The Lost Country

by William Gay

  A shadow passed across them and Bradshaw started but it was only the girl standing there watching them. The sun was bright in her hair and her face was grieved and cynical.

  You may as well get it out of your head, she told Bradshaw. She won’t let nobody drive this car. I ain’t even been to town since Daddy died.

  Is she crazy? How do you get grocers and stuff brought out?

  She calls and they send a cab. Mrs. Epley and them comes on Sunday and takes her to church. The girl had come in between them and from the polished trunkdeck their dwarfed reflections watched back at them, a triad of conspirators.

  Bradshaw’s eyes were thoughtful. A man’s got to have a way to work, he said.

  She sat rocking in silence while Bradshaw held forth, spinning lies, regaling her and Sudy with their exploits, his long legs cocked against a porch support, while crickets and whippoorwills called a dreamer’s chorus from the honeysuckle dark.

  I’se down in Lubbock. That’s in Texas. I’se in a pool game there, shooting pill with two slickers that thought they had me boxed in. One of em was hooking me, or thought he was, and the other one was settin his buddy up ever time. I just smiled to myself. I was hustling them and they was hustling me. I let em win the first game and then I won four in a row.

  The old woman, who had little if any idea what he was talking about, rocked with her eyes closed, and Edgewater divined that she was not hearing words, she was hearing just his voice, a chant, a litany, a murmur of water a long way off, a mariner gone long without water. The hard old eyes opened, glanced at him, then flickered into the dark beyond the porch past him as if he did not exist, as if there were something in the humid dark only she was privy to.

  We’s playin for twenty dollars and in the sixth game I had it sewed up and one of em raked the thirteen ball on me. I just happened to see him out of the corner of my eye. I throwed my stick down and told him to pay me. He got real innocent on me, said he made the thirteen ball and the other one backed him up. They was goodsized men and they knew they had me in a pinch. They was both laughin, they aimed to get my twenty and all I’d won besides. Then I seen this feller here sittin on a bench there watchin us, not sayin anything.

  The girl’s eyes, blue and wondering in her soft face, flickered from Bradshaw’s face to Edgewater’s. He felt that the girl worshiped her brother, wondered from force of habit if there was anything to play on, anything here to work to his advantage. He listened to the spurious animated story without interest.

  Edgewater was just sittin there. I said, What about it, buddy? Did he make that ball or not? I fully figured he’d say he didn’t know. Anybody would just say they weren’t payin no attention or something. But not this feller. The fat one raked it in the side pocket, he said, and we all went at it. That was some fight. They finally called the law and me and Edgewater like to slept in the Crowbar Hotel that night.

  The old woman might have been asleep. Her face in the moonlight was angular even in repose, Edgewater thought absently. The skin brown and wrinkled as old leather, the cheekbones high and flinty, not as old as she looked. Listening or not listening to this droning voice with an expression that old griefs had carved as infinitesimally weather carves stone. One grief more or less no more to her than one more rain was to granite.

  They would of beat me to death if it hadn’t been for Edgewater. Hell, they’da had to get my money.

  The old woman roused herself, spat snuff into a coffee can. If you’d not been in such a place as that you wouldn’ta had it to worry about. Them that goes in there can just expect it and you wasn’t raised to cuss like that, neither. Your daddy learnt you long ago Jesus saved you, she said to Bradshaw. You old enough to know that, whether you do or not.

  I reckon he must have stepped out for a minute then, Bradshaw said. Edgewater was the only one come off the bench.

  She pushed herself up by the arms of the rocker, went into the dark house.

  Mama’s getting old, the girl said softly after a time, as if this were some apology she offered Edgewater. She ain’t the same since Daddy died.

  Edgewater felt vaguely used, knew that Bradshaw felt no emotion with this knowledge and was using his presence to abate their emotions, knew if he had not been there there would have been a tearful reunion, a dredging up of buried griefs. He felt the sharp edge of old sorrows. That’s all right, he thought. He studied her face, faintly pretty in the pale light. One hand washes the other. Like Bradshaw, the girl was pale, the facial flesh soft and vulnerable. But where his eyes were reckless and go to hell, hers were vulnerable, hesitant, as if she told the world: well, here I am. I’m not much but I’m the only one there is. Do with me what you will.

