Provinces of Night: A Novel

by William Gay

  There’s not going to be any electricity?

  Not unless you want to box it up and tote it to him. Do you see any wires run in here? Then let’s get to work. We can run them septic tank lines and cover the tank over without it.

  They stood up. You reckon you could really find water around here? Fleming asked.

  I could if it’s here. Back on a dry ridge like this here it’d be a long way down if you did find it.

  Let’s see you try.

  Why? You wouldn’t know anymore if you watched than you do right now. It ain’t somethin you see. You feel the fork jerk and tremble in your hands. If the stream’s strong enough it’ll draw it straight down, like a magnet draws iron. I’ve seen it twist the bark off.

  I never saw anybody witch for water before. If it wasn’t too far down me and Junior Albright might dig him a shallow well.

  I’d almost pay money to see a well you and Junior Albright dug, Brady said. In fact I’d see it if I had to borrow the money to get in.

  He walked about the clearing, stooped and cut a forked sprout. Folks’ll tell you it has to be a peachtree sprout. Or a willow, or some such. That’s rubbish. It ain’t the stick, it’s you. If you’ve got the gift you could find it with a jack handle just as easy.

  He walked about the clearing, the stick held before him by the forks. Once at the corner of the trailer it jerked spasmodically, as if a slight current of electricity had coursed through it. He walked away, began covering the area in a gridlike pattern. When he approached the same corner of the trailer the forked stick trembled again.

  You mind if I try?

  Brady halted and offered him the stick. This here’s the only nibble I got, he said. And it’s doubtful at best. You may do better. We may be just drownin in water a foot or two down.

  Fleming held the stick in his hands as he’d seen Brady do. He crossed to the woods, back again. The fork held steady. But at the corner of the trailer it jerked in his hands, seemed almost to be vibrating. Brady was watching. He shook his head in amazement. We may have somethin here, he said. You may be on to somethin.

  Fleming walked away. When he returned the stick twisted again. Brady had approached, was following along behind him. You may have the gift, he said. It shows up in ever generation of the family, I’ve run it back. You may be the one in this generation.

  I may well be, the boy agreed.

  He approached the deeper timber. At a clump of sweetgum the witching fork seemed taken with some kind of fit. It jerked and struggled, seemed to be trying to wrest itself from his hands. Then the point sprang earthward.

  The boy tossed it aside. He stood and withdrew the water jug from the thick shaded greenery. Not too far to this, he said. Brady was watching balefully Fleming unscrewed the lid and drank. He lowered the jug. Pretty fair water too, he said.

  You’re a cruelhearted little shitass, Brady told him. It’s no wonder your whole family moved off without tellin you where they were goin.

  ON HIS WAY to the bus station E. F. Bloodworth was caught up in a surging tide of humanity that had turned out for some sort of festivities. He had gone only a few blocks from Cora’s boarding house when he found himself borne along whether he wanted to go or not, so dense were the folk here. Every strata of Little Rock’s society seemed represented, from sharecroppers to prosperous farmers in Panama hats. Even the jaded merchants themselves were standing in the doorways of their shops, fondling their watch chains and watching the streets expectantly as if something of enormous significance was on the verge of happening.

  He finally made the shelter of an awning that shaded the front of a jewelry store, a pocket of calm backwaters eddied in the lee of swift water. He leaned on his walking stick, a handcarved length of hickory emblazoned with stars and moons and enigmatic hieroglyphs and the carved handhold carved to represent the neck and head of a serpent. The old man stood at least a head taller than anyone in the crowd milling about him and with his ferocious eyes and irritated demeanor he looked like a weary old bear beleaguered by a pack of hounds. He took out a handkerchief and wiped the perspiration off his neck and folded the handkerchief carefully and slid it into the pocket of his black suitcoat. Aside from this coat he wore a baggy pair of biglegged gray slacks and a starched white dress shirt. He wore an enormous maroon tie with the likeness of a longhorn bull adorning it. He wore the pearlgray fedora with the brim slightly rolled and cocked at a jaunty angle, and with his height and demeanor and the Stetson he would have been an imposing figure anywhere but in this sweating throng of humanity.

