dried beans and tobacco. Candy and a case of peaches canned in heavy syrup and he bought everything he thought they might need to see them through till spring. The grocer had to send it out on a truck. Edgewater catalogued his provender with satisfaction and stored it away in cabinets. He had visions of sitting with his feet on the hearth while the snow flew.

  Just what are you doing, Billy? she wanted to know. She was looking at all this largess with amazement, as if Edgewater had gone into the grocery business. Why did you buy so much? Are you not goin back to work?

  He had not thought about it. Why? he asked.

  It took her a moment to frame an answer. Because everybody works, she said. That’s what people do. They get a job and they work at it and they make a livin.

  We’ll get by.

  I don’t want to get by. You’re not supposed to just get by. We’ve got a baby on the way. And anybody can get by. I want nice things, pretty clothes, things other people have. Don’t you care what people think?

  Edgewater was silent, but he realized that he did not. He had come to think of survival as an end in itself, not something to be taken for granted. Anything beyond that was just frosting on the cake.

  I’ll see what I can find, he told her.

  Some days she would go visit the old woman and when she did or on days when she was in a bitter mood he would put on his coat and prowl the woods. The timberland went he knew not how many miles before there were other houses. Some days he was in them all the daylight hours and past nightfall but he was never lost. There was a calm silence to the woods, and acceptance. They had nothing to prove to him and they did not ask anything. When the woods swallowed him time lost all meaning, it was the same here as it had always been, perhaps it would always be. Daylong he’d walk through this silence till it permeated him, seemed to soak into his very clothes. When he was back he’d have nothing to say to her, no defenses to offer, as if little by little he was taking on the qualities of the country he moved through.

  Following a rutted road grown thick with blackberry briars and cut by gulleys deeper than his height, he came upon old signs of civilization. He passed graves rounded with cairns of stones and an abandoned church or schoolhouse with its roof half caved and windows sashless and dark. He peered in. It was a church, here were the pews and the pulpit, old hymnals swollen and hard from rain. A scholarly and pious gloom. Sanctuary now for a congregation of predators and night prowlers.

  Further there were mineral springs and the ruins of a veritable community. A post office. What seemed to have been a grocery store. Then down where mineral springs boiled out of limestone rock near a derelict hotel in opulent ruin. The hotel had been built on both sides of the stream and spanning the creek was what appeared to have been a dance floor, half stripped of its oaken flooring by vandals or inclement weathers and when he crossed the timbers it swayed and creaked eerily in the wind, old cables protesting his unaccustomed weight. The railing had been stripped away by wind and lay with broken windows among flower bushes grown mutant and strange.

  He walked amidst all this ruined splendor and something unnamable touched him. The wind stirred velvet drapes long rotted to mildewed shards as colorless as funeral silks and to this music he envisioned dancers swaying lantern lit and graceful. Easy laughter floated over the waters and he heard voices in slow and refined cadences, eternally carefree, locked or frozen in time. Down a curving staircase of ruined oak came ladies of quality on the arms of men of means. Long gowns swept the parquetry floors and diamond earrings winked in the light of revolving chandeliers. Old doomed watering hole of the rich. Its benefits proved false. Its waters had not saved them. These dancers were long dead, their bones no more than the gnawed bones of rabbits predators left like an offering on the marble foyer, their voices just the winter wind singing through their skulls.

  The past stirred all about him like something he had awakened from sleep. Old meaningless intrigues were played out here, the smiles and flirtations on those long-gone summer nights. Cuckoldments and betrayal perpetrated here with grace and style. Dalliance among the rich had come to no more than among the poor in the long run. And this was the long run: velvet wallpaper brought from foreign shores that lay in watermarked and rotted sheaves for rats to nest in.

  The sun tracked on and the air grew thick and oppressive as amber and he went down the stairway on the other side of the creek and back out into the world.

  He’d taken to staying gone as if he kept more curious work hours. He would come in at four or five after being gone all day, in the woods or perhaps at the Knob listening to Swalls and Bradshaw swap lies. She never asked him where he had been. He came in one evening and she had been crying. She was sitting in the rocking chair he had bought her to ease the pain in her back. He put his arm around her and she did not pull away. He could feel her shoulder trembling through the cloth of her blouse.

  I want to move, she told him. We have to find another house.

  Move? Why? What’s the matter with this place?

  I’m scared here, she told him. This place is haunted.