  When she arose and went inside they sat drinking coffee. It had grown very quiet. The old house was so far from the highway that Edgewater could not even hear cars, could hear only insects and nightbirds, the faint sounds of the girl moving about inside the house. A light was clicked on inside.

  They’ve sure let this place go to hell, Bradshaw said. Moths haloed against the square of yellow light fluttered impotently. I never seen a place go down so fast.

  Edgewater did not reply, was not even listening. He was looking past Bradshaw toward the distant gap in the horizon, where the dark sky met still darker ink slashes of crazed trees. The highway was there somewhere. The highway was humming almost a silent counterpart to Bradshaw’s complaining voice, it was an invitation he could accept anytime.

  Financially she was better off with him dead for he had an insurance policy and times had sometimes been lean. Yet there had been a respectability about him that she could feel slipping away. The material signs of her respectability were still here: the neat brick house that was paid for, the shingles she’d insisted on over tin, the aluminum storm windows and doors. A lot of piepans of change had gone into the house, a lifetime of Sundays.

  The day before he died they had had some bitter argument. She could not even remember what it had been about. He had been taking up hay and he came in at noon for lunch and there wasn’t any. You’re a grown man, she told him. You ought to be able to fix yourself some dinner. He’d cooked up some kind of mess and eaten it and gone back to the hayfield without washing the pans. She’d hurled them into the backyard. After they found him dead she went out and gathered them up one by one and sat senselessly among them and stared at whatever caked a skillet and it was proof that he had been alive, concrete, no less substantial than the daughter he had died and left at a bad age, or the son in Arkansas or wherever he’d drifted to like a steel bearing rolling downward in a maze.

  Guilt assailed her. At first she’d carried his picture and his Bible every time she went anywhere, for fear the house would burn. The embodiment of guilt she must bear, the weight of stone. From the mantle where the picture rested when she was not carrying it, the eyes were complacent, guileless, staring out of a face with no regrets.

  Then after a time it came to her how thoughtless he had been. Wherever he was he was not having to concern himself with saving a daughter’s virginity or a son that seemed determined to drink himself to death. A virginity she could not help but assume: she’d never been let out with that Yates boy and there did not seem to be opportunity or time. Her own girlhood forgotten, perhaps, her generation’s cleverness taken for granted.

  She came to see this virtue as the last bastion of morality. Buddy might drink until his liver dissolved in alcohol and coursed through his veins but a girl’s chastity was what counted anyway and she had come to see herself inextricably intertwined with her daughter’s fate, had taken upon herself the thankless task of protecting this last grail of innocence—and recognized the moment her jaundiced eye fell on Edgewater a sworn enemy.

  She loathed him. She saw in him a threat, sensed in him something old and evil. An unrepentant word, a misdeed awaiting atonement, for the ways of the world lay on him like clothes he had near outgrown.

  She had made down the couch, turned back clean sheets, there was a pil
low that smelled freshly of summer. But he lay wide-eyed, still, in the unfamiliar dark, staring at the ceiling, listening to the creaks of the old house, its complaints as it shielded these transients against the night. It was not the unfamiliarity of surroundings; Edgewater was long used to sleeping in other people’s beds, using other people’s belongings, to sifting through the rusty tin cans and castoff clothes of other people’s lives. He was listening to the sounds the girl made. She was restless as well. The springs would creak when she turned over and yet that would not suit her. He felt himself waiting for her to turn again, holding his breath. Then it would come again. At last he heard her get up and the bathroom door open, her soft footsteps, the light click on. He heard water running.

  He grinned into the darkness, as if to some invisible audience of familiars that applauded his actions, hung on his every word. He wondered if the old woman was restless, what she had been like when she was a girl. If she had ever had a drink of whiskey, if she had ever said a breathless yes a long time ago beneath the honeysuckle.