  A short ducklike woman had been swept into the shelter of the awning. She was hanging on to three wildeyed children like survivors she’d snatched from floodwaters.

  The old man had begun to hear music, the brassy strident sound of a marching band. He searched his mind for some holiday this might be that would call for a parade but could not think of one.

  I was as tall as you I might be able to see something, the ducklike woman said irritably to the old man, as if she held him responsible for the disparity in their height. What do you see out there?

  The tops of folk’s heads, mostly, Bloodworth said. What is this mess?

  Can you not see any mules yet?

  Mules? he asked in disbelief.

  Yes, mules. This is Arkansas Mule Day and I’m tryin to get these kids closer so they can see better.

  Why anybody would want to see a mule closer is a mystery to me, Bloodworth said.

  These is all champion mules, she said dismissively, as if he’d taken leave of his senses.

  A champion mule ain’t nothin but a mule with a ribbon tied on it. You walk behind as many turnin plows as I have you’d be well satisfied to never see a mule again. Or even know there’s one left in the world.

  But she had no ears for such heresy and she jerked the children back into the packed wall of humanity and began to struggle toward the street.

  Mules had indeed now swung into sight, a trio of them decked out in red, white and blue bunting, ridden by girls in sequined swimsuits that glittered in the sun. Behind them a phalanx of baton twirlers and a band playing a just-recognizable version of Stars and Stripes Forever and behind the band cavorting clowns on tricycles and even one riding a unicycle and waving bothhanded at the crowd. Then mules and more mules like some vast migratory herd headed westward into Oklahoma. Bloodworth ignored the mules and watched bemusedly the smooth tanned thighs of the strutting baton twirlers, his leathery face impassive and sleepy eyelids blinking occasionally like some ancient turtle basking on a rock in the sun.

  When the main battery of mules had passed the crowd straggled after it as if loathe to lose this magic and after a time the old man was able to continue up the street. He had set out this day for the Trailways bus station to inquire as to ticket prices but as he reached for the door and was about to enter something caught his eye and he released the door and went on down the street. What had drawn his attention was a truck parked in an alley, not actually the truck but its license plate, a Tennessee license plate shaped like the state itself. He stood for a time studying it, leaning on the stick and lost in the geography of the shape as if it were a map, the chart of some landscape he’d crossed long ago and left his mark on.

  He walked about the truck examining it intently as if it were some purchase he was contemplating making. It was a red Diamond-T truck of recent vintage and lettered in white on the doors was the legend COBLE CATTLE COMPANY, MEMPHIS TENNESSEE. The truck Was Side-boarded with a framework of black lathing, floored with straw and cow dung.

  Bloodworth looked about. The nearest business was a long stucco building with a sign that said WILD BILL’S BILLIARDS. Next door was a diner. One or the other but I’d give odds on the poolhall, the old man thought and turned and limped back to the Trailways station.

  Inside he drank thirstily from a drinking fountain and with the water an icy bulb swinging inside him he strode toward the counter where a young woman sat reading a paperback book.

 
How much is it to Ackerman’s Field, Tennessee?

  The girl laid the book face up on the counter. The cover showed a nearly naked woman being shot in the abdomen by an enormous .45 caliber automatic held in a gloved and disembodied hand. The girl glanced up at the old man and unconsciously smoothed her hair and began to search through a list of cities on a schedule.

  I don’t show it, she finally said. What is it close to? Maybe we can figure it out from there.

  It’s close to Schubert, the old man said. But I doubt you show that either. Have you got Nashville?

  Of course, she said, a red fingernail tracing a column of figures down a sheet. It’s seven-eighty Did you want one way or round trip?

  Let me think about it a minute, he said.

  She looked up and smiled at him. Of course, she said. There’s seats over there where you can rest in the cool.

  There was a curious quality to the old man, a sort of courtly dignity that made people treat him with a certain unconscious deference. He had long grown accustomed to it and it sometimes amused him that he had been mistaken for someone of importance.

