Provinces of Night: A Novel Read online

  Boy, you’ve got me all wrong. I just walked across here to see what you was up to.

  You wait right where you’re at till I get the car, Brady said. I don’t want her seein you and me havin to explain all this mess and I don’t ever want you back over here again.

  I don’t recall ever signin this place over to anybody, Bloodworth said. You got a deed to it in your shirt pocket?

  Wait right where I told you, Brady said.

  For reasons he could not understand the old man waited until Brady brought the car. There was something in Brady’s face that did not brook argument, something in his congested eyes that scared the old man a little. He looked for something of the boy Brady had been twenty years ago in the pale freckled face but if any of the boy remained he could not find it.

  When Bloodworth was seated awkwardly in the front seat by Brady instead of driving up the road the way a normal driver would go Brady drove along the cedar row through the wild oats and broomstraw, the car lurching wildly on its shocks, Brady peering at the house in the rearview mirror. He kept raking his hair out of his eyes with his long freckled fingers. The old man watched him, thinking for a surreal moment that Brady might not even stop at the trailer, just put the pedal to the floor and drive him farther than he ever meant to be, drive him deep into the Harrikin and shove him out like a man dropping an unwanted dog.

  Let me ask you something, Bloodworth said. Why did you ever agree for me to come back here? Why didn’t you just pocket the money and forget it, or just refuse to talk about it in the first place? I never pushed it on you. I had a place to be, and somebody that would have looked after me.

  Blood is blood, Brady said. You can’t deny your own blood askin for help.

  I believe blood needs a little more acknowledgment than that, Bloodworth said dryly. Here’s what I think. I think you liked the idea of me settin over there in that oven with no water and no lights and you knowin where I was ever minute. I think you can’t stand it because me and that boy and young Albright scuffled around and made it livable. You wanted to make it hard on me. But I’ve got news for you. Hard’s what I’m used to. I’ve always been able to make do. I can live in a brush arbor. I could live set out on a flat rock in the sun.

  They had reached the edge of the road. Driving onto it the car bottomed out and the rockerpanels scraped the shoulder but Brady seemed not to notice. He drove slowly until they had reached the trailer. Brady parked and wordlessly climbed out and opened the passenger side door. Bloodworth got out.

  You told me what you think, Brady said. Now here’s what I think. I think when you went wherever it was you took off to it was like we never was. We wasn’t real to you. You was wherever you wanted to be, doin whatever you wanted to do. Tunin your banjo, maybe. But I was here. I had to see her them first few years. You never. We didn’t even exist to you. You was in Arkansas, tunin your banjo.

  The old man shook his head, stood leaning on the stick. I never felt the need to explain my actions to any man, he said. But I will say this. There’s two sides to everything. That’s all I’ll say. But I will give you some free advice. You keep tryin to live a life somebody else has already lived and it’ll drive you crazier that you already are.

  Just don’t come around her no more. Brady got into the car and closed the door. If you do I’ll make it hard on you.

  I told you I was raised on hard, the old man said. But if you’re goin to be so damn unsociable I may bring somebody in over here for a little company. That wouldn’t bother you, would it?

  Brady cranked the car. He jerked it into gear, held it with the brake. His mouth worked and he leaned and spat onto the hard white clay. You bring some Arkansas whore on this place and I’ll kill you myself, he said.

  BY THE TIME half the hay was loaded out of the field onto the flatbed truck and hauled to the barn the sun was at its whitehot zenith and it seemed to hang there pulsing malevolently. Fleming had sweated so much into his eyes the edge of things he looked at had a blurred provisional look to them. The field sloping away with its hundreds of neat rectangles of hay seemed to roll on forever until it faded out in a green smear. His arms were scraped raw from handling the bales and latticed with bleeding scratches and the flesh around his midsection where the waistband of his jeans chafed felt parboiled. He wiped his eyes on his forearm and stood staring down at the foreshortened shadow beneath his feet and wondered how much longer this day could be.

  He couldn’t fathom how Albright did it so effortlessly Albright looked all arms and legs and was skinny as a carpenter’s rule but he’d heft up the bales by the seagrass twine and thrust them with his left arm onto the truck with a sort of offhand grace.

