Provinces of Night: A Novel Read online

  It had come down finally to a choice between Bloodworth and her father and she hesitated only a moment before she climbed onto the wagonseat with Bloodworth. Another man might have noted only that she chose the wagon, which was already turned in the yard and pointed outward bound but Bloodworth saw the hesitation. He saw it as a lack of commitment, and while realizing how absurd this was, nevertheless wore it the rest of his life like a scar.

  What he told Fleming was a shorthand version and there were things he kept to himself not because they painted a picture or told a story he did not want told but because they were things he could not articulate.

  He could tell Fleming he was a musician but he could not communicate what the music said to him or said to the people he played it for. The music told itself, it made some obscure connection for which there were no words. The music was its own story, but a man could dip into the vast reservoir of folk and blues lines and phrases and images and construct his own story: though upon performing it and without it losing any relevance to his own life it now belonged to the audience as well. It was something he could not fathom. The old songs with juryrigged verses like bodies cobbled up out of bones from a thousand skeletons. Songs about death and lost love and rambling down the line because sometimes down the line was the only place left. Songs that treated the most desperate of loss with a dark sardonic humor. I’m goin where the climate suits my clothes, the song said, not saying the frustration and despair that created it, saying that in the sheer lonesomeness of the sound, in the old man’s driving banjo. There was an eerie timelessness about it that said it could have been written a thousand years ago, or it could have been an unfinished song about events that had not yet played themselves out.

  So quick it would jerk your breath away I went from bein a man with six hundred dollars in his pocket to a man twelve hundred dollars in debt, the old man said. You couldn’t see over the top of twelve hundred dollars, it was just too big. Julia had a bad sickness and before I knowed it I owed what was then a small fortune to doctors and hospitals. A man might make two or three hundred dollars cash money a year sharecroppin. I said hundred, and I said year.

  Then I had a fallin out with the landlord and he took the crop. Lookin back on it I can see it was as much my fault as it was his. I was always quick to get mad and slow to get over it. The way I saw it he cheated me, not just me but everybody that scooted a chair up to my table. I beat hell out of him, and there we went with all our plunder roped to the wagon. Winter not too far off. Not just one winter to get through, I could see that, but a long line of winters. One winter after another. I went to makin whiskey. Julia thought banjo playin was the road to hell but with whiskey makin she figured I was off the back roads and on the blacktop highway.

  He fitted shells into the cylinder of the gun watching through moted glass Bradshaw sitting the wagon seat erect and proud as a deacon sitting a church pew. Look at the old son of a hitch, he thought, spinning the cylinder as smoothly as a barrel whirling in water. Let’s see if he sets that straight when I clip his spine, let’s see if he keeps that head cocked to hear whatever it is Jesus is whisperin in his ear.

  He’s here because I sent for him, Julia said.

  I don’t know why anybody would send for a dead man, he told her.

  He had to fight her and he had to do it without hurting her. He could have killed Bradshaws, fathers and brothers, all day long like ducks popping up in a shooting gallery but he could not hurt her. He held her finally back to his chest and the soapy smell of her hair in his face and clamped in arms that would not constrain her urgency.

  If you do you’ll have to kill me too, she finally said, and he knew that she was telling him the truth.

  Did I ever hurt you? he asked.

  You hurt me ever breath I draw, she told him.

  He laid the pistol aside and watched the door close behind her and watched her climb aboard the wagon and watched the old man speak not to her but to the mules, popping the lines and turning the wagon into the dusty roadbed, watched the wagon diminish into the white dust until there was nothing to see but dust settling, and watching even that.

  You hurt me ever breath I draw.

  The house was so silent it gave off a faint humming, like a banjo string turned relentlessly toward the breaking point. Madness and self-loathing hung over him like a plague, violence moved in him like another sinister self moving under his skin, trying to adjust itself to the shape of Bloodworth’s body or adjust the body to itself.