  He tipped his hat to the girl and went over to a row of seats that looked like church pews and chose one and sat next to a sleeping soldier. He leaned the back of his head against the hard back of the seat. The girl had taken up her book and begun to read but occasionally she glanced over the top of the pages at Bloodworth. He closed his eyes. She thinks I ain’t got no money, he thought, feeling the lowgrade heat from the folded greenbacks in his front pocket. I got plenty of money. I got enough money to burn a wet mule. Even a champion mule, he smiled to himself. He thought of returning to the boarding house to pick up the rest of his belongings, but it was a thought he immediately discarded. When Bloodworth was ready to go he was just ready to go, and when he itemized his possessions he came up with nothing that could not be discarded, carried in a pocket, or worn.

  In truth the old man did not trust bus stations. He had once had a Gibson Mastertone banjo stolen out of a bus station in Shreveport, Louisiana, and he had been in a rage monumental even for him. He had haunted the bus station for weeks demanding the return of the banjo until folks dreaded to see him coming; with any advance notice at all the help went out the back as he came in the front. He had been a banjo picker all his life and banjo tunes still ran through his head like brightly colored threads.

  He rose and put on his hat. He raised a hand politely to the girl and went out into the sun and struck out for the poolhall. After a time he could hear raucous laughter, the click of pool balls. When he entered he was inundated in a cool gloom like the deepest of summer shade. He seated himself in the cloistral calm at the bar and placed his hat before him, first wiping the counter with a coatsleeve should there be an errant beerstain.

  What’ll it be, the barkeep said.

  Give me a draft, the old man said. Just whatever you got that’s cold.

  The man took up an enormous schooner and filled it from a siphon and tipped off the foam and slid it across. He rang up Bloodworth’s dollar and slapped three quarters on the bar. Them fools off the street? he asked.

  Mostly, Bloodworth said, watching bubbles rise in his beer. I never realized that mules was that well regarded. It may be that I never gave them their proper due.

  He took up the schooner and drank, his adam’s apple pumping the beer down. When he set the schooner down empty his eyes were slightly unfocused and his upper lip was coated with mustaches of pale thick foam. He wiped them off with a coatsleeve and turned to survey the room: two pool players and a heavyset man in a broadbrimmed white straw hat watching them. This would be Coble Cattle Company, Memphis Tennessee. While he was debating the best way of approaching Coble the problem solved itself. The man in the straw hat leaned and whispered something to the pool player on the bench beside him then rose and crossed the painted concrete floor toward Bloodworth and seated himself on the next stool over.

  Watch this, oldtimer, he said. We may see us a little action here.

  He tilted the brim of the white straw hat toward the pool players: some sort of confrontation seemed to be shaping up. Pills had been shaken out onto the pool table and accounted for and one of the men was shaking his finger in the other’s face. When the hand was slapped away the tall man swung from the ground up and knocked the other into a rack that exploded with pool cues and armed with one of them the fallen man struggled up shaking his head as if to clear cloudy vision.

  Coble had ordered two beers and he pressed one onto Bloodworth. They had swiveled their stools the better to see the fight.

  They fightin over pills, Coble volunteered. The one and sixteen come up missin and turned up in thatn with the pool cue’s pocket. They wasn’t playin for but a dollar a game but I reckon that’s where honor come into it.

  You mean he was holdin out pills?

  He was after I slipped em in his pocket and told the other one he was hidin em. Coble chuckled to himself, not a pleasant sound.

  The gangling man was trying to get to the pool cues but he was kept busy dodging swipes from the stick the fat boy was using and finally he grabbed up a handful of pool balls and began firing them like baseballs.

  Here, Goddamn it, the barkeep yelled.

  You mean you started that mess yourself and then eased out?

  Didn’t cost me a red cent and it passes the time, Coble said.

  One of them pool balls upside the head would pass a right smart of it, Bloodworth mused.

  I don’t know but what I’d watch out, oldtimer, Coble said. His aim don’t appear to be the best in the world.

  Even as he spoke a ball whizzed past Bloodworth and smashed the mirror behind the bar. Hellfire, the old man said. He grasped up his hat from the bar and sat cradling it in his lap.

  I said by God stop it, the barkeep was screaming. He had jerked up the telephone and was dialing numbers as fast as he could work his fingers.

