Twilight

by William Gay

  There had been cuts on her forehead and cheek he’d worked on earlier and now he leant and touched them delicately with a forefinger. He unpocketed from the limegreen smock he wore a tube of tinted cream and carefully daubed the wounds. Studied the effect and wiped away a minuscule amount with a tissue and seemed satisfied.

  Within a few minutes he had her dressed in black underwear and a pink evening gown, and he caught her up in his arms and went with her to another room. A great amphitheater of a room with sloping ceilings and dark wooden beams and a hardwood floor of oak pegged with cherry. An orchestra played softly from concealed speakers.

  He placed her on the divan with a grunt and stood for a moment breathing hard. He watched her. Her head stayed erect for a moment, held by the divan at the back; then it tiltedforward and lolled loosely sideways. He leant and straightened it, and it lolled the other way, and he stayed it with a pillow.

  He seated himself beside her and clasped her hand. For a time they just sat there listening to the music. He chatted away at her, and her face wore a slightly quizzical look, as if she couldn’t quite fathom what he was talking about.

  Brandy? he asked her. He got up and from a sideboard brought a bottle of brandy and two snifters. He moved a small table near her knees and set her snifter atop it and sat with his own cupped in his small white hands. After a time he drank it, and then he drank hers as well.

  The sourceless music wafted about the room. That’s Mahler, he told her. I don’t suppose you’re familiar with Mahler. His voice gently chided her lack of erudition.

  Gustav Mahler was an Austrian composer from around the turn of the century. This is a cycle of songs called the Kindertotenlieder. Translated, that means ‘Songs of Dead Children.’ Don’t you think that’s a nice touch of irony?

  He went on lecturing the dead girl for some time about classical music and various composers and then he seemed stricken by some emotion. Overcome perhaps by the music or the brandy or her perfumed presence. The room swam, veered like a warping world with its supports suddenly jerked away. He placed her hand on his thigh and when it slid away replaced it. He already had an arm about her shoulders, and now he dropped a hand to cup her breast. He drew her to him with a stricken urgency and buried his face in the soft white curve of her throat. Across his shoulder the dead girl with her unfocused eyes stared out across the great empty room as if she watched something from across a vast gulf of distance orwas straining to hear some faint and faroff sound.

  The clapboard house sat in a clearing surrounded by dense trees. Unlit, silent. A pale moon clocking through ragged clouds wrought his shadow a twisted dwarf beckoning Tyler on. He didn’t know to where. When he came into the yard, the first thing he saw was a German shepherd watchdog chained to a clothesline. The dog was lying at the farthest reach of its tether. Tyler stopped. He stared at the dog in bemused wonder. It was lying in a pool of blood that looked black in the moonlight and its eyes were open and its lips drawn back over its teeth in a perpetual snarl. He stood hesitantly, then glanced toward the dark house and stepped around the dog and up a stoop of stacked rocks and hammered at the door.

  Just silence answered him.

  I need help, Tyler called.

  The voice, when it came, came instantly, muffled but alert. You’ll by God need some shortly if you don’t get off my porch. Get away from that door.

  I’m lost. I just need to talk to you a minute.

  I was just sittin here thinkin about blowin a hole in my front door with this shotgun. You standin on the steps there, you liable to get hit.

  Tyler stepped to the side of the door. Open up a minute.

  There was silence within. A flare of dim light. Then a covert stirring.

  The door sprang inward as if under the onslaught of enormous winds and an overalled figure stood above him clutching the door in one hand and a doublebarreled shotgun in theother. Tyler could smell kerosene, and behind the man a yellow light dished and wavered in its globe of glass. The man’s face was florid and unshaven and he looked halfdemented. How is it all you crazy son of a bitches always know how to find me? Out of all the people in this round world and half of it covered in trees, why is it you fools keep wanderin up out of the same goddamn woods into my front yard?

  Put your gun up. I don’t aim to hurt anybody.

  Put up yourn. And I shore can’t say the same about myself.