  All right, he thought, if they can’t quit tolling her off I will kill them all. If she can’t quit going when they toll her I’ll kill her too. I’ll stretch out Bradshaws till they hold each other up like trees felled in a thick woods, Bradshaws hung up in each other’s tops. They ain’t quit makin shells. They ain’t quit makin caskets. I’ll stretch out Bradshaws from the biggest to the least, till they have to import caskets out of other states, till they run dry on that and bury them without caskets, till they finally throw up their hands and let em lay where they fall.

  When did you quit?

  What? Quit what?

  Quit making whiskey.

  Oh Lord, I never quit. Well, I guess I’ve quit now. I quit a thousand times. I’d quit when anything else come along. One time I got a shot at makin some records. Another time I’d make a cotton crop and do all right with that. A few times I got caught. You’ll damn sure quit when they send you to the penitentiary. A few times I quit to get Julia to come back.

  When she left word at the store for him to come get her he rode there with a pistol shoved down in the waistband of his trousers and the grip and hammer exposed and handy. The Bradshaws had told around what they were going to do to him. Shoot him and let him lay where he fell, just a windfall for the undertaker.

  The house lay like a house in a dream, empty and silent, utterly devoid of motion. Not even light moved on the windowpanes. A hawk hung in the cloudless blue like a hawk frozen forever by the eye of a camera.

  He waited. When the door opened inward he could feel the checks on the pistol grip against his palm. It was her. No one else showed a face, no hand drew back a curtain. Lifting her onto the wagon seat she had seemed weightless, he could have set her down on the moon just as easy.

  She saw the pistol stuck in the waist of his pants. You never needed that, she said.

  I had it if I did, he told her.

  You started in again when you got out of the pen? Fleming asked.

  I always started in again, the old man said. You couldn’t tell me anything. Couldn’t beat sense into me with a log chain. I was shot at more than I was hit, I guess that made me think I was ahead of the game. I couldn’t run off a few gallons like everybody else. I had to make more of it, sell it over a wider territory. It had to be the best, I had to make good whiskey. Once they laid for me on Indian Creek, hid out in the bushes. Never showed theirselves, or anyway not where I could see them. Just shot through the weeds and brush. The air was full of little chopped-up green weeds. Killed both my horses and shot me four times and left me for dead. Shot me clean off the wagon. I was layin there and I was half in and half out and I could hear the glass jars rattlin when they unloaded my wagon. I could smell their horses, and I was layin in bitterweed, I could smell that, I just couldn’t open my eyes. I thought I was dead.

  It was awkward for the old man to chord a banjo anymore but he’d tune an old Martin double-F guitar into an open E and fret it with a pocket knife, the guitar laying across his lap, the music he made was strange and marvelous and so fragile Fleming would fall silent so the spell would hold.

  Here, the old man would say, handing him the glass of whiskey, drink this before I forget and drink it myself. Get something on your stomach before that lemonade makes you sick.

  The guitar would be the lonesome wail of a lost train climbing through Georgia pinewoods. Fleming could see the raw earth red as a wound through the trees, see the boxcars flickering in and out of sight. The longest train that ever I saw, the ol
d man sang, went down that Georgia line … Or, Clouded up and lookin like rain, round the curve come a passenger train …

  Fleming would take tiny sips of the whiskey and let it dilute in his mouth while the guitar faded the old man out, took him down that long lonesome road, to where the climate suited his clothes, to where the water tasted like cherry wine.

  ALBRIGHT ORDERED a Falstaff and rang his thirty cents down on the countertop. He was sprinkling salt onto the top of the can when he noticed three highbinders downbar huddled over a newspaper they’d unfolded on the countertop. He drank deeply from the can then rose with it and walked past the jukebox to see what was so interesting in the paper. When I’m drinking, I’m nobody’s friend, Webb Pierce sang from the jukebox.

  What’s the big news? he asked, leaning down in the poor light to read for himself, but already seeing it all. LOCAL BUSINESSMAN KILLED IN PRIVATE PLANE CRASH, the black headlines read.

