Provinces of Night: A Novel

by William Gay

  Fleming unfolded himself from the porch. Well, I guess I better start looking if I aim to dig any.

  Well. You’ll need you a sack. Get one of them tow sacks out of that corncrib back there.

  All right. Say, what happened to your company?

  They’ve loaded up and headed out. Gone back north.

  I’ll see you, Mr. Hixson.

  You come back anytime.

  CAME THEN plague days of desolation when loss ravaged him like a fever. The house was empty and dead without her. A place of ice, of perpetual winds. He heard her voice at odd times, echoes of things she’d said. He awoke once in the night and her soft laughter had just faded into silence. Once he distinctly felt her hand lie on his shoulder. Before she’d shared his bed, life had been pointless, but now it had become unbearable. She had appeared from nowhere and returned to it, but she’d taken over his life, left with a lien on his body, a mortgage on his soul.

  He tried to remember what she had said about writing, about Christmas vacation. To replay it word for word. I’ll snow you under in letters, she said. You’ll dread to see the mailman coming. He heard the clipped Yankee cadence of her speech tell him how much she loved him. He’d been haunting the mailbox since Boyd left but now he redoubled his efforts. The barren mailbox mocked him. He wasted long hours computing distances, estimating the length of time it took a letter to travel from Detroit, Michigan, to Ackerman’s Field, Tennessee.

  In the final throes of desperation he began to check Dee’s mailbox as well, sorting through the letters for one with a Michigan postmark, a firm girlish hand filled with curlicues, the i’s dotted with little circles.

  Then one day as he approached Dee himself was coming down his driveway toward his mailbox. Fleming fell in with him, as if they’d check the mail together.

  You ever hear from Merle since she went back north? he asked casually.

  Who? Oh, no, Merle ain’t never been much of a letter writer. Tell you the truth I’m sort of glad that bunch is gone. I reckon I’ve lived by myself so long I got used to the peace and quiet. Leastways her and that Randy got back together before they left.

  Who?

  Randy. Her husband. Big old redheaded boy. They set into fightin like cats and dogs for about a week there. Then she laid out on him somewheres a night or two and I reckon it taught him a lesson. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other by the time they left. It would about turn your stomach.

  Fleming had simply walked away. He was crossing the bridge before he even knew where he was. He turned and Dee was standing by the mailbox staring after him.

  Why that undermining little bitch, he said aloud. There would be no letters, no Christmas vacation. O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come hack again! But by the time he had reached the foot of the hill he was feeling better and his face was a curious mixture of anger and rueful amusement. He took a small and bitter comfort in knowing that Randy was at least as big a fool as he was.

  NO GOOD ever comes of having a police cruiser pull into your yard and park. This was not something that Albright had to learn, it had been bred into generations of Albrights all the way back to the days when the law rode up on horseback. It was part of his genetic makeup.

  If in addition to parking a khakiclad deputy gets out with a paper in his hand and compares the name on the mailbox with the name on the warrant then everything is simply compounded, trouble multiplied by itself to an incalculable power.

  By the time the curtain fell against the glass Albright was lightfooting it toward the kitchen, by the time he heard the official step at his hearth and the first peremptory rapping he was out the back door and gone, past the hogpen and the woodlot in a desperate stretch for the woods, the jagged line of pines bobbing in his vision with the pounding of his feet, the darkness beyond their trunks a land that offered its own kind of absolution, a land of timber and hollows so deep they threatened no extradition.

  YOUNG FLEMING BLOODWORTH, with the proceeds of two weeks of herb gathering folded in the toe of his right front pocket, stood before Breece’s Variety Store staring at a huge old Remington typewriter enshrined behind plateglass. After a while he went in past rows of hangered clothing and bins of toys and shelved cosmetics to where a salesgirl was marking prices on tiny white tags and stapling them to the sleeves of blouses.

  How much is that typewriter in the window? There’s no price on it.

