The Lost Country

by William Gay

  I don’t know. Hellfire, Edgewater. I’m drunk. I heard a preacher say that one time. That or something like it.

  Edgewater rose and glanced at Roosterfish. He began ostentatiously to roll up his pants legs.

  What? Roosterfish said.

  Drowning in bullshit is one of the sorriest ways to go I can think of, Edgewater said, and I think I’m in danger of it. I’m moving to higher ground.

  Sometime deep in the night he awoke. The sky was overcast and there was a soft mist of rain falling on his face. It had just begun, his blanket was not yet wet. He woke Roosterfish and they moved to the shelter of the bluff. Roosterfish had barely awakened, went almost immediately back to sleep.

  Edgewater sat wrapped in his blanket, peering beyond the bluff across the water. The rain intensified, he could hear it falling in the river, a steadily increasing hiss. The coals of their cookfire guttered soundlessly, vanished. He sat in a vast timeless silence that was only deepened by the rain and the river, the world was in a hush, even the nightbirds held their cries in abeyance. A shifting curtain of rain swung off the shelf of limestone.

  Far upriver where the bridge spanned the water, carlights crossed and arched briefly upward scanning the beleaguered heavens. The rain in their beams was silver, slanting, roiling the water where it struck like hot stones. Then the lights went out, the trestle was an inkblack skeleton whose image flared white on his retina and died, was perversely resurrected by a faint and soundless flicker of summer lightning. As the storm approached him, following the course of the river, the lightning became more frequent, there were faroff reverberations of thunder vaguely sinister. Then lightning quaked in one continuous arc as if some curious chain reaction had begun that if unabated would incandesce all it illuminated: slick rainglossed cars on the trestle, two doll-like figures peering toward the river. The world vanished, they would not share with him their darkness. Who were these wayfarers, would he know them? Was the world that wide, time that long? All up and down this river lay people in troubled sleep, what things done or not done would not let them rest? He would never know, the present was too infinitesimal to factor, all there was was past and future. Regret like a stab twisted in him that he could never live even a fraction of their lives. Their daughters tossed in chaste beds, he would never comfort them, their hot secrets would never fall on his ears.

  Where he was going or not going, there was a girl who waited or did not wait. He had said what he was expected to say, did he mean it? It was in the past, dead, but even then it had rung false in his ears like lines from a castoff magazine, and what had her face been like? Perhaps she slept this night, serene in the faroff mountains. Did she dream of her sailor on bottleglass seas? Or was she fast in the seize of love, did another’s body move above hers in the fecund sweaty night?

  He had no way of knowing, nor did he care. He pulled the blanket tighter about him. He would go, or he would not go. He felt rootless now, uncompelled. The dread to come no worse than that behind.

  After a time he slept fitfully. What woke him before daybreak was a boat going downstream, disembodied voices above the murmur of the river, sealbeamed lights flashing across the lapping water. Then laughter and the slap of oars.

  In the morning the rain had ceased and the sun rose on a world that seemed to have become lush and green overnight. After breakfast Roosterfish exercised his fighting cocks while Edgewater washed the dishes in the river. Each cock was fitted with diminutive boxing gloves that padded their spurs. Roosterfish set them on the rocky floor of the bluff, stepped aside to watch them circle each other warily, light on their feet, stepping high, heads ducked like boxers.

  Watch that blue one, Roosterfish said.

  The cocks feinted and dodged, stalking each other, their eyes intent as if their concentration excluded all save the enemy. The blue rooster leapt into the air, in one graceful motion pared of the extraneous and stabbed at his opponent’s head.

  Roosterfish knelt and separated them, soothed them with strokes and soft words. He’d had a cockheel he’d a hooked him right through the eye. That’s his style of fightin. Goes right for the brain. You ever seen a cockfight?

  No.

  That’s a Allen Roundhead rooster. He’s got royal blood in his veins. If he was a man he’d be a prince or a king. I got him out of Cullman, Alabama, and I been bringin him right along. Look at his eyes, Roosterfish said. He’s a mean son of a bitch, I’ve fought him a couple of times. He goes for the kill, he don’t take no prisoners. There’s a cockfighter up in Lewis County gonna be sorry he ever laid eyes on me.

