Provinces of Night: A Novel

by William Gay

  I’d go to wherever you sent for me from, Cora said, half amused and half angry. But God, what kind of fool do you think I am? You never needed anybody bad enough in your life to send for them.

  I’m goin to town before this heat gets worse, he said, taking up the stick from where he’d leaned it against a porch stanchion.

  You wait up, she said. If you’re so set on going I’ll call you a cab.

  He went on. He did not want to die here in this boarding house. Cora was a good woman but he did not want his last vision of the world to be her moonshaped face floated down to his, leaning to whisper the password that would permit him access to a world that was in all probability even stranger and darker than this one.

  TWO DAYS LATER just as he was falling asleep Fleming heard Boyd whistling his way down the footpath from the barn. The whistling was fiercely evocative, an artifact out of his childhood, and he thought at first he had dreamed it. He was out of bed and lighting the lamp when he heard Boyd’s heavy step on the porch. The room leapt into yellow relief as the door opened and Boyd came in. The room was suddenly smaller, the house less empty and dead. Boyd filled it with raw and jagged-edged life.

  Who cut all them weeds? Looks like the place was attacked by a bunch of mowin machines.

  I did. I ran out of anything to do.

  You’d do better to be in school unless your plan is to set your ass in the same seat next year. It does look some better, though. You’ve probably run up property values all up and down Grinders Creek.

  Fleming didn’t reply. Boyd had a bundle wrapped in white butcher’s paper and a loaf of bread. He set all this on the cooktable. Build up a fire and let’s cook some of this beefsteak, he said. I’m about starved away to nothing.

  He removed a paperback book from the back pocket of his dungarees. I brought you this. I don’t know whether it’s any good or not.

  Thanks, the boy said. He turned away from the cookstove where he was lighting kindling and took the book and tilted its cover toward the light. Yellowhair by Clay Fisher. The cover showed a yellowhaired man the boy judged to be George Armstrong Custer beset by a horde of marauding savages. It looks pretty good, he said. I may start on it tonight.

  Let’s get this steak floured up and fried. I’ve toted it halfway across the country and we might as well get some good out of it.

  While the stove heated up Boyd sliced the steak and tenderized it with the edge of a saucer and breaded it with flour and pepper and salt. He sliced potatoes into a skillet of melting grease. The boy watched him. He was waiting for Boyd to ask the question he knew he was going to ask and finally Boyd asked it.

  You not seen nothin of your mama?

  No.

  I ever catch the son of a bitch she run off with I’ll cut his throat. I aim to catch him, too.

  Fleming didn’t say anything but he heard this with a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. Another man might say these words and have them mean any number of things but if Boyd said it it just meant he was going to cut somebody’s throat.

  Where were you at?

  I been through hell and just barely got scorched. I learned that hell is real flat and somebody has planted cotton all over it. How come you ain’t over at Ma’s like I told you to be?

  I don’t know. Brady’s a little hard to take at times.

  He is that. At most times. Any clean shirts around here?

  In that box by your bed. Old man Overbey was by here looking for you. He wants us to set out some pines.

  Pines, Boyd said. He was turning the sizzling steak, stirring the potatoes. It’ll be hard times indeed when I work for that stingy son of a bitch. Is there any coffee left?

  We’re about out of everything.

  Something’ll turn up.

  They ate the steak and potatoes by lamplight, fending away one-handed moths and candleflies the light drew through the window. Boyd wiped his plate with a slice of lightbread and rose still chewing and filled the wash basin from the water bucket. He pulled off his shirt and balled it up and raised the stovelid and dropped the shirt onto the coals.

  Great God, the boy said.

  I fell off a train, Boyd told him.

  Fleming judged there was a story here could he but hear it but Boyd was a man whose fences you broached at your peril and he guessed if Boyd wanted him to know he’d tell him.

