Provinces of Night: A Novel

by William Gay

  The room he slept in was shaped like a triangle, its sides formed by the rafters that framed the roof. He found a box of magazines and read the second installment of a serial by George Sessions Perry: he could find neither the first nor third segment but he read it anyway. It began to rain gently, he could hear it on the roof, a comforting murmur of faroff thunder. He read on, while his Uncle Warren watched him from a gilt frame on the bureau, until he lowered the magazine and studied the photograph.

  Warren handsome in his Army uniform, his Congressional Medal of Honor pinned to his tunic. The smooth wing of his hair, clipped mustache like a nineteen-forties matinee idol. The boy thought of the invasion of Normandy that Warren had told him about, scrambling up the beaches over the bodies that had gone before, mortar fire that lit the night and exploding artillery shells that trailed out of the velvet sky like strings of phosphorus.

  He slept but awoke sometime before day in this strange room and for a time he didn’t know where he was. How he’d come to be here. He had no idea what time it was. The room began to feel like an enormous womb that was keeping him alive with its warmth, its comfort. It seemed alive, he imagined its stertorous breathing, he could feel its dark heart’s blood coursing through the wiring, the plumbing. He got up and moved through the sleeping house. In the kitchen he made sandwiches of biscuits and slabs of ham and he cut two wedges of dried peach pie and put all this into a flour sack.

  He went outside and struck out past the dog kennel toward home. The rain had stopped. A few of the dogs awoke as he passed and they roused themselves and followed him sleepily for a time. He paid them no mind. His feet were sure and confident on the path his eyes could barely see. They knew every turning, every windfall tree that lay across it. One by one the dogs fell away as if he was bound for some world they wanted no dealing with, and they turned and went back toward comfort and civilization.

  SPRING THAT YEAR was a strange and solitary time. There were days when the only car that passed below his house was the mailman, weeks when he spoke or heard no word of human speech. Boyd did not come and he did not come and there was no letter, as if the border of trees he’d walked into had fallen closed behind him like a curtain that shrouded the mysteries of one world from the mysteries of another. Brady was sent to check on the boy but Fleming did not return to his grandmother’s. He was sent again but this time the boy watched from the shade of the woods and did not acknowledge his presence. Brady stood on the porch and knocked and waited a while, the sun like a fire in his bright red hair, and then he went away. If he returned Fleming was not there to see it.

  The house was full of odd silences, dark corners. The house seemed to be listening to him. To be waiting. As if he’d begun to tell some tale and the house was waiting for him to continue, listening patiently to hear the end of the story. But he’d lost the thread of the narrative and he could not go on.

  The books he’d read no longer comforted him. The progression of the words had been subtly altered so that they deceived him, sentences had been shifted like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle and arranged into lies. He forgot to eat until finally things began to look subtly different to him, their edges shimmering with a bluegold aura. There seemed imponderable mysteries veined in a leaf, he watched light that fell through a gauzy curtain onto a tabletop with a bemused wonder. He watched its sweep across the rough pine grain of the wood as if he couldn’t fathom where it came from, what purpose it might possibly serve. He began to suspect another, deeper layer of time, a time of stone and cloud and tree to which the time of clocks and calendars was a gross mockery cobbled up by savages. He felt the ways of men fall from him like sundered shackles.

  He stayed out of the house, he was much of the time in the woods, he felt like some animal half domesticated but ultimately unable to resist the feral ways of the forest. The spring nights were fecund and warm and alive, and there were nights he did not come in at all.

  He followed the creek where it wound toward the river and he stayed in the woods for days. He came out in a long stretch of bottomland at Riverside across from which was a country store. He bought candy bars and when he spoke his voice felt rusty and unused, it fell on his ears in a harsh croaking. Such folks as he saw had begun to look at him oddly. With the candy bars he returned to the woods and went on toward the river. He thought when he reached it he might follow to see where it led then follow that. Storms seemed to be following the streams as well and from the shelter of a cave he watched lightning sear the night sky like something irreparably wrong in the vaulted dome of the world itself and walked on over hailstones that lay gleaming like pearls.