  Where?

  Up between here and where you’re headin. They have cockfights up there and I aim to clean em out. They got highrollers drive all the way from Texas in Cadillacs just to go out in them woods and drink whiskey and bet chickens.

  Sure they do.

  It’s a fact. I’se raised up there and lived there most of my life. For the last year I been workin my way back, takin my time, just enjoyin it, bringin my chicken along. The only thing on my mind’s that cockfight. I got my money laid back and one morning I’ll ease in there with my rooster under my arm, and when I walk out I’ll be even with D.L. Harkness and I’ll have money in ever pocket and money in my shoes.

  Or a dead rooster.

  Bet me. Not this rooster, son. Puttin him up again them chickens they got is like putting a thoroughbred in a mule race.

  There were green meadows kept bound by rows of chestnut trees where somnolent cows grazed and the sound of their bells tolled faint like bells of a long time ago. There were white houses set atop declivitous closecrop lawns with fruit trees in careful rows and they seemed remote, foreign as if they had been built out of the reach of the aching poverty besetting the lower regions. Roosterfish spurned with contempt these mansions where country squires sat at their counting tables for the wonky little shacks at the mouths of hollows, tilted askew and looking as if they had been hastily constructed of whatever oddments of material fell to hand. Curious oblique little shanties somehow imbued with menace, sinister with years of misfortune, nights of death, stillbirth and hunger, hard words and deeds harder still.

  Gray clapboard tenant shacks in bare earth yards, unglassed homemade doors opened noiselessly on leather hinges to reveal Roosterfish and Edgewater, once again mentor and protégé, father and son. Roosterfish with his rolled-up copy of the Saturday Evening Post, hat aloft, his foolish dimestore spectacles slid down on this nose to make him more—what? Scholarly? Benign? Spectacles lensed with window glass and even that suspect, spectacles as spurious as the rest of him.

  Shuttered gloom. Fetid air, miasmic with tinned mackerel, with the residue the years deposit in their wake. His smile innocent, benevolent. They watched him as if he were some traveling wizard awaited with intense patience. Whatever legerdemain he might perform. Edgewater looking about the sparse furnishing, seeing mirrored the enforced austerity of his youth.

  You get one of these a week, he would be saying, right here in ye mailbox. Nothin you’d have to hide did the preacher drop by.

  Good Christian readin matter, too, not like these here trashy dime detectives and true story books. Come over here where the light’s better and look at these receipts. Sign this receipt and you’ll get this here magazine delivered to your house for one year. These here kids needs this magazine. Man could grow up cultured if he never read nothin but the Good Book and The Saturday Evening Post.

  His pencil at work, tablet on his knees, alert eyes scanning for something to trade should no money be forthcoming. Preferably something readily convertible to cash.

  At the end of the day the old Studebaker would be cocked on her springs with the day’s accumulation of largess, bags of garden stuff, scrapiron, curious old pieces of farm equipment, car batteries he could sell for the zinc. Odd bits of copper, canned goods, perhaps a chicken or two. His receipt book thick with names, a perverse census of the region’s unwary.

  Stopping past a covered bridge where a spring boiled ou
t of limestone rock and a tin cup hung by a lichened pipe they drank cold water, rested in the deep shade of liveoak, the air drugged with the rampant growth of spearmint. Roosterfish drank from his halfpint, chased it with water, sighed with the weariness of a man at the end of a long day, bonetired but satisfied with himself. Bemusedly he shredded the receipts, tossed them like confetti into the stream. They listed amidst the watercress, fanned out. Edgewater stood watching the creek take them.

  The highway yielded up strange treasures.

  One Sunday morning they passed what looked like a slack and lifeless body thrown into the weeds. Some luckless casualty of Saturday night.

  I couldn’t tell what it was.

  Hell, it was a dead man.

  We don’t need to be foolin with any dead man.

  That’s for damn sure.

  Roosterfish drove on a mile or so in troubled silence and when they came upon a church thronged with cars and wagons he stopped and cut off the switch and sat listening to the pious voices wafting out across the scrubby pines. Hell, I’m goin back, Roosterfish said. That son of a bitch might have been wearin a wristwatch.

