Provinces of Night: A Novel Read online

  At closer range the house did not seem so opulent. There was an air of benign neglect about it. The paint was faded and peeling, the trim in places showed areas of bare wood. He was out of the Dodge and inspecting the cornice when the door opened and a middle-age woman came onto the porch. Albright couldn’t help noticing the front door itself was in bad shape, weathered and dull, the dark stain leached off the wood and everything in general just needed a good scraping and sanding.

  Albright was wearing a paintspotted painter’s cap over his pale curls and he was studying the pocked and scaling fascia board with a professional eye.

  What do you want here? the woman asked him.

  Albright took off his cap and turned to inspect her. She was a squat ungainly woman with a hairdo that came down past her ears then curled abruptly outward. Her hair looked all of a piece, something sculpted from wood, a wig chopped carelessly out of dark mahogany and clapped onto her head. Albright judged her perhaps the ugliest woman he had ever seen.

  Mr. Woodall told me to come out and look at the paint on this house, he said.

  Mr. Woodall is dead.

  I know he is. This was sometime back. This house needs paintin. It needs it about as bad as any I ever seen.

  She didn’t argue. Gene was so busy he let things go quite a bit around the house. You appear to be a painter. Do you want the job of painting all this woodwork?

  I owe Mr. Woodall somethin, Albright said. I figure to work it out. Paintin this house might not square it, but it’d go a long way.

  I know nothing about that, the woman said. That would have been between you and Gene and Gene’s dead. I’ll pay you for your work.

  I’d rather just do it to settle up.

  What do you owe him?

  Albright thought about it. To begin with I guess I owe him a house paintin, he said.

  He began the next day. There was an enormous amount of scraping and caulking to do before he could begin the actual painting. As the paint flakes flew his heart grew lighter. He felt his debt being whittled down to a manageable size. The second day she came out and watched him at work. He thought at first she was keeping an eye on him to see that he did the job right but this seemed not to be the case. Perhaps she just liked to watch folks work. These were warm golden days of Indian summer and sometimes she would bring a book out to the lounge chair she favored. She would read a while then watch him work for a time. She wore hornrimmed glasses when she read but when she watched him she would lay them aside on the arm of the chaise and study him with no look at all on her face.

  Toward the end of his first week she asked him if he’d like to use Woodall’s pickup truck to haul his ladders. It’s just sitting there going to waste, she said. I’ve been thinking about selling it. Gene was very fond of that truck. I may give it away, or let some junkyard scrap it out for parts.

  This made no sense to him but he had about quit looking for sense in things folks said to him and he drove the truck anyway. It was easier than using the Dodge with ladders jutting ten feet out behind the trunk. He couldn’t help noticing that it handled a lot better than the Dodge, too. Sitting behind the wheel gave him an eerie sense of power, as if he were absorbing something of Woodall’s essence from the cab of the truck. He caught himself wondering what had happened to Woodall’s white superintendent’s hat, and he decided that if an opportune moment ever presented itself he would inquire about it.

  JUST AFTER dark the red cattletruck parked where the chainlink fence stopped it and Coble got out. He stood squaring the straw hat on his head, looking at the house, listening to the raucous barking of dogs. Brady rose from the lounge chair beneath the pine tree. Hush, he said. The dogs fell silent. Coble came through the gate and Brady crossed to meet him. Pools of shadow lay like dark water beneath the pine and Brady limped nimbly around them. Without an inkling of who Coble was or what he wanted Brady knew intuitively that this was someone he needed to know who possessed knowledge he needed to acquire.

  THAT NIGHT E. F. Bloodworth had difficulty in falling asleep and he lay in bed for a time thinking about the horse named Cisco that he had once owned. A small spotted stallion gaudy as a circus poster that he had traded for in Mississippi. The night of Cisco’s demise Bloodworth had been trying to keep a mare and the stallion apart. He had penned them in separate pens. Between the pens and joined to them on either end was a barn with a sloping tin roof.

