The Lost Country

by William Gay

  Bradshaw went to get the car and they waited for him at the front of the courthouse.

  Where’d you get the money?

  I wrote a check and signed Mama’s name to it.

  Why?

  She pretended to misunderstand. Because she had money in the bank and I didn’t. What do you think?

  I’ll pay you back.

  Let it go. I’ll just try to beat her to the mailbox when the checks come back. If I know Buddy it was all his fault anyway.

  Edgewater was going through his pocket. You hadn’t got such a thing as a cigarette on you have you?

  She opened her purse and at last took out a half pack of Camels. I guess you can have one of these. I don’t smoke. They’re a keepsake. A souvenir I guess you’d say.

  He took the cigarettes, tilted one from the pack, handed it back to her. She put it back in the purse. The tobacco was dry, a cylinder of tinder that flared when he lit it. The tobacco smoke tasted stale, weak. A souvenir of what? he tested.

  Just a keepsake. Here comes Buddy.

  Edgewater followed her to the car and got in. He pondered on what sort of memory had left only a half pack of cigarettes to keep it alive.

  In spite of getting up in the mornings with the intention of going he stayed on all through the summer. He would be thinking of leaving and Bradshaw would say, How about easing over to the Knob for a brew? Or would draw him aside and say, Swalls needs a little whiskey. Let’s pick him up a load in Hickman County and make a little pocket money. By this time the old woman had come to see him as the fruition of some grim curse cast upon her by her enemies, some maledictive embodiment of evil come to lead her son down the red cherted road to hell, her doling out dollar bills grudgingly and one by one, then rehiding the old purse somewhere Bradshaw would not look, wishing he was gone and afraid he would leave at the same time.

  It had been a wet spring that year but when the rain ceased and the clouds dissipated it would not rain again, as if all the year’s allotted water had been dispensed, the sky clear and infinitely blue. July went out hot and harsh and dry. Corn that had been green and richly promising withered and yellowed, less than waist high, forlorn and hopeless. The stalks twisted on themselves as if they would by main force wring water up from the parched earth.

  Long used to the vagaries of the weather, folks were still touched by an unease, a disorientation, an aberrance in the way of the world. Leaves starved for water turned yellow prophesying an early fall. Taproots crept ever deeper, searching for the sustenance locked in the earth’s keep. Vines wilted and their tendrils curled and then blackened as if frost had seared them. The earth grew harsh and then harsher. Faultlines came in it and fissured microcataclysms crept through the fields and the sun bore down a fierce and vindictive retribution. Cisterns dried up, streams fell and shrank, left fish beached goggle-eyed and gills faintly pumping to drown in fetid sloughs. Ponds dried to a slimy green scum that was a wonder to young boys, marvelous primeval life forms the sun sucked the water from so that in time it became a dry fibrous mass coating the slick clay. Then the clay dulled and dried, became an intricately faulted surreal waste as barren as anything that must shuttle through the stellar depths.

  Old men would come out that year at night and stare at the sky as if some sign might flare there briefly: stood out in the hazy blue dusk while fireflies moved like spirit lights among the dark boles of trees and heat lightning flared and died, faint mocking thunder tumbling roll on roll down the well of the sky. They listened to the sounds of the night as if encoded in the cries of insects might lurk some secret knowledge of the earth’s complexities, surely creatures of the night dwelt deeper in God’s favor than they. Sometimes along toward dawn clouds might form and offer surcease. Then the sun would rise over the jagged trees orange and malefic and its heat would fall like a weight. What clouds had formed would dissipate into faint wisps the sun burned away and ultimately the sky would be marvelously clear, a hot mocking blue.

  Old carbodies lost in the rank sweetsmelling jungle of honeysuckle and kudzu became unbearably hot to the touch, tar on the blacktops bubbled soft and viscous, became a quagmire drawing into itself the tracks of children and bottlecaps and hapless insects and whatever befell it. Heat at midday fell flat and malign and the concrete highway curbings took on a glint as if they were encrusted with jewels, a highway of diamonds.

