Provinces of Night: A Novel

by William Gay

  He didn’t know what to make of this or even how to reply to it so he just nodded and pulled the door closed behind him.

  She was not in the drugstore or in the Eat and Run Cafe. Nor about the snowy streets, which were as bare and bleak as if the town lay under an edict that shuttered its citizens inside. He sat with the Dodge parked at the curb and sipped at the whiskey and kept one eye out for the law but the law itself seemed denned up somewhere with the dirt pulled after. He drank and searched the streets as if he could conjure her appearance by sheer will. It was his intention to marry her on the spot or as close to it as possible. Or to launch himself into insane recriminations about Neal. He had no idea what his intentions were beyond the next sip of Itchy Mama’s whiskey, which had now cooled far below 98.6, and watching the snow list and slide on the glass. The day was failing and down the street where the poolroom was the nightlight came on, the harsh blue neon bleeding into the frozen air like ink in water.

  He cranked the car and drove around the city square, down side-streets blown free of snow. Snow was sticking now on the uneven surfaces of folk’s lawns and in the glow of the streetlights it had a bluish cast.

  He was about to cut his losses and leave when he noticed a brick building with a brass plaque that said LIBRARY. He parked the car and went in. She was sitting at a table reading a book, her back to the door, and she did not turn toward the noise the door made opening or closing. She was alone at her table and he crossed and seated himself opposite her.

  What are you reading?

  She looked up from her book, her eyes lost for a moment in transit from the place the book had taken her to this room with its oaken tables and the intense young man sitting across from her. She looked for a moment as if she couldn’t fathom who he was or why he might care what she was reading.

  Then she said, What are you doing here?

  It’s snowing, he said, meaning to say anything but that.

  You drove forty miles to give me a weather report? I could have got that from the radio. Or looked out the window.

  You didn’t tell me what you’re reading.

  Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. It’s about my favorite book, and I’ve probably read it a dozen times already. Is the snow really starting to stick?

  Your mother said tell you to get home. What’s the matter with her? She treated me very nearly as if I was human.

  She’s desperately searching for a bridegroom, Raven Lee said. She’s measured you for a suit and tie and decided you’re better than nothing.

  I’m not sure I know what you mean.

  She gave him a small cryptic smile. You will here in a minute, she said. Let me get this book checked out and if you’re so set on driving me home I guess I’ll let you.

  When she rose with the book and her purse and crossed to a desk where a bluehaired woman sat he saw that what he had judged a blouse was in fact a maternity smock and that beneath it her waistline had thickened considerably since they had sat in her room listening to the old man’s records. While he waited for the library card to be processed he crossed to the glass double doors and stood looking out. The night had darkened and all he could see was his reflection and snow drifting against it. Then Raven Lee’s reflection turned with the book and approached him. Her reflection slid an arm through his. They went out.

  Did you see that woman watching you? She was wondering if you’re the proud father.

  He opened the passenger door and she got in. He closed the door and came around and climbed in. It was very cold and he cranked the engine and sat for a time with a hand cupped over the heater vent and watching windshield wipers clear the snow.

  It’s starting to stick now, he said.

  I’m showing pretty good, don’t you think? she asked, laying a hand on her swollen abdomen. This is what they call showing, you’ve heard people say that, she’s starting to show. I may be better at showing than I expected to.

  To have something to do with his hands and to avoid answering her he eased the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. There seemed no other cars anywhere and he backed around and turned in the street and drove to the square where the traffic light went from red to green shuttling phantom cars through the windy snow. He did not speak until he had laboriously maneuvered off the twisting sidestreets and down the hill to Raven Lee’s house.

  What are you going to do?

  Have you read Rebecca?

  Yeah, I read it a long time ago. It’s pretty good.

  It’s just about my favorite book.

  He had left the engine running for such poor heat as the heater was pumping out but it was still cold in the car. You said that, he said. What are you going to do?

  I’m going to read it again.