  Sometime in the night he woke to bedlam. He could hear a horse screaming, dogs barking madly. He jumped out of bed and ran into the moonlit yard. The stallion was screaming and thrashing about inside the barn. Bloodworth saw with a stunned disbelief that the stallion had climbed a stack of haybales at the end of the barn and somehow managed to clamber onto the roof; the tin and two-by-four lathing had not held, and the spotted horse had fallen in a jumble of tin and broken lumber. The horse looked like a unicorn struggling wildly to free itself from a snare and he saw with horror that a sharp section of rotten lumber had imbedded itself in one of the horse’s eyes like a horn. He’d struggled in the darkness dementedly with Cisco trying to remove the splintered board until he finally noticed that one of the stallion’s front legs was broken and he gave up and went to the house for his gun.

  What the spotted horse had done awed him a little. He thought then and he thought now the cry of flesh calling to flesh must be the strongest thing in the world.

  Finally he slept but woke to a din of barking dogs and for a moment he was caught in a deadfall he’d laid in time long ago himself and he knew he was going to have to struggle with the stricken horse again, sick at heart he was going to have to go on shooting it until it stayed dead. Then he remembered where he was and picked up the gold pocket watch from the table. It was just past two o’clock in the morning. He laid the watch back and closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep. It was useless. Hellfire, the old man said. He lay listening to the dogs and staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. One dog after another or the same dog repeating itself was running up the steps, barking furiously all the while, slamming against the door, running back down into the yard.

  He got up and poured himself a shot of Early Times and stood looking at it for a while and then he drank it. He took the pistol out of the Martin’s case and checked the loads and stood beside the door. He turned the doorknob but when he did the door was jerked roughly from his hand and he had a German shepherd in the trailer with him. He wasn’t using his stick and when the door leapt backward he fell. He didn’t even think. He fired three times as fast as he could squeeze the trigger and the dog was jerked backward and tumbled howling down the steps. He sat on his haunches holding the pistol bothhanded before him as if expecting the onslaught of other dogs.

  He struggled up cautiously and peered into the yard. The dog lay by the doorstep, its legs working slowly as if it were swimming. He fired the gun at random into the yard until both gun and yard were empty. The dogs had fallen silent. They seemed to have vanished into the woods, slunk back up the road to the field. He reloaded the pistol and sat for a time on the doorstep. For no reason he could name he felt as if someone was watching him from the edge of the woods.

  AFTER HE LOADED the dead German shepherd Brady sat hunkered by the side of his juryrigged pickup truck. His hand held a length of stick he’d sharpened with his pocket knife like a stylus and he was scrawling the earth with meaningless hieroglyphics, random scratchings. You ought never to have shot my dog, Brady had said by way of preamble. Bloodworth didn’t ask him how he knew the dog was dead. He didn’t want to know. He sat on the doorstep staring at the pickup truck, on whose side long ago he had painted JOLIE BLON in some other lifetime.

  I don’t want to even be around you, Brady said. All I want to know is why you told all those lies on me.

  The old man was dumbfounded. Hellfire, boy, I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Lies to who? I can’t remember saying anything about you, truth or lies either one.

  That’s funny. That cattle buyer, Coble, he remembers it wor
d for word. How crazy I am. Babtizin cows and chickens. Preachin to stumps. Where’d you come up with all that mess? I knew you were evil and worthless but I never knew you were totally insane.

  The old man was silent a long time, hands on knees, stick propped against his leg. How to begin. Finally he said, Boy, that wasn’t about you. That didn’t have anything to do with you. I don’t really know why I made that stuff up, but it wasn’t even about me. It was about a man named Rutgers who wanted a ride to Tennessee.

  All that crazy stuff about me marryin bulls and cows. Readin at them out of a Bible. Did that man really sit there and believe all that nonsense?

  Bloodworth permitted himself a small smile. He eat ever bit of it and set there holdin his bowl and spoon wantin more, he said.

  Well. I believe he’s about had a bait of it now. He’s makin trouble.

  I figured after a while he’d just laugh it off.