  Woodall run over a mountain, one of the men said with some satisfaction. I reckon the son of a bitch thought Sand Mountain would just duck its head and let him go by.

  I heard there wasn’t a piece of that plane you couldn’t have toted off in a shoe box, another said.

  He felt lightheaded, his body went weightless, he had to grasp the bar to keep from floating off. Son of a bitch, he said.

  He was that, the men agreed.

  Albright was halfway down the street before he realized he was still holding the beer. He drank it off and tossed the can into the street without even looking around for the law. Somehow being a coldblooded murderer put the open container law into a different perspective.

  He’d walked past his car without seeing it and he had to retrace his steps. He got in and sat behind the wheel. Traffic passed in the street without his hearing it. Dimly he realized that he was free, Woodall would never again knock on his door, he would never swear out another paper. But the ramifications of what he had done were enormous. That Goddamned Bloodworth, he said aloud. He had killed a man as surely as if he had held a pistol against his head and discharged it.

  He leaned his head onto the steering wheel. He could feel the hot plastic against his face. He felt like weeping.

  GENE WOODALL HAD BEEN on his way to Valdosta, Georgia, to look over a potential job and prepare a bid on it. He was somewhere over the mountains on the Tennessee-Georgia line when the engine sputtered the first time. A palpable shock of anger ran through him and he thought, Oh, that son of a bitching mechanic is going to hear from me.

  He was flying alone but not really alone, because for the last hundred miles he had been thinking of his new girlfriend, Carolyn Spiess, so intently that she was almost a tangible presence in the cockpit. He had only just met Carolyn, but he had big plans for her. She was twenty years younger than his wife, and at least that many times as pretty and when she had opened her mouth under his before he boarded the plane she tasted like Juicy Fruit gum.

  He’d lost a little altitude and he adjusted the throttle and tilted the yoke to climb and the pitch of the engine increased and smoothed out momentarily then began to sputter. It misfired, hard, caught again, and when it misfired this time the engine seized.

  Almighty God, Woodall said. He began to struggle impotently with the instruments and then ceased, drifting in an eerie silence save the rushing of the wind.

  He thought of Carolyn. Within hours she would be on her way to the Maury County airport to meet him. There would be a bag in the floorboard containing two bottles of wine. They would spend the night in the Dixieland Motel and the thought of his frogfaced wife would be far away.

  Below he could see moonlight on the rocks, the fleeing shadows of clouds tracking darkly across the pale limestone, the strewn lights of a mountain town like spilled jewelry. The wall of the mountain rising to meet him looked as pale and smooth as a granite headstone.

  The plane was spinning now like a carousel that had slipped its moorings and it went through the tops of the firs and cedars like a mowing machine, the air full of chopped greenery and the smell of the pines. He thought very hard of Carolyn, her sharp insistent tongue, the way she’d opened her thighs as she kissed him, the feel of her sharp pelvic bone against the fleshy heel of his hand. The tail section struck first and sheared away and the white stone rising to meet the fuselage looked like something surfacing with dread inevitability from calm clear water and he flung an arm across his eyes.

  When the plane exploded fire went streaking down the wall of night like trails of phosphorous from a firework of unreckonable magnitude and cascaded away in a shower of falling stars, touching the velvet balsams with a profound and eerie beauty.

  IT HAD NOT rained for some time and the road lay thick with a dust pale and fine as talcum. It rose light as smoke with the old man’s footfalls and hung suspended and weightless in the air, whitened the cuffs of his trousers and pressed itself covertly into their folds and into the webbing of his shoelaces. It was early but already hot. The sun lay over the eastern horizon and burned its way toward him through the trees with a bluegold light. When he crossed from the road into the edge of the fallow field the earth beneath the trees where the wild oats did not grow was pale and baked hard as clay from a kiln, faulted with cracks and crosshatched lines like defects in the surface structure of the earth itself.

