The Lost Country

by William Gay

I’m not an official shredder, ma’am, Roosterfish said. That has to be done by a licensed official of the Standard Bible Company. They won’t allow just anyone around the shredder.

  Jesus, he thought. How much deeper is it going to get around here?

  That’s the first page they shred when they get them back, he finally said.

  Well. Let me think. Maybe we can trade it out some way. I’ve got a car I need to get rid of. The truth is I was noticing your car out there in the yard. It don’t seem a fitting car for a representative of the Standard Bible Company, much less a preacher of the Unified whatever it was. What was it?

  Roosterfish couldn’t remember himself. He was thinking a twenty– eight-dollar car wouldn’t be much of an improvement.

  If you’ll excuse me a few minutes I’ll show it to you, she said. I’ve got something in it I need to move. You sit right here and wait on me.

  I believe I’ll step outside while you do that and go through my tickets, Roosterfish said. Kindly catch up on my paperwork.

  She went through a curtained doorway into another room and he heard what he guessed was the back door open and close. He went out the front door and fumbled under the front seat for the bottle. He held the bottle, broke the seal, put it under the stump of his arm and twisted the cap righthanded and tilted the bottle and drank. Past the bottle he could see just the flat gray sky and when he lowered it there was the red road winding through the wet rampart greenery, rolling mist blowing off the fields like smoke, and there was an enormous temptation to get in the car and just drive away, leave her the Bible with its spurious goldleaf salutation from the dead and just forget her, mark her account closed, get on to something else, feed her to the shredder.

  Mr. Goforth?

  She’d been standing at the corner of the house watching him drink. He capped the bottle and slid it into his coat pocket. He crossed the yard and followed her around the corner of the house to the back yard.

  I knew you for a Christian gentleman right away, she said. Even them old prophets in the Bible would take a drink. What happened to your arm, did a lion tear it off?

  I lost it in the sawmill, Roosterfish said.

  There’s the car, she said.

  The car sat gleaming in the rain and it looked as if it had just come off the assembly line. It was a green and white DeSoto no more than three or four years old. He walked all the way around it. It didn’t have any dirt on it, even the tires looked new.

  I couldn’t afford no car nothin like that, he said.

  I’m prepared to make you a good deal on it, she said. The keys are in it. Just get in there and start it and listen to it run. Then tell me you can’t afford it. It’s not as new as it looks, but Clarence kept it up and it’s in fine shape.

  He opened the door. He was instantly assaulted by an almost suffocating odor of flowers, sickeningly sweet, honeysuckle, gardenia, the odor of roses, something.

  What’s that smell? he asked.

  It’s been sitting here shut up for a good while, with the windows rolled up, she said. I sprayed it down good with air freshner while you was doing your paperwork.

  He fanned the floral stench out of the air. That’s some highoctane air freshener, he told her. He cranked the car and the engine seemed to catch before it had fully turned over and it sat idling smoothly with no ping to the motor. He put it in gear and he rocked it forward and the transmission caught instantly. He put it in reverse and that worked too. He got out and walked back to see if any smoke was coming out of the tailpipe. There wasn’t.

  What’s the matter with it?

  There’s not a thing in this round world the matter with it.

  Then why do you want to sell it?

  It’s a personal matter, she said. But I don’t mind telling you. It’s painful seeing it set out here every day. It reminds me of Clarence.

  What would you take?

  I might take two fifty if you’d throw in the Bible.

  Oh Lord, I couldn’t afford that. Can you come off that figure a little bit?

  I know it’s worth more than that, she replied. You’ve got a pretty good mark up on those two-dollar Bibles. I imagine you could come up with it.

  You wouldn’t take about a case of them Bibles would you?

  She just looked at him.

  He got back into the car and cut the switch. The odor was as overpowering as it had been before. The smell reminded him of something but he couldn’t think what. There’s a hole here in the front seat, he said.

  I imagine Clarence got in with a screwdriver in his pocket, she said. You could darn that right up.

