Provinces of Night: A Novel

by William Gay

  He leapt onto the sidewalk still holding the knife and without slackening his speed. He went down a narrow alley between buildings that rose on either side like the limestone bluffs rising from the banks of Grinders Creek where he’d been raised, and the concrete he ran full tilt on, arms pumping, seemed to be a creekbed. He dreamed a fan of water that rose before him, that diminished behind his churning feet. He could see light at the canyon’s mouth, pale green diffused light like a May sun in willows, and he ran on toward it.

  ON AN EARLY Sunday morning Fleming left the street and went up a driveway toward a white stucco house set back in a grove of pecan trees. The house was flatroofed and low and the windows had ornate shutters of wrought iron painted black that made the windows look barred when they were closed. He went up wide concrete steps to a patio where from a chaise lounge a great marmalade cat lying in an oblique square of yellow sunlight watched him with disinterested and insolent eyes.

  He opened a storm door constructed of the same iron as the shutters and knocked on a dark wooden door. After a while it opened and an old man stood regarding him with a friendly quizzical expression. He came onto the patio and closed the door behind him.

  Could I help you this morning, young man?

  I’m Fleming Bloodworth, Mr. Marbet.

  Ah. Boyd’s son.

  Yes sir. We live down on the creek on that place you own.

  Marbet took off his glasses and began wiping the lenses on a handkerchief he took from his jacket pocket. He seemed dressed for church. His cheeks were ruddy and shiny from being freshly shaven and he was wearing a white shirt and a necktie. The tie was maroon silk figured with tiny regal lions rampant across it.

  How is Boyd getting along these days?

  I don’t really know. He’s up north, working up there making cars or something.

  Well. It’s a shame when a man has to leave his home to find a way of making a living. Is there something I could do for you? Would you come in and have a cup of coffee with us?

  No, thank you. I just wanted to ask you something. I was back toward the river the other day talking to a man cutting timber and he was telling me something about the TVA planning to build a lake back in there.

  Oh yes. They plan to build a dam on the river, they tell me for flood control. It’s going to be a huge lake, enormous. Most everything not underwater they’ll use for a recreation area. Camping, and so forth.

  Will it affect your property down there?

  It’s not going to be my property much longer, Marbet said wryly. As soon as we come to terms it’ll all belong to the TVA. No papers have been signed, but it’s just a matter of time. The way it was put to me, it’s not something I have a choice in. Not my decision at all. If I don’t sell they’ll just pay me what they consider a fair market price and take it.

  Can they do that?

  Oh yes. Certainly. They’ve done it a lot in the past, and I expect they’ll do it a lot more in the future.

  Where does it come to?

  Where does what come to?

  The land they’re taking, or buying up. My grandmother lives back across the ridge there and I was wondering if she would be affected.

  Oh, I know that place well. No. It’s a long way back through those woods. As I understand it, the TVA line will be on my property somewhere about that old crossroads. Do you know that place?

  Yes.

  I should have driven down there and had a talk with you, but to tell the truth I had forgotten about that house even being there. I never charged Boyd any rent, in all honesty I never considered that house worth renting. I have so much to look after, and that place just slipped my mind.

  Well. I guess I’ll get on, then.

  You’ve probably got a few months, but I’d certainly be making other arrangements. That’s all going to be underwater. If you need a place to live come see me. I’ve got a farm down there on Cane Creek I could use another cropper on. There’s an empty tenant house on it, and we’ll find something for you to do.

  Well, I’ll think about it.

  You’re well spoken and you look as if you’d make me a good man. Don’t think too long, I’ve got people asking about houses all the time.

  All right, Fleming said. He turned to go.

  We’d be glad to have you out at the church this morning, Marbet called.

  Fleming raised a hand and went on.

  THE DOG DAY HEAT held into the tag end of August, and there were days when they’d just head out in the communal taxicab with no destination in mind save sufficient speed to engender a breeze through the rolled-down windows. Albright and Fleming would pick up the old man at the trailer, Bloodworth coming out wildeyed with the heat and fanning himself with the Stetson, reeling on his stiff leg like some casualty of the malevolent heat itself, a celluloid man left in the heat too long.