  I don’t know how much he wants for it, you’d have to ask Mr. Breece. He’s never said anything about it to me.

  Is he not here?

  He’s somewhere there in the back. The storeroom. Just go to that door and holler at him.

  Breece was a tall cadaverous man in wire-rimmed glasses and thinning gray hair worn long in the back and combed carefully forward in the forlorn hope it would cover his baldness. He was unpacking glassware from a cardboard carton filled with shredded paper and when Fleming told him what he wanted he nodded and pulled on a gray sweater and buttoned it and clipped a black bowtie to the collar of his shirt. Let’s go up to the front and look at it, he said.

  I’ve learned there’s not much call for typewriters here in Ackerman’s Field, he said. If one tears up over at the courthouse they get a new one through some wholesale office supply. Same thing up at the school.

  How much is it?

  I’m asking sixty dollars. It’s a eighty-dollar machine but I’ve had it too long and I’d like to move it. It’s a top of the line machine. Crafted like a Swiss watch.

  He popped the top and lifted it free and set it aside. See that? Like an expensive watch.

  Fleming looked and he couldn’t help but agree. Gleaming copper gears and steel springs and the bright hinged levers that worked the keys. There was an efficient businesslike manner to the machine that said it would brook no nonsense. It was not a toy. To Fleming it seemed some alchemical device out of a long-lost civilization founded on magic, capable of transmuting life into neatly stacked manuscripts. It looked as if it had a thousand tales to tell and needed only his complicity to begin the telling.

  You wouldn’t put it on layaway, would you?

  Why Lord yes. It’s been on layaway two years without a nickel paid on it. How much did you want to put down?

  I could pay fifteen today.

  I’ll just put a sold tag on it and put it in the storeroom. You can come in and pay on it any time you want to.

  He exited the store back onto sidewalks thronged with Saturday revelers. They seemed to have come from everywhere seeking some rumored carnival. Some from so far back in Godforsaken hollows the owls and chickens bedded down together just for the company. Out of tarpaper shacks that smelled of greasy smoke and kerosene. Young sharecroppers with their stoic calm faces and their childwives with querulous eyes that looked at him then darted away. Whole families, old women chewing their snuffsticks and old men in clean overalls listening to the sound of sand diminish in the glass. Babes in arms with wonderstruck eyes. Ribald whores from the countyline jukejoints and smooth country Romeos with brilliantined hair and knives in their pockets or straight-razors worn under their shirts like necklaces on leather thongs. Splo whiskey on their breath and a taste for mindless violence and an affinity for finding it before Saturday night is gone. They will awake in alleys with the sun in their eyes, in jail, in places they don’t remember going to and don’t want to be. Every few Sunday mornings one of them wouldn’t wake up at all.

  Saturday drew these folk as a magnet aligns iron filings. They had come in pickup trucks or old rattletrap cars held together by some perverse suspension of the laws of physics, in sedans seemingly hacked into trucks with chopping axes and beds cobbled up out of sawmill slabs, in wagons drawn by mules, on foot, strung out on the road like refugees.

  Mad streetcorner prophets ranted their own unhinged interpretation of the gospel so far removed from its source it might have been a garbled folktale handed down by word of mouth. Or homemade scriptures they’d written in Big Chief tablets by coal-oil light the nig
ht before. One had drawn a small crowd of stragglers and Fleming paused to listen. This preacher wore a guitar roped about his neck which he used not as you’d expect but as a sort of discordant punctuation at the end of his phrases.

  The Bible says the hairs on a man’s head is numbered, he raved. But listen, brother, where does that leave the baldheaded man? Is he shut out? Is he not even kept up with? Is he cut loose adrift without his name put down in the great book of records? The good book says His eye is on the sparrow, is a hairless man not as deserving of His eye as the fowls of the air?

  He was full of such questions but like the rest he seemed to have no answers and Fleming soon drifted away.

