by William Gay
Copperbrown and black, the snake looked atavistic and evil, its ancient eyes cold and heartless as time itself. Its coils moved on themselves sluggishly, thick and heavy with poison. It seemed to be recovering itself but it still wasn’t crawling away.
He leaned and placed the tip of the carved stick lightly on the rattlesnake’s head, serpent to serpent. He was going to grind it into the earth then he stopped. Somehow it didn’t seem fair. Something flies down and hooks its claws into your flesh and soars away with you, high into the thin blue air, the comforting earth miles away and no more than a remembered dream. Then it drops you, and you slam into the ground and you lay there with your senses knocked out. After you finally start to get at yourself, and marvel at your incredible escape, an old man limps up and shreds your head into the clay with a hickory stick.
All right, he told the snake. I’ll tell you what I’m goin to do. I’m fixin to let you go. But the only people you can go into the world and bite are my enemies. Folks with guns and badges, khaki britches. Prison guards with shotguns. Lawyers, no limit on them. Maybe an undertaker or a insurance salesman every now and then. But no kids. No kids and no folks just tryin to scratch out a livin. You bite one of them, just one, and it’s me and you, I’ll be on your ass like a plague, I’ll finish what I started.
He moved the stick. After a while the snake began to crawl slowly away. It went into the cedars, finally vanished as if it had been no more than the coppery cedar needles and a trick of the light.
The old man went on, glancing skyward every now and then. He was no believer in signs and portents, but if the Almighty was going to rain serpents on him out of a clear blue sky he figured he might as well be indoors.
WE PULLED INTO Blythesville, Arkansas, one time, Sharp told Fleming. He opened the bottle of Coca-Cola and slid it across the bar to him. We was flat broke, he went on. Not a cryin dime between us. Hadn’t eat in nearly two days. We run out of gas right past the city limits sign and had to get out and roll the car out of the street.
It was on a Saturday mornin and there was a lot of folks stirrin about. People haulin cotton into town on wagons to the gin. Folks come in on Saturday to trade. Saturday was a big day back then. Saturday was what got you through the week. What do we do now? I asked E.F.
He got his banjo out of the trunk and by the time we got up to the square we had folks followin us. Kids, everybody. We looked like a parade. He had folks hollerin at him, Hey E.F, and as far as I know he’d never been in Blythesville, Arkansas, before. I played fiddle for him then, and I know I hadn’t. How about a tune, E.F, they was hollerin. Play a little for us.
By then we was on the courthouse square. E.F. set his banjo down but he never took it out of the case. I’ll tell you how it is, he told them. Our car’s out of gas and we are too. We ain’t eat since yesterday mornin. I don’t mind pickin, but it’s goin to cost you a little change. By then somebody was passin a bottle around and E.F. took a good horn of it. I may have too, I was bad to drink back then. I passed the hat around before E.F. ever uncased his banjo. Passed it around again while he was tunin up. It beat everything I ever saw. We’d took up over ten dollars before he ever commenced the first song. Hell, it plumb put workin in the shade. A man might make a dollar a day back then, if you could find anything to do.
By the time he was through with Goin Down the Road Feelin Bad he had em in his hip pocket. They would have followed him off a steep bluff, into a house on fire. The cops come and was goin to break up the crowd cause it was blocking traffic and before you know it they was just like anybody else. I seen one take a drink out of a bottle somebody handed him. Time we went down to the cafe to eat E.F. could have run for mayor and been elected hands down. They thought he ought to be on the Grand Ole Opry.
The old man drank beer and wiped the foam off his upper lip. He laughed. I did try out for the Opry one time, he said. And they was goin to hire me. But by the time they sent a man around I’d got caught makin whiskey and done been in Brushy Mountain penitentiary three months.