  No. For some strange reason he don’t see the humor in it. You took him hundreds of miles out of his way and worse than that you made a fool out of him.

  Hell, I didn’t make him, Bloodworth said. He was a fool when I got there.

  He thinks you’re crazy and he’s goin to do all he can to get you into trouble. He thinks you ought to be put away somewhere, and I agree with him. All the lies you told about me, then that remark the other day about company. I knew what kind of company you meant, you never needed but one kind. Women. Shooting off a pistol like you was doing last night. You are crazy.

  I’ll just pay him his ride bill and be done with him, the old man said.

  That’s not what he wants.

  Then to hell with him. The only reason he done it to begin with was because he thought my back was against the wall so hard I was goin to practically give him a herd of Black Angus cows. Damn them cows anyway. I wish I’d never even thought of them.

  In truth the old man felt a certain amount of guilt about the story he’d concocted. Long after telling it he’d remembered that Brady as a youngster used to preach funerals for runover dogs, writing sermons in tablets to read at them, said prayers over roadkill animals. He wondered if all this hadn’t in some manner seeped up out of his memory and colored what he was saying to Coble. The hell with it anyway, he thought. If it did it did. It was just one more misstep in a long line of missteps and there was nothing he could do about it now.

  His idea was for us to get a lawyer and have you declared incompetent. Have the court appoint somebody to see after your business.

  I guess you’d be a fine candidate for that, the old man said. You couldn’t see after the business a settin hen could accumulate.

  None of it matters anyway, Brady said. You’re fixin to die. You’d be dead before the ink could dry on the paperwork. I run it out in the cards. Worse yet, you’re goin straight to hell. When I look at you settin there now it’s like you’re already on your way. Comin into the city limits of hell. Your hair’s startin to singe and little blue flames are flickerin all over you. Smoke boilin out of your ears. Your blood’ll boil and your brain snap and pop like grease in a hot pan. Your bones’ll burn white-hot and just burn through your flesh.

  The old man struggled up. Get away from me, he said, and although he tried to keep the contempt out of his voice he could not.

  WITH THE SHIFT in the seasons Fleming brought saw and axe and began to cut the old man’s winter wood. He felled blackjack and red oak and cut them to length with the bucksaw and split the cuts and ricked the wood behind the trailer. Working in the woods seemed to bring purpose to the days, a sense of order. He cut dead pine for kindling and a red cedar whose closegrained oily wood gave off a rich exotic odor that evoked some vague memory he could not get a fix on.

  Finally the old man stopped him saying he’d never live long enough to burn such a pile of wood as the boy was accumulating. It was just as well for the rains of November began and the world turned bleak and somber, the woodsmoke from Bloodworth’s heater clinging to the ground in the damp heavy air. It seemed to rain every day and the days shortened and seemed to be perpetually dimming so that it was impossible to tell the exact moment that night fell. There were days he sat in the house watching rain string off the eaves and he was touched with a desperate and growing unease. The rain fell with an unvarying intensity until it seemed that the weathers of his world had coalesced in this mode and it had become a rain without a proper beginning or end and crossing through it to check on Bloodworth he moved always with the rushing of rain in the unwinded trees like a dark unmetered poetry of the woods.

  WHEN FLEMING got out of the cab in Itchy Mama’s yard he closed the car door and stood for a moment staring past the hills toward the southwest. It was no more than midafternoon but the world had darkened save for a band of light that lay above the horizon. A bitter wind had swept the drunks from Itchy Mama’s porch and it rattled beercans hollowly against the stone steps and blew scraps of paper like dirty snow. Birds alighting about the trees were soon off again restlessly as if they’d had word of ill weathers that had not reached the world at large.

  He went up the steps and crossed the porch and rapped at the loose screen door. Come in here, Itchy Mama yelled. Everybody else has. When he went in he saw that the cold wind had blown the sots and derelicts not to homes if they had them but to Itchy Mama’s front room, where they were ill-contained on ragged couches and easy chairs and even hunkered against the walls. He went past them acknowledging their greetings and comments about the falling temperature with an upraised hand and to the kitchen where Itchy Mama was slicing ham into an enormous iron skillet.

