Provinces of Night (6 page)

You always made the strongest coffee.

If I wanted to drink muddy water I’d just drink muddy water.

He sipped from his coffee. What was it a warning of? he asked, though he knew, knew all this by rote.

It was when old Mr. Bloodworth, Elbert’s daddy, that would have been your great-granddaddy, was laying abed. He’d had pneumonia but the night I’m speakin of he seemed to be some stronger. He’d knowed Elbert that day and spoke a few words. He was layin right there by that window, in that very bed.

When the boy looked at the daybed a cold bone hand lay on his shoulder, ice crept the back of his neck. The window had gone opaque with night, reflected light threw the room back at him, a dark gangling boy and an old woman holding coffee cups.

It was nearly one o’clock in the mornin. Everbody was asleep but me, I was settin up with Mr. Bloodworth. It was hot, in August, and so stiflin you couldn’t hardly breathe. Heat lightnin in the west. That was before Warren got the electricity and we didn’t have no fan or nothin. I looked about Mr. Bloodworth and thought I’d go stand in the door a minute to see if I could get any air and that was when I seen it.

Brady was reading a farm magazine or pretending to but as well seemed transfixed by the old woman’s voice. His glasses had slipped far down his nose and he had stopped turning pages.

It was a white shape. Like a woman in a white dress or gown. It was comin across that field on the other side of the garden there, kind of glidin, comin faster than a person could walk. But when it come to the garden fence it stopped like it was goin between the woven wire and the strand of bobwire at the top, the woven wire was loose there then and it was just like a person pushin the wire down and climbin through it. Mr. Bloodworth made some kind of a racket and that brought me to myself. I turned around and when I looked back Mr. Bloodworth was settin up in bed lookin at the window there. Then he just fell back with his eyes open. He had died.

I always wondered why a haint or a warnin had to crawl through a
barbed wire fence, Brady said. It looks to me like it would just hit that fence like it never amounted to nothin and keep on goin.

I never made the world, the old woman said irritably. I don’t know why everthing does what it does. All I know is what I seen.

Before he went up to the attic to bed he went outside for a time in the deepening silence. Far to the south lightning flared and died in photoelectric brilliance, relit the clouds briefly before the night sucked them back down to darkness. So far away no thunder came, so far away it was unreal. He thought of dark hollows, lightning on rainwet leaves, rain, and Boyd crouched for shelter under a dripping cedar, his fierce vexed face already impatiently scanning the night for a road the lightning might show him.

An owl called from somewhere out of the telluric dark. He imagined shapes in the shadows, a white form telescoping toward him out of the night, and he turned and went back in.

He was to sleep in his Uncle Warren’s old room, and the stairway to it led out of the room his grandmother called the pantry. He stood for a moment looking about the room in a kind of wonder. Here was largess beyond measure. Shelves and shelves of canned foods. String beans and peaches, strawberries in their rich amber juice. Sugar-cured hams hanging on the walls, a side of bacon cured with smoke and brown sugar, bins of potatoes and apples, a barrel of flour and one of meal. He thought wryly that Boyd certainly hadn’t inherited this trait: he seemed to want nothing the world had to offer. He wanted nothing but the clothes on his back and he wasn’t terribly concerned about those. He seemed to feel that his movement through life should be unfettered by the ownership and accumulation of objects that slowed him down.

The room he slept in was shaped like a triangle, its sides formed by the rafters that framed the roof. He found a box of magazines and read the second installment of a serial by George Sessions Perry: he could find neither the first nor third segment but he read it anyway. It began to rain gently, he could hear it on the roof, a comforting murmur of faroff thunder. He read on, while his Uncle Warren watched him from a gilt frame on the bureau, until he lowered the magazine and studied the photograph.

Warren handsome in his Army uniform, his Congressional Medal of Honor pinned to his tunic. The smooth wing of his hair, clipped mustache
like a nineteen-forties matinee idol. The boy thought of the invasion of Normandy that Warren had told him about, scrambling up the beaches over the bodies that had gone before, mortar fire that lit the night and exploding artillery shells that trailed out of the velvet sky like strings of phosphorus.

He slept but awoke sometime before day in this strange room and for a time he didn’t know where he was. How he’d come to be here. He had no idea what time it was. The room began to feel like an enormous womb that was keeping him alive with its warmth, its comfort. It seemed alive, he imagined its stertorous breathing, he could feel its dark heart’s blood coursing through the wiring, the plumbing. He got up and moved through the sleeping house. In the kitchen he made sandwiches of biscuits and slabs of ham and he cut two wedges of dried peach pie and put all this into a flour sack.

He went outside and struck out past the dog kennel toward home. The rain had stopped. A few of the dogs awoke as he passed and they roused themselves and followed him sleepily for a time. He paid them no mind. His feet were sure and confident on the path his eyes could barely see. They knew every turning, every windfall tree that lay across it. One by one the dogs fell away as if he was bound for some world they wanted no dealing with, and they turned and went back toward comfort and civilization.

 

S
PRING THAT YEAR
was a strange and solitary time. There were days when the only car that passed below his house was the mailman, weeks when he spoke or heard no word of human speech. Boyd did not come and he did not come and there was no letter, as if the border of trees he’d walked into had fallen closed behind him like a curtain that shrouded the mysteries of one world from the mysteries of another. Brady was sent to check on the boy but Fleming did not return to his grandmother’s. He was sent again but this time the boy watched from the shade of the woods and did not acknowledge his presence. Brady stood on the porch and knocked and waited a while, the sun like a fire in his bright red hair, and then he went away. If he returned Fleming was not there to see it.