  Fleming watched the sideboarded truck diminish down the rolling hillside, the stackers atop the hay clutching the sideboards and swaying and bouncing toward the barn.

  Fleming’s mouth was parched and dry. He turned and spat a cottony mass onto the field. Next time you get one of these highdollar jobs with the work all picked out of it you can leave me out of it, he said.

  Hell, I never told you it was a candy-pullin. You’re a country boy, you know what a bale of hay looks like. See that shade yonder? Look how blue it looks. Go set in it, and I’ll tell the old man I burnt your gimlet ass out.

  Piss on you. I never said I was burnt out.

  You’re showin a whole lot of the signs. Let’s hit that water jug while they’re unloadin the truck.

  I wish I had about a gallon of the old man’s lemonade.

  I wish I had a beer about the size of a fifty-gallon oil drum. I’d just lay down and roll it on top of me. I aim to have one tonight, too, if they make such a thing.

  They started toward the line of shade at the woods. The cured hay they walked through smelled as if it were smoldering, Fleming could feel the heat of it through his shoes. The skin on his back felt tight and drawn, as if the sun was shrinking it, and he figured it was too late to put his shirt on. The cooler sat on a stump in the edge of the woods. Albright rinsed a bottle and poured and out the water and filled it with ice water. He drank and hunkered on his heels, sat holding the bottle as if he’d forgotten it, his face screwed up in a sort of bemused perplexity.

  If you’re not going to drink that don’t tie up the bottle. I’m about sweated down here.

  Albright reached him the bottle. Ever time I get still that Woodall business comes back on me, he said. I can’t for the life of me figure what I’m goin to do.

  Do? Do about what?

  Do for Woodall.

  Say a prayer for him or put flowers on his grave. That’s about all you can do for a dead man.

  That’s a hell of a way to look at it, Bloodworth. I the same as killed him. Like I held a pistol against his chest and pulled the trigger. I took him out of this world, or hired it done, and somehow I’ve got to make it right.

  Well. You could borrow another fifty dollars at the bank and hire Brady to unhex him. He’d probably come flying right up out of the ground like it was the rapture or something. Dirt flying everywhere.

  Shitfire, don’t talk like that, ain’t you got no respect? Anyway I done talked to Brady.

  What’d he say?

  It took him twenty minutes to say it but what it boiled down to was tough shit. He said let it be on my head.

  You sound as crazy as he is. Who do you think you are, God Almighty? You think you can grab an airplane out of the sky and slam it against a mountain? Seems to me you and Brady have sort of an inflated idea of what you can do.

  You’re lookin at it all wrong. If I had laid for him and shot him, would that mean I was God Almighty? If I had wired a stick of dynamite to his ignition? It would not. It would just mean I killed him. And that’s what this means. If I was God Almighty I’d be plannin on how to bring him back. Or makin it to where it had never been.

  Just shut up about it. You’re giving me a hellatious headache.

  I’ve got to make it up to his wife. Or whatever family he’s got.

  Maybe you c
ould just pay back the money. Rebuild that crimper. That’s what it all come up about.

  Maybe.

  You could take all this hayhauling money and endow some sort of charity in his name. The Gene Woodall Foundation. The Busted Crimper Society. Give out college scholarships or something. Send missionaries amongst the heathen to save souls in his name.

  Just shut the fuck up, Bloodworm. I’m sorry I ever mentioned it to you.

  Donate crimpers to the underprivileged.

  Yonder comes that truck and I’m damn glad to see it. When I’m slingin them bales I don’t hardly think of him at all. That fucker’s just as worrisome dead as he was when he was swearin out all them papers.

  COBLE IN THE red Diamond-T cattle truck circled the courthouse twice before he found a parking place. He’d had to wait until Saturday and he might have known the town would be overrun with woolhats and rednecks buying their flour and bacon. Such town as it was. He climbed out of the truck and locked the doors and stood looking about Ackerman’s Field with a sort of bemused contempt. To a man from Memphis this place looked like a wide place in the road, a hog wallow, less than that.