  What are you doin out?

  I’m just out, he said. Why wouldn’t I be? I didn’t know the world was coming to an end till I saw all those refugees camped out in there. Have they not ever been cold before?

  Don’t you listen to the radio? They got warnins out about a ice storm. Done hit Alabama.

  It looks like it’s hit your front room. That bunch looks ready to start breaking up chairs for firewood.

  You better be checkin on your grandpa.

  I just came from there. He said he’s denned up like a badger and dragging the dirt in after him. And he didn’t even need a radio.

  You might ought to be huntin a hole yourself.

  He smiled slightly at this and gestured toward the coffee pot. I thought I’d stop by a minute and see if you’d sell me a cup of coffee.

  No, I’ll give you one. Give you a cup of coffee or a drink of whiskey either one. Which do you want?

  I guess I’ll take the coffee, he said.

  But she had produced from between her huge breasts a flat halfpint of clear whiskey. She tilted it to study the bead.

  You don’t have a cup of coffee down there, do you?

  Here. Take a little dram of this. It’s heated to body temperature already and it’ll go down like sweet milk. I’d even put a nipple on it if you wanted.

  He took the bottle she was proffering. It did indeed feel warm to his touch. He unscrewed the cap and drank and stood by the window looking out to where the wind blew the cold trees. All the monochromatic world seemed in motion.

  What’s the matter with you? You look like you’ve got the whole world’s troubles to sort out and you’re runnin behind already. Did somebody die?

  No. I don’t know. I guess they did somewhere, nobody I knew died. I guess I better be going. I thought I might drive off down to Clifton.

  You took Albright’s car away from him?

  He’s been driving that pickup truck Gene Woodall used to drive.

  She grinned, turned to cap a lid over the popping grease. Ain’t a fool a wonderful thing? she asked.

  He wasn’t sure who she meant by that, but he didn’t ask. I’ll see you, he said. I’m going before this ice storm or whatever spreads from your front room.

  Pile up in there with that bunch of drunkards, she said. About midnight I’ll come drag you off to my bed and show you how to stay warm. Goodlookin thing like you. I’d keep you for a goodluck c
harm.

  You’d give that up soon enough, he said, reaching her the bottle.

  She waved it away. Take it with you. You never know when a snake’s goin to bite you.

  When he went out the day was more chill yet but he drove off into it anyway. A bleak feeling lay in the pit of his stomach heavy as a stone. He knew this was purposeless and could come to no good end but any sort of end at all was better than his life. Time had been grinding to a halt and he no longer possessed the tools to set it to motion again. He kept thinking he ought to turn back but he drove on into the leaden day. The wind spun a few snowflakes against the windshield.

  The closer he got to Clifton the stranger the weather grew and by the time he cut off the switch before the pink house it was snowing hard and the wind was blowing it in shifting windrows ephemeral as smoke. When he got out of the car bits of ice scoured his face like sand.

  He knocked and waited a while. He kept glancing back at the car and at the street. So far the wind was whipping the blacktop clean but the Dodge’s tires were slick and it was a long way back to Ackerman’s Field.

  The door opened, the screen was unlatched. He was expecting Raven Lee but it was the mother herself who stood aside and bade him enter. He went in and stood awkwardly in the small parlor, not quite knowing what to make of the civility he was being shown.

  I was just looking for Raven Lee, he said.

  Well, she ain’t here. She’s uptown somewheres. Maybe the drugstore, she sets in there and reads them old magazines.

  I guess I’ll go look.

  You see her tell her to get herself home. They’re callin for ice and freezin rain on the radio and from the looks of things it’s already here.

  I’ll tell her. He turned to go. He already had the door in his hand when she spoke again and he paused.

  You talk right up to her. I can tell you think a lot of her but she’s a little pushy. A little overbearin. You speak up or she’ll run right over you.