Provinces of Night: A Novel

by William Gay

  He went on. When he reached the crossroads the moon was well up and the intersecting roads lay dusted with silver until they faded into the velvet trees. He sat for a time and rested. He was uncertain as to which way to go. If he bore left he would wind up at his grandmother’s. Straight ahead followed the spine of the ridge to his home. There was something mystic about crossroads, they doubled the options, confused both pursuer and pursued. He didn’t know which he was, and after a while he made a pillow of the magazines and slept this night at the crossroads.

  BOOK TWO

  BOYD LIVED in a rooming house with other men whose lives he understood better perhaps than he understood his own. He did not know their names or their faces except to nod to when they met on the worn carpet of the hallway yet he had known them all his days, had known them as thoroughly as if he’d been an invisible listener to their every conversation, read their mail, hitchhiked through the burnt landscape of their troubled dreams. They were all men like him, gone north for something better, and finding there the trouble they’d fled was somehow augmented, their lives multiplied by themselves.

  Nights he’d come out of the house to the electric neon streets and walk down to a strip of gaudy bars and find hundreds of others wearying themselves toward dreamless sleep. He watched drunken men pound themselves senseless in alleys, in bars, he kept to himself and he kept his mouth shut and he skirted barroom brawls that were just masses of men and whores and flailing cuesticks with a sort of amused contempt.

  And so into the night. The rainy streets echoed the flickering neon as if the ghosts of revelry continued silently on at some subterranean level. The air was electric with sound: jukeboxes and the click of pool balls and the sluice of tires through the rain and police sirens, the wail of fire engines. Folks were always wounded, dying, burning alive. They died on roadhouse floors of gunshot wounds, of being flung through the windshields of automobiles that had been suddenly halted by utility poles, trees, concrete underpass abutments, they died of knife cuts you could just not get to stop bleeding.

  He wondered at the jobs folks had, these curious restorers of order. There were people who moved in as if they homed on violence, they towed away the crumpled wrecks, others swept up the glass, others mopped up the blood. Together they knitted whole the fabric of night where violence had rent it. Everything was always changing and everything was always the same.

  On the way back to his room there was a dog that would bark at him every night. Run down the length of a concrete sidewalk between box elders that were glossy black in the streetlights. There was a gate of wrought iron hung between two concrete posts. The posts were surmounted by gargoyle’s heads. The German shepherd would come padding down the concrete barking furiously, halt at the closed gate and watch him, his eyes fierce and alert, the skin of his nose and upper lip wrinkling with its short, angry barks.

  One night the gate was standing open and the dog paused as if undecided whether to come into the street. Boyd watched it. He’d halted when he saw the unexpectedly open gate. He fumbled out the hawkbill knife, knowing if he ran the dog would be upon him. The dog seemed uncertain, watching Boyd, watching the gate.

  Boyd showed it the knife. Get away from me, you son of a bitch, he told it.

  Something stirred on the porch. Here, Jack, a man’s voice called. You there, what are you doing to that dog?

  I’m just before cuttin the son of a bitch’s head off, Boyd said.

  He could see the man standing on the top step, just a dark shape against the paler shape of the house.

  You do and I’ll pound your hillbilly ass right into that sidewalk, the man said.

  Why don’t you do it first and brag about it later, Boyd said.

  Something had been growing for weeks inside him and he felt it burst, the tissues rupture and a richly corrupt and violent liquid spread warmly through him. Are you the one? he thought. I could practice on you. Get my moves down. I could start on you and work up to that drummer.

  I see that knife but it doesn’t bother me, the shape said. I have a gun in the house.

  In the house? Go get it. I don’t know why you people think Winchester made one Goddamned gun and then went out of business.

  A silence fell. It elongated, spun out, frayed.

  After a while the shape turned and went into the house. The door closed. Boyd waited but the door stayed closed. Finally he looked once at the dog then backed down the street. Not even the dog would follow him.

