Provinces of Night: A Novel

by William Gay

  I was layin up there in Hot Springs takin the waters when I got a telegram about that boy. He’d gone plumb off the deep end. He’d started tryin to keep my cattle from breedin. Called it fornicatin. He couldn’t stop it so he started marryin em. Performin these ceremonies on em, reading out of the Bible. He was pairin em off a bull to a cow but there was more cows than there was bulls and what was worse he couldn’t keep em lined up the way he’d married em. They kept committin what he called adultery with cows they wasn’t married to and he couldn’t manage em. It was wearin him out. He was slippin around at night watchin em. When he couldn’t stand it no more he got a gun and shot four of my best bulls. He was tryin to drag a little Texas bull I had off a cow with his bare hands and that bull just figured I reckon he’d by God had enough and come off that cow and gored him. He’s layin up there in Vanderbilt opened up stem to stem and them doctors don’t hold out much hope for him. He’d have to improve some to be a vegetable, what they tell me.

  Good God, Coble said. That’s the damnedest thing I ever heard, old-timer.

  It’s been the ruin of me. I don’t even want to think about the doctor bills.

  Where do you live, Mr. Rutgers?

  I live about seventy miles back from Nashville.

  I’m out of Memphis myself. I might just take them cows off your hands. That’s what I do, buy and sell cattle. You didn’t know that, did you? How’s that for a coincidence? I got caught in that mess of a parade and just had to wait it out.

  If that don’t beat all, Bloodworth said. He took out a thin gold pocketwatch and popped the case on it. I got a bus to catch, he said. You call me up and we might work up a trade on them cows, if I ain’t done sold them.

  Why we’ll go right now, Coble said. You’ll ride in my truck. We’ll drive straight through and if the cows suit me and the money suits you we might just strike up a deal. How’s that sound to you?

  Why I hadn’t thought of it like that, Bloodworth said. That’s the very ticket.

  I’m about ready to kiss this place goodbye anyway, Coble said. Mule parades and folks warpin one another with pool cues. I never seen such a place for foolishness.

  The day was further progressed than Bloodworth had thought and by the time Coble was assisting him into the high cab of the truck evening shadows were lengthening and a fireball of sun lay low in the west. Coble turned the truck eastward and drove fast toward the open highway with Little Rock kaleidoscoping dizzily past the windows on either side and the road lying in wait like a promise someone had made them. When at length they were rolling toward the Tennessee line the old man was touched by a rising tide of exhilaration. Coble as well seemed touched by it for he began to sing. T for Texas, he sang loudly as the big truck strung the curves. T for Tennessee.

  HE WAS COMING up the spring path carrying a bucket of water when he heard a car engine shut off at the foot of the hill. A car door closed and then nothing. Fleming set the pail down and waited. He knew it wasn’t Boyd. If a taxicab had let Boyd out the driver wouldn’t even have shut off the engine. He guessed it was Brady, and Brady had nothing to say that he wanted to hear. He approached nearer to the house, watching the rocky ledge of hill through the cedars.

  A head appeared, a smooth oiled wing of auburn hair. Spivey Spivey in a shortsleeved nylon shirt, a brown paper bag tucked under his deformed arm. Goddamn it, the boy said. He sat down to wait.

  He could hear Spivey knocking at the front door. Fleming, Spivey called. Hellfire, just go away, the boy thought. He wondered how persistent Spivey was, how stubborn. He was caught in a freezeout here without supplies or weapons, some hunter would kick his bleached bones out of the leaves some winter to come.

  He looked. Spivey was standing on the porch silhouetted against a harsh cobalt sky, an electric sky in a failed painting. He wasn’t holding the bag. He stood a time as if undecided. Then he turned and went back down the hill. As if expecting a trap the boy waited not only until the car had started up but until it had turned at the mailbox and its sound had diminished down the road. Then he took up the water and went on.

  The bag was on the doorsill tilted against the door itself. Three books. A book called Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger, Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote, a huge volume by Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the Rifer. When he opened the Wolfe novel there was a thin sheaf of bills, two twenties and a ten, stuck to page one with a piece of transparent tape.

  ALBRIGHT PARKED the car where a chainlink fence stopped him and followed the fence by touch until he found a gate. He’d commenced hearing the dogs when he cut the switch and they had grown louder, a cacophony of barks and howls and long plaintive moans such as wolves were told to call one to the other. He didn’t know if the dogs were walled in or walled out but there was a wild sound to their voices that stayed him with caution. So far he was trespassing, he hadn’t been asked in, he hadn’t even made it to a door to knock on. He guessed he should have come in the daytime but he had felt instinctively that this was a thing best done at night. He glanced about, picking out an escape route, a back door out of here, imagining himself levitating the chainlink fence with a dog’s teeth clamped in the tail of his shirt.

  The house sat yellowlit beyond the inked shadow of the great pine and he strode on toward it, the hot pungent smell washing over him as he passed beneath it.

  Who are you? a voice asked out of the darkness.

  Albright leapt at the sound and turned in its direction. A man was sitting in a metal glider watching him, barely visible in the darkness. Albright had thought he was walking past an empty glider.