  They drove back cautiously. Miscreants returning to the scene of the crime. They stopped and walked along the dusty roadbed bright with bursts of chiggerweed like orange flames. But it was not a body after all. It was a canvas sack filled with something lumpy and very heavy and secured at the top with a thong. Edgewater cut it with his knife. The top pulled open to reveal a cornucopia of green painted mallards, duck decoys carved by some loving hand.

  Well, shitfire, Edgewater said.

  Help me load em.

  I’m not interested in any sack of wooden ducks.

  Will you just help me tote the damn thing.

  Ever a man to pare a thing to the usefulness at its core, Roosterfish, when he could not sell them, gave them away as premiums with lifetime subscriptions to the Progressive Farmer. Left them sown like seeds along the creeks and hollows of McNairy County, curious souvenirs of his duplicity nesting among bricabrac on backwoods whatnots, set down with care amidst china dogs and Cheshire cats with painted smiles.

  Down off the blacktops another world lay sleeping. Down cherted hills passing hollows deep and breathtaking and down to narrow barriered hardpan roads where raincrows called to them and scarecrows watched them over crops already passed with maudlin stares like Roosterfish’s own.

  His people, he told Edgewater. His heart warmed to sharecroppers and cordwood cutters, to all congenitally disenfranchised stairstepped children that came out and looked with faces that showed you nothing at all, not expectation at their arrival or disappointment at their departure, washed out dried up women with lank hair, nothing much left to say. Their nubile daughters who giggled at Edgewater and hid behind their hands and their eyes said that whatever had befallen their mothers would never in a thousand years happen to them.

  A few years back I happened on a good thing, Roosterfish told him. Traded for a few old battery radios and I’d carry em out to some of these here shacks like that and hook em up and turn em on. I ain’t got no money they’d say. Don’t even turn that thing on. Don’t worry about no money, I’d tell em. I’ll just leave it here a week and then I’ll come back around and if you don’t want it just say so. If you do you can pay me, if you don’t I’ll take it on with me. I’d tune it up, and show em where the dials were. Well sir, I’d go back in a week’s time late Saturday evening when they was looking forward to the Grand Ole Opry and hopin I wouldn’t come. I don’t know where they got it but they’d have it. Stole it or borrowed it or sold the cow or what but once they got a taste of Roy Acuff they had to have that radio. You couldn’t have prised it out of their hands with a wreckin bar.

  Roosterfish waxed nostalgic, mellowed in the homey flickering firelight. They sat wrapped with blankets against the damp of the night, there was strong chicory in tin cups.

  You’ve heard people talk about their old women, he told Edgewater. I’ve heard many a man say, I had the best little woman in the world and I done her wrong. Not me. I had one I thought the sun rose and set between her legs and she managed to shit on me ever which way I turned.

  Edgewater grinned into the firelight, said nothing, listened to the rush of the water, to owls that called lonesome from some forlorn wood.

  Her and D.L. Harkness, Roosterfish went on. Between em they put me where I am today. My arm wound up in a loose belt in his sawmill and she wound up in his bed.

  Edgewater’s eyes glanced at Roosterfish, then back to the fire.

  Well. I lost my arm and I felt he owed me for it. I couldn’t get no compensation and I couldn’t work. We had a hearin and he got up in court and swore I was drunk and fell into that belt. Course it wasn’t so, a lie. I got no reason to lie about it now. But him and the judge had to go dove huntin that evenin so the hearin didn’t take too long. He was just a lowlife son of a bitch. Pushy and overbearin. Got a little money and a sawmill he won in a crap game and things started fallin right the way they will. Always a knife in his pocket, not perty by a damn sight. Ugly as a look into hell, you wouldn’t think a woman’d look at him. A man thinks with his peter instead of his head. The only women he wanted was always somebody else’s.

  How’d he get your old lady?

  Well, it was a matter of time before he got around to her. Like I said, she was a fine-lookin woman and seems like she’d started screwin everbody from the paper boy on up and everbody knew it but me. I guess they say the husband’s the last one to know, Roosterfish continued. I had a feelin. I thought she’s fuckin the light man, you know comes around and reads ye meter? On the morning he’s supposed to I went off like I’se goin to work and then slipped back in and hid in the bedroom closet and just waited. Time just crawled by. That’s the longest morning I ever put under and as hard a work as ever I done.