Bloodworth was already forty years old when he heard that a man from a New York company was auditioning performers in Knoxville. He rode there on a bus, a pint of his own whiskey in his coat pocket, the cased banjo held upright between his feet because he did not trust the bus company to keep up with it. Watching the countryside ascend into mountains he’d never seen he tried not to think of the crop that needed laying by, Julia’s eyes that looked through him or around him when he came into a room. There was a hunger in him that he did not trust and could not even come close to explaining.
In Knoxville he played on streetcorners and passed his hat. It always came back with money in it. After a while he’d grow cocky and pass the hat before he’d even uncased the banjo. There would still be money in it. Even then there was something about him. He had a tale to tell. He made you believe it was your tale as well. Police came to tell him to move it along and stayed to listen. Sometimes they even dropped their own half-dollars into the hat. Bloodworth sang songs he’d heard and songs he’d stolen from other singers and songs he’d made up. He sang about death and empty beds and songs that sounded like invitations until you thought about them a while and then they began to sound like threats. Violence ran through them like heat lightning, winter winds whistled them along like paper cups turning hollowly down frozen streets.
The auditions were held in the Norton Hotel and it was full of pickers and singers from all over the south. From North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas. The old man sized them up. Even with a halfpint of his own whiskey comforting him he felt intimidated. Here were folk who played and sang for a living. They had bands, they toured and played county fairs, dances, church functions. They were professionals. Bloodworth was a sharecropper, a whiskey runner, whatever fell handy. A man named A. P. Carter was there. He failed the audition. Bloodworth did not.
He rode a train to New York City and cut eight sides, four 78 rpm records. All the way to New York what he wanted to do most in the world seemed to follow above him just out of reach. I can do this or I can do that, he thought. There seemed to be no way he could do them both.
He seemed to be betting his life on the fall of the next card and even if he won he’d lose.
The record company wanted more sides cut but E.F. put them off. We’ll see how these do, he said. He had the countryman’s fear of being taken by these city slickers. He did not become famous but the records sold well enough so that he was asked to cut four more. By then he was part of a band called the Fruitjar Drinkers and they were touring the rural south in a Model A Ford. A fiddle player, a guitar player, Bloodworth and his Gibson banjo. Playing little towns that were hardly more than a grocery store and a couple of churches, shotgun sharecropper shacks, red roads that did not seem to go anywhere anyone in his right mind would want to be.
They’d set up on the long porches of country stores, stores that might have all been constructed from the selfsame blueprint. There’d be electric lights strung up and moths drifting in and out of their arc so thick they seemed some curious by-product of the electricity itself. Before Bloodworth had finished tuning up folks would be drifting toward the lights, at the first driving notes of the banjo, the old man squaring his shoulders and leaning into the din of noise like a boxer coming out of his corner, folks would have clustered the porch as if they’d risen out of the dusty red clay itself.
Tubercular revenants in overalls and a week’s beard, their wives and stairstep children, old men on canes and ole women in pokebonnets hanging on to them and boldeyed women staring up at him out of the hot electric dark who seemed to be hanging on to nothing save the night itself.
Oh, Death, he began to sing, a song that in its various incarnations predated even his forebears’ presence on the continent, his smoky sardonic voice half defiance, half entreaty. Get out of the graveyard, E.F., Sharp the fiddle player would call, grinning his gaptoothed grin above the sawing bow. These folks don’t want to hear about the graveyard.
B
ut Bloodworth was not fooled, he had these folks’ number, he’d been reading their mail, walking a lifetime in their shoes. Beyond the mothriddled light their faces were rapt and transfixed, he sang about death as if it was the only kept promise out of all life’s false starts and switchbacks, all there was at the end of the dusty road, his voice told them about calm and quiet and eternal rest. No landlord, no cotton to chop, no ticket at the company store growing like a cancer. Just time itself frozen like leaves in winter ice and nothing in the round world to worry about or dread.
They sold records out of the trunk of the Model A. They sold them with no trouble at all, folks digging up change out of their purses so worn the faces denominating it looked spectral, mere ghosts of themselves. They sold them to folks who did not even own phonographs, who had no prospects for owning one, folks who seemed to regard the records as talismans. Who handled them reverently and turned them to the light and studied the spiraling grooves as if they’d find there some physical evidence of their own provisional existence, as if their very lives were somehow encoded there.
