by William Gay
He was far out on the Natural Bridge road rolling toward the river when night began to fall on him. He’d thought it morning but the light was just dimming down. Then the day lightened, like the advent of a bleak and cheerless dawn. He drove on. The world darkened again, night fell so that he turned on the headlights but they weren’t working and he drove along in the dark with the brake half in and half out and when day came again he was on the shoulder of the road and the trees he was driving toward looked like trees in an inksketch left in the rain. The first sideroad he came to he cut into it, bumping along over the rough earth, the world through the windshield shifting and fading as if reality itself was out of control.
He drove until the road had deteriorated so that he was driving over brush that stood headhigh in the headlights, stopped where the logroad began to incline toward a hollow. He got out and unwired the trunk. Then he slid down the quarterpanel and sat on his feet, his cheek resting against the corner of the bumper.
When the man in the green coveralls came up out of the woods Neal had managed to get out a cigarette and light it though he was not smoking it. He just sat holding it. You taken drunk a little early in the day, ain’t ye buddy? the man in the green coveralls asked. When he saw the blanketcovered form his eyes went curiously blank for a moment. He did not set the deer rifle down as he’d started to but shifted it to his right hand with his thumb laid across the hammer and with his left turned back a corner of the blanket. They Lord God, he said.
E. F. BLOODWORTH LAY in state like fallen royalty, like a ruler an assassin’s bullet has stricken down. The undertaker had not been able to make him any more benign or approachable than he had been able to make himself in life. He was a fierce-looking corpse to the end, doomed reprobate patriarch whose lineage had gone strange and violent, he lay sternfaced and remote, at a cold remove from his seed that had bloomed finally in poisonous and evil flowers.
Everyone seemed to be there save Fleming but if his absence was noted no one commented upon it. Bellwether came. The old men who haunted Itchy Mama’s porch were well represented and they all had pronouncements to make. You won’t see his like again, they said. They broke the mold when they made E.F. The old stories were told again and death made them new, gave them a validity they had not possessed before. Albright came with a woman who nobody knew and who did not introduce herself. She was a boxlike woman with bright orange hair and she stood looking down at E.F.’s scornful visage with a dry and bitter eye. Then she turned away, without looking at anyone, and Albright followed her out of the house.
The body lay in Brady’s front parlor. Forbidden its thresholds in life in death he was hauled forth like an exhibition, like a trophy in an elaborate and expensive showcase. The old woman had drawn a chair near the casket and from time to time she would look at the old man’s face. Brady had permitted her this. This time, Brady’s face seemed to say, he’s not going anywhere at all.
Warren had little to say to Brady or to anyone else. He stood looking down at the enigmatic old man but he was as inscrutable in death as he had been in life. He studied with something akin to detachment the reconstruction of the old man’s temple, wondered what had been used to implement the undertaker’s art. Then he turned away. He leaned and kissed his mother’s cheek and went out the door into the night. He stood for a time beneath the pine tree. It was very cold and he could smell the astringent odor of the pine and it reminded him of when he had been a child. He looked up and through the pine branches the stars looked the same tonight as they always had, from then to now the cold uncaring constellations seemed to have altered not one iota. He took a halfpint bottle out of his hip pocket and unscrewed the lid and canted the bottle against the stars and drank.
In the house Brady was the consummate host, his shoulders mantled with a new and unaccustomed dignity. He spoke platitudes in a low somber voice. He saw that everyone received a cup of coffee, a slice of cake. He said, yes, it was a shame, but he was thankful that he had brought the old man back to die among his own people. Blood called to blood, Brady said. Blood would not be denied.
His face burned with the light of the redeemed. He was redeemed, but the old man was the redeemer; see him, Brady’s face said, see what it has come to. He used his life as a weapon and when there was no one left to hurt he turned it on himself.
FROM THE HILLSIDE where he sat he could hear faint singing. He had his father’s binoculars trained on the white double doors of the church and when they opened outward he watched the pallbearers come down the steps with the casket. Albright to the right front, his fair hair like a torch in the winter sun. Sharp on the left. Brady following behind the pallbearers, the grandmother on his arm. She was wearing a hat with a veil and the wind cartwheeled it away across the graveled parking lot and a child ran to fetch it. In the spare sun the hearse was a deep sinister mauve and it seemed to be drawing all the light into itself.
They progressed toward the dark rectangle beneath the canvas awning. He followed them with the binoculars. They assembled about the grave. A man with a Bible read words Fleming could not hear. In the stiff wind the preacher had to hold the pages flat with both hands. Fleming wondered what he read. He smiled to himself. I seen a pretty woman in a red dress, the old man had said once. And then I seen her take it off. What else is there? The awning flapped in the bitter wind. Women clutched the hems of their dresses, men their hats.
He lowered the glasses and the scene distanced itself to animate dolls at some undisclosed rites. He sat for a time in the cold, in the quiet. Trees moved above him, tossed in the wind. When he looked through the binoculars again they were filling in the grave. He rose to go. He did not want to be the last mourner to leave. He did not want to be the one to leave the old man alone on that lonesome hillside with night coming on the way it was.
