Provinces of Night: A Novel

by William Gay

  Fleming sat on the couch in the living room and studied the old man. Bloodworth seemed ill-prepared to stay so much as a night here. He had brought no food, and there was nothing to cook it on if he had. Dark was already seeping out of the woods and there was not so much as a kerosene lamp in the trailer. He was mulling over the idea of asking the old man to spend the night at his house when Albright spoke.

  You could bunk with me, he said. As long as you’re not too particular. We could fly in on this thing tomorrow and maybe shape it up in a day or two.

  The old man appeared to think this over. Finally he said, I thank you for the offer, but I ain’t never been much at movin in on nobody. Anyway this place is where I aim to live, around here where I was raised. But I’ve got to have a bath, seems like I been livin in a cattle truck a week. Has this place got a motel? It didn’t when I moved off.

  Yeah, the Cozy Court’s right on the north side of town.

  Well, that sounds like my best bet for a bath. Let’s lock this place up and find somebody willin to sell us some supper.

  In the cab Bloodworth asked Fleming about Warren and Boyd, and the boy figured he’d been expecting them to meet him. If he was he never said so, and he did not ask about Brady at all.

  I reckon it’s worked down to me and you then, he told the boy.

  Within a week the old man, with the help of Albright and Fleming, had wrought a considerable change in his holdings. Albright fell into the role of chauffeur and general handyman as easily as he had assumed the mantle of cabdriver. Fleming found the old man’s company agreeable and improvements on the trailer a way to use up time, a commodity this summer he seemed to possess too much of.

  Bloodworth learned of a man at Beaver Dam who had benefited from the rural electrification program to the extent that he had a Delco unit for sale cheap. This Delco was a system of storage batteries and a generator that charged them. It furnished direct current for lights and small appliances and since the farmer had no further use for them he sold Bloodworth as well a fan and a refrigerator and a small stove designed to operate on direct current.

  The old man said his pockets weren’t deep enough yet for a well but he was mulling over plans for a cistern and pump. In the meantime they found a steel tank that had done service on a dairy farm and laboriously mounted it on poles so that Albright could juryrig a gravity flow of water to the plumbing of the trailer. A county truck with a water tank was hired to fill it and with water in the pipes and lights to defray the darkness the trailer was approaching the comforts of home.

  The first night there his sleep was broken and chancy as an old man’s often is and sometime in the night he dreamed of wolves. The dream was so vivid it was almost tactile, he could have brushed the silver ruff at the wolf’s throat with his fingers. He was looking across an expanse of ice and snow toward a huge wolf baying at the moon. The wolf was silhouetted against the moon which was full and hung low in an indigo sky strewn with curdled clouds the color of foam on seagreen water and the wolf’s breath smoked coldly in the air.

  He woke knowing that something had slammed against the front door, a sound that vanished the instant he was awake to hear it. Dogs were howling. They seemed to be all about the trailer and he rose and turned on the light. The cacophony of howls and barks did not diminish with the light and the old man crossed the room and opened the front door. A dog sprang from the doorstep into the yard. You hush that up, the old man yelled. There was no moon and all he could see was the vague shape of dogs like revenantial dogs cobbled up out of night and shadow crossing and recrossing the yard. Now I’m not about to put up with this mess all night, he said to himself.

  He pulled the guitar case from beneath his bed and opened it and removed the guitar and from the storage compartment meant for picks and extra strings withdrew a shortbarreled .38 Smith & Wesson revolver. He crossed back to the doorsill and stood on the top step with the pistol held beside his leg. The dogs were still milling about the yard and at the edge of the woods he could just discern a spectral human figure, a vague paleness against an indecipherable darkness, perhaps a man wearing a lightcolored shirt.

  Who’s out there? he called.

  He could hear the soft almost furtive sounds of the dogs fading toward the woods. No one answered him and even as he watched the figure vanished, not abruptly but like something sinking slowly backward into deep blue water, like a light dimming down until finally there is nothing there at all.