I sure would like to have one of them records, the woman said.
I’ll sell them to most anybody, Bloodworth said.
I don’t have any money.
Money has always been one of the requirements for buying something, he pointed out.
The woman had huge dark eyes that did not look away when he studied her face. They held his own eyes locked to hers and seemed to communicate on some whole other level. The black hair like a shadow down her back was as straight as if she’d taken a flatiron to it. She stood so close he could feel the heat of her.
We could maybe walk down by the levee and talk about it, she said.
Likely we could, he agreed.
They walked along the side of the road. Between the black honeysuckle and sawbriars the road was white as mica. She carried the record against her breasts as a young girl might carry her schoolbooks. Somewhere out there in the dark beyond the levee the Mississippi rolled like something larger than life, like a myth, like a dream the world was having. Here the land was flat and the stars swung so close to earth they seemed foreign, in configurations he’d imagined but never quite seen. A whippoorwill called out of the musky dark in some language he’d never heard. Sin seemed so evil, so sweet.
You got a drink on you, Mr. Bloodworth?
Of course he had a drink. What would a Fruitjar Drinker be without a drink?
Is anybody goin to be lookin for you? he asked.
Just you, I hope, she said, turning to him.
All this was a negation of death. The taste of her mouth, the feel of her breast, so soft that the feel of a naked breast always surprised him. Her quickened breath was the very affirmation of life.
Death in those days had a tendency to walk past his house at night, cross the yard and peer in his window, bone hand raised to shade black eyeholes that were just night augmenting itself, death fought him every night for the covers, tried to crawl into the very bed with him.
Not tonight, he’d think, hands gentle at the buttons of her dress. Death, you’ll sleep at the foot of the bed tonight.
WARREN SAT awkwardly in the old man’s lawn chair, his car parked at the edge of the road. There was a blondhaired woman sitting in the passenger seat drinking something from a paper cup and glancing occasionally toward the trailer.
How you makin it, Pa?
I reckon I’m scrapin by, Bloodworth said. It’s good to be back here. Seems like it’s peaceful, just bein in a country that lays the way you remember it layin.
Warren was wearing dress pants and a white shirt and his slippers were shined. He took a flat pint bottle out of the side pocket of his coat and offered it to the old man.
I reckon I’ll pass, Bloodworth said. It don’t agree with me anymore.
Then I don’t reckon you’ll mind if I take a drink.
You’re well past the age where what I think about anything matters, Bloodworth said. He sat studying Warren. It was not yet ten o’clock in the morning yet Warren already seemed unsteady on his feet. Perhaps he’d started drinking when the sun came up, perhaps he’d not waited for the sun. The old man was touched by something in Warren’s face and he wished he could make things right. Pick him up out of his tracks and set him down in other tracks going another direction. He could not think of anything to say to him, and since his own life did not lend itself to example he would not have said it anyway.
Warren drank from the bottle and screwed the cap back on and returned it to his pocket. Brady come around much? he asked.
No, he kindly seems to be avoidin me. The time or two I’ve talked to him he’s mostly just raved and ranted about me goin to hell. I reckon him and God Almighty’s got together and worked it all out.
There’s somethin the matter with Brady. I hate to say it but I believe he gets worse ever time I see him. He’s got all that crazy mess about fortunes and hexes on his mind and I don’t think he can think about anything else anymore.
I blame myself some, Bloodworth said. But you can’t walk back to where you was twenty years ago and start over.
There was somethin wrong with him twenty years ago, too, Warren said. You just never noticed it. Does that boy of mine come by much?
No, I’ve not seen him. That boy of Boyd’s speaks of him a lot.
I’ve about give up on Neal. Just throwed up my hands and said let him roll. He’ll probably wind up in the pen. All he studies is pussy and whiskey and I can’t seem to get him interested in anything else.