  My name’s Junior Albright. I’m lookin for Brady Bloodworth.

  I thought that was who you was. I’ve seen you around town and out on the roads. What did you want with Brady Bloodworth?

  I need to talk to him, Albright said.

  You are talkin to him. Get that other chair, set a while. I like to set out here in the early part of the night and settle my mind. I got a restless mind, it don’t always do what I want it to. What can I help you with? If you’re sellin somethin I won’t buy it and if you’re runnin for some office I probably won’t vote for you.

  It ain’t nothin like that. I need to hire you for somethin.

  I don’t work out much anymore. Did you want the cards read?

  Albright had seated himself in the other glider. The night was warm and balmy but the metal was already wet with dew and it felt cool against his skin. I don’t want my fortune told, he said, perhaps feeling that all of his future at once might overwhelm him, he’d rather learn it a piece at a time.

  Well, I can see things but you have to run out the cards for me to see them. You may as well break down and tell me what it is you want.

  Harwood ain’t carryin the mail no more, Albright said tentatively.

  No, he ain’t.

  Albright was noticing that the dogs had fallen silent. It seemed to him that they had grown quiet at the moment that Brady had said Who are you? out of the darkness, as if they had been waiting for him to speak and so right the world.

  There’s a fellow, Albright began, and while Brady listened in respectful silence and his voice took on an aggrieved quality he told the story of the crimper’s destruction. He was remembering the heat dancing off the metal roof, the weight of Woodall’s arm on his shoulder in the pool room, his own name typed so neatly on the official-looking papers he had been served with.

  He’s holdin a mortgage on the rest of my life. I won’t never have eight hundred and sixty dollars at one time, and he’s chargin me interest on that that keeps mountin up. They’ve probably had to take on extra hands over at the courthouse to handle all the paperwork, and they’ll likely be wantin me to pay that. I want him off my back. I don’t want him took with no cancer or nothin like that but I want him to let me alone. Maybe he could just wake up some mornin and realize it was all a bad mistake.

  Come on in the house and drink a cup of coffee, Brady said.

  They sat at a kitchen table cove
red with oilcloth so faded and worn he could see the weave of the cloth at the corners of the table, faintly discern lithographed coffee grinders and spice mills on the slick cloth. Once a tiny old woman who looked like an Indian passed through the room but she did not speak, just nodded once birdlike at Albright and went into the front room.

  Brady took from a purple chamois bag a deck of cards. He shuffled them. His fingers were long and delicately formed as a woman’s, the nails pink and smooth as if he manicured them. They moved the cards with a liquid dexterity, placed them with a slap on the oilcloth before Albright.

  Cut them, he said.

  I don’t want my fortune told.

  Then I won’t tell it. You’ve got to cut the cards anyway.

  Albright cut the deck and slid it back to Brady. Brady rifled the cards into three stacks then fanned each section and sat in bemused concentration. It took him a long time. Albright sat in a strained silence, like a man in a doctor’s office waiting to find out just what it is he’s got. He studied the fading flowers climbing the wallpaper, the windows that instead of showing the world outside turned the room back at him in a tense claustrophobic reflection.

  At length Brady scooped them up and restacked them and restored them to their soft bag. He studied Albright in silence, his blue eyes focused and so intense that for a moment Albright felt that he was staring with clinical detachment into his very soul, turning to the back pages where his darkest and most shameful secrets were written in cryptic notation, and he turned slightly in his chair, as if he’d in some manner impede Brady’s view.

  It’ll be tricky, Brady said.

  What?

  I said the cards when I run them out showed me it’d be tricky. When Harwood run over the dog he done it on purpose. He told me to put the dog up and I didn’t and he run over it. That’s black and white, left and right, up and down. Your situation is blurrier than that. You did break his whatchamacallit, his crimper, and he did pay money for it. Whether he paid eight hundred and sixty dollars for it I can’t say. The cards are uncertain and I’m thinkin he’s tryin to make money off you. He don’t like you. I believe he’s had it in for you for a long time.

  Then you can’t do it?

  Oh, I can do it all right. I just said it’d be tricky.

  Say, how come you can do things like this, anyway?

  I don’t know. I always had secondsight. I was born with a caul, I always knowed things. It seems natural to me, a better question might be how come you can’t. I reckon I just see a wider range of things than most folks. Other people can just see the things, I can see the connection between them. Once when I was eight years old I was choppin cotton for a feller down on Grinder’s Creek. This dog I had met me when I was halfway home and walked the rest of the way right beside me. I found out later he had been dead for two days, but what does that mean? He was as real as me or you. He was a collie and had long hair and there was cockleburs in it. I stopped on the way home and pulled them out, I can still see them comin off with long strands of his hair wound up in the burrs. Does that make any sense to you? It don’t to me. All I can do is take it and go on. I can witch for water. Pa dug out a hole forty feet deep and five feet in diameter because I told him there was no water where he was diggin. When he finally moved to where I said he hit water at eighteen feet and that’s the well we’re usin to this day.

  His voice had taken on the curious singsong quality of a fundamentalist preacher. It made Albright nervous and kept reminding him of his crazy father but he didn’t get up to leave. He had begun to believe for the first time that Brady might actually do such a thing.