  In truth he wanted the car. He’d had an intense vision of himself driving it down the main street of Ackerman’s Field, past the house where the wife who’d cuckolded him still lived. Parking it in front of the Snowwhite Café, de Vries cabstand. He saw himself pulling up in front of the Swiss Colony cockpit, Here comes a highroller, some old farmer would call out.

  You in the tall cotton ain’t ye, Roosterfish? he thought to himself.

  He went back around to his car. He leaned against it thinking. He took a drink and thought some more. He took out a worn billfold and leafed through the contents. Two hundred and fifty dollars would about clean him out, but the car was worth it. Besides, he could always earn it back. There might not be a sucker born every minute, but they come along often enough to suit him.

  He left a few minutes later in the DeSoto. He was towing the Studebaker with a length of chain he’d found in the barn and that she’d charged him five dollars extra for. He drove off with her standing on the front doorstep with a sheaf of greenbacks in one hand and the inscribed Bible in the other and he had all four windows rolled down in the hope that the rainy wind would blow the smell of perfume out of the car.

  You could run a French whorehouse out of the back seat of this son of a bitch, he said aloud, and then it hit him that what the car smelled like was not a whorehouse at all but a funeral parlor, the tenanted casket on the catafalque and the banked wall of gardenias with their sickening reek fanning outward bound like a miasmic cloud of radiation.

  It was three miles back to the crossroads grocery where he’d planned on stopping to get a drink and before he’d made it a good deal of the floral smell was blowing into the atmosphere and he was ruefully imagining it settling visibly in crevasses and sinkholes and stinking up the countryside for miles about when he became aware of another smell that was asserting itself, a scent that was even worse: a dark charnel house scent of corruption and death, as if the car had come not from a Detroit auto plant but a reeking slaughterhouse, as if the car was not metal and chrome and rubber but something organic, something that had been alive and wasn’t anymore, and hadn’t been for some time and he glanced in the rearview mirror nervously as if half expecting clouds of vultures descending and he slammed the brake pedal and got out and just stood looking at the car.

  What the fuck is that? he wondered.

  At the service station he stood and smoked one, just breathed in the cool damp air that smelled of clean woods and brushcut grass and the distant river.

  Say you ain’t got no kind of air freshener or deodorant in there have you?

  The storekeep looked at the DeSoto and made some noise in his throat that might have been a laugh and might not.

  What the hell’s that supposed to mean?

  You ain’t from here, are you?

  No.

  I see you met the widow Ashton, he said.

  She sold me this here car.

  The storekeep didn’t seem surprised. She’s tried to sell it all over two counties, he said. Nobody’ll have it.

  Why? What’s the matter with it? It seems to run all right.

  It does run, it runs fine. You just can’t get the smell out of it and folks around here all knows the story.

  The story, what story?

  That DeSoto got something of a history, he said. It’s the car that Clarence Ashton died in. You sure you want to hear this? Yeah, just go o
n and maybe you can drive it when you got a bad cold or somethin.

  So he died in it, Roosterfish said. I’ve lived in houses folks died in. Folks die all over the place. What’s the big deal?

  He was shot in it, the storekeep said. Two folks was shot in it. He had that oldest Potts girl out on a logroad and they was in there naked and somebody shot and killed em both. They wasn’t found for a month. For a month, and that was in July and part of August. When some hunter run across that DeSoto and opened the door you can’t imagine what it was like. Her head was in his lap and she’d been shot through the head and whoever it was shot Clarence in the head as well.

  Godamighty, they Lord God, Roosterfish said.

  Damn right. Folks around knowned Bertha done it but she had a daughter over by Milan swore up and down Bertha’d spent the night there. Folks says they was in it together. But nothing ever came of it. They never even found the gun. She had a wrecker haul it home and washed it out good and kept on washing it. Trying to get the smell out. Can you imagine washing up after a mess like that?

  I can barely imagine driving the son of a bitch, Roosterfish said. Maybe she’ll give me my money back.

  And maybe when Clarence went through the gates of hell they issued him a set of ice skates, the storekeep said.