  Brady? he called.

  SHE HAD BEEN brought up hard but not that hard. Not as hard as it was to live in an uncertain state of fear, knowing each day that the law would sooner or later come with government warrants and going to bed at night with that knowledge somehow intensified because it seemed even more apt for them to come at night. Even E.F. had to sleep sometime.

  Not as hard as the door being kicked from its hinges behind her as she crossed from the stove to the table, a hot pan clutched bothhanded before her, the door caving inward and the room abruptly filling with stumbling men, Julia halfturning, the pan tilting, and she remembered the hot bright spatters of scalding soup on her ankles.

  Julia sat in the shade of the pine in the metal chaise lounge. A broom stood tilted against her knee and there were fresh broommarks on the earth where the straw had gone. The air was winey with the smell of the sun in the hot pineneedles, a breeze arose and the smell intensified, a dust devil spun lazily down from the barnlot like a ghost and across the driveway and passed over her, her clothes rustling, the whirling wind cool against the drying sweat on her face.

  She took off the goldrimmed glasses she wore and polished them on the hem of her apron, old feedsack material so often laundered it had gone patternless and soft as chamois. A catbird called from the tree but the bird’s cry had no more reality than the sounds of deputies in her kitchen long ago, a raincrow called from a distant field but what she heard was the castiron kettle striking the hardwood floor, tomato soup spattering the wall like blood.

  E.F. was sitting at a wide pine trestle table that bisected him above the waist and cut from view the pistol shoved into his trousers. All this was caught in a moment, etched her memory like acid filigrees on steel: there was a bowl of milk before Bloodworth, he was holding cornbread he was in the act of crumbling into the milk. His eyes widened but only momentarily, then narrowed to slits, the face gone at once sleepylooking and intent, and she knew him so well his thoughts were almost audible to her, what to do, what to do.

  She was grabbed hard from behind, her throat and head caught in the crook of an elbow, she could see part of a blued rifle barrel extending into the upper corner of her vision, feel the rough serge overcoat sleeve against her throat. She clawed at the arm but it was strong and adrenalinecrazed, it was like struggling against a steel band. She felt her throat close, she was gasping for one more breath.

  E.F. rose, facing the men, his hands raised, turning suddenly to kick away the chair behind him. The chair slammed into the wall, careened impotently across the floor.

  Suddenly she slid downward toward the floor, the serge scraping across her cheek, felt her face distort against the clamped arm, eyelid stretched and distended until the eye opened against her will, the sandpaper of serge across the ball of the eye itself. The floor seemed somewhere she had to be. Her hair was caught in the buttons of the man’s overcoat then he seized her hair in his fist trying to haul her back up to shield him.

  She was no more than halfway down the man’s body, descending him like a ladder, when E.F. fired. The hollow boom was enormous and the concussion came wave on palpable wave and the fist released her with her hair stringing away and she could feel strands of it plucked from her scalp. Her head slapped the floor and when she rolled over onto her back the man loomed above her, enormous but wounded, like a stricken god. He clutched himself where neck and shoulder joined then moved the hand away and stared at his bloody palm in a kind of wonder. A haze of smoke drifted.

  She now saw that there were three of the m
en. She’d thought the number greater and she wondered were there more outside. The deputies seemed frozen, the rifles at port arms across their chests. She could read in their faces that they had just wanted to arrest him without killing or being killed and the faces showed how unlikely that possibility had become. E.F.’s face just showed that he didn’t care if he killed them or not and maybe he’d a little rather kill them. He had the pistol pointed at the man’s head and she watched the cylinder’s slow turn and the hammer go to halfcock.

  Lean them pieces against the wall, E.F. said. No, throw them out that door into the yard.

  They did.

  Get over in that corner, he said, or one at a time I’ll punch three tickets to hell.

  He was helping her up, leading her through the doorway into the bright sun. A wind had risen and shadows moved across the yard like something the wind was blowing before it.