  Tyler glanced down. He’d forgotten the useless rifle. It don’t shoot, he said. I jammed it somehow.

  How many of you crazy sons of bitches is it out here?

  Tyler considered. Just one, he said.

  It’s folks has to work for a livin. Has to sleep. All of us can’t get by runnin crazy in the woods all night long.

  Who else was here? Somebody’s killed your watchdog.

  No shit.

  Granville Sutter’s after me. I think he’s crazy.

  You think he’s crazy? I know for a fact he is. I can guarangoddamntee he’s crazy as a shithouse mouse and getting farther into the territories all the time. And it’s a thousand wonders I ain’t layin here dead as my dog is yonder. If Sutter hadn’t of had the sense to stay away from the winders, Fenton Breece would be tyin a necktie around his neck.

  He aims to kill me if he can.

  You need to get the hell on away from here. As long as you’re somewhere else I’m thinking he’ll be too. I’ve just about had my bait of this crazy mess.

  Who are you?

  I’m Sandy Barnett. I know who you are. Sutter told me andthat’s all I need to know about you.

  I’m trying to get to Sheriff Bellwether. Have you got a car?

  I got one but it’s broke. All I got is a team and wagon.

  Take me to Ackerman’s Field.

  Not likely. I’m a Godfearin man. I ain’t messed up with you two and don’t plan to be. I know for a fact he shot my dog in cold blood, and no tellin what you done. Diggin up graves and everthing else from what he was ravin. And aside from all that I don’t believe this is the night I want blowed off a wagonseat with a 30-06.

  Then let me in awhile. I’m about wore out. You want to talk about graverobbing, somebody needs to check out Fenton Breece. He’s crazy, sick somehow, the things he’s doing to dead folks. Open a few graves and you’ll see what I mean.

  Tyler could hear him breathing. Wind caught in the glass globe of the lamb and behind Barnett the room seemed to be in motion.

  The man did not speak, nor did he move to unblock the door.

  All right then. At least show me the way the railroad tracks are.

  The man just pointed mutely into the night and when Tyler looked the way he pointed there was only darkness.

  That way? Hellfire. That’s the way I came.

  I can’t help that. They’ve always been there, and unless they moved em they’re there still. Now head out. And the next man prowls into my yard tonight they goin to have to drag him out.

  He stepped backward and the door slammed to in Tyler’s face. A wooden latch fell with a sound of finality. Through the cracks faint yellow light, remote, tantalizing, inaccessible. Tyler turned and trudged back down the stone steps into the yard. The light was blown out and the windows went secret and still and black and there was only the moonlight foreign and oblique. He went on toward the woods. Halfway across the yard he turned.

  How far is it?

  Nothing.

  How far?

  The house seemed vacant, some old place with newspapered walls and caving roof he’d stumbled across in the Harrikin long ago.

  Tyler seemed suddenly taken by a fit of rage. He was fairly screaming. Goddamn you, he shouted. I never made these crazy sons of bitches. None of it’s my doing. They’re just put here for me to contend with. They’ve killed my sister and tried to kill me, and I don’t even know if she’s buried or not.

  He could feel the wet earth of the yard through his jeans. He’d fallen to his knees. He was almost sobbing. As if in prayer or remonstration with whatever gods held domin
ion over these territories no one wanted. He kept thinking about Corrie but the face that kept coming to mind was her freckled child’s face as if her life had stopped at this innocent point and none of this had yet happened.

  He stood for a time waiting for a reply but there was none. Had he been able he’d have brought a bolt of lightning out of the uncaring heavens and blown the house to splinters but as it was it occurred to him what a good target he made in the moonlit clearing and he faded into the woods and struck out for darker timber.