  They might sit in the shade of itchy Mama’s front porch with others like them but not quite, old men who treated Bloodworth with the sort of deference they might accord exiled royalty or a man living under the edict of death. The old man holding one warming beer for hours and listening to the tales the old men told, telling some himself. Fleming and Albright sitting among these garrulous old sots like acolytes or apprentices, as if they were picking up the fine points of being old.

  You need to let your chauffeur there take you deer huntin, E.E, Cater Hensley said.

  Who’s that, young Albright here?

  When they first started bringin deer into this part of the country Junior took it into his head he had to kill him one.

  Hellfire, Albright said. I’ve heard this till I’m sick of it.

  He just lived in the woods there for a while, Hensley went on. But he never did come up on one. Then he was drivin up Riverside one day and there was a eight-point buck standin right in a fencerow Junior got his rifle out and took a rest on the trunk and cut down on it. It never so much as blinked. He shot again. It didn’t even look around. Junior couldn’t figure how in the world he’d missed it. Clyde Tennison was with him and Clyde said it looked for all the world like that deer had heard how bad Junior wanted to kill one and was offerin itself up for a sacrifice. Clyde had done seen what it was but he said Junior shot up a whole box of 30-30 cartridges and that deer just wouldn’t fall. Junior kept sayin his sights was off. Shot off one of its horns and it never moved a muscle. Finally they walked out there to the fencerow and somebody had skinned one out for the meat and hung the head and hide over that fence. Clyde said that hide looked like it had been stood up before a firin squad.

  Clyde Tennison is as black a liar as ever drawed a breath, Albright said. I never shot up nowhere near a whole box of shells. It could of happened to anybody.

  It could happen to anybody one or two times, Hensley said. How many shells is in a box, twenty? It could only happen twenty times to you.

  He killed two concrete deer off old Judge Humphreys’s front yard, old man Breece said. Humphreys shoveled them deer up and rolled em off in a wheelbarrow.

  Or they’d late in the day head out in the cooling air for a breath of the river, sit hours on the high gallery of Goblin’s Knob where you could look out across the river and mingle with the revenants of men who’d been knifed there or shot or simply clubbed to death with the hickory truncheons the men of Beech Creek were told to carry. A place of almost mythic violence, the haunt of men so confident in their ability to push things past their limits they could empty a lesser bar by coming through the door and sizing up the clientele. Men who killed each other over being called a son of a bitch with the inflection of the voice a shade wrong or over looking at the wrong woman the wrong way. Men who would for a kind of twisted honor kill each other over a woman who did not care which lived and which died and would before the matter was settled have taken up with another man altogether.

  To Fleming’s bemusement Bloodworth and Sharp and the other old men remembered all this with something like nostalgia, as if this violent history was something you’d save bloody mementos from a
nd place between the pages of a Bible like faded flowers. The old man himself, Sharp said, able and better to hold his own. When he was in his prime, Sharp said, the old man used to sweep the place out on Saturday nights like a longhandled broom.

  You ever tell your runnin mates there about that shootout you had with the deputies?

  The old man gave Sharp an almost imperceptible shake of the head. Sharp hushed. Bloodworth sat watching bubbles rise in the glass of beer on the table before him. Some things is better in the ground with the dirt throwed over them, he said.

  Like deputies that use your wife for a shield and cut down on you with a .44 Special, Sharp grinned.

  The old Dodge had idiosyncrasies peculiar to it and was subject to innumerable malfunctions and you might see it halted on the shoulder of the road with the hood raised, Albright blowing trash out of a fuel line or cleaning the points with a piece of sandpaper, Fleming looking on and the old man ensconced in the back seat, fanning himself and waiting with the ingrained patience of the old.