  What happened?

  Nothin happened. I set there and I set there and I heard the dog barkin and the pickup come up but he didn’t even cut the switch off. Turned out I guess the light man was the only one she wadn’t fuckin. Just got back in and drove off. I’se afraid to come out, fraid she’d see me and about to die for a smoke. I lit one up finally and was faggin away when she come in and seen smoke rollin out from under the door. They Lord, she thought the house was afire. She flung open the closet and there I set.

  I bet that was hard to explain.

  Yeah. But by then I’se half crazy. She’s a pretty woman, the prettiest I ever saw. Bout ten year youngern me. And a woman couldn’t be satisfied no matter what she had. I don’t mean screwin, though it might have been that too. I mean everthing. She could see a couch in a store that was the prettiest God ever allowed upholstered and I’d buy it and time I got it home it was a piece of shit a dumpkeeper wouldn’t have. She was like tryin to fill up a hole didn’t have no bottom. You’d throw in ever-thing fell to hand, all you could get, but it was never enough, more, more, more, and she had a cruel mouth. She could twist the heart out of ye.

  It looks to me like you ought to be glad she’s gone, Edgewater told Roosterfish.

  I guess that’s one way of lookin at it. Course I thought a lot of her, never could get over that. But the main thing is that Harkness took her and he didn’t have no right to do that. When one person does that to another one it throws the scales out of balance. All I’m lookin to do is set somethin about the same weight on the other side of em.

  He fell silent, was quiet for some time. By the wavering light his face was abstracted, perhaps he attended hills and fields of his youth.

  She took to workin in one of these here garment factories, he finally said. Worked all hours, you’d think the place’d shut down without her to look after things. Like I said, long about then I’se half crazy. I took to going through her pocketbook like a sneakthief. Lookin for overtime on her checkstubs. They wadn’t none. Then one time I found one of these lil old plastic boxes holds three rubbers and one of em was gone. I can’t tell you how I felt when I studied on the fate
of that missin rubber.

  What’d you do?

  I took me a needle and punched me a little bitty hole in the ends of the two that was left and put em back like they was.

  Good God. Why’d you do that?

  I don’t know, I told you I’se crazy. Why? What’s the matter with that?

  It just seems a little inadequate to me.

  I always thought if she ever done me like that I’d shotgun em both on the spot, but you never know what you’ll do till it looks you in the face. I guess that ain’t my style. I can wait as long as it takes, just as long as I can see the end of the road. That cock in that coop yonder is a born champion, bred for generations back to do just what it’s fixin to. When the time’s right.

  I guess there’s a certain amount of poetic justice in you getting back at him with a fighting cock.

  What?

  Nevermind. Go ahead.

  I’ll ease in there early some Sunday morning with its feathers all wooled up and it lookin like somethin I jerked out of a fox’s mouth and I’ll act about half drunk and pull out my roll and the suckers’ll wink at one another and line up on ever side.

  If you say so.

  Hell yes I say so. I know these people, son, I been among em all my life. I know Harkness. He can’t let a sure thing slide by. And when I walk away he won’t have a pot to piss in or a winder to throw it out of. I’ll win enough to buy that son of a bitch and sell him, if they’s any taker left.

  What about her?

  I don’t know. She may be tired of him by now. He may be tired of her. I been gone a long time; she may be dead, she may be in a whorehouse. But I expect by now he’s dumped her and she’s tendin bar in a honkytonk somewheres, sleepin wherever night falls on her. And with whoever it catches her with. I maybe could get her back. Or maybe not. I don’t even know if I want her. I guess I’m better off like I am. You can’t own a living thing, Roosterfish said. I can say that rooster belongs to me but he don’t. He belongs to his own self.

  He arose and set the coop nearer the fire. I hope this damp air don’t give em somethin, he fretted. The firelight flickered in their inscrutable eyes, black gems of arrogance, generations old. As if they held themselves above whatever tawdry uses might be found for them.