  He stayed on a day at a time ignoring the old woman’s bitter looks and remarks through a summer that day by day grew hotter and drier until the creeks dwindled to a trickle across fissured land and the earth seemed to bake in the sun and cornfields wilted in its pitiless glare with defeated stalks askew, as if some malign bird atop Edgewater’s shoulder called down this indiscriminate retribution from a sky marvelously clear, a sky with absolutely no intimation of rain.

  He followed Sudy across a plowed field, watched her disappear into the brush at the creek’s edge, reappear a few minutes later ascending the hill on the other side, carrying flowers now, moving upward toward a thin stand of sassafras at the summit. He went on leisurely, as if they were merely strangers bound for the same destination.

  The field was convex at its center and he guessed that long ago there had been an Indian mound there, the loam he walked across was littered with flint and shards of broken pottery and here and there a broken arrowhead among the silvered and leached-up cornstalks of summers past. Perhaps beneath his feet were the skulls of warriors of another day, bones scattered, scored by plowshares, careful ceremony and solemn rite come to nothing in the end. Destroyed as thoughtlessly as the careless wind might alter the pattern of driven leaves. Old gods left aghast and speechless and powerless at this desecration, sleeping, dreaming of simpler days.

  Edgewater crossed on a footlog where the creek narrowed and deepened and went on up the sandbar through a stand of willows. Above the greenery the sun was tracking midmorning and there was no breeze and here in the lowland the willows were hot and still. He came out of them following a wellworn footpath and out onto the grassy base of the hill, cleared land here, the trees had been cut long ago and the brush burned. He angled up the hill, the grass worn away in a path like the padded trail that led to an animal’s lair.

  She had her back to him, kneeling, pouring red dirt from a bucket, smoothing it with her hands onto the grave. HERMAN P. BRADSHAW, the stone read. BORN AUG 1900. DIED JUNE 1954.

  It was a double stone and the woman’s name was Emma. Below the names, in script: HE LEADS THE WAY OTHERS FOLLOW. The grave was still red with the clay dug from the hill and it looked raw, bleeding, an unhealed wound. There was a fruitjar half buried in the earth of the grave and she had put wildflowers there, knelt arranging them.

  She turned at his step, glanced at him, looked back to where her hands moved about the flowers. I thought you was Buddy. I don’t reckon he’s even comin up here.

  He hunkered on the ground, looked out across the summit of the hill across other graves, a dozen or so of them, neat community of the dead. Are all these your people buried here?

  Yeah. My grandparents on Daddy’s side are here. But some of them are old, a long time ago. I don’t even know who they all are. She gestured toward two rectangles of sunken earth, more diminutive than the others. I had two little sisters born dead and they’re buried here.

  I’m sorry.

  She smiled wanly. I doubt there’s anything you could have done about it, she said.

  He tipped out a cigarette, offered her the pack, but she shook her head. He lit the cigarette, idly stuck the smoking match into the earth. What’d you say killed your daddy, a stroke?

  That’s what the doctor said. She absentmindedly drew a circlet in the red clay with her finger. The doctor said he didn’t suffer, he died real quick.

  Something of guilt here, he thought: something done or not done. Bitter words said and nothing to repent to but the vacuum a man leaves and this ochre clay staining her hands. Edgewater knew she was crying although he did not look at her, heard the faint tremor of her voice. There’s always things you think of you ought to’ve said, she apologized, dabbing at her eyes with her sleeve. Above them sparrowhawks wheeled, dropped cries harsh as broken glass.

  Why don’t you let the grass grow up over it?

  It would be like forgettin him, she said, faltering. It would be lettin him go. It was hard to give him up. You just don’t know. Especially with Mama the way she was and nobody to do anything but me. Buddy gone again like he always is when you need him for somethin. Where’s your folks live?

  He paused, going through his lies like some old burntout actor sorting faded costumes in a trunk. Well. They’re both dead. They had a carwreck when I was growing up and it killed both of them.