  A pool ball had struck the fat boy squarely in the middle of the fore-head and he dropped his cue stick and clasped his face in both hands and swayed gently from the knees up and slowly settled to the floor. The tall man had begun to hurl balls in a kind of random malevolence. The door opened and a man made to enter but when a ball shot past and halted the jukebox in midsong he just grinned and shook his head and eased back out the door and through the glass Bloodworth could see him hurrying away.

  They get a right lively trade in here, don’t they? Bloodworth asked.

  The barkeep snatched a cigar box from beneath the counter and withdrew a small black pistol and by the time he had fired one shot into the ceiling Bloodworth was up pulling on his hat then taking up the walking stick and limping toward the door.

  I just might join you, oldtimer, Coble said. It’s gettin a little close in here, ain’t it?

  Outside they could hear a siren’s whooping down through the hot vibratory air. Let’s just move our patronage over to this diner, Coble said. I believe I can hear a fan blowin in there.

  When they were settled into a booth with a cold beer before them Coble said, That’s a mighty fine hat you got, oldtimer.

  It is that, Bloodworth admitted. I paid too much for it but I wanted it. I ordered this hat from Miller Stockman out of Wyoming.

  I figured you for a cattleman right off, Coble said.

  The old man studied Coble. His face was round and vapid, the small piglike eyes holding a kind of self-satisfied stupidity, the result, the old man figured, of the fight he had caused. Why is a fool such a hard thing to resist? he asked himself in a kind of wonder.

  I’m about out of it, Bloodworth said. I’m about ready to sell my cows off for next to nothin and settle up a bunch of medical expenses I’ve run up.

  I noticed you went with a sort of limp but you appear healthy enough.

  Oh, it ain’t me, Bloodworth said, and he felt almost a physical dividing of himself, so that momentarily there seemed two Bloodworths, one trying to divine how big a lie Coble would swallow and another, a tiny cynical Bloo
dworth, standing aside with its head cocked attentively as if this was all news to him too.

  What’s your name, oldtimer? Coble asked.

  Rutgers, Bloodworth said without hesitation, wondering immediately where the name came from. After a time he seemed to remember seeing it on a seed catalog.

  What kind of cattle you fool with?

  Black Angus, Bloodworth said. But let me tell you. Back in the winter we was buildin a new silo and a section of scaffoldin come loose and that boy of mine fell. He never fell more than eight or ten feet but there was a walkboard swingin on a rope and it caught him right square in the head and knocked him coldern a wedge.

  They Lord, Coble said.

  Bloodworth nodded. That wasn’t the worst of it. He never had been right but this plumb addled him. He drug around like a chicken with the limberneck for a week or two and then one Sunday he decided he was goin to church. He never had been to church much, we never was big on churchgoin. Anyway he put on a suit and went, and what they tell me he cut a shine. Jumpin pews and rollin around foamin at the mouth like a maddog. Took some kind of Jesus fit and went to talkin in tongues. After that he went to preachin. He’d preach to just whatever. It didn’t matter whether folks’d listen to him or not. He’d preach to cows or stumps or just whatever was in front of him. Chickens. He baptized nigh every chicken I had on the place, drowned a bunch of Allen Roundhead fightin cocks I had.

  Course I was laid up with a stroke of paralysis with this left leg stiff as a preacher’s pecker and I couldn’t do much about it. Then the doctor sent me to Hot Springs for the baths and that’s where I been.

  Bloodworth paused, drank from the amber beerbottle. He glanced covertly at Coble to see how he was taking all this. He thought he might have been ladling it on a trifle heavy. But Coble’s porcine face showed no sign of disbelief, just a thin veneer of spurious commiseration masking opportunism, and Bloodworth took heart. He did not feel that Coble was overburdened with brains, and he was seized with a perverse desire to see how far he could go without Coble realizing the old man was making a fool of him: in addition to this, the old man had not taken any alcohol since his stroke, and he could feel a pleasant buzzing in his head that seemed to be in some manner lubricating his tongue. He pressed on, and felt free to let his imagination soar.