———
He lay on the bed and he felt he might never rise from it. He lay in an enormous torpor. The world was too heavy to bear and it was settling itself onto his chest. He felt old, old. Civilizations had risen and fallen in the brief time that he had lived. He felt that when the old man’s head exploded across the snow he should have turned the gun on himself.
He felt he should rise and make a pot of coffee, cook a meal, build a fire. Instead he lay without volition listening to the house whisper to itself. It whispered in the voice he had used as a child, it took on the sibilant murmur of his mother’s voice, Boyd’s burred monotone. Old imprecations and recriminations and placating words rose and fell and trembled in the dead air as if words once sequenced into phrases were never done with but recycled themselves in perpetuity. Ghosts went about their preordained rituals. The house was full of the dead, of the dead in life. The windows lightened, they darkened. He heard banjo music that seemed to be rising out of the earth itself like ground-fog.
Brady came. He was still wearing his dark suit, as if he were becoming a professional mourner, hiring himself out for the solemn occasions of others.
You’ve disgraced the family by not showin up at your own grandaddy’s funeral, he said.
The boy just lay with his fingers laced behind his head and watched with cold eyes. Leave me alone, he said. Get away from me.
Why don’t you have a fire in here? Brady’s breath smoked in the cold air. What’s the matter with you? Are you sick?
I’m sick.
What’s the matter? What are you sick with?
I’m sick of you, Fleming said. I’m sick of all of you, of all your crazy bullshit. I won’t put up with it anymore. I want you out of my house.
Brady seemed not perturbed by this outburst. In fact he seemed almost amused. How does it feel to be a cat’s paw? he asked.
What?
How does it feel to be a tool that does my bidding, Brady said. That I can pick up and use to do something I want done but don’t want to dirty my hands with. How does that feel?
I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about. I doubt that you do.
That old man never killed hi
mself. I shot him, with you for a cat’s paw. Do you remember that cigarette butt I showed you that time? That Harwood thumped out?
The boy noticed for the first time that Brady was carrying a paper bag. Brady opened the bag and withdrew a book. Fleming sat up on the side of the bed. Is this yours? Brady asked. He reached Fleming the book. Thomas Wolfe, the spine read. Of Time and the River. The boy flipped the pages. The only word his eyes registered was October. He suddenly drew the book back and slammed it as hard as he could into Brady’s face. It struck with the force of a fist. It burst Brady’s nose and opened a cut at the corner of his left eye. It staggered him back against a sewing machine cabinet and he fell, hands splayed out to break his fall. Fleming was up instantly from the bed to recover the book. He threw it again. It struck Brady in the forehead, the red waves of hair springing up, his glasses spinning away and skittering across the floorboards.
Brady was trying to cover his eyes with his hands and he was working his way in an awkward backward crawl to the door. You’ve gone as crazy as he was, he said.
Fleming picked up the book and laid it on the cabinet. He stood breathing hard and he was dizzyheaded with the effort it took not to fall upon Brady and kick him to death with his boots. He could not rid his mind of the image of Brady somewhere watching the old man dying like an animal in the snow. If he’d not seen it in fact he’d seen it crouched behind and peering through the twisted bracken his mind was clotted with.
Brady was up and fumbling with the doorlatch. Don’t think this is the end of this, he said. He raised a hand and pointed a quivering forefinger at Fleming. I’ve got other possessions of yours, he said. Don’t think you can abuse me and talk to me like a dog and get away with it. I own the rest of your life. I’ll cast spells day and night so that nothing goes right for you, the rest of what little time you’ve got left. I’ll thin your blood till it seeps out of your pores like water. Your seed will dry up and you’ll be as useless to a woman as a gelding. You’ll die in one of the wars with your lungs filling up with salty water.
Fleming so wanted done with this madness that he rushed Brady and turned him and shoved him through the open door onto the porch. He slammed the door and latched it then hooked the chain that secured it and went back and sat for a time on the side of the bed. Brady did not leave immediately. Fleming sat listening for the sound of footsteps crossing the porch. They didn’t come. He imagined he could hear Brady breathing through the boxed walls of the house. Time passed. When he had begun to think that Brady had covertly eased off and gone Brady suddenly shouted, Don’t fall asleep in there. I’ll set this mess afire and it’ll fall in your face while you sleep.
He lay watching dust dance in the mooted light from the window. After a while Brady seemed to come to some decision and Fleming heard him get up and descend the steps. It seemed an interminable time before he heard a car engine crank at the bottom of the hill.
Then he rose himself and began to build a fire in the woodstove. When he had it crackling cheerily he put the coffee pot on to boil and dumped coffee into it. He took up the Wolfe book and one other and he took from beneath the bed the leather satchel containing the records the old man had given him. He unlatched the door and went out and stowed the books and records some distance from the house and then he went back in.
By then the coffee was made and he poured himself a cup and holding it in his left hand with his right stripped the covers and sheets from the bed and piled them on the floor by the heater. He threw on magazines and newspapers and dumped the picture box on for kindling, photographs drifting like dry leaves, folks frozen for an instant in some curious life that no longer bore any relevance to his own. There was a kerosene can on the porch with perhaps a quart of fuel in it and he brought it in and poured it all over this tinder. He set the can aside. He looked about once as if he’d commit this place to memory for good and all then he tilted the wood heater over into the floor. Stovepipes fell in a clatter, in a rush of soot that drifted like anthracitic snow. The kerosene caught immediately and flames leapt up and the paper on the ceiling began to curl and smolder.