  Oh, I didn’t mean to pry.

  You’re not. It was a long time ago and we never got on so well anyway. My daddy was a preacher and he had a way of seeing things and that was the only way there was.

  You mean your daddy was a preacher too?

  On Sunday and every other day, Edgewater told her. Preachers sometimes run out of forgiveness before they get to their own house.

  She nodded. They can be hard, she said. Mama’s like that. They’ve got to have people the way they want them or they don’t want em at all.

  Edgewater began a mythical story of his youth. Improbable hard times, harsh words, harsh deeds. His eyes were pained, his voice sincere. You would have thought he believed it. Perhaps now he did. Perhaps he no longer knew. A part of him drew aside, a separate self that watched with weary cynicism while he sorted greedily among his lies and held them to the light like a miser counting coins.

  I know what you mean. It’s funny both our daddys bein preachers and both of them dead.

  It is a coincidence.

  She arose, smoothed her dress. I better be goin on back. Mama’ll be throwin a fit if I don’t.

  Why?

  She flushed. Well. You and me both gone at the same time. She’s got an awful suspicious mind.

  We’re not doing anything wrong.

  Try telling her that sometime at three o’clock in the morning, she smiled. She began to walk out of the spinney of sassafras, slim and graceful trees that did not shade the sun. He caught up with her. They began walking back toward the porch, their shadows close before them, already merged at the shoulders with noon’s heat.

  You got a boyfriend?

  No. What in the world makes you think that?

  I didn’t mean anything by it. You’re just a pretty girl and most pretty girls I’ve met had a boyfriend somewhere.

  I bet you’ve met a lot of them.

  Not prettier than you.

  Not me. Well, there was this boy. But Daddy and Mama both hated him, couldn’t stand the sight of him, he drank and all that.

  What happened to him?

  I don’t know. A girl at church told me he went north.

  The look was in her eyes, had been there all the time. A look Edgewater had long given up on analyzing, though he had seen it countless times before, would see countless times again. It was a curious look, part sensual, for a fleeting moment. Edgewater had seen the look in cafés and bars and streets. It said, All right. Do whatever you want to do. It was what Edgewater lived for. It was what got him down the road.

  When they had crossed the creek and came out into the field he careless
ly took her hand, swung it along. She did not pull it away until they came up the stone walk from the springhouse and saw the old woman standing on the porch, watching their approach with bitter eyes. When they came to the door she moved away, some ancient troll on a mythic road, permitting them grudging passage. She was fooled, defeated, as old women always are. She fired upon Edgewater a black and vindictive look, would looks kill he’d be six feet under. He paid her no mind, felt no need to influence her, win her over. She had nothing he needed. Her twisted face was a gargoyle left to guard some temple long ransacked and plundered, a sentry watching walls fallen long ago.

  Seen through the kitchen window and washed by late afternoon light, the old woman was going with her milk bucket and men’s shoes through the backyard toward the barn. Bent, stepping through the barbedwire fence and tiptoeing delicately through the lot’s offal and on toward the stable, then out of sight. Just at this same moment and seen through the same window Bradshaw was moving through a field of cornstalks with a rifle on his shoulder, angling toward the big hickories at the wood’s edge.

  Edgewater came up behind Sudy where she stood facing the sink of dishwater and laced his arms about her, feeling the large soft breasts against his forearms, his weight laid against her, his face above the soap-scented blonde hair. He turned her to him and bent his face to hers. Her eyes were shut, her mouth already wet. Hands along his face slick with soapy water. She came tight against him as close as she could, a slack and unresisting weight, arms locked about his neck in a sort of dormant urgency he’d awakened.

  Preferring the porch to the house, the girl gave over her bedroom to him. The old woman was already wishing him gone, glanced sharp suspicious looks at him but that did not bother him. Nothing much bothered him anymore; long used to being alone and to doing his will he took no more offense than if nature had decreed rain on a day when he would have preferred sun. It was all temporary anyway, tomorrow would change it. Tomorrow might find him down the line, head pillowed elsewhere.