  Beyond her clean profile the porchlight flared like a cheerless beacon. The door opened and he could dimly see the mother come onto the porch and stare at the car before the cold drove her back inside.

  I guess it’s Neal’s baby?

  You guess correctly. Neal’s the only guy I ever got serious enough with for things to get to this point. And they sort of reached this point without me knowing what was going on. I guess you could say it’s sort of out of my hands.

  You never told me what you planned to do.

  She turned to look at him. He thought she might have smiled but in the poor light he couldn’t tell. I don’t know how much you know about biology but this is something that’s pretty much happening on its own. I’m not doing anything. Or planning on doing anything, except having a baby.

  I meant like an operation. There are doctors who will perform abortions, for enough money.

  Not in Clifton. Besides, I’m way too far along. It wouldn’t matter anyway. I’m not going to kill this baby.

  I reckon Neal knows.

  Oh yes. He knows in no uncertain terms. Mama seen to that. She was trying to make him marry me, even with him denying right down to the ground that it was his baby. I said to hell with that. I’m sixteen years old, I’m not signing the rest of my life away to some jerk who’d lie about a thing like that and can’t even keep his pants zipped. Anyway, he’d already quit coming around. I think he must have some sort of sixth sense that warns him when this happens.

  That sorry son of a bitch. I’ll kill him.

  This time she did smile, and leaning toward him in the darkness, laid a hand on his arm.

  If you’re going to start in killing folks right and left you may as well start with me. He didn’t waylay me in some dark alley and rape me. Club me over the head and drag me back to his cave. We did it, the both of us, I’d be lying if I blamed it all on him. He can just walk, and if I walk, it sort of goes with me.

  God, he said.

  I guess this is just my way of telling you to get the hell away from me and leave me alone, the way you asked me to do that time.

  I must be the dumbest person in the world.

  You’re pretty dumb, all right.

  Brady can see the future like a man reading a newspaper and Neal’s got this fabulous sixth sense. All this shit just blindsides me out of a clear blue sky.

  Oh stop feeling sorry for yourself. At least you don’t get morning sickness. You’ll get over it. You might even learn something from it. If it ever happens to you you’ll know not to walk out from under it.

  I’d know that without having to learn it, he said.

  Little by little the windowglass had gone opaque. Rain had begun to mix with the snow and instead of tracking down the glass it was freezing in a thin translucent skim that made the streetlamps blurred and otherworldly. The interior of the car seemed the world’s last outpost, these two the last two survivors.

  I’ve got to go, he said. Likely I’ll slide off the road and be walking in this mess and it won’t be nearly as much fun as it was with you.

  That was sort of fun, looking back on it. Probably because I’m comfortable with you. I was never comfortable with Neal, though I guess a look at me would make you doubt that.

  Were you pre
gnant by then? That night by the river?

  Of course I was. I was even a tiny bit pregnant that night you got the crap kicked out of you. I’ve never known you when I wasn’t pregnant. I haven’t seen Neal since before that night Junior brought you over and we met. He doesn’t even seem real to me anymore. Like I dreamed him or something. He just came to me in a dream and knocked me up and then I woke up.

  You don’t have to be so crude about it.

  That was the least immaculate conception you could possibly imagine.

  I’ve got to go.

  Then go. No, wait, not yet. Anyway you don’t have to go. Sleep on the couch, I doubt if Mama would say a word. By now she’s probably thinking any Bloodworth is better than no Bloodworth.

  Don’t think I wouldn’t like to. But it’s getting slicker all the time and I’ve got to get back. Somebody has to make sure the old man has wood brought in and a fire kept up. He’s sort of got to depending on me.

  She had opened her purse and taken out a small wirebound notebook and a pen. She opened the notebook and wrote a number on a page and tore the page out. Here. Do something for me. When you get back to Ackerman’s Field, I don’t care what time it is, call this number. That’s a girlfriend of mine and she’ll tell me tomorrow.