  The courthouse was a red brick two-storied building centered on a neat city block of closecropped grass. Benches set beneath huge old elms and on them old men sat in clusters whittling and telling lies and unraveling the mysteries of the universe. An American flag and the Tennessee state flag hung devoid of motion from a flagpole. On this hot morning even the leaves on the trees seemed frozen. By the time he got to the courthouse steps and opened the door sweat was already darkening the armpits and across the shoulders of his khaki shirt.

  The sheriff’s office when he found it was in the basement but the door was locked and he could not see through the pebbled glass. Probably sitting in there asleep, he told himself. A sign hung from the doorknob. Back in thirty minutes. Thirty minutes from when? he asked it.

  He went back up the stairwell and stood for a time beneath a slowly revolving ceiling fan. He kept glancing at his watch. At last he went out the door and down the steps and across the street to the General Cafe. A sign on the wall behind the counter said that the special of the day was meatloaf and three vegetables. He ordered the special and sat down in a booth by the window.

  The waitress who brought it was young and pretty. It was hot in the restaurant and she was filmed with a sheen of perspiration. He tried twice to get a glimpse of her breasts, once when she placed his plate before him and again when she leaned to lay his check on the table. All he saw was a stubbled armpit, a worn pink bra.

  I’m lookin for a feller named Rutgers, he told her.

  He ain’t down the front of my dress, she said. She slapped his tea onto the red Formica table and walked away.

  Everything on his plate seemed drenched in grease but he ate it anyway then wiped the plate clean with a slice of lightbread. He sat sipping the tea and watching out across the lawn where a huge red sun flared behind the courthouse. When thirty-five minutes had passed he arose and paid the check. He didn’t leave any tip. He went back to the sheriff’s office. The sign hung on the doorknob as before. You’re a lyin son of a bitch, he told the sign.

  He was lounging against a limegreen wall of stippled plaster picking his teeth with a sharpened kitchen match when the sheriff appeared. He looked pointedly at his watch but Bellwether did not seem to notice. Bellwether fumbled out a large ring of keys and selected one and unlocked the door. When he went into the office Coble followed him.

  Bellwether crossed the room to a coffeepot that sat on a corner shelf. He poured a cup of coffee and drank from it and spat into a wastepaper basket then cranked the window out and poured the coffee out the opening and hung the cup back on its peg. What could I do for you? he asked. He went behind a scarred blond desk and seated himself in a swivel chair.

  Coble had told his story twice before on the telephone, with no result, and it didn’t take him long to tell it again. When he was through Bellwether shook his head. You say you drove two hundred and seventy miles? This sounds like something that could have been handled over the telephone.

  Well, a man would think so, but I guess not. I called twice, and both times I got the same shit-for-brains deputy. You know what he told me? There’s nobody in this country named Rutgers.

  Do you know why he told you that? Because there’s nobody in this county named Rutgers. Bellwether picked up a thin telephone directory and tossed it to Coble. It struck him lightly in the chest then dropped to his lap. There’s also a county census you could check, among other things, Bellwether said. And speaking frankly, Mr. Coble, I don’t care to hear my deputies categorized in that manner.

  Coble straightened in his chair. Categorized in that manner, he echoed. Hellfire. Now I let this old son of a bitch out in your county. I know he’s from here. He talked about this place like he was born and raised here. Like he come over on the fuckin Mayflower or somethin and discovered it. Now by God I traded for a herd of Black Angus cattle and drove four or five hundred miles out of my way to get them. That old man owes me a herd of cows.

  He owes you a herd of cows? You paid him sight unseen for a herd of cows?

  Hell no, I never paid him. You know what I mean. My only reason for even bein in this Godforsaken place at all was to pick up them cows. I’m either going to have a herd of Black Angus at a substantial discount or that old man’s goin to tell me the reason why.

  Bellwether tapped a Lucky Strike against a thumbnail and scratched a match and lit the cigarette. I’ll tell you the reason why myself, he said. There’s not a Black Angus in this county. Look, Mr. Coble, it’s obvious his name wasn’t Rutgers. What did he look like?