He stood by the flames for a moment refilling his cup at his leisure and then he went out of the house for the last time. He recovered the books and the records and since he could already feel the heat from the dry pine he retreated some farther distance and stood drinking the coffee and just watching it burn.
He sat with the old woman on the south end of the house where the thin sunlight was. The weather had moderated somewhat and the day was cold but bright. The grandmother would not allow herself to be kept inside all the time and she seemed to have reached some point in her life where the weathers were of no moment. They sat in wickerwork chairs against the wall where the light fell and the old woman had allowed a shawl to be draped across her lap. The boy wore a heavy dark coat that hung oddly to the right side for he had recovered the old man’s pistol and it was his intention if Brady said a single word to him to shoot and kill him.
His other intention had been to give her a word of farewell or at least some news of his going but this was not one of her better days. She had known him at first but when he had mentioned leaving she had confused him with E.F. and seemed determined to maintain this confusion and see it through to its end.
She studied his face in a cold appraisal, eerily like a young woman peering through the ruin time had made of her face. You’re a good-looking man, she told him. But you’re not the only man in the world. Far from it. You’ll turn up some time from you whiskeymakin or your musicplayin and be mighty surprised.
She fell silent and watched him out of her fierce hawklike face. I’m not goin to put up with it anymore, she told him. Jails and shootin laws and bein treated like trash. If you go this time that’s an end to it.
He looked away, out across the garden with its dead and windtilted weeds. Where the wraith had leaned to raise the wire and so accommodate its passage. A flock of blackbirds moved like a shapeshifter against the blue void.
This old music, she told him, it’s drove you crazy. It’s got inside your mind until you think that’s all there is. More than me and what’s worse, more than them boys. Do you think kids raise theirselves?
No, he said. No, I don’t think that.
Then what are you goin to do about it?
I don’t know, he said.
No. I expect you don’t.
All I can do is just do the best I can, he said.
It would need to be some better than the way you’ve lived so far, she told him.
He rose abruptly to go. But he turned back and leaned over her where she sat and kissed the papery skin of her cheek. She looked up in mild astonishment, recognizing him, then waved him away. Get on away from here, she told him. Quit wastin your time with an old woman, go do whatever it is young men are supposed to be doing. He grinned and turned to go, resting his hand a moment in passing on her bony shoulder, still breathing the smell of her skin where he’d kissed her. There was a dry acrid smell about her, and the fugitive smell of death biding its time, and a compound of spices, cinnamon and cloves and nutmeg that made him think of Egyptian mummies in their sarcophagi, their viscera jarred and the sacred flesh preserved for eternity with exotic spices, far underground, waiting while the sands shift ceaselessly above them and the millennia roll.
She seemed somewhat surprised to see him but not displeased. I thought I was shut of you for good last time, she told him.
No, you’ll probably never be shut of me, he said. I’ll probably aggravate you for the rest of your life.
I suppose I could learn to live with that.
She was heavier yet through the abdomen and he thought he should inquire about her health but as this was a matter of some delicacy he did not quite know how to go about it. Finally he said, Are you uncomfortable?
She gave him a wry smile. I don’t believe I’m as uncomfortable as you are.
They were sitting in the yellow Dodge outside Raven Lee’s house. Fleming kept glancing t
o see was Mother about but she did not make an appearance.
I’m going off for a while, he said. I’ve got some stuff I need you to take care of for me. Funny as it might seem to you, I don’t have anybody else to ask.
What is it?
A couple of books. Those records we played that time. The old man’s banjo.
Oh, Jesus, Fleming. He didn’t die, did he? He died.
So he told her his tale, staring out toward Clifton where not a soul seemed to be about this cold December day. He told her all of it, and when he was done with it she just sat quietly beside him for a long time. Finally she leaned her face against his shoulder and closed her eyes.
So what are you going to do now? Where are you going?
I’m going in the Navy. I’m seventeen and Warren signed for me and I’m leaving for Memphis sometime tomorrow.
God, when you make a move you really make a move. Are you sure this is what you want to do?
He thought about it a while. There were a lot of things he could have told her but they seemed somehow beyond articulation so finally he just said, I can finish school and they’ll help pay college tuition. I’ve got to do something, no move is the wrong move, Warren always said.
It sounds like you’ll be aggravating me from a considerable distance, she said.
He took six folded fifty-dollar bills and laid them beside her on the seat. You may be needing this, he said.
What’s all this? She was fanning the bills out like a poker hand, studying their unusual denominations.
It’s till I can send some money. You’ll be needing money for doctors and all that. I guess it’s just for whatever you need it for.
Lord, where’d you get it? Rob a bank? And why on earth are you giving it to me?
I borrowed it from Warren. Actually he offered it and I took him up on it. He said he’d just piss it away on loose women anyway.
Is that what you call what you’re doing with it?