The house was full of odd silences, dark corners. The house seemed to be listening to him. To be waiting. As if he’d begun to tell some tale and the house was waiting for him to continue, listening patiently to hear the end of the story. But he’d lost the thread of the narrative and he could not go on.

The books he’d read no longer comforted him. The progression of the words had been subtly altered so that they deceived him, sentences had been shifted like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle and arranged into lies. He forgot to eat until finally things began to look subtly different to him, their edges shimmering with a bluegold aura. There seemed imponderable mysteries veined in a leaf, he watched light that fell through a gauzy curtain onto a tabletop with a bemused wonder. He watched its sweep across the rough pine grain of the wood as if he couldn’t fathom where it came from, what purpose it might possibly serve. He began to suspect another, deeper layer of time, a time of stone and cloud and tree to which the time of clocks and calendars was a gross mockery cobbled up by savages. He felt the ways of men fall from him like sundered shackles.

He stayed out of the house, he was much of the time in the woods, he felt like some animal half domesticated but ultimately unable to resist the feral ways of the forest. The spring nights were fecund and warm and alive, and there were nights he did not come in at all.

He followed the creek where it wound toward the river and he stayed in the woods for days. He came out in a long stretch of bottomland at Riverside across from which was a country store. He bought candy bars and when he spoke his voice felt rusty and unused, it fell on his ears in a harsh croaking. Such folks as he saw had begun to look at him oddly. With the candy bars he returned to the woods and went on toward the river. He thought when he reached it he might follow to see where it led then follow that. Storms seemed to be following the streams as well and from the shelter of a cave he watched lightning sear the night sky like something irreparably wrong in the vaulted dome of the world itself and walked on over hailstones that lay gleaming like pearls.

He ate the candy bars and when they were gone speared fish in clearwater pools or ate nothing. He seemed to be drawing inward toward some point at which he would be reduced to the fundamental essence of himself. Finally he turned back. He’d reached a border beyond
which lay a world he wanted no dealings with. He left the river and went back over hills and ridges he’d never seen but which had a comfortable familiarity about them nonetheless so that they led him without a misstep to the head of Grinders Creek.

Going up the long spine of ridges below Dee Hixson’s he remembered a childhood haunt and descended into a deep hollow wickered in greengold light and followed it past an old whiskey still of which remained only twisted copper tubing and broken jugs and rusted fifty-gallon drums chopped with axes. Past an ancient springbox hewn or chiseled out of the limestone itself and to the ruins of a log cabin almost drowned in riotous honeysuckle and mimosa. The roof was halfcaved and virid with a thick growth of moss.

He stooped to pass beneath a tilted lintel and entered the house. It was curiously cold, perpetually shaded, profoundly abandoned save for a blacksnake that dropped from a ceiling beam and flowed like a moving inkslash through a floorboard and gone. He climbed a steep narrow stairway to the upper floor. The drone of dirtdaubers at their labors was all there was to break the silence. He looked about. Through the missing shakes the harsh trees and unreal sky looked intense and oversaturated, color bleeding into color. In the shadows of a wall an old work shoe cured hard as stone, like some piece of art sculpted from an alien material. Old newspapers pasted to the boxed walls. He crossed and read what he could as if to see was there news posted here for him but the paper was foxed and crumbling and such sentences as he could decipher seemed to be cryptic references to violent deeds splintered from some larger and more violent whole and they bore so little relationship to his life they might have been strange oral accounts filtered down from some older order or just ravings leaked through madhouse walls.

For this place as well was steeped in old violence. Folks called this place haunted, felt the emanations of an unspeakable act moving outward like ripples on water. Long ago, he did not know the year, a sharecropper named Parnell had come in from the fields after laying his crops by. Perhaps he had drunk at the spring, washed his face in the cold water. He had come into this shaded cabin and at some uncharted point had killed his wife and three children then turned the shotgun on himself.

Young Fleming Bloodworth sat for a time on the top stairstep trying
to divine answers to this old lost mystery, the inevitable why of it, the event that permitted a previously forbidden thought, the impulse that transformed thought back to deed. In the charged gloom he heard the rattle of trace chains, a horse’s hooves click on stone, heavy footsteps on the porch, the soft laughter of children at play.

He descended the staircase and went with some haste into the hot white light. He hurried through walls of flickering greenery. He had begun to fear for his sanity, felt that madness tracked him like a homeless dog, needed only a kind word or gesture to throw its lot with him forever.

It was a season of violent storms. He would be jarred out of sleep by an enormous concussion of thunder, open his eyes to a room of photoelectric light so intense all the color had been drained away. The thunder would go rolling across the bottomland in diminishing intensity, and wrapped in a blanket he’d go onto the porch and watch the storm blowing in from the southwest, the dome of light faulted by lightning so that the wild unfolding landscape of agitated trees and wet black stone was shuttered light to dark and back again like a series of snapshots that bore no relation one to the other. The wind would be stiff and cool on his face and in his hair and before it the pale undersides of maple leaves ran like quicksilver. Save for the wind in the trees and the thunder the night would be silent, holding its breath. The wind bore sticks and chaff and stripped leaves, the feel and smell of rain and ozone. The lightning wrought everything in bold relief, brought images leaping out of the dark in surreal clarity, and in its glare he would see like some release from tension the first wave of rain approaching, swinging slant and silver in the light, distorted by the wind, and behind it Hixson’s house and the hills that framed it blurring then vanishing. The rain would be in the trees now and the first heavy drops striking the roof like stones.