  FOR DAYS Fleming had been seeing smoke that lay perpetually on the southern horizon, and when the wind was right he could smell it, faintly acrid, sometimes with the scent of burning cedar and pine. A haze hung over the treeline, somewhere back toward the river.

  Late in the day he went with a blanket and a coffeepot and ground coffee folded in a paper bag and climbed a tall bluff that ascended from the creek. At its summit the cliff formed a rough dome that seemed to overlook the world itself and all that grew there was one enormous cedar leaning and windformed, its roots finding only precarious purchase in the fissured stone.

  When dusk fell he built a fire and set the coffee in the coals to make. He sat against the trunk of the cedar and watched bats come veering up out of the twilight on isobars sheer and plumb as if they’d had courses plotted for them. In deeper darkness an owl crossed above him, its wings beating heavily and almost invisible, just a pale shape shifting against the dark heavens.

  It had grown cooler with the fall of night and when the coffee was made he sat with the blanket drawn about his shoulders and drank a cup watching a glowing line of fire that was the southern horizon, a faint line that ebbed and throbbed like a length of redhot wire. In the unstable dark it seemed to advance and retreat, tremble and flare brighter under the fanning of winds he did not feel. As night deepened all he could see was the shifting line of fire, like some malfunction in the wiring of the world itself, as if the very night had combusted and was creeping incrementally toward him.

  He branched off the Grinders Creek road and walked back toward the river. This road was just a log road but recent and heavy traffic had smoothed it and widened it and turned the hard white clay to a pale thick dust that rose and subsided with his footfalls and the passage of vehicles had talcumed the sawbriars and honeysuckle that shrouded the roadside. The road seemed to ascend all the way to the river and he stopped once to rest where he’d remembered a spring that flowed out of a hollow. He raked the wet black leaves away and let the water clear and drank from his cupped hands. The water was sweet and cold.

  After a while he began to hear the sounds of machinery, trucks and what sounded like bulldozers, the stuttering whine of chainsaws. Still the timber held steady, a thick wall of green, but he could smell smoke strongly now and he could see it. He’d reached the summit of the long grade and here the world flattened out and the walking was easier. He’d forgotten how far away the river lay.

  In late afternoon the road wound through an area being decimated by saw and dozer. Trees lay felled in all directions with dozers shaping them into smoking windrows and the blue haze shifted over everything as far as the eye could see. This was the spine of the ridge and here the earth sloped away toward the river and the hills and hollows seemed to be just blackened ash. Alongside the road trucks and lowboys had been parked and he could see men fanned out like an army of ants. He followed the road a time past all this destruction until the road itself vanished in a field of quaking ash. He hunkered for a time and studied the countryside in a kind of wonder. Not a sapling, not a twig or flower seemed to have survived. Everything past this point was ashes.

  When he passed the trucks going back the way he’d come in a man was filling a Coke bottle with water from a five-gallon cooler set on a stump. When he drank he set the bottle back and took up a yellow chainsaw and set it atop a stump and began to file the chain.

  How about a shot of this water?

  The man turned and looked up. He wore a yellow hardhat and he appeared not much older than Fleming
. Help yourself, good buddy, he said.

  Fleming filled the bottle and drank then filled it again and walked with it to where the man was filing the saw.

  What’s going on back in here?

  We’re clearing off a hell of a new ground, the man said. You better drink up and go before a foreman sees you. Not supposed to be any civilians back in here. Have they not got those no trespassing signs up yet?

  I didn’t see any.

  There’d be a hell of a lawsuit if somebody got a tree cut on him. The TVA’s got a thing about avoidin lawsuits.

  There’s nothing back there. Not a bush or a sprout. Why are you clearing it out so clean?

  Do you not know sure enough?

  No.

  There’s goin to be a dam and a lake back in here. A hell of a lake, what they tell me. We’re clearing it clean enough to eat off of. I thought everybody knowed about it. Course nobody lives back in here, this is all company land. But we’re spreadin that way. Where do you live?

  Fleming pointed with the empty bottle. How far does this lake go that way?