Reckon how in the world he wound up like that, the old man grinned. Many preachers and Sunday School teachers as this family has turned out.
I reckon he’s a throwback to olden times or somethin. Say that boy of Boyd’s comes by and keeps you company? He seems all right.
He’s around here a right smart. And he is all right. He’s about as peculiar a young feller as I ever seen, but he’s all right. He’s goodhearted. Mostly keeps his mouth shut but he looks like he’s watchin and listenin all the time. Hard to figure what he’s studying about.
Warren we need to go, the woman called from the car. I’m just melting down out here.
Warren stood up. He seemed obscurely relieved to be getting underway. Well. You’re sure you’re all right, Pa?
I’ll make it. That’s not Juanita out there, is it?
Warren turned. The woman was studying her face in a tortoiseshell compact, reworking her lipstick. No, I reckon me and Juanita has come to the parting of the ways. Me and Modine there’s goin down to Florida and walk barefooted in the sand.
He withdrew a moneyclip from his pocket and handed the old man some folded bills. If you need anything just get it, he said. You got any way of gettin to town?
Young Albright hauls me around a lot. I don’t want this money.
Keep it. It’d make me feel better if you’d take it.
Bloodworth slid it into his pocket. I don’t want the responsibility of makin you feel bad, he said.
Well, let’s go where the palm trees grow, Warren said, turning for a moment and shaking the old man’s hand.
You be careful, Bloodworth said, still clasping the hand, not knowing what he wanted Warren to be careful of, but aware suddenly that the road Warren was headed down was fraught with a thousand kinds of peril and it saddened him that he had only noticed this long after it was too late to do anything about it.
It’s too late for that, Warren said in an eerie echo of what the old man had been thinking.
HALFWAY DOWN the row of cedars was a tree fairly taken over by muscadine vines and Bloodworth stood for a time beneath it picking muscadines one by one off the lower branches and eating them. It seemed early for muscadines to ripen but he figured the hot dry summer had caused it. But the muscadines were of a good size and full of juice, he liked the hot winey smell of them and the sharp evocative taste that made him think of wine he had made and drunk fifty years ago.
He was watching the house. It set still and dept
hless against the blue border of woods, the white weight of the sun thrown on it like a floodlight. The top branches of the great pine stirred with a breeze that never touched the earth and in his mind he smelled pine needles in the hot windless calm.
He filled his shirt pocket with the black fruit and went on down the cedar row, from time to time unpocketing one and breaking the tough skin with his teeth. Well, let’s pay a call on the family, he told himself, something that was almost dread swinging in him like a pendulumed weight.
He was coming out of the cedar row almost at the garden fence when Brady saw him. Brady was coming up from the kennels with a fifty-pound sack of dog food across his shoulder. The old man raised an arm just as Brady saw him and immediately Brady dropped the bag and began to hurry toward him, loping crookedly along on his bad leg. The old man turned to look about as if to see was there some imminent danger Brady was running to rescue him from, a bear stepped out of the woods perhaps but there was nothing, it was Bloodworth himself Brady was closing on.
When Brady grasped his shoulder it was so unexpected he staggered and dropped the muscadines he was holding and stabbed wildly at the ground with the stick to recover his balance. When he did he stood for a moment with the stick held like a weapon he was brandishing.
What’s the matter with you? Are you crazy?
Brady’s red curls had tumbled across his forehead. You got no business over here, Pa. Don’t you know enough to stay where you’re put?
I’ve always been accustomed to puttin myself pretty much where I wanted to be, Bloodworth said.
I don’t want you around Ma, I thought you understood that. Now go back across that field the way you come. No, wait right where you’re at. I’ll get the car and drive you, that’d be faster.
Wait a minute, what do you think I’m goin to do, hurt somebody? Do you think I aim to hurt her?
You done that long ago and I’m not about to stand by and let it happen again. She’s old and her mind’s gettin bad and as far as I know you’ve been forgot. It’s my plan to see you stay that way.