  Late in the day he was going through a country showing signs of old commerce. Steep bluffs tended away to treegrown hollows, and the bluffs were riddled with horizontal shafts. Old rusted purposeless machinery like the flung playthings of petulant giants with a bent for the peculiar and the machinery itself in places Tyler couldn’t fathom how it got to and the ferriclooking bluffs hung still with rotted scaffolding dangling into space and everywhere the bright orangebrown rocks and split boulders with their layered centers in subtle gradations of earthtones and old rotting conveyors where the ore had gone and on a flattening of one of the ridges a perfectly round building forty or fifty feet tall built of contoured blocks with the roof caved and serving now as floor and the last few feet at the top gaptoothed and asymmetrical, and it was as inexplicable to him as some druidic configuration of stones ten thousand years old.

  He skirted a deep quarry, its sides cannelured by marks where the featherdrill had gone. Far below, blacklooking water pooled in the quarry bottom and as he watched a bobcat drank then highfooted back up the sloping side, boulder to boulder with an almost surreal grace and vanished like some creature wholly of the imagination.

  He began to come upon the ruins of shanties and silvergray tinroofed shacks fallen and vinecrept and solitary chimneys like sentries left charged with some watch then forgotten and after a while in a frail stand of sassafras he came upon a desecrated graveyard. He’d heard of a black cemetery in the heart of the Harrikin pillaged by vandals. It was part of local folklore that blacks were buried with whatever of value they possessed and the thought of such chattels as jewelryand gold pocketwatches had drawn those who’d already gone beyond the pale here to initiate their own tawdry resurrections, and Tyler’s own nights with a pick and shovel were not lost upon him. He passed an open grave with sloping rainwashed sides at whose bottom lay a splintered coffin and reflexively he looked away, but there was a glimpse of a yellowed skull and a funeral suit bleached absolutely colorless by the weathers. This world should know better than to leave an old grandfather staring sightless into the sun with nothing of shelter left to keep him from the rain and predators.

  He hurried on through thin tilting tablets of stone with their weary redundancy of script, and all there was to sum up these lives was the two dates so told. He stopped at the edge and stared back at this desolatelooking city of the dead. All these hardscrabble honor graduates from the school of hard knocks. Their lives had been drawn so thin it was one continual struggle just to exist and when death came like the one kept promise they’d ever encountered, their graves were pillaged for watches they’d never owned, jewelry they’d never even aspired to owning. The very air was telluric with all these untold stories but there was no tongue left to tell them, no ear to hear them save his own.

  He went on. The land was ascending through thinning timber and he had come upon a town. A town whose thoroughfare was grown with brush and saplings and whose wooden sidewalks were rotting. Old buildings tilted and robbed of windows, with doors standing open as if awaiting commerce. Stores with faded signs for Dr. Pepper, Groves Chill Tonic, 666. He went up a high set of steps to a porch that ran the breadth of the building. When he entered the store he flushed a family of pigeons who fled startled through glassless windows. He’d been hungry all day but whatever tinned foodstuffs had been left here had been looted long ago, and all that remained was a cavernous room with broken shelving and a long counter down one side. An ancient cash register had been broken open and cast aside. A few flyspecked bottles of some darkly coagulant cureall patent medicine still remained, and a hardened and moldy set of horseharness hung from a nail driven into the wall. A cool, dank smell of old rains and drifted leaves and animal dens and the subtle composite smell of time itself, the cancerous work of the shifting seasons.

  He prowled about looking for some sort of tool to attempt repair on the rifle, but anything at all that would have served a useful purpose seemed to have been removed. Even boards had been ripped from the walls to repair other dwellings, great poplar and chestnut boards of improbable width.

  He went out. Shadows lay long and distorted in the waning day. The sun was fleeing west. Such sparse windowglass as remained burned briefly with orange fire. He went past a log building mouldering into the earth; this building’s windows were barred with crisscrossed slabs of hammered iron, and he guessed this must have served as the jail. He thought of Bookbinder. Do you remember old Hollis Bookbinder? he asked the silence. A row of smashed whiskey bottles on a window ledge bore witness to some past hunter’s target practice. He went on past the jail down sloping earth, and in a clearing stood a great whiteoak that drew his eye, for this must be where the black had died for impugning the white whore’s honor. He didn’t see a church or a school or if he did he didn’t recognize them. He kept thinking he’d happen uponthe railroad tracks but he did not.