  I don’t know, the man said. I just cut what trees they tell me. But it’s goin to be a hell of a lake. You might give some thought toward movin or learnin to swim.

  FOR THREE DAYS the mail carrier had been a person unknown to Junior Albright and he had observed all this with a more than casual interest. On the fourth morning he sauntered down to the blacktop and idled there by the mailbox until the dustcolored Plymouth came around the curve.

  This mail carrier was a woman, a heavyset woman with a bulldog jaw and short hacked-off hair. Albright had his three pennies ready. I need a stamp, he said.

  She carefully tore a single stamp from a book and slid it into a small glassine envelope and exchanged it for the pennies.

  Say, what’s happened to Harwood? he asked.

  Mr. Harwood’s sick, she told him. They got me substitutin for him. He’s in a Nashville hospital.

  You don’t say. What’s his trouble?

  They don’t even know yet, the woman said. They keep runnin tests on him, callin in more specialists. Somethin to do with his stomach.

  You don’t say, Albright said bemusedly.

  OBLIQUE YELLOW LIGHT moved in waves across the broomstraw and early morning crows called from the cedar row where the cool still held and the dew lingered. When they set out it was just after seven o’clock but already a bloodred sun hung poised like a threat and the sky was a serene cloudless blue.

  Fleming had expected they’d follow the road but the truck was bouncing across a field Brady had chosen as a shortcut. The furrows jarred Fleming so hard his teeth clattered. He was holding the water jug and a bucket of food his grandmother had packed and he was hard put to hang onto it and stay in the truck, for there was no righthand door. In fact the truck looked like a truck cobbled up by someone who’d heard trucks rumored but had never actually seen one, a funhouse mirror reflection of a truck. It served most of the time as a cutoff saw, one rear wheel removed and a belt and pulley mounted on the axle. The hood and front fenders were missing and on the driver’s side door someone had painted the legend JOLIE BLON in faded freehand script.

  The flat wooden bed of the truck was loaded with concrete blocks and shovels and picks and jacks and all the tools they might need to set up the old man’s trailer. Fleming had been conscripted to help and he was curious to see how this job might be accomplished.

  Where the field ended they lurched out onto a roadbed and turned right. After some distance Fleming caught the glint of the sun on metal and then he could see it, a short cigar stub of a trailer with two rounded ends. Brady parked before it and cut the switch. Home sweet home, he said.

  Fleming got out trying to rub feeling into his backside. Where’s the rest of it? he asked.

  What?

  There doesn’t seem to be much to it.

  Well, he’s not but one old man. Likely he won’t live long anyway. Beggars can’t be choosers, can they?

  How’s he begging? I thought you said he sent you the money to buy him a trailer.

  And you see it before you, Brady said. Let’s get this stuff unloaded. I’ve got more to do than set up this mess. Find a shady spot somewhere for that water jug.

  Shade seemed hard come by here, and he wondered, but did not ask, why Brady had chosen this spot. There were no trees surrounding the trailer, nothing but chesthigh blackjack scrub.

  Why don’t we clear some of this brush and move it back in there where the trees are?

  Move it? Pick it up and set it back there?

  We could maybe move it back in there with the truck.

  Maybe. Or maybe turn it over and bust it like an egg. Don’t worry about it. Maybe the Lord will take mercy on a sinner and miracle an air conditioner into that front window yonder.

  Brady set him to digging a hole for a makeshift septic tank and positioned a jack at the low end of the trailer and began to raise it, shoring up with concrete blocks as he went, checking the underside of the trailer from time to time with a spirit level. After he’d dug through the top layer of clay and chopped out the tree roots Fleming found the going easier and actually began to enjoy the work, loosening the earth with a mattock and throwing the dirt out with a shovel. By midmorning he had an enormous amount of earth mounded on the rim above him and he was standing chestdeep in a hole he could have buried a horse in.

  Hey.

  Brady came over to look.

  How deep does this thing have to be?

  Some deeper than that. We can’t have a worldfamous musician doing his business in the woods like a heathen.