  They might have been on their way back to Itchy Mama’s, and they might make it yet, where some nights they had vicious cutthroat games of Rook where millions of conjectural dollars rode on the fall of a single card, Itchy Mama and the old man teamed against Fleming and Albright, Itchy Mama watching Albright’s dealing with a hawklike intensity and describing the serious bodily damage that would ensure if she caught him palming the Rook or red one.

  In these early days with the old man it seemed to Fleming that he was already changing, though he had never known his grandfather before and could not have said what he was changing from: from the protagonist of other men’s stories, perhaps, for he no longer looked like a man given to gunfights with deputies, this benign old man watching whatever moved with his wry ironic eyes did not seem the type to clean out Saturday night honkytonks, to be waylaid on Indian Creek by men who rose out of the sage like sepia men of another century who sighted down the barrels of their rifles and blew him off the wagonseat into the bloody weeds.

  Even when he’d arrived he’d had restless eyes, eyes that were always looking about as if he might notice some place he’d rather be and head out for it immediately. Fleming had heard him tell Albright once that he had come back to make peace with his family. But as far as Fleming knew he had made peace with nobody. After a while it occurred to him that without even knowing it the old man was making peace with himself, and that that had probably been a good part of the trouble all along.

  THE OLD MAN rolled six lemons on the countertop until they were soft and full of juice. The hot air in the tiny trailer took on their astringent, citrusy smell. He cut the ends off them one by one and one by one squeezed them into a widemouth glass jug and sliced them into chunks with his pocketknife and dropped them in as well. He poured in sugar gauging the amount with an eye instead of a measuring cup and added water from the tap.

  Chunk us off some of that ice, he said.

  The refrigerator had refused to freeze more ice and Albright had brought out a fifty-pound block the day before from the ice plant. What remained the old man had wrapped in a quilt and stored beneath the sink. Fleming unwrapped it and with a clawhammer knocked off several fistsize chunks. He handed them to the old man. Bloodworth folded one of them into a clean towel and pounded it with the clawhammer and dumped the shaved ice into a snuffglass. He took down from a doorless cabinet a bottle of Early Times and poured an inch or two over the ice.

  He held the tumbler to the sunwashed window and then held it to his face and breathed in deeply. Early Times, he said. I always liked the name better than the whiskey. Early Times are the best times there is.

  I believe we’ll drink these in the sitting room, he said, filling a glass with lemonade and reaching it to the boy. I believe I can smell my hair starting to singe.

  He had supervised construction of this sitting room himself. What it consisted of was a clearing perhaps twenty feet by twenty feet hacked out of the undergrowth behind the trailer. Junior Albright and Fleming with briarblades and brushhooks and axes had cleared the smaller saplings and honeysuckle vines and brush then raked the earth clean as if swept with a broom. Above them a tangle of summer leaves and grape and muscadine vines interlaced so tightly they formed a virtual ceiling, so that the sitting room was always in shade save the early morning hours and just before dusk. The old man had bought three lawn chairs and he and Fleming and Albright would sit about the glade at their leisure as if they were quality folk taking the air from the balcony of a columned mansion.

  This place is all right with me, Bloodworth said. I could live in a brush arbor. I could live in a groundhog den.

  The old man did not actually drink the whiskey anymore. He had a bad stomach and a bad liver even aside from the stroke and he’d sit hour-long with a glass of bourbon in his hand as if he were absorbing it into his blood by osmosis. He’d occasionally take a birdlike sip or wet his lips with it, sometimes he’d raise the glass and just smell, taking in the odor of icy whiskey and mint like a connoisseur of fine wine inhaling the bouquet from a crystal goblet.

  I’ve drunk good whiskey and I’ve drunk bad, the old man told Fleming. I’ve drunk whiskey so good you could smell the leaves in the woods where it was made and I’ve drunk it so bad you could strip the paint off a barn door with it. I’m inclined to believe it was the paintstrippin kind that left my stomach in the shape it’s in.