  Oh for God’s sake.

  I heard a baby cryin in that shutoff bedroom, she told him. This evening. It k
ept cryin and cryin. I unboarded the door and went in and it quit. It was just old boxes of stuff in there, clothes and things. There wasn’t a baby in there.

  Of course to hell there wasn’t a baby in there. Didn’t you watch me board it up when it started turning cold? Didn’t we look in all those old boxes?

  I don’t care. I know what I heard and I heard a baby cryin in there. And that’s not all.

  Oh good God.

  I seen a warnin, she told him.

  A warning of what?

  I don’t know. I seen like a shadow on the ground. I went out and got a stick of wood and started back in the house and this shadow, like a great big bird, come over and just swooped down and flew along the ground. Not a bird, just the shadow of one. I looked up and there wasn’t anything there and looked back and it was still there.

  Well.

  Laugh if you want to.

  I’m not laughing, Sudy. I don’t think it’s funny that you’re scared. But I think it’s just your nerves. I don’t think there’s crying babies and big black birds around here.

  Somethin’s goin to happen.

  He sat before her, laid a hand on her knee. Of course something’s going to happen. Something’s always going to happen. Thousands of things, an infinite number of things. Some good, some bad, to us, and to everyone else. And they’re locked in, set, they’ll happen whether babies cry or birds fly or whatever.

  Somethin bad.

  Well.

  You don’t believe me.

  I believe you’re scared and worried. That’s all I’m concerned about.

  Are you concerned enough to move?

  All right, Sudy, I’ll look around for a place.

  You won’t do it.

  He asked around town for an empty apartment the next day and when he came in Harkness’s truck was parked on the bridge. Harkness himself leaned against the truck drinking a beer and listening to the baying of distant dogs. He turned and threw his empty can into the bed of the truck and raised a hand to acknowledge Edgewater’s existence. He did not speak. Edgewater sat for a moment and waited for Harkness to move the pickup but he made no move to do so. Edgewater got out.

  I live over there, he said. I need to get across the bridge.

  Harkness nodded and got in the truck and pulled across the bridge. This time he did not get out but cut the switch and opened another beer and sat watching Edgewater get out of the car. Runnin my deer dogs a little, he said by way of explanation.

  Edgewater didn’t reply. He went up the steps and into the house. Sudy was reading by the waning light of the western window and she didn’t look up. Edgewater turned the light on and picked the coffee pot up from the stove. It was empty. He filled it with water and put it on to boil.

  What’s he doing out there?

  I don’t know. He said he wanted to run his deer dogs.

  Did you tell him that he could?

  Well, I didn’t tell him he couldn’t, I didn’t see any harm in it. Do you?

  Of all the land in the world I don’t see why he has to run his deer dogs in my front yard.

  He’s known Mama and Daddy of years, Buddy. All of us.

  Not quite all of us, Edgewater said.

  He went into their room to change clothes. When he couldn’t find any clean socks he pulled open one of Sudy’s drawers, pawing through stockings and brassieres and panties. Out of a tilted box of Kotex slid a half pack of Camels. He hadn’t known she still had it, or why. What moved her to it in such a fashion. He put his shoes back on sockless and went out.

  He made coffee and carried it to the window. It was near sunset, light the color of blood mottled the windshield of Harkness’s trunk and burnished the bullhorns mounted on the hood. Harkness was out now and leaning against the tailgate with an air of patience and staring toward the hollow where the dogs ran. There was about him a comfortable attitude that suggested that he was making himself at home and that he might be there for some time.

  Fuck this, Edgewater said. He set his coffee cup down hard on the windowsill and arose. She was watching.

  What’s the matter.

  Nothing.

  He went out and down the steps and when he came into the yard Harkness looked up.

  I don’t want you hunting here.

  Do what?

  I don’t want you running dogs or parked here or drinking beer here, I want you gone.

  I reckon you own this land here, then.

  I don’t own it but I’ve got a rent receipt in my pocket.

  Let me tell you something, good buddy. I’ve lived all my life in this county. I know ever soul in it and most of the cats and dogs. No man ever denied me permission to run dogs on his land or cross his fences.

  I wouldn’t know about any of that. All I know is I pay the rent and I want you off it.

  Harkness’s face was heavy and florid, the sun lacquered it as well, bathed him in rich deep colors, purples and reds, out of a more resplendent time. One eye was somehow a little higher than the other and it lent to his face a mismatched look, as if it had been cleft and imperfectly joined.