  NOTHING TURNED UP and Monday morning they came out of Hubert Overbey’s barnlot and climbed a hillside to the edge of the woods where night still hovered, their shoulders laden with great burlap bags of pine seedlings, mattocks swinging along loosely in their hands. They fell to work on a slope of ravaged red clay, a blasted heath where nothing seemed to thrive save sawbriars and ditches.

  An ascending sun burned off the early chill and as he warmed Fleming fell into an easy rhythm of working, a blow with the mattock, a dropped seedling, earth raked and tamped with a booted foot. Boyd worked savagely as if he bore each separate seedling some bitter grudge, as if he’d inflict pain to the earth each time he sank the mattock to the eye in the hard red clay.

  At noon they ate a silent lunch of leftover breakfast bacon and biscuits and watched clouds form in the west, a thunderhead that rose and lay above the lowering hills like a tumor. Boyd threw away the rest of his lunch and poured out his coffee and got up. We’d better get it before that rain blows in here, he said.

  By midafternoon they had covered scarcely a quarter of the slope and Overbey’s supply of seedlings seemed to have diminished not at all. They laid aside their tools when all the sun there was was a fierce chromatic rose flaring behind the thunderhead and by the time they reached the roadbed night was seeping down out of the trees and nighthawks came slant out of the mauve dusk like flung stones. When they reached the house full dark had fallen and the house was cold and dark and enigmatic, like some house abandoned, like some house where no one lived at all.

  The boy was cooking when they heard a car door slam at the foot of the hill. Boyd started at the sound and Fleming said, it’s not her. Likely it’s Dee Hixson.

  I don’ believe I feel like fightin them pines all day and contendin with that nosy old loafer all night. I believe I’ll just run him off.

  Fleming was standing in the doorway peering into the darkness where a figure was climbing the hill, shoeleather clicking on stones, a shape gaining corporeality as if it were forming itself out of shadows.

  It’s Brady, Fleming said.

  On the other hand Dee might not have been so bad, Boyd said.

  Brady Bloodworth was Boyd’s younger brother though you would not have known it to look at him. He was small and freckled and intense. Slightly hunched as if something inside him was winding itself up and as it tightened drawing him toward his own center. His curly red hair sprang out wildly from beneath the felt hat he wore and his eyes burned incandescent as a cat’s eyes in the lamplight. Childhood polio had marked him with a warped leg that limped still when he walked and left him perhaps as well with other warpings not as visible to the naked eye.

  He sat on an old replevied car seat that served as a sofa and took off his hat and hung it on his knee. He ran a hand through his tangled hair. Still bachin, I see, he said.

  Still bachin, Boyd told him.

  What’s that boy cookin up?

  I don’t know. We won’t know till it’s done. We’d ask you to supper but our grub’s probably a little rough for you. You used to Ma’s cookin and all.

  It’s just as well. I believe he’s fryin up candleflies and everthing else. I seen a big one fly into that pan and I ain’t seen it fly out yet.

  We’re a little loose in our ways around here. We wasn’t expectin company.

  What I come about was Pa. He’s finally comin back.

  That’s a little hard for me to believe.

  Believe it. He’s had a stroke of paralysis and he ain’t got nowhere else to go.

  Well, hell, Boyd said, with a curious note in his voice that made Fleming turn and look at him. It must have been
a bad stroke to make him do that. Pa always had more pride than was good for him and he never was one for backtrackin. How bad is he?

  He ain’t goin to die, if that’s what you mean. I talked to him on a telephone, long-distance from Little Rock, Arkansas. He just called right up on the telephone. Lucky I was in the house and answered it. It could just as easy have been Ma.

  That wouldn’t have been the end of the world, Boyd said dryly. I expect she’s noticed by now he’s gone. It has been twenty years.

  He’s stove up but he’s got all his senses and everything. His faculties. Got a limp on one side and goes with a stick but he says he’s gettin better. He thinks he’s goin to die, but he’s not.

  He’s not? It must be nice to know stuff like that that other people wonders about. To have God lean down and whisper secrets in your ear.

  Well. I run it out in the cards and he ain’t fixin to die.