  Preachers hinted apocalypse in Sunday sermons to rows of limp parishioners among whose ranks fans fluttered listlessly as leaves in the vagaries of the wind. Saturday corner gospelmongers were more direct. Demented and hydrophobic they ranted of man’s dark side. I told you and you wouldn’t listen, they said with satisfaction. Maybe you’ll listen now. The wrath of God had kicked aside a rotten log, bared the sun’s white agony onto a motley of writhing grubs, sexton beetles scuttling for shelter. The earth wearying of its tenants, shuffling them off into the eye of the sun. Choking with vitriol these men of God looked savagely about for such souls as Saturday night might bring within the range of their voices and saw little worth sparing. Mad faces turned toward the hot sky, they demanded God smite all these whoremongers and adulterers, honkytonk brawlers, whiskey drinking fornicators. That not even the young be spared for evil already ran through them like a fault line.

  It became a summer of random violence. Tales carried tense and breathless backyard to backyard with a kind of anticipation, each day new horrors.

  Forsaken by sleep, Wallace Suggs lay and listened to the tin pop with heat and the slow drone of dirt daubers about the rafters and to the breathing of his wife beside him and katydids beyond the unscreened windows told him of old wrongs she’d done him, old cuckoldments, old lovers on other nights as slow and sweaty as this one: told of burnt-up corn and notes due and at length he got up naked and barefoot and took down his shotgun. He shot her while she slept and went down to the children’s room and shot them as well save the oldest boy who sprang out the window. A figure mad with desperation fleeing toward the barn through latticed moonlight and gone in the haysmelling dark. Gun aloft and barefoot Suggs leapt tenderfooted over rocks and briars and killed his boy in the loft, turned the gun last on himself.

  In later years they called it haunted there, shunned, plagued. Boys taking dares stoned such windows as there were and fled, and at night blue lights were said to flit about the cottonwoods and a globe of phosphorescence to rise above the graveyard. Cries of old violence crossed and commingled, rage and entreaty warred ceaselessly in the listening night.

  Another: Stella Weatherspan held back the curtain and peered past the yard to where her husband Clovis worked on his truck and a deepest rage seethed within her, apocalyptic visions flared behind her limpid eyes. He had a bottle of beer aloft and eyes squinting into the sun as he drained it and set it on the angleiron rimming the truck flat. He was bare to the waist and bronzed from the sun and despite the slack gut there was a look of indolent violence about him.

  The truck was jacked up and both rear wheels off and he slid under it. I told you to bring me a beer, he called without looking toward the house.

  I told you they ain’t one.

  Then you better shit one.

  Beyond the cordwood truck sicklooking cotton drowned in Johnson grass and she had not been able to get him to so much as file a hoe, he seemed always to clutch a wrench or a beer bottle, to be always leaving for Goblin’s Knob. He half raised one elbow and peered toward the house. There was a curious look on his face: not contempt or dislike or even anger but simply a kind of dismissal, a denial of existence. An arrogance that transcended her and this cottage with its gingerbread scrollwork and the giveupon cotton. It was a look gone in a flicker but by such moments are the thought and deed welded to one.

  She had already noticed the jack cocked slanting but he would ever defy fate to smite him. She was close enough to see the slick sheen of perspiration on his upper torso and the tattoo of a naked woman lost in a thicket of suncoppered hairs and he was reaching an arm toward the brake line when sh
e took up the galvanized pipe he used for a fulcrum and warped the jack as hard as she could.

  There was some insurance money; she soon discovered there was no shortage of good old boys to help her spend it. A strange new world opened itself to her. Grief stricken, folks said at first, taken to drink and to riding in topless cars and slow dancing at Goblin’s Knob to honkytonk songs and to high brittle laughter devoid of humor. By the time the money was gone she was living with a gangling youth named Ray Tanner who left a cancer-ridden wife for her.