  He was a mile or so down the road when he decided to stop and get out a minute just to breathe deeper. He figured maybe he’d try driving with his head outside the window for the breeze but the blowing rain complicated it and he drank from the bottle and repocketed it and without thinking and for no good reason he stuck a finger into the hole and probed in the seat. Something hard there, hard as concrete at the tip of his finger. His forefinger came out with black grains and a black dried substance caked under his fingernail. He stood studying it a meditative moment. Then he went hastily holding the finger before him down an embankment and scraped it clean in the grass. He thought a time and then poured whiskey over the finger and scraped it again.

  He pocketed the bottle and climbed back up the embankment and went back and unhooked the towing chain and just stood there, feeling the weighted iron links. He slowly walked up to the DeSoto and reached in the open window and cranked the wheel all the way to the right, then pulled the gear shift into neutral. He climbed in the Studebaker and eased it up till the front bumper engaged the rear bumper of the DeSoto and then pushed till the front wheels of the DeSoto were over the incline and watched as the car disappeared down the embankment.

  Edgewater made his way back into town and took the main road south. The next evening about dusk he thought he heard music. It was distant, faint, a cappella. There were no words he could decipher, or even melody, just a delicate piety inlaid on the fragile dusk. He soon came upon a camp meeting. Now he could hear the singing, they were girls’ voices, ethereal and pure. Oh why not tonight? they asked. You must be saved…oh, why not tonight?

  There was a tent and dark shapes and a preacher ranting salvation, an electric hum that hung over them all like a revelation. There were forms writhing about the ground in apparent ecstasy at promise of imminent and eternal torment, random movements went to and fro in the beleaguered woods.

  Edgewater crossed to the far side of the road, but a dog had barked sharply at his passage, two men had spied him and separated themselves from the thronging dark and loped toward him through the dust and entreated him to hold up. Edgewater increased his pace. They came up to him on either side and caught his arm. Hold on brother. Come on in to the meetin and let salvation into ye soul. We got the devil on the run tonight.

  He did not speak but turned on the man and something in his face or eyes gave the entreator pause for his arm was dropped instantly and the two men stopped uncertainly in the middle of the road. They did not call him, but he could feel their eyes on his back and he could hear the singing for a long time. Far off there was a stand of cypress he moved toward, it seemed assuring in falling dark.

  But a third man had come up. He was older than the other two, beefy with pouched freshly shaven jowls and a slack, dissolute look about him. His black hair was shot with gray and slicked down with grease. He had on a white shirt with a dirty collar and wool slacks and work shoes.

  Where you headed in such a hurry, brother?

  I got a long way to go, Edgewater told him. Clear across the state.

  Well, the man said, beaming at him and rocking back and forth on his heels. You didn’t plan on makin all of it tonight, did you?

  I need to make as much of it as I can. Edgewater was peering down the white road. In the vague distance blue dusk was shimmering and the dark trees were merging one with the sky as if the coming night was dissolving them, they lost form, seemed afflicted by some curious motion.

  Which way you tryin to go?

  I need to get back on 70. They told me up the road if I kept on this way I couldn’t miss it.

  Well, it’s this way all right but it’s fifteen or twenty miles and you liable to get turned around in the night. Now you just come on in and let Jesus show you your way.

  I know my way, Edgewater told him. I just need to be on it.

  No you don’t. They’s lots think they know, but mighty few that does. You may think all the where you’re goin is Highway 70, but, brother, you’re wrong.

  Praise Jesus, the two flanking him said. Edgewater glanced at them with some misgivings. Their faces were blank as still water and he had begun to fear that the trio was not going to allow him to pass on his way, would fall upon him and beat him with their mercy until he repented some vague, undetermined sins. He looked again down the road. The man had leaned close into his face, his eyes narrowed in accusation.

  Is that a half-pint bottle I see through your britches there?

  It may be, Edgewater told him. What about it?