  No, she said, tugging against his arm, wondering what he was thinking. Fight one man off and there’s always another one, she thought. The boys were in school, they’d be along. To an empty house that smelled like gunpowder, blood on the walls, blood on the floor.

  No, she said, I can’t live like this no more, I won’t do it. Go on and go wherever it is you want to.

  I can’t leave you, he said.

  You left me a long time ago, she told him.

  He released the cock on the hammer of the revolver and shoved it into the waistband of his trousers. It’s none of my doin, he said.

  It’s all your doin, she said. And always has been.

  She stood leaning against the wall. Her throat felt raw and her right eye hurt. She felt she might faint. The world shimmered, flickered like something halfway between reality and dream. She slid down the wall, sat on legs that had miraculously folded beneath her.

  When the engine cranked she looked up. E.F. was turning the old truck in the yard. An old model-T cut into a pickup truck, the likeness of a woman brushed in white on the door, Jolie Blon. The truck bucked and jumped and died when he popped the clutch and he restarted it, his face focused and intent, the eyes already prepared to see whatever it was the road wanted to show him.

  She sat on her legs. Light through an intricate wickerwork of branches moved and swayed, moved and swayed. Light and shadow latticed together moved endlessly on the earth and she stared at it, thinking for a time that she could divine pattern there, order. But it moved with the sun and it moved with the wind and ultimately it was as random and unordered as life and she gave up on it and closed her eyes.

  She thought she’d just dozed a moment with her head against the wall and the sun on her eyelids but when she opened them the metal of the chaise lounge was hard against the bun of hair on the back of her head and the sun had gone and looking upward into the thick pine branches was like staring down a tunnel into night itself.

  She rose stiffly, still caught in the memory, touched for a moment the sagging crepe of her throat as if she’d expected to feel there the flesh of a girl. She took up the broom and went on toward the house. She wondered where Brady was and why the lights were not on.

  On the porch she turned, hand already reaching for the doorknob, at some sound. Banjo music came drifting across the barren field, down through the cedar row, soft and then more defined, louder then almost fading out, as if during its passage through the cedars the trees were performing this alchemy upon it. Oh my whiskey bill is due, and my board bill is too, the music said, and my last gold dollar’s done and gone. And my last gold dollar’s done and gone, and she was suddenly touched with terror. She didn’t know if the music was in the world or in her head.

  Feeding bats crisscrossed in the deep blue dusk. The last of the light throbbed like a distant fire above the treeline. She suddenly heard a wave of sound, cicadas and whippoorwills and crickets that just abruptly assailed her, and she wondered if they’d just begun or if they had already been calling and all she’d heard was the banjo music, ancient and myth-laden and somehow enticing, like sound seeping through the cracks of a place you couldn’t get to anymore.

  ALBRIGHT HAD LEARNED of the widow with the barn roof that needed painting at Patton’s store and had gone immediately to her farm across the river, to the edge of a wild area called the Harrikin. He was hired. The husband had died sometime back leaving three five-gallon buckets of vilelooking green paint but the roofs untouched. When Albright was through with the barn she looked at the level of the paint remaining and decided to paint the other outbuildings as well and she waited until the last of the paint was used and Albright was cleaning his brushes in a bucket of kerosene to tell him that she had no money and had planned on paying him with a halfgrown hog.

  Albright was outraged. I need my money, he said. I don’t have any use for a hog.

  Well. I don’t have any money.

  He suspected she was lying but short of falling upon her bodily he did not know what to do about it. Why didn’t you tell me ahead of time, he asked. I don’t know what in the world I’d do with a hog. I don’t even have any way of haulin a hog.

  I figured you knew, she said. It was known all up and down this creek I wanted to trade that shoat for work. That hog’s worth every penny of thirty dollars, and they’ll buy him down at the store.

  In the end it was take the hog or take nothing and they went out to look at it.