  In the poolhall he drank a Coca-Cola so cold it turned to slush when the cap was popped and watched Junior Albright put the last of his money in the pinball machine. He kept feeding it nickels until the odds were raised nigh off the scale then tilted it on the third ball.

  It tilts real easy when the odds get high, Fleming said.

  Albright looked at him. I notice the son of a bitch does, he said. He kicked it so hard it slammed against the wall and balls clanged hollowly in its bowels and Carlton Baxter came from behind the bar and fixed Albright with an angry scowl.

  Keep your feet off that machine unless you plan on payin for it and takin it home with you, he said.

  I’ve paid for the rotten whore ten times over, Albright said. He turned to Fleming. Let’s walk down to the show and watch the girls come out, he said.

  Passing the Snowwhite Cafe Fleming said, You want to go in and get a cheeseburger?

  No, Albright said. I can’t go in there. I saw a deputy in there this mornin through the glass and he might still be in there waiting for me. I’m keeping a lower profile than a snake. I fully expect another set of papers to come down on me.

  I saw your picture down at the post office, Fleming said.

  It ain’t funny. To me it’s not. I’ve got to where I dream about the damned cops. Once you do something to draw their attention you might as well hand it up.

  I thought he already took you to court.

  I didn’t go. I never showed up and they went ahead and had it without me. They say I got to pay that eight hundred and sixty dollars and Woodall’s lawyer. Somethin for the court. I think the judge’s gone off down to Florida on a vacation and is sendin me the bill for it.

  Why didn’t you go to court and explain what happened?

  I didn’t have a legal leg to stand on so I just let her roll. There was about forty people seen the fucker blow up like it had a stick of dynamite in it. There wasn’t much way of lyin out of it.

  He was silent a time. They had approached the Strand Theater and stood before it studying the black and white stills of Rex Allen and the Durango Kid. Fleming could smell the greasy odor of buttered popcorn and hear the sound of distant gunfire.

  Look at them duded-up outfits, Albright said. I seen one one time when this stagecoach was runnin away and he climbed out on the traces and worked his way all the way to the front. They was goin about ninety mile an hour and his fuckin hat didn’t even blow off. They kept goin by the same rock too.

  He fell silent again. Finally he said, I’ve got to get that damned Woodall off my back. He’s goin to hound me all my life. If I ever get a decent job he’ll garnishee me. If I ever get a car he’ll take it. If I marry he’ll be screwin my wife. My whole life is mortgaged.

  Fleming grinned. Put a hex on him, he said.

  Put a what?

  A hex. A curse. Get my uncle Brady to voodoo him. He’s got one on Harwood, the mail carrier, right now. Harwood run over one of Brady’s dogs and now his insides are supposed to turn to concrete or something.

  But does it work?

  Does it work. Hellfire. Of course it doesn’t work, Brady’s as crazy as a shithouse mouse. He’s got these widow women coming around to get their fortunes told. He tells them what they want to hear about their love life and they pay him five dollars. He’s started believing it himself.

  The wide double doors of the theater opened and folks began to string out into late afternoon light, first the kids, their eyes strange and disassociate from the visions they’d seen, brought back too abruptly from the purple sage and set down on these twentieth-century sidewalks. Young girls came out in giggling groups, bright as summer flowers. Albright was watching them with a kind of deranged hunger. One paused and studied Fleming with cool appraisal from a fringe of dark lashes then turned and caught up with her friends. Albright grasped him by the arm. He was staring after the girls in a kind of wonder.

  Just think, Fleming, he said. They’ve all got one. Ever Goddamned one of them.

  That’s anatomy for you, Fleming agreed.

  Going out toward home just before dark Fleming started up Park Avenue South and as he passed an office door it opened and a heavyset man in a dentist’s smock hailed him.

  What say, Young Bloodworth.

  Hey Doc.

  I saved a bunch of those magazines for you. You want them?

  Sure.