  Forty years ago he had set out a row of cedars that extended for over a quarter of a mile, that ran from the road he’d just left and crossed the wide field to the fencerow that had enclosed his garden. He thought for an amused moment that if he was ever remembered for anything it would likely be the cedar row. His wife had finally had enough of his sinful ways and doings and his sons’ lives had followed strange and destructive bents but the cedar row was as straight as if they’d been set to a staked line, and he stood for a moment leaned on the stick and staring down the row cedar on cedar until they diminished before the house he’d built, bluelooking and cool in the deep morning shade of the woods.

  He heard a screen door slap to, though he could see no one, and the sound seemed to have a curious quality of timelessness about it, something that had happened years ago with the sound just now reaching his ears.

  If she came out, if she came out.

  He stood, leaned on the stick, watching. A hawk circled the field in lowering revolutions, its feathers trembling in the sun like light flickering on water, shrill cries falling to earth bright as broken bottleglass.

  He remembered the man who had come looking for Warren with such dire intent.

  There was the cedar the man had been standing beneath, looking up and batting his eyes in surprise, expecting a seventeen-year-old Warren but encountering instead the old man himself, bad news that morning, hungover and violence moiling about his feet like a vicious watchdog.

  He’d sent his emissary to the house and waited with his two brothers.

  It’s a man by the cedar row wants to see Warren, the boy said.

  What’s he want?

  The boy looked away, he just wants to see Warren.

  Well just let me get my hat, the old man said. It may be that it’s me he needed to see all along.

  The man stood with his cap cocked over one eye, a fistsize chew of tobacco in his jaw, a hawkbill knife printed against his leg in thin worn denim.

  The man was on the ground before he could even get the knife out and after a while he forgot all about it. He might just as well have left it at the house.

  Motion drew his eye back to the house. A figure crossed the porch. He was so far away he could discern little. The vague illusion of a blue dress, that was all, but what he was had been gone for fifty years, frozen in his mind as if it happened yesterday, a young woman coming onto a porch, a door slapping to behind her, a pan of dishwater slung into the yard. Just that, but the woman, who had been his wife, was so vibrant and alive that she seemed a symbol representing life itself, and the dishwater she threw glittered in the sun like quicksilver.

  At length he turned back the way he’d come. Brady seeme
d to be avoiding him and he thought that perhaps he might catch him out around the house. But dogs had begun to bark somewhere below the house, and he wondered if maybe they’d caught his scent. The dogs he’d seen around the trailer that night had a distinctly dangerous look. Now the dogs barked on and on dementedly as if they would never shut up. The old man had never been much for barking dogs and he wondered how they stood the racket. The dogs were company, Brady had always said, but company like that he would have long ago put on the road.

  He was halfway back across the field when something happened that he had never seen before or heard tell of. A rattlesnake fell out of the sky and thudded onto the path six or eight feet in front of him. This so stunned Bloodworth that he froze and just stood staring at it in a kind of slackjawed disbelief. Then finally he looked up as if to see were more on the way. A huge hawk drifted on the updrafts, the white undersides of the wings like polished chrome in the sun.

  Got somethin you couldn’t handle, didn’t you? the old man asked, then added, or decided you didn’t want no part of.

  He wondered if the hawk had been snakebit but he guessed not for after a moment it began to ascend until it was just a black dot printing itself on the blue void and ultimately vanishing as if he’d just been imagining it all along.

  The snake was a diamondback rattler, thick as the old man’s arm. He approached it with caution, brandishing the stick like a club. The rattler was stunned but it was not dead. Its tail moved sluggishly, like a snake caught out in wintertime. He tried to count the rattles but could get no precise count. The snake was making no attempt either to escape or bite him, and he figured it was so addled it couldn’t fathom where it had gotten itself to.

  Damned if you won’t have a story to tell the rest of them when you get home, he told it. But nobody is going to believe a word you say.