  The hog was lying in a dry mudhole in the shade of a fence encumbered with virulentlooking poison oak. When Albright climbed over the fence the hog fixed him with a look of unalloyed malevolence and scrambled upright. The hog had a razorous mouth and a frayed ear and malignant little piggy eyes.

  A dog done that to his ear, the old woman said. Just clamped down and hung on while that hog drug it over half the county.

  How do I get him in the car? he asked. I don’t know anything about hogs.

  Well, she said. She gave him what was almost but not quite a shrug. I guess you could do it ever how you want to. He’s your hog now.

  He sat down on his heels and thought about it a while.

  I believe there’s an old dog collar and a leash in that stable back there, she said. I’ll go look. Or you might try tollin him.

  Tollin him?

  Leadin him with an ear of corn or somethin. Callin him.

  Let’s try all of it, Albright said.

  She came around and opened a gap in the fence Albright hadn’t seen. It would be a sight easier if you brought your automobile down here, she said. I don’t know much about automobiles but I do know they got wheels and hogs don’t.

  He gave her a sharp glance. A different tone seemed to have entered her voice since the last roof was painted. That’s a good idea, he said. I was just about to do that.

  He went and got the taxicab and backed it to the edge of the gap and got out and opened one of the rear doors. She had the leash and collar in one hand and an ear of corn in the other and she was waiting on him.

  He finally managed to get the collar on the hog but it bit him once in the calf of the leg and once on the forearm. Collared and leashed like some degenerate breed of dog the shoat lay down in the dusty mudhole and put its chin on its paws and watched him arrogantly. He pulled as hard as he could on the leash but all it did was draw the hog upright. It positioned its sharp little hooves and leant against the leash and Albright couldn’t budge him. It didn’t want the corn, either.

  Maybe you could push on him or somethin, he said. You push and I’ll pull and maybe he’ll get the idea.

  She just shook her head. I believe he’s already got the idea, she said. Anyway I never liked that hog. It had the worst turn of any shoat I ever raised.

  He threw the ear of corn as hard as he could at the hog and walked around behind it and encircled its chest with both arms and heaved with all his might. The hog lurched upon its hind legs and began to squeal. He waltzed it toward the car this way and that and with his arms about the hog and both upright they looked like two lascivious drunks trying some new kind of crazy dance. Bemused perhaps by this a
pproach the hog allowed itself to be pushed to the car and Albright put a heavy foot against its haunch and kicked. The hog went scrambling over the seat and Albright slammed the door and stood against the Dodge breathing hard. He could hear the hog squalling in outrage and lurching about inside the car. He was wishing he’d left shoatless half an hour ago, wishing he’d never heard about the old woman at Patton’s store.

  He didn’t even look at the old woman. He got into the car and started back toward the river. He looked back once and the hog was studying him with something akin to speculation. Halfway across the railroad trestle over the river the hog seemed taken with some sort of fit. It began to whirl about and slam against the doors and leap from seat to floorboard and back again then it made a razorous slash in the upholstery and dragged out a mouthful of stuffing. Shit, Albright said. He slammed on the brakes and turned in the seat and began to beat the hog about the head and shoulders with his fists. Quit it, he yelled. He climbed out of the car and opened the rear door but when he did the hog leapt against it desperately. The flung door caught Albright on the temple and he fell as the hog bolted across him and struck out for the end of the trestle. Albright scrambled up and managed to grasp the end of the leash. He ran fulltilt after the hog trying to get slack in the leash then slid in the gravel at the trestle’s end. Somehow he managed to hang on to the leash. The hog dragged him six or eight feet then turned in the roadbed facing him and just stood there gasping.

  He closed on it. They fell together in the road like the very essence of degeneracy and struggled up with Albright cursing and the shoat grunting in short explosive bursts and upholstery gummed hydrophobically around its mouth. Albright had a long slanting cut on his bicep and man and hog alike were crazed with dust and blood.

  That trestle ain’t but one lane wide, a voice said. You was to move your car I’d get on out of your way and let you go about your business.