  Come in and I’ll gather them up.

  He went in the dentist’s waiting room, bare of waiting patients. A pinepaneled room of wonders, a museum in miniature. While the dentist stacked copies of True and Collier’s and The American Magazine Fleming made a slow tour of the room. He’d seen it all before but he looked again. Time caught like a fly in amber and displayed behind plateglass. Civil War swords, a Colt dragoon in a curio case. Old dentist’s instruments so barbaric they looked like artifacts from a medieval torturer’s toolbox. Arrowheads. A long lethal spearpoint chiseled with meticulous craftmanship from flint. The skull of some ancient Indian, the cranium shattered by a rifle ball in a concussion that still rolled wave on wave forever in this room.

  Here you go. I don’t have anything to put them in. Can you carry them under your arm?

  That’ll work fine. Thanks a lot, Doc.

  Don’t mention it. You take care, Speedo.

  He went out and up the street but the stack of magazines kept slipping and sliding and he knew they’d wear him out before he’d walked the miles he had to go. He crossed the street and went down an alley toward the railroad where the feedstore was and behind it found a pile of burlap bags. He took one up and shook the loose grains of feed out of it and loaded the magazines into it and left with the bag slung across his shoulder.

  He was no more than on the highway when he got a ride, a felthatted oldtimer in a pickup stacked with bags of corn. They rode in silence listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio. A country comedian was telling a story about a rube outfoxing a city slicker. In the west the sun had gone and the point where sun and horizon met burned in a blur like some cosmic conflagration.

  Ain’t that Rod somethin? That Minnie too. Don’t they beat anythin you ever heard?

  They’re pretty funny, the boy agreed, and grinned weakly as if he’d prove it.

  What’s a young feller like you doin goin in this time of day? The night ain’t even got wound out yet.

  I guess I just ran out of anything to do.

  I was your age they wasn’t no runnin out. These warm nights you couldn’t of held me down with a log chain. I’d do anything. I’d wake up in Alaska hungover with my beard froze to the ground.

  The boy didn’t reply. Beyond the dark glass fields and trees and houses slipped past, so blurred they were like ghosts of a landscape, just symbols that stood for a world. The truck had turned off and now they were going downhill, the wornout brake shoes skirling metal on metal.

  I’d hang around that show and pick me up one of them young girls wanders around. Take her down by the tieyard and throw a tool to her.

  I get off anywhere along here.

  What?

  I get off here.

  The driver stopped. He looked. There ain’t nothin here, he said.

  There’s a road across that branch. A log road. I live back across that ridge.

  Well. You’d better get across it. It’s about slapdab da
rk.

  He went down an embankment and crossed a swift narrow stream that went noisily over the stones and followed a footpath through a thicket of elderberry and sumac and came out on an old log road that wound toward the timbered ridge. Everything was sinking in indigo dark save the road which seemed to exude a faint phosphorescence like an enchanted road in a witch’s wood orphans might follow to the cottage at its end.

  He trudged woodenly on, the bag slung across his left shoulder. He seemed to move in a pocket of silence, nightbirds and insects falling silent at his arrival, taking up the cry after he’d passed. He wondered how many times he’d walked this road with Boyd, how many times dark fell on them before they made the crossroads. Boyd in front, the burlap bag of groceries on his shoulder. The boy behind, folded comic books in his hip pocket. Landmarks rose out of memory. A stump, a tree. The way a horizon held against the heavens. Here we lost my shoes one time, had to backtrack a mile and a half to find them. The pale shoe box against the drifted leaves. I was beginnin to think we dropped them comin out of the drygood store, Boyd had said.

  The feeling that off somewhere in the bracken man and boy still walked rose in him nor would it abate. With their steps locked in sync with his they paced him in the silent black wood, passed through the boles of trees like revenants. A moon the color of yellowed ivory cradled up out of the dark and he could see them moving through the trees transparent as water, insubstantial as a handful of smoke.