  He ate the candy bars and when they were gone speared fish in clearwater pools or ate nothing. He seemed to be drawing inward toward some point at which he would be reduced to the fundamental essence of himself. Finally he turned back. He’d reached a border beyond which lay a world he wanted no dealings with. He left the river and went back over hills and ridges he’d never seen but which had a comfortable familiarity about them nonetheless so that they led him without a misstep to the head of Grinders Creek.

  Going up the long spine of ridges below Dee Hixson’s he remembered a childhood haunt and descended into a deep hollow wickered in greengold light and followed it past an old whiskey still of which remained only twisted copper tubing and broken jugs and rusted fifty-gallon drums chopped with axes. Past an ancient springbox hewn or chiseled out of the limestone itself and to the ruins of a log cabin almost drowned in riotous honeysuckle and mimosa. The roof was halfcaved and virid with a thick growth of moss.

  He stooped to pass beneath a tilted lintel and entered the house. It was curiously cold, perpetually shaded, profoundly abandoned save for a blacksnake that dropped from a ceiling beam and flowed like a moving inkslash through a floorboard and gone. He climbed a steep narrow stairway to the upper floor. The drone of dirtdaubers at their labors was all there was to break the silence. He looked about. Through the missing shakes the harsh trees and unreal sky looked intense and oversaturated, color bleeding into color. In the shadows of a wall an old work shoe cured hard as stone, like some piece of art sculpted from an alien material. Old newspapers pasted to the boxed walls. He crossed and read what he could as if to see was there news posted here for him but the paper was foxed and crumbling and such sentences as he could decipher seemed to be cryptic references to violent deeds splintered from some larger and more violent whole and they bore so little relationship to his life they might have been strange oral accounts filtered down from some older order or just ravings leaked through madhouse walls.

  For this place as well was steeped in old violence. Folks called this place haunted, felt the emanations of an unspeakable act moving outward like ripples on water. Long ago, he did not know the year, a sharecropper named Parnell had come in from the fields after laying his crops by. Perhaps he had drunk at the spring, washed his face in the cold water. He had come into this shaded cabin and at some uncharted point had killed his wife and three children then turned the shotgun on himself.

  Young Fleming Bloodworth sat for a time on the top stairstep trying to divine answers to this old lost mystery, the inevitable why of it, the event that permitted a previously forbidden thought, the impulse that transformed thought back to deed. In the charged gloom he heard the rattle of trace chains, a horse’s hooves click on stone, heavy footsteps on the porch, the soft laughter of children at play.

  He descended the staircase and went with some haste into the hot white light. He hurried through walls of flickering greenery. He had begun to fear for his sanity, felt that madness tracked him like a homeless dog, needed only a kind word or gesture to throw its lot with him forever.

  It was a season of violent storms. He would be jarred out of sleep by an enormous concussion of thunder, open his eyes to a room of photoelectric light so intense all the color had been drained away. The thunder would go rolling across the bottomland in diminishing intensity, and wrapped in a blanket he’d go onto the porch and watch
the storm blowing in from the southwest, the dome of light faulted by lightning so that the wild unfolding landscape of agitated trees and wet black stone was shuttered light to dark and back again like a series of snapshots that bore no relation one to the other. The wind would be stiff and cool on his face and in his hair and before it the pale undersides of maple leaves ran like quicksilver. Save for the wind in the trees and the thunder the night would be silent, holding its breath. The wind bore sticks and chaff and stripped leaves, the feel and smell of rain and ozone. The lightning wrought everything in bold relief, brought images leaping out of the dark in surreal clarity, and in its glare he would see like some release from tension the first wave of rain approaching, swinging slant and silver in the light, distorted by the wind, and behind it Hixson’s house and the hills that framed it blurring then vanishing. The rain would be in the trees now and the first heavy drops striking the roof like stones.

  FLEMING WAS passing the Snowwhite Cafe when a voice hailed him. He halted in midstep and turned. An English teacher named Kenneth Spivey was holding the door open and motioning at him with his crippled arm.