  They sold the house when there was nothing left to sell and with the money embarked on a monumental binge. They closedanced at the Knob through an alcoholic haze while he mentally computed how much money must be left. Wayne Raney sang, My hair’s still curly and my eyes are still blue. Why don’t you love me like you used to do? The homilies of Hank Williams fell on deaf ears: Take my advice, or you’ll curse the day you started rollin down that lost highway.

  With the last of the money they bought an old silver housetrailer angular as a tinfoil box and set it down on rented land, a cornfield bare of tree or flower. They set it on cinderblocks and she dug up a bed at the end of it for hollyhocks. Then one day he was just gone. There were long lonesome days waiting for the mailman but there was not a letter ever.

  She lived all alone then and with the years a kind of bleak austerity settled itself upon her, as she grew older she looked with disapproval upon the doings of the young. She was saved at a traveling tent revival, all her sins absolved, washed white as snow.

  Swalls drew up two dripping brown bottles of beer and uncapped them. You ever see weather like this in your life? It’s a hunnerd and twelve degrees out there.

  They sat on the high shaded porch and drank the beer. Edgewater glanced toward the road. The blacktop was overhung with shimmering waves of heat and the fronds of sumacs hung wilted and thickly talcumed with dust.

  Arnold drank from his bottle. Hell, Edgewater brung it with him from California. They have this kind of weather out there all the time.

  Swalls looked at Edgewater. I hope you plan on carrying it with you when you go, he said.

  They were down by the creek when she told him, hesitant to be the bearer of such ill tidings. She was reticent at first, he later wished he’d kept his peace. He wouldn’t have had to ask her what the matter was. Yet she would have told him anyway, she was bound to get it said. They stood in light dappled by late summer greenery, the creek catching and refracting the sun like a stream of moving light. As she talked she spoke faster, her face lit with a bright and fragile anger.

  Are you sure?

  Yes.

  Well, goddamn.

  She fell silent, shredded dried bark in her nervous fingers, dropped it into the creek, watched it list and slide. It was a long time before she spoke. I thought you was doin somethin, she said apologetically.

  I guess I was, he said. I guess I done a little more than I thought.

  He was shaking his head. That’s crazy, he told her.

  It may be crazy but that’s the way it is. What’s crazy about it, anyway? It happens to people every day.

  How do you know you are?

  How do you think I know? The way people always find out.

  You mean you’ve been to the doctor then.

  Of course I hadn’t been to a doctor. Quit makin fun of me. You’re the one talkin crazy.

  How late are you?

  She flushed, her eyes turned away to follow a cardinal’s flight, bright drop of blood in a world of green. I don’t know what you’re talkin about.

  He had knelt in the yard, laced his arms about his knees. She remained standing before him, still, accusatory. Yet watchers from a distance would have seen in this silent tableau something courtly, a carryover from a simpler time. Knelt so in the earth perhaps pled her hand.

  Come off it. When was your period supposed to start?

  Around the twentieth.

  Good God. You’re not hardly a month late. What are you getting so excited about? A lot of things could have caused that.

  I just know the one. Her face was pale but there was a stubborn core at her center, there was no give to her. Why do you keep saying me, askin about me? You’re in this too, you know. I thought you was doin something.

  Doing something? Doin what, for Christ’s sake?

  You know what I mean. Wearin them things. Somethin to stop it, to keep it from happenin.

  Edgewater was quiet. I am doing something, he thought. I am moving down the line, infinitesimally slow, you cannot detect my motion yet. You’re setting me up, he told her.

  She began to cry, there was a brittle desperation about her. She was looking at the ground before his feet, at meaningless marks he made there with a stick. She would not meet his eyes. I knew you’d try to get out of it, she told him.

  Goddamn it. I never claimed to be a genius but at the same time I don’t have to be hit over the head with a stick. I don’t have to hear bells ring or have a light bulb appear over my head.

  I guess you’ll deny doin it to me all those times. Ever night nearly. I guess you’ll deny admittin you never used them things or done anything to stop it.

  I guess you’ll deny practically dragging me from my chaste and continent bed.

  You wanted it.