  What about it? The man peered upward to the sky gathering night. Jesus. Everthing about it. I fought moonshine whiskey all my life and it won ever battle but one. I just this week got shut of it. Monday night at this meetin God laid a hand on me and picked me up and shook me the way you’ve seen a dog shake a snake to pop its head off. I knowed it would either kill me or cure me. Well sir, I been a drunkard all my life and run over as good a woman ever drawed breath. I lost grocer money to crooked dice and I gone with whores talked out of both sides of their mouths and laughed behind my back. Well bless Jesus, no more. No more. I’m saved.

  During this tirade Edgewater had taken two or three steps backward but the man had followed him. What are you, some kind of preacher? Edgewater asked.

  No, I ain’t a preacher. But I’m full of the Lord, running over with Him. We all soldiers in the army of the Lord.

  I didn’t know he had armies, Edgewater said inanely.

  The man grasped his arm. Now you just come on in here, brother. Forget that whiskey, forget whatever worries ye. I won’t ask ye to do nothin ye don’t want to do. Now if you want the Lord, you’ll know it, and if He wants you, He’ll know it. All I want you to do is come on up to the camp. Then after the meetin me and my wife’s gonna give you a bed to sleep in and as good a meal as ever you ate. And tomorrow I’ll sit you down on Highway 70. Now is that fair or not?

  Edgewater allowed himself to be pressed toward the crowd at the tent. Lanterns had been lit, hung aloft on poles that supported the canvas and moths and bugs dove impotently at their yellow globes. The congregation was singing, their eyes glazed, their bodies swaying as though some occult wind moved them. There seemed to be forty or fifty people in the tent, old and young, Edgewater moved by the steel hand clamping his bicep into the realm of the maimed and crazed. An old man on hands and knees shook in some queer palsy, afflicted perhaps deeper by whatever mercy moved here tonight. There was an invisible current of tension, an inaudible hum like high-voltage electricity. Arm in arm courting couples passed with autistic eyes toward the brush drawing close to the tent.

  A thin little man in a black frock coat ranted about the devil. He seemed possessed, his eyes feverish. Oh, I have seen him,
he told them. His voice rose and fell. I know his guises, I have seen the other side of his face. I have seen him moving through my sleeping house, going through my pockets in the dark like a sneakthief. The old man’s sparse hair was plastered with sweat, there was a yellow sheen on his skull. I have seen him in the dregs of a whiskey bottle, seen him reflected in the eyes of a harlot. The devil is here among us tonight.

  He went on at some length about the devil and all his works. Edgewater fell to studying his teeth. He had the falsest-looking set of false teeth Edgewater had ever seen and they looked for all the world like the wax teeth he had bought in childhood ten-cent stores.

  After the preaching there was a call for souls and they began to sing softly again. Four or five leapt eagerly forward to be first and the man pushed Edgewater toward the center of the tent. Edgewater stiffened his knees and staggered a step or two and whirled. You keep your hands to yourself.

  There were several to be healed. Various afflictions: all the ills man is heir to. A cancerous old man, throat half eaten away, a woman goitered and swollen, the crippled, the eviscerated and flayed by life. This preacher healed them all.

  Then a man began to pass among them with a coffee can, Edgewater could hear the clink of coins all down the line. The man carried a stack of tracts, giving one to each donor. The can stopped expectantly in front of Edgewater, waited. I need it worse than you do, Edgewater told it. The eyes above the can were almost pitying. At last the man gave him a tract anyway. Before the can passed on, the man behind Edgewater threw a dollar into the can. For him, he said. Edgewater folded the tract and slid it into his pocket. You read that, the man told him.

  They spilled finally into the warm mothflecked night, moving toward their vehicles. There was an air of camaraderie. Yins come see us, they called to each other.

  The man saved from alcohol was Lester Batts and his wife was Jesse. He was a pig farmer from down on Little Creek and he shepherded Edgewater and the woman toward his battered pickup. The woman seemed to be still in an ecstatic state of bliss. She hung onto her husband’s arm and she urged Edgewater to praise Jesus. They got into the truck and backed around in the clearing, cut toward the road. Their lights briefly lit the preacher and the man holding the coffee can. As they disappeared from sight the preacher had one arm raised in farewell or dismissal and the other was reaching into the depths of the can.