  Why on earth would you want me to do that?

  I’m hooked on you. No, I don’t guess I’ll ever see you again but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life thinking you’re iced over in a ditch somewhere. Will you do it?

  I guess I’d do about anything you asked me to.

  Except leave me the hell alone.

  Except that.

  She couldn’t get the door open and he had to reach across her and shove the door hard with the heel of his hand. It opened with a soft shriek of splintering ice and he slid across the seat after her and helped her to the door. The sidewalk was iced over and they walked in the grass beside it. At the door she squeezed his hand hard for a moment but there seemed nothing at all to be said and when he turned back toward the street the world glittered like an ornate world fashioned from ice.

  In times to come he would decide he made it back simply because he didn’t care if he made it back or not. The world came and went through the headlights, freezing rain blurred the road until it finally vanished and every so often he’d have to get out and scrape a porthole to see through. Then coming off the long hill before the river bridge the car went into a slow drift, the rear wheels spinning sidewise, the car drifting off the hill in eerie freefall, the headlights limning the steep dropoff into darkness, telephone poles strung with ice like strands of crystal, the topmost branches of trees that beckoned like a haven that promised a warm place to sleep, to rest forever. He took this foot off the brake and just let the wheels roll on their own. Little by little the car drifted around and righted itself, the black highway like a mitered track that slid toward the cold iron trestle of the bridge rising out of the dark like a tunnel’s mouth. In his mind the unseen water below it was steelgray and choppy and hard as stone.

  He drank the last of the whiskey and tossed the bottle into the floorboard. He did not know what time it was but he judged it late. He saw no other fool on the road save a highway patrolman he met who was paid to be there but he saw cars slid down embankments and cars abandoned by folks who’d decided walking might be safer. Still the snow and freezing rain fell. He lost count of the times he had to stop and clear the glass.

  All this was nervewracking drive he’d had in the back of his mind the grail of hills Ackerman’s Field lay within and the knowledge that if he got up them it would be on foot. He thought longingly of Mother Halfacre’s vomitflecked couch, cheery waves of heat rolling off the woodstove. But when he got to the long hill on Highway 13 it had been salted and there were black strips of macadam visible through the ice like remnants of an ancient and more temperate world. He drove on and finally into the ghosttown of Ackerman’s Field, the town square white with blowing snow and so utterly deserted it might have been beset with plague and abandoned.

  He called from a payphone but the phone rang endlessly somewhere in a house he’d never seen and he finally gave it up. He guessed everyone of right mind was somewhere covered with blankets asleep. Only fools abroad this night and apparently only one of them.

  When he could make no further headway in the frozen night he had fetched halfway to the top of a steep hill with the ice coming straight at him out of heavens so black they negated the headlights, the rear wheels spinning impotently and the car sliding sideways and backward onto the shoulder of the road. The door would not budge. Finally he turned in the seat and kicked bothfooted until it opened in a hail of flying ice and he got out cautiously, hanging onto the door, his feet skating crazily on the slick incline.

  Here was a world so alien he seemed to have taken a wrong turn somewhere and wound up in an arctic wasteland, the wind howling down through the frozen trees like wind through the strings of an enormous illtuned harp, the rain coming slant and hard and freezing upon everything it touched. The earth glowed with an eerie blue phosphorescence that seemed to be flickering somewhere beneath the transparent ice and tended away into the blurred mauve trees. He’d seen childhood snows every winter of his life but nothing that had quite prepared him for this. He reconsidered the wisdom of the derelicts huddled in Itchy Mama’s parlor, and he thought, a man could die out in this shit. Really die, wake up stiff as a poker in some other world. You’d have to thaw to even ease through the golden portals.