  You’re just a goddamned troublemaker, ain’t you? And don’t think I ain’t got your number. Why I’ve knowed that little girl longern you have. I reckon you ain’t lived around here long enough to learn me. I’m the bullgoose in this poultry yard, Harkness said. I’m the steed in this barn lot. You understand me?

  You may well be, Edgewater said. You’re certainly handy enough with the bullshit.

  Don’t fuck with me young feller, I’ve got nothing against you but don’t fuck with me.

  Harkness got in and cranked the truck. Edgewater started back toward the porch. He turned when he heard the truck shut off. I guess you got the goddamned road rented from the county, too, hadn’t ye? Harkness asked. He cranked the truck and spun it backward, pulled across the bridge. Edgewater climbed the porch steps and went in. He came back out momentarily with his coffee. Harkness had stopped the truck fifty or so feet down the road. The door was open and yellow light spilled onto the gravel. Edgewater could hear the radio, then the baying of Harkness’s dogs. He went back in.

  The pain in her back and side worsened sometime before dawn and it did not cease all day. This day seemed endless, it wore on and on. He stayed inside with her all day, kept urging her to let him drive her to the doctor. It’ll get better after a while, she’d say. I might as well get used to it. In midafternoon it grew more severe still and he went to the store at the junction for aspirin. She took some and after a while he asked her, Is it any better?

  I believe it is getting some easier.

  He asked her again later and she said the same thing but he knew she was lying.

  At suppertime he heated canned soup and they sat at the table but she hardly touched it.

  Do you want to go to your mother’s? Or me go call her to come over here?

  Why? I don’t see what good it would do.

  Well.

  Dusk fell and then dark. He listened to the radio awhile and read and watched her where she rocked and he’d see little glimmers of pain flicker across her face. He threw the book aside but did not rise. She sat watching the fire, crocheting some small garment. When it was time they went to bed. Then he got back up. He found the flashlight and with it he went out naked and cranked the car to see would it start. He checked the tires and the water and the oil. It was clear and very cold and there was not a breath of wind. Off in the dark he could hear the creek running. He exhaled and his breath plumed palely. He inhaled and the air was sharp and icy. Starlight gleamed reassuringly on the old car.

  He went back in and lay down beside her. The lights were out and all he could see were the luminous hands of the clock. He lay beside her still and quiet and after a long while he would begin to think she had gotten easy and fallen asleep. He half dozed: then he would hear her breathe in a sharp intake of air like a gasp and he would come wide awake again, senses all alert, intent, staring into the blackness.

  He dozed. Billy?
He came awake again and she had a hand on his shoulder, fear in her voice. Billy?

  He leapt out of bed and turned on the light. He was hauling on his trousers, getting sockless into his shoes, struggling with his shirt.

  Damn it you’re going if I have to drag you.

  She was huddled under the sheets watching him. Her eyes were wide. I think I’m havin it, she said.

  You can’t be.

  I think I am.

  He helped her into her gown, wrapped a blanket about her against the cold, and carried her outside, holding her onearmed while he wrestled with the door, at last kicking it wide, lowering her onto the seat gently. So fragile a burden, already faulted.

  Just hurry, Billy.

  Across the bridge and so into the night. The speedometer didn’t work but he kept it floorboarded, seldom braking, feeling the Fleetline drift beneath him on the graveled curves, her frightened eyes, the ragged elongated tapestry of trees at night. Slowing going into the curves, speeding up coming out, the headlights burning away the night.

  There was a long hall gleaming with floorwax and set in a room or alcove at its center a square nurse’s station. A bank of telephones. Busy women in starched white imbued with purpose. A grayhaired woman listened to his tale with no anxiety, calm, she’d heard it all before. It’s nothing to get excited about, she told him. Perhaps a little secret, amused at the prospective father, sockless and beltless and shirt wrong side out, dressed on the run.

  He had to count money into a waiting palm before attendants spurred by some imperceptible signal that he’d paid hastened past him with a wheelchair and out to where she waited in the car. He’d been across this country and now back again but he was naïve in the ways of the world.

  Fetched up against the wall to let them pass, he watched them speed silently by with her and down to the end of the hall, her face turning toward him as they went by, pale, a frightened face uncertain of where she was being taken. He started that way as well but the sliding door closed after the wheelchair went through and he stood uncertainly in the hall.