  A rising wind ruffled the carpet of leaves and with the wind at his back he hurried on. He wanted shut of this place with its air of dissolute ruin and its desecrated dead. A host of voices rode the wind, garbled and indistinguishable, all talking at once and all telling him stories he didn’t want to know. Old grievances he couldn’t bear. He came upon a stone building open to the sky built across a stream and within a spring. He raked leaves away and waited for the water to clear and drank and when he raised his face the world had darkened.

  The sun had not set but clouds blown in from the west had obscured it and a few drops of rain sang in the leaves. He turned and the rain was swinging across the clearing toward him and what lay beyond it went shimmering and translucent as if it were all being erased from existence.

  Just at dusk he came upon an old truck, rusted and motorless, down a hillside cocked against a tree. By some miracle all its glasses remained unstoned and its seats intact and he got in and closed the door against the rain and sat wearily staring out the blurred windshield. After a time his eyes closed and he slept with his head laid back against the back of the seat.

  It was full dark when he awoke and he was sore and stiff and moonlight was falling through the windshield. He got out. It was clearing and high above him clouds sped eastward in the keep of some enormous wind. They trailed inkblack medusalike tendrils and the moon shuttled in and out of them and appeared to hurtle eastward but never neared the horizon. He walked with his shadow fading in and out with the passage of clouds until at length the clouds were gone andthe woods began to burn with eerie silver fire.

  He went on and he came to feel that he carried the seed of some dread plague that would lay waste to all before him and behind him and that word of his coming had preceded him so that folks dropped whatever tools they were holding and grasped up their children and fled into the woods with doors left ajar and meals left halfeaten on dining tables.

  Then he thought he must have crossed some unmarked border that put him into territories in the land of Nod beyond the pale where folks would shun him for the mark laid on him to show that he’d breeched the boundaries of conduct itself and that he’d passed through doors that had closed softly behind him and only opened from the other side of the pale and that he’d gone down footpaths into wilderness that was forever greener and more rampant and ended up someplace you can’t get back from.

  He went on eastward looking for some high point he might climb and search for a light. When he found one he climbed it and turned, unwilling to believe all this blackness to the four points of the compass, but all lay sleeplocked and dark as if in all this de
solate world he moved through he was the first man awaiting others or the last man left mourning those who had gone before.

  For what seemed to him hours he had been following the sound of human voices raised in song and faroff imprecations of fervent faith or rage. He kept angling toward it and ultimately came out on a road. Beyond in a muddy clearing a tent and worshipers thronging out into the chill night. Voicescalled each to each. Goodnight, brother. God bless you. See you at the meetin tomorrow night.

  He stood uncertainly by the wayside with the rifle which was by now an extension of himself dangling at his side searching countenances in the vague dusk and trying to decide who to ask.

  A family passed. A short, slouching man and a bonneted woman, then, in descending order, a darkhaired girl and a teenage boy a year or two younger, then another boy younger still.

  The man abruptly stopped, and when he did the woman and children as well as if they had walked into an invisible wall or were in some manner all geared together. The man was studying Tyler’s face intently and leaning forward in the failing light. Boy, he asked, are you washed in the blood?

  Tyler shifted his weight on the balls of his feet. Not him, he was thinking. Man follow his directions, no telling where he might wind up.

  I don’t reckon, he said.

  Say you don’t reckon. That means you ain’t. If you don’t know for sure, then there ain’t no use hemmin and hawin about it.

  No, then.

  Then what are you even doin here then? This ridge is a place for worshipers tonight. No place here for sinners. No stormcellar here for sinners and backsliders to crawl into.

  I just heard the singing and followed it. I’ve been turned around in the woods. I’m lost.

  Lost? The face had leant closer yet and wore such a look of beaming benevolence that Tyler had begun to look skittishly about for someone else to ask. Madfolk he had fallenamong here and no safety in numbers such as these. The man had proffered his hand and Tyler shifted the rifle right hand to left and warily shook it. The hand was hot and dry and frantic.