  He had a thought to stay in the car but immediately abandoned it. He had to keep moving. No move is the wrong move, Warren had said that night, and Warren though drunk may have stumbled upon some philosophy that had escaped Sophocles or Plato. Life is motion, stasis is death. Got to keep moving, got to keep moving, blues falling down like hail, he remembered his grandfather singing in some old bottleneck blues. Another, perhaps more applicable, I’m the man that moves with the icicles hanging on the trees.

  He hammered on the trunk with the jackhandle until he shattered the ice in the lock and finally got the key to turn, fully expecting it to break off in his fingers. His hands felt useless as blocks of wood. He’d have liked to shove them deep into the cleft between Itchy Mama’s enormous breasts where she’d heated the whiskey to its body-accommodating temperature. He’d have wallowed in her arms, drunk the heat from her body like blood. Lain in her stricken grasp like a man fallen asleep in the warm embrace of a grizzly.

  He found the blanket and wound it about himself as best he could and staggered off into the night toward home. With the blanket about him and cowled over his face he looked like some crazed young monk or an acolyte testing the temper of his faith against the elements.

  He cut through the woods over terrain he’d known all his life but even this familiarity was perilous. The weight of ice and snow caused huge branches to split away from the trunks of trees and they fell all night with sounds like highcaliber riflefire. His feet were beyond cold, finally beyond feeling, clumsy chunks of insensate matter trudging woodenly through the snow. He fell and got up and went on. Once he sat leaned against a tree and thought he’d rest a while then go on. Somehow it seemed to be warmer here, a more temperate part of the blizzard, perhaps the eye of the storm. The room where its heart was housed. His mind seemed to be shutting down as well, coming and going, shorted voltage dancing across the circuits in flickering blue light.

  Once he thought Boyd and his mother had returned in his absence. They’d built up a huge fire and the walls of the house were amber with its glow and the heat-saturated air jerked him inside like a warm embrace. Your supper’s in the warming closet, his mother said. We eat while you were traipsin around in the woods like a crazyman.

  When finally he fell through the door the cold and darkness rolled on him wave on wave like black water. He wanted heat worse than light and before he’d even lit the lamp he crammed the stove with paper and pine kindling and by feel found the kerosene can and threw on oil as well. He kept breaking
matches or dropping them but finally he had it lighted. He could hear the heat from the kerosene roaring in the flue and he sat before the stove with his hands upraised to it like a supplicant.

  THE WEATHER had been holding below a viable painting temperature so Albright had decided to do all the scraping and caulking then paint when the weather moderated. He had scraped cornice and gables and shutters and caulked everywhere cold might gain entry around the windows. Some of the windows had long needed reglazing and he was finishing that when Mrs. Woodall came out the front door.

  Mr. Albright, I’d like to see you a few minutes when you get time off from your work.

  Well, to tell you the truth I’m about through here. I’ve about got her except for paintin and it’s too cold for that. It keeps tryin to sleet or snow or somethin but I didn’t see any need of comin back tomorrow to glaze three or four windows, I thought I’d just knock her out tonight and go.

  Well, you’d know more about that than I would. We have plenty of time. At any rate, I want to talk to you. Just come in the front door, it isn’t locked. Don’t bother knocking, there’s no one here except me.

  When he’d finished the windows he capped the can of glazing and stowed his tools in the bed of the truck and went up the flagstone walk to the front door. The door was an ornate entrance of mahogany that had been let go almost too long. But Albright had stripped and sanded the wood and the carved cherubim that mantled it and sealed everything with preservative and he was well satisfied with the way it looked.

  He went into a living room with a floor of pale polished oak. Rugs thrown about here and there. Pictures on the walls. He looked about cautiously as if his mere presence might begin breaking things. The room looked cozy and comfortable and he could feel a warm rush of air blowing discreetly from somewhere.

  Have a seat in that easy chair in there and warm, she called from another room. I imagine you’re about chilled to the bone.

  He seated himself in the chair as told. He was cold indeed and the soothing heat seemed to be soaking itself into his pores like some rich oily liquid. He leaned back and closed his eyes.