  Where’s he going to get water?

  I guess I’ll have to haul his water. Unless you want to fly in when you’re through with that hole and dig him a well.

  Fleming wiped sweat out of his eyes and stood leaning on the shovel. He could think of nothing worse than being trapped in this eggshaped tin can dropped down in the boiling sun and dependent on Brady to haul his drinking water.

  That old man is going to singe and draw like a spider, he said. He went back to shoveling.

  At noon the heat felt malefic and they walked through the brush behind the trailer into the shade and ate the lunch the old woman had prepared, roast beef sandwiches and hardboiled eggs. The boy finished with a fried apple pie he washed down with tepid coffee from a Mason jar.

  How come you’re so down on the old man, Brady?

  If you’d ever been around him you wouldn’t need to ask me that.

  Well, I wasn’t, so I do. None of you talks about him, or none of the family anyway.

  Boyd and Warren ain’t so down on him. Let him come on back, they said. You’ll notice Warren’s in Alabama and Boyd’s traipsed off God knows where and I’m the one out here sweatin over this mess.

  I’ve learned more about him from listening to other old men talk than I ever did from you or Pa, Fleming said. You act like he just stepped through a hole in the ground and vanished.

  Well, Brady said, that’s about what happened. Except now he wants to crawl back out of the hole. If it was left up to me I’d stand on the edge of the hole and stomp his fingers ever time he tried to get a handhold. He just left Ma settin and walked off. Just walked. Not havin a car never stopped him. He’d rather ride but he’d walk if he had to. He always had these trashy people he could turn to. He had all the company he wanted, of one kind or another. But blood is never left up to you, blood will call to blood. You can’t deny your own kin.

  He was silent for some time, his sharp intent face locked in concentration. I expect it was mainly that music, he finally said. I’ve thought about it a lot, and for a while I thought it was the whiskey. But I’ve come to see it was them old songs. They was real to him in a way they wasn’t real to nobody else. Whenever he’d take that old banjo out of the case and go off by himself, you’d know in a few days he’d be gone. Like a man goin on a drunk, except it’d be them old songs he’d be drunk on. That old lonesome-soundin banjo. His voice sou
nded like a fingernail on a blackboard. They say he’s made some money at it but Lord I’d like to know who spent it. It never sounded worth fifteen cents to me.

  The boy sat and listened in silence. He tipped the last of his coffee onto the ground. The earth was dry and baked white and fissured with cracks like miniature faults in the earth. Like the embryonic beginnings of some ultimate cataclysm. It sucked the coffee instantly into itself and left no trace. He thought about what Brady had said. He felt instinctively that every coin had two sides and that this was only one of them. In the poolhall and on Itchy Mama Baker’s front porch he’d heard another story. Once people knew who he was they always had a story to tell him about his grandfather. They seemed to regard him as somehow larger than life. As if in living life on a larger scale than they were permitted or perhaps permitted themselves he had somehow redeemed them. He’d heard stories of a man who’d sometimes lived outside the law but had forded a swollen river on horseback to pay back a two-dollar loan. But, the man amended, it might have been that E.F. just wanted to see if he could swim the river. He was a man who had had trouble adjusting himself to the expectations that other people, particularly people in authority, had for him. He seemed to have some difficulty playing the role that life had cast him.

  The last time he left, Brady said, he had just got out of the pen. He was making whiskey then and he wound up shootin a deputy sheriff. I wasn’t there but he must have just walked in the front door and out the back. And then that was that.

  He sat for a time without speaking. He seemed to be studying his shoes. He was studying them intently, as though they were some make of shoe he had never encountered before.

  I ought never to have let you get me started on this line of talk, he finally said. Things run along smooth when I don’t think of him at all. My mind’ll smooth off. Then I get started on him and it’s like somebody jabbed a stick down inside my head and stirred everything up. My mind’s like muddy water. There’s times I could have killed him like a copperhead I seen in the woods and just walked off and left him. Let’s get this mess done and get out of here.