  Come in and drink a Coke with me.

  I need to get on, Fleming said. I’m late already.

  Late for what? Spivey asked.

  In fact Fleming was late for nothing and bound nowhere in particular and he figured Spivey knew it. Trapped, he crossed the sidewalk to the cafe and went in. I guess I have time to drink a Coke, he said.

  Spivey was sitting in a booth by the plateglass window and Fleming seated himself across from him with the width of the red Formica table between them. He sat crouched on the edge of the seat like one who only has a moment and must soon be off.

  A waitress in a white uniform stood at his elbow. Let me have a lemon Coke, Fleming said, and she wrote it on a pad.

  Don’t you speak anymore, Fleming?

  He looked up. A girl he remembered from school and for a dizzy moment no name came to mind. I didn’t even know you worked here, he said.

  Just on the weekends. I’m still in school.

  Fleming doesn’t know us anymore, Spivey said, leaning to his cherry Coke, his girlish mouth pursed, like a leech or a slug clamped about the straw. He’s gone on to other things.

  When the Coke came it was in a tall glass of shaved ice with a wedge of lemon floating atop. He sat sipping it and studying the scratched tabletop. B.C. loves E.M. Elise loves Warren Bloodworth.

  Have you dropped out of school, Fleming? Spivey asked.

  Well, I don’t know. I guess not. I just haven’t been going lately.

  No. Not for quite a while. It would be a shame if you did drop out. It’s always a shame when a young person gives up but even more so when it’s you. You’re the most promising student I ever had. I had high hopes for you, and I would hate to lose you.

  Fleming was absentmindedly nibbling the slice of lemon. I don’t know anything about any of that, he said.

  You don’t have to know it. That’s my job. I’m the teacher. What do you plan to do? Somehow I don’t see you working in the shoe factory. Sharecropping. Perhaps you want to offbear at the sawmill and go home to a little country wife and a bunch of little Flemings running around.

  He was leant across the table with his protuberant brown eyes fixed upon Bloodworth. Fleming was always uncomfortable in his presence and he was acutely so now. The soft bulging eyes were leaning an almost unbearable weight on him. Spivey’s eyes were naked peepholes into his soul and whatever emotion he felt, pain, anger, frustration, was there for the world to read. This was knowledge Fleming had no use for and he looked away. Across the street in front of the poolroom a man and a woman were arguing in silence. Their mouths moved but Fleming could hear no sound. They spoke in gestures like angry mimes. Finally the man gave a contemptuous gesture of dismissal and walked back through the poolroom door. The woman stood there for a time and then she went on down the street.

  What did you think of that book I gave you?

  It’s the best book I ever read.

  There’s another book, a sort of sequel to it called Of Time and the River. It continues the story of Eugene Gant. There’s a very powerful scene where old man Gant dies. Would you like me to bring it to you?

  Well. I’d like to read it. I could pick it up somewhere.

  No, I’d like to bring it. I have a lot of books and books are better if you can share them.

  Spivey’s withered arm looked like the arm of a deformed child, the drawn fingers the talons of some grotesque sort of bird. The tiny hand fished in a shirt pocket and drew out a pack of Camels as if it were performing a trick it had been trained to do. Spivey took the cigarettes with his good hand and tipped one out and placed it between his meaty lips. By this time the withered hand had produced a lighter. As he lit the cigarette his eyes were still fixed on Bloodworth.

  I’d like to help you, he said. I’m in a position to help you. I know something of the situation you’re in.

  The what?

  The situation you’re in. Your home life. I’d like to do something about it.

  There’s not a damned thing wrong with my home life, Fleming said.

  Spivey smiled a sad onecornered smile. His wet eyes looked hurt, bruised. You southerners, he said. I’ve been here for fifteen years and I’ll never understand you.

  We do just fine on our own, Fleming said.

  I live in this enormous farmhouse down on Catheys Creek. I used to live with my sister but she passed away a few years back and I’m alone in it. I just rattle around that old house. There’s plenty of room. You’d have your own quarters, the use of my library. I know how lonely life can get.