  What do you mean by tricky?

  I can’t control what’ll happen. I had a picture in my mind of Harwood clutchin at his bowels and cryin but this don’t give me no clear picture. Just somethin about a machine. I guess because you say that thing you broke was a machine. It’s like … it’s like there’s a wall, but my hand’ll go through the wood, and on the other side are all these things that can happen but ain’t happened yet. They’re just swirlin around. Might never happen. But when I get hold of one I can’t always see what I’m gettin. You see? When I haul it out through the wall into this world I may not know what it is, but it’s goin to happen, and you can take that to the bank.

  Albright sat in silence. Brady was watching him. The silence went on until it honed itself to a thin wire so taut it gave off a faint humming. Brady’s eyes had fixed him where he sat. Albright thought of taking out a cigarette and lighting it, just to have something to do, but he sat without moving.

  You want me to hex him?

  Yes. I got to get him off my back, get some relief. He’s drivin me crazy, I think he’s gettin a kick out of it. Do it.

  Then let it be on your head. Have you got fifty dollars?

  Albright had it in his front pocket, five folded tens, and he laid it atop the table. Brady did not pick it up, as if now that its existence was confirmed it was of no moment, as if it was the willing exchange rather than possession that mattered.

  I’ll need somethin of his. Somethin he touched.

  Albright rose and went through the front room. The old woman was peering at an unfolded newspaper through a pair of spectacles and she did not look up. Outside the yard was dappled with shadow and light, the moon was out now and curdled clouds ran before it as if in the keep of some enormous lunar wind.

  He took the blue hardhat out of the back floorboard and for a moment just stood holding it, wondering how Brady could use it, trying to feel something of Woodall in its sleek metal surface. He put the hat on his head and stood remembering the hot metal through his shoes, the clicketyclack of the crimper. He tried to think as Woodall might think. Then in a moment of insight he saw himself as a fraction of the fool he was. He felt a tremendous compulsion to just get in the Dodge and drive away without looking back. Then he took off the hardhat and went slinging it along in his hand toward the house.

  THERE WAS a hollow booming sound that he dreamed he went from room to room looking for, but it was always in the wall he’d just left or the one he was bound for. Then it fell silent. His eyes opened. He looked at the phosphorescent hands of the clock.

  You want to open the Goddamned door?

  Fleming raised up and felt around for his shoes.

  The pounding commenced again. I know you’re in there, a voice said.

  All right, all right, I’m coming, he called.

  When he opened the door his uncle Warren Bloodworth was regarding him with a kind of bland patience that belied the intensity of the pounding. He was standing in the moonlight with his handsome dissipated face showing only a benign placidity, blinking occasionally as if waiting for the boy to do something he had already been instructed to do.

  You’re a sound sleeper, ain’t you?

  Well. It’s two o’clock in the morning. I’m usually abed by then. Are you drunk?

  I probably am. That’s not my problem though, I’ve managed somehow to run off the road down there and I can’t seem to get back on it. You reckon you could give me a hand?

  Sure, I guess so. What do you want me to do?

  Anything would be an improvement over what I’ve managed. You don’t have a mule or anything like that in there do you?

  I don’t have a mule or anything like a mule.

  I guess Boyd gave up on farming.

  I guess.

  Well come on anyway. Maybe we can figure something out.

  They cut through the woods with Warren falling twice before they reached the embankment that shouldered the road. Fleming could see the car tilted off the road in a stand of sumac that followed a three-strand barbed wire fence.

  Can you drive? Warren had halfslid and halffallen down the embankment and now he was struggling up onto the roadbed.

  Brady lets me drive his tractor. Junior Albright let me drive his car once, but I wasn’t very good at it.

  Hellfire, it sounds to me like you’re qualified for a chauffeur’s license. Get in and see i
f you can do anything with it.

  He tried rocking the car, shifting from low to reverse and popping the clutch and back again but the right rear wheel seemed to have no purchase and spun impotently until he could smell thick acrid smoke from the burning rubber. He cut the switch off and then the lights and got out.

  He found a stack of fencepost inside Dee’s field and threw three of them over the fence and climbed through the strands of wire. He jammed a post as far as it would go under the rear wheel and wedged the others beneath it and got back into the car. The car smelled like new leather and whiskey and perfume and some other odor, musky and somehow unpleasant.

  He cranked the car and when he popped the clutch he felt the rear end shift and come off the post but when it did it caught solid chert and sent the car spinning onto the roadbed with the barbed wire breaking and whanging away into the darkness and him whipping the steering wheel impotently this way and that and the red chert bank looming enormous in the headlights. He slammed the brakes as hard as he could and slid lockwheeled to the side of the ditch with something slamming hard against the seat and knocking him into the steering wheel and thumping solidly into the rear floorboard. When he looked back over the seat a woman in bra and panties was struggling up out of the floorboard ranking lank strands of hair out of her eyes like someone struggling up through deep foliage.

  You little bastard, she said. I’ll claw your eyes out. What have you done with Warn?

  Fleming rolled down the glass. Warren, he called.