  Jesus Christ. You run it out in the cards. Everbody dies sooner or later.

  Brady had taken the packet of cards from his shirt pocket without noticing, slid them from their satin slipcase, rippled them smoothly from one hand to the other. He seemed to draw strength and confidence from them.

  The cards don’t lie, he said, apologetic but at the same time a little condescending. He may die later but he won’t from this stroke.

  I believe you’re glad he’s had a stroke. You seem to relish the idea of him bein a cripple, a broken old man.

  The Bible says as ye sow so shall ye reap. He sowed it, not me.

  It also says fortune tellers and soothsayers are an abomination before God.

  Then it turns right around and says don’t hide your light under a bushel. He gave me this secondsight, which is light in a way, and I ain’t about to hide it.

  I give up. How come him to call you, knowin the way you’ve felt about him for twenty years?

  You ain’t got a telephone. I guess he didn’t know Warren’s runnin that show in Alabama. He must have made a little money all them years he was pickin the banjo and singin all that crazy stuff nobody wanted to hear. He’s wirin me the money to buy him a little housetrailer and set it up somewhere on the place.

  Oh Lord. He’s sendin you money and trustin you to do that?

  Well, Pa always favored me over the rest of you. Always petted me, right up to the day he walked off and not a word out of him for twenty years. He done me and Ma sorry and you know it. Walkin off like that without a word. Not goodbye, not kiss my ass. Nothin.

  Nothin to us, you mean.

  Nothin to anybody. I can’t believe he’s got the nerve to come back. The gall. He probably expected to move right into the house with me and Ma.

  Well. It’s a pretty big place, two hundred and seventy acres. And I believe he bought and paid for it.

  He’d have lost it over that penitentiary business if it hadn’t been for Warren. I paid the last of it off myself.

  He stood to go. I just thought you’d want to know he’s comin back, he said. That boy there ain’t never even seen his grandpa.

  Don’t rush off, Boyd said. I was just teasin you about the food, it’s fit to eat. Just stay and eat with us.

  I eat hours ago. I have to see about Ma. I have leavin her by herself at night. She’s gettin old and childish. Absent-minded.

  She’s got more sense than me or you either one.

  She’s also over seventy years old and ain’t realized it yet. I’m always afraid she’ll fall or somethin. I’ll let you know when I hear from Pa again.

  Well. Come back, Brady.

  When Brady was down the hill and they heard the car start Boyd said, That stroke must have kicked the hell right out of Pa. For him to swallow his pride and call Brady on the telephone.

  He took a pan of water off the stove and set it on the table and positioned a mirror by the lamp. He lathered his face and began to shave. Fleming could hear the faint scrape of the straightrazor against Boyd’s beard.

  Poor old Brady, Boyd said. One minute you’re feeling sorry for him and then he’ll start that crazy mess about cards and hexes he’s put on folks and about how the Jews are takin over the world and the Pope’s takin over the world and you just want to wring his neck.

  After supper the house was hot from the cookstove and to cool Fleming went outside and sat on the doorstep. The wind was at the trees like something alive and faint light quaked and died, flared and diminished far to the west and he held his breath waiting for the thunder. It finally came, so faint it was like a dream of thunder, a hoarse incoherent whisper, just a madman mumbling to himself in the eaves of the world.

  The rain commenced sometime in the night and it was raining when they ate breakfast in a cold damp halfdark and raining still when they fell out with the mattocks. Fleming thought Boyd might wait for a break in the weather but there was no mention of this and they garbed themselves in old coats and hats until they looked like animated scarecrows starting up the roadbed. There was already a yellowish tinge and a quickened urgency to the water in the creek and a steady rushing sound of rain in the trees.

  They labored like men demented over the muddy slope. There was no letup in the rain or even a rumor of it and the day seemed to chill as it progressed and the boy felt cold and wooden in his outsize clothing. He was loathe to move against the waterlogged clothes but he felt he’d freeze if he stopped working.