  The boy tilted back in the lawnchair and drank down half the glass of lemonade. It was so cold it made his throat ache, strong with the sour taste of lemons, sweet with the sugar the old man had dumped in. The old man always used too much of everything, too many lemons, too much sugar, as if halfmeasures at anything were beneath him. He tipped too high in restaurants, exhorted Albright to drive faster, was wide awake and ready to roll in the small hours of the morning when Fleming and Albright folded on him.

  Fleming was finding E. F. Bloodworth strange past any expectation of him. Much accustomed to only the company of himself the old man might complacently sit half a day without saying a word. Or he might, under the boy’s gentle prodding, begin to talk, telling little by little sections of his life. At some point it began to seem like a story telling itself, and finally a narrative the old man was telling for his own benefit. As if he’d make some order out of these chunks of personal history, some sense. Like shifting about the pieces of a puzzle on a table until the edges dovetail.

  Studying him where he sat Fleming tried to match the old man to the photograph he’d found in his grandmother’s picture box. No pictures of him hung on the walls of the house. Fleming had seen family portraits with the old man neatly scissored out and only the blank man-shaped space he’d occupied remaining, as if the old man had been there a moment ago and you’d looked away then back and he’d vanished. Vanished so thoroughly all you could see of him was the newsprint or fabric you were holding the picture against. The air itself. Now you see me, now you don’t, the old man seemed to say. Wink and I’m gone, cross me or badger me and I’m down the line.

  This photograph had somehow escaped, and Fleming suspected the old woman had hidden it away. It was perhaps four inches by six, darkened to varying stages of sepia, from the palest beige to a brown almost darkened to umber. It had a thick crumbly texture as if it had been fired in a kiln. A man stood before a board wall. Rough sawmill planks, you could see the circular marks where the saw had gone, the nailheads where they’d been hammered together. The man wore what looked like part of a dark serge suit, pants that looked oversized suspendered over a collarless white shirt. The man wore a dark fedora and beneath its brim the fierce empty eyes looked out as if they were coming from a thousand miles away, and were off immediately another thousand in some other direction. The eyes were just dark holes, he’d thought as a child if you canted the photograph to the light he could have seen through them like pinpricks charred through the cardboard.

  He held a banjo that was slung by a strap across his shoulders, and the banjo was what the pho
tograph was about. I’m not so much, the reserved young man in the photograph seemed to be saying. But look what I’ve got here. The left hand formed a chord on the neck, the right loosely clasped the head of the banjo, as if he were proffering it slightly for the camera’s inspection. The face was intense and slightly ill at ease, as if the young man was on his way elsewhere and only had a moment to pose for this picture.

  Music had been his undoing, he told the boy in an ironic self-deprecation. His bane and his salvation. It had gotten him through times that would have otherwise been unbearable and it had made everything else he had gone at twice as hard.

  A cold glass of lemonade in his hand, the air full of the winey ferment from the curing vegetation they had cut, Fleming began to learn something of the old man’s life.

  When he had gone courting Julia Bradshaw he had managed to have six hundred dollars that he carried folded in the pocket of his pants. Six hundred dollars at that time and place was an enormous amount of money. It had taken a long time and a lot of work and stinting to save it. He had a place lined up to crop. He had a wagon and a team of horses. He had a house spoken for should the need arise. Julia’s father did not care for him and he knew better than to go courting a girl as pretty as Julia with no prospects.

  Saul Bradshaw liked him no better with six hundred dollars in his pocket than he had liked him when Bloodworth was a penniless banjo picker uncasing his instrument at any gathering he heard rumored.

  E. F. Bloodworth was a layabout, a drunkard, a seducer of innocent young women and a patron of whores. When Bradshaw looked into his eyes all he saw was horizons receding fold on fold until the last one faded into a transparency of the palest blue. He will not stay put, he told Julia.

  Julia Bradshaw was part Cherokee Indian. She was small and dark and the inscrutability of her eyes hinted at enigmas a man might unravel would he take the time to try. Bloodworth was to learn that it is the nature of an enigma to remain unsolved, and that inscrutability means just what it says.