  Well. It doesn’t matter now. None of it does. I’m just a little foggy on just what it is you want me to do.

  You ought to know without me havin to beg you. I want you to do what a man has to. If we’re going to have a baby it has to have a name. Was everthing you told me just lies?

  No, but I still don’t like being played for a fool.

  Why do you have to make it seem like something dirty? I oughtn’t said anything to you about it. I ought to’ve told Mama and Buddy and had them do what it is you do. Let the sheriff serve you with the papers or somethin.

  The hell with a bunch of papers, Edgewater said. You better be thinking this over. You better be making some other arrangements.

  She was still crying. The only other arrangements I know is to kill myself, she said. Kill it or myself and I don’t know how to kill it.

  Edgewater was looking around with a kind of desperation. He arose and laid an arm about her shoulder, touched her cheek but she twisted away.

  Sometimes I think how good it’d be just to go to sleep and not wake up, she said bitterly.

  Stop talking crazy.

  I swear I will. I’ll kill myself and it’ll be on your head. I’d rather do it as tell Mama, it’d kill her. You’ve got to help me, Billy.

  I don’t have to do anything but die.

  Then what’ll I tell her and Buddy? What’ll I tell everbody?

  Just deny everything and tell them you don’t know how it could have happened.

  You think you’re so smart because you don’t care about anything or anybody. Like that puts you above everbody else.

  Well. I don’t know. I’m just like everybody else, trying to get by as light as I can. It seems to me it took awhile for things to come to this; I guess it’ll take longer than a few minutes to figure out what to do. Quit crying and quit thinking about it till I work out something.

  It’s all I can think about. It’s all I’ve been thinking about.

  We’ll work something out.

  That’s easy for you to say. You’re not real, she told him mockingly. If they was taking a census I doubt they’d even count you.

  When they started to the house she hung back, there was a kind of mournful dread about her, and all the way back he was thinking: If I’d left yesterday I wouldn’t know any of this, none of it would exist.

  Edgewater drank a beer at the Knob, saw his reflection wrought twisted and strange by the bar glass, the past suddenly all about him as if it existed still, a strange world peopled by his past and present and future, a triple exposure crowded with magic.

  It had been Jenny. She said his name and her voice trailed off, faltered, the phone fell and banged against something.

 
Here was a deadfall laid in time: the phone had rung in National City. Jenny was in Chula Vista and he had not let anything slow him down but by the time he got there it was too late anyway.

  All the lights were on and he wandered from room to room like a harried burglar until he found her in a bathroom. All his mind would register at first was blood, an inordinate amount of blood, pooled where she lay dead on the tile floor on rags and towels and bedsheets and delicate drops of it about the floor in a widening mad pattern of desperation, a puddle of it by the phone, a spoor for the damned to interpret and follow.

  She was curled on her side with a towel clutched between her legs and she had died trying to hold life in, would defy it to flow out of her, had chinked herself with cloths like rags stuffed in cracks against the winds. There was a half fifth of vodka open on the dinette table and a glass and he judged she’d gotten herself drunk before attempting, her drinking to the edge and past it. Long lonesome hours, as lonesome as it ever gets. He drank half a waterglass of the vodka and walked out into a day bright as any day ever was, a day in which the mechanisms of the world meshed just as smoothly as they had ever done, he detected no changes. One soul, one mote, spun off its orbit into the abyss, a thing of no import. He walked up the street in the hot sunshine with the vodka burning in his stomach and imbued with a mystic wonder that his feet did his bidding. He went back to his apartment because he could not think of anything else to do.

  A neighbor turned in his name and the SDPD picked him up for questioning but they did not seem to have any questions he had answers for. An abortion kit, they called it. Somebody picked it up in Tijuana. It hadn’t been him, he hadn’t known they existed. Imagine asking for one in a, what? Drugstore? Had the baby been his? Well. It could have been. It could not have been. The things you never know about a person you think you know. She was a jigsaw puzzle he held only one piece to, did not really care to compare notes with the holders of the rest of the puzzle.