  They had brought no lunch but at what they judged to be noon they sheltered beneath a huge cedar and watched the slope go to water, a thousand red rivulets coursing down the muddy hillside. In the ruined hat collapsed about his face Boyd seemed the very embodiment of human misery. A pale wash of hat dye was seeping down his face and he wiped it away and grinned ruefully. I don’t know why it’s so damned cold, he said. Blackberry winter ain’t till May.

  Maybe it’s some other kind of winter. Toad frog winter.

  Whatever winter it is it’s a cold son of a bitch. And I believe that somehow it’s managin to rain harder under this tree than it is out in that field.

  The boy scanned the sky in the faint hope of a lightening but the sky was just cold weeping slate and if there was any sun behind it there was no indication of it. Why don’t we call it a day and go to the house, he said.

  We will here in a while, Boyd said. His face was cold and determined, as if he’d set himself some goal beyond the capabilities of ordinary men and would settle for nothing less than its completion.

  When only twenty or thirty bundles of seedlings remained Boyd paused for a moment and considered them in speculation. What I ought to do is throw the damned things in a sinkhole and be done with them. But I contracted to set them out and by God I’ll set them out.

  They finished the last of them in red sucking mud and shouldered the mattocks and walked toward Overbey’s farmhouse. Climbing the high steps onto the porch Fleming’s legs felt as if they were asleep and his feet felt numb and wooden. They stood on the porch. Boyd knocked and waited. Pools of muddy water formed around their feet. The boy could hear the rushing of the creek somewhere off in the trees.

  Overbey opened the door and stood regarding them with a bemused wonder. They looked like refugees, worse, like something exiled from the very fringes of human society. Something chimerical and insubstantial engendered out of the windy rain.

  Overbey was cleaning the lenses of his glasses on the tail of his shirt. He looked warm and dry, cozy as a badger in its den. Beyond him a warm hearth, the flickering flames of a fireplace. There was a strong odor of steaming coffee.

  I’ve heard of people willing to work but you two are about the beat of any I’ve seen. There wasn’t that much of a rush to it. You get them all?

  We got them all.

  Well. Wait here and I’ll get your money.

  He went back in and eased the door to. Right, Boyd said. We wouldn’t want to drip on your Goddamned carpet.

  When Overbey returned Boyd was wringing water out of his hat. Overbey proffered a thin blue slip of paper and Boyd looked at his hands and tri
ed to dry them but there was no place that did not have water running out of it. Finally he shoved them beneath his coat and dried them as best he could in the armpits of his shirt. He took the check gingerly and folded it and stowed it in a glassine envelope in his wallet.

  You men want a cup of coffee?

  We got to get on, Boyd said.

  I do, Fleming told him.

  Boyd glanced sharply at him but waited stoically while Overbey brought the coffee and impatiently while it was drunk. Fleming’s hands were shaking and he held the cup with both hands and drank the coffee. It was hot and strong and he imagined he could feel it coursing through his veins and thawing out the parts of him that were frozen.

  Overbey just looked at them and shook his head. I’d give you a ride but I expect it’s over the bridge by now. It’s fell a world of water last night and today.

  Tell me about it, Boyd said.

  Fleming reached Overbey the cup and they went down the steps into the rain. The day was already beginning to wane and they could see past the greening trees white fog rising off the creek like smoke and the very air felt dense as water in their lungs.

  When they got to the crossing the creek was far out of its banks and they didn’t even suspect where the bridge might be. The creek was a roiling mass of leaves and tree branches and once an entire tree, its dislodged roots twisting into the bank and the tree clocking around wheellike in the swirling yellow foam. All the sound there was was the angry roar of the water. Boyd stared disgustedly at it as if this was just one more cross to bear, one more obstacle laid in his path.

  A drowned cow went by, its legs jutting stiffly upward. One of Overbey’s, Boyd said with satisfaction. You want to try that swinging bridge?

  Fleming decided that his father had gone mad. Something had simply broken in his head. Finally he said, I don’t think so.