  I’m not lonely at all, Fleming said, and suddenly realized that he was speaking the truth.

  Perhaps not, Spivey said. You’re so young. You’re so well read I sometimes forget you’re practically a child. I wonder if I was ever that young.

  By now Fleming had drained his glass and was standing. He felt like the character in a comic strip who suddenly has an enormous lightbulb appear over his head. The feeling was so intense that he could feel the hot knowledge on his face.

  Spivey smiled his worn threadbare smile. It’s not what you’re thinking, he said.

  I’m not thinking anything at all.

  I’d like to believe that. Spivey looked away, past the sunwashed glass to the streets where there was nothing at all to see. I’ll bring the book anyway, he said.

  FROM THE SHADE of the ivy-covered end of Itchy Mama Baker’s porch the old men in ladderback chairs and tilting Coke crates watched the hot blacktop that snaked up the grade toward Ackerman’s Field three miles away. They’d sit daylong and wait for something to happen, anything to happen, waiting for the road to entertain them.

  These were old men in clean chambray shirts and suspenders and pants so roomy they could have held another oldtimer entire and shoes split down the sides for comfort. They’d sit ruminatively, building their Country Gentleman cigarettes and leaning birdlike to spit their snuff-juice past the edge of the floorboards into the yard. Talking about old lost times and looking back over their lives as dispassionately as though these events were something they’d read about or something that had happened to somebody else.

  The screen door opened, slapped loudly shut. An enormous woman had come onto the porch, a woman with a fierce turtlelike face and wild frizzy carrotcolored hair. She was wearing a bright yellow tentsize dress with dark halfmoons of sweat fanning out from the armpits.

  One of you loafers spits on my porch you’re cleaning it off, she said. She studied them in a kind of mock anger that they were so accustomed to they deemed it threatless and so paid her little mind.

  I’m spittin in the yard, Ferris Walker said.

  When one of you gets kindly caught up on his spittin I need some wood busted up.

  I might could handle that, Walker said. What’s in it for me?

  Well, I ain’t chargin you rent on this porch.

  How about a little dri
nk?

  There might be a halfpint hid back up there in the holler somewhere.

  I might could bust up a little wood, Walker said. He rose and ambled off toward the woodpile looking for the chopping axe.

  Who’s that rollin that car tire? one of the old men asked.

  They turned to see. He had just appeared on the periphery of their vision, a gangling young man with a halo of wild white hair, slowly rolling a carwheel up the grade.

  That’s that Albright boy, Itchy Mama said.

  He’s lost his automobile, one of the men said. All but one wheel.

  No, he’s always doin that, another said. His casin’s flat and he’s rollin her to town to get it fixed. Nobody’s ever told him about some folks havin a extra one they haul around in the trunk of their car in case one goes flat.

  It wouldn’t take many trips up that grade for me to figure it out, the first one observed.

  That boy’s opinion of himself don’t match the one everybody else has got. He thinks he’s all aces but he’s mostly sevens and eights.

  He may be a little slow but he ain’t a patch on his daddy for crazy. That was the one rewritin the Bible. Old man Tut Albright. He was rewritin her start to finish, takin out all the begats and the therefores and writin it where what he called the common man could make sense out of it. He read me some of it one time. You ort to heard it. It was a part about some angels of heaven layin with the daughters of men and he took out that part about layin with and just put in they screwed the daughters of men. It was the damnedest thing I ever heard.

  He used to cause carwrecks back when he was a young man, the first oldtimer said.

  He what?

  Used to cause carwrecks. He had this long blond wig he’d put on and this little red shortwaisted dress. He lived on this real sharp curve out by Horseshoe Bend and he’d put that mess on and go set in a lawn chair there by the bank of the road with his legs spraddled out. He caused I don’t know how many bad wrecks. A whole carload of drunks run off out there one Saturday and two of em finally died. There was some said he wore red drawers when he done it but I ain’t fool enough to know about that.