  He was a right presentable old gentleman, Coble said. Big man, held hisself kind of straight. Went with a stick, told he’d had a stroke of paralysis. That was likely a lie too. Had kindly long black hair, dyed, I figured, and a gray Stetson hat he wore. Had these real black, kind of meanlookin eyes.

  For a moment he thought he saw something flicker in Bellwether’s eyes but he wasn’t sure. If he did it was gone almost before it registered. I’ll keep an eye out for him, Bellwether said.

  You’ll keep an eye out for him. All right. What do you people do in this county, watch each other’s backs? Sweep one another’s tracks out? I’ll tell you what I’m goin to do. I’m goin to find him, and when I do he’s goin to rue the day he made a fool out of me.

  Bellwether stood up. He stabbed his cigarette out in an ashtray. Well, he said, I rue the day he made a fool out of you too, because I don’t see much I can do about it. What do you want me to do if I could find him, lock him up? What crime is that? I don’t know, extortion? It looks to me like he owes you for your time, or mileage, or something, but that’s about all.

  All the time he’d been talking Bellwether had been crossing to the door. I don’t mean to be abrupt with you, he said. But I’ve been over on the Hickman County line where we had a head-on carwreck. Three killed outright, two of them kids, and another little boy that opened his eyes and looked at me while I was helping get him loaded into the ambulance. All the time I was listening to you complain I was thinking about calling Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville. To see if he made it, or he didn’t make it. That’s why I couldn’t give the proper attention to your little story about some cows.

  He opened the door and made a sort of sweeping gesture, as if he meant for Coble to go through the doorway.

  Coble was fumbling for his cowboy hat. He squared it on his head and went through the doorway without speaking.

  LET ME show you something, the old man said one day. He rose and set the tumbler of whiskey on an orange crate he was using for a coffee table. From beneath the bed he drew a suitcase, scuffed and battered black leather with brass plates at the corners. He unlocked the clasp and opened it. Inside there was a sort of leather satchel, and the old man opened that too. Like a Chinese box, Fleming was thinking. Inside there’ll be another one. Instead there were four 78 rpm records with squares of car
dboard placed between them for packing. They looked new, their sleeves crisp and clean, as if the old man had just run them off a few minutes before. He withdrew one from its thin paper housing and handed it to Fleming. He was hunkered on his knees on the floor of the trailer and a long strand of his thin black hair had fallen across his forehead.

  Fleming studied the record. Okeh Records, the label said. Race Records. The name of the song was James Alley Blues. E. F. Bloodworth, the name below the title said. He turned the record over. I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground was the title on this side.

  I don’t guess you’ve got any way of playing these, Fleming said.

  I’m afraid not. The old man arose with some effort and seated himself on the side of his iron cot. He raked his hair back with his fingers. That’s four I saved back, he said. They ain’t never been played. Never had a needle set on them.

  What’s this mean, Race Records? What’s a Race Record?

  The old man laughed. Back then they made records for different races of folks, he said. They made Okeh and then they made Okeh Race Records. They was for the colored. Blues singers, that kind of stuff. I reckon there was some kind of confusion about me, I was long gone when they pressed the records and made up the labels. Somebody I reckon thought my voice sounded colored. Or maybe the way I picked a banjo, I didn’t frail a banjo the way most of them oldtime pickers did. I picked the notes, in a different key than most of them songs was in.

  The old man took a tiny sip from the whiskey, set it aside. He took up the guitar, held it loosely across his lap. It never bothered me to be taken for a colored singer, he said. To tell the truth, it kind of tickled me. I never liked them old ballads a lot of the white singers used to sing. Somebody grieves theirself to death for love and a rose grows up through their rib-bones. I never cared for that. But them old blues songs cut right to the quick. Says it all in very few words. Like it was … like it was boiled down, concentrated. All that feeling. One says, Sometimes I think you just too sweet to die, another time I think you oughta he buried alive. That’s James Alley Blues, and it’s old, old. Always been here ever since the first man set on the side of the bed with a halfpint of whiskey in his hand wondering where his old lady was.