Provinces of Night: A Novel Read online

  Then it’s either sleep here tonight or go back to Overbey’s and come around the bluff. Which’ll it be?

  The swinging bridge was a quartermile downstream. In the flooded bottomland sycamores rose white as bone out of the turbulent water. By the time they reached the platform the bridge was swung from they were slogging through thighdeep water. The ladder rose dizzily to the top of the platform where cables were suspended tree to tree. A relic of some older time, the bridge was seldom used anymore and sections of its flooring had fallen away and what remained were rottenlooking and questionable.

  It seemed a long climb to the bridge. Farther still across the swaying cable to the other shore. Boyd crossed first, as if he’d defy these waters to take him. Fleming went cautiously, trying each board before he entrusted it with his weight, hanging onto the cables that served as handholds while the bridge creaked and yawed drunkenly over the mutated stream that went in a dizzy rush beneath him. He looked down once and the moving water appeared in some perversion of gravity to be tugging the bridge downstream and when his head reeled with the un-spooling water he forced himself to look at the farther side until the shifting trees halted their spinning.

  Going down there was water again but nothing to do but wade it and when they again reached the roadbed Fleming felt like some shipwrecked mariner struggling onto the reefs of a lost and barren island.

  In the house he lit the lamp but was too tired to eat and too tired to build a fire and he stripped off his sodden clothes and put on dry ones and fell into bed. He’d thought he’d known before what exhaustion was but he’d been mistaken. He was immediately in a dreamless slumber but woke sometime far into the night at what he thought was some sudden sound but what woke him was silence. The rain had stopped.

  The next morning the first thing he noticed was that he was warm. He got up and went into the front room and saw that Boyd had already been up and about. There was a fire in the heater and the room was filled with the strong evocative odor of coffee and chicory. He did not see Boyd anywhere.

  He took a cup from the cooktable and filled it from the coffee pot on the stove and went outside. It had cleared in the night and the sun was bright though it was still very cold. A steely rime of frost lay upon everything. He didn’t see Boyd and he went back into the house.

  The first thing he saw was a note taped to the mirror by the window. Now what the hell is this, he thought. He took down and unfolded the sheet of foolscap.

  I have gone to get your mama. From what I can learn she is in Detroit Michigan with that peddler. I hate about taking the money but it is all I can do and I’ve got to have it. I will send it back when I get work. I will be back soon but till I do you go over to Ma’s and stay there. I mean stay there.

  He stood holding the note for a time with no look at all on his face. Then he crossed to the heater and opened the door. He balled the note up and threw it into the flames.

  WHERE THE WOODS ended abruptly the field began, so that Fleming Bloodworth stepped from a thick viney undergrowth awash with birdsong into an open meadow lazy in the sun, cows grazing placidly below him, the new grass shading the rolling slopes with the palest of green. Tilting blackbirds burnished by the noon sun gleamed like contrivances of tinfoil, somewhere behind him a dove began to call, soft and mournful as something lost.

  He sat for a time on the splitrail fence that bound the pasture, idly watching the house and its attendant buildings sleeping this warm day away. A great gothic farmhouse, of whitewashed lumber, its steep green roofline and gables like something moved intact from New England, its windows curtained and shuttered like drowsing eyes. He waited patiently to see what life would show itself. Some of Brady’s dogs milling below the kennel, a wild motley of strange dogs of no exact color and no determinate breed, perhaps some breed Brady had invented. Or invoked from the mismatched parts of other dogs, he thought, raised like Lazarus from roadkill dogs by the dark alchemy he boasted of. Fleming smiled to himself, in no hurry, feeling the sun on his shoulders, postponing the moment when he must rise and make his way down to his grandmother’s house.

  Suddenly the screen door of the house opened and his grandmother came onto the porch with a broom, tiny, silent, furiously animate. She lit into one of the dogs with the broom and he could hear its startled yelp, see it scrambling madly for the gate down the doorstep. The gate must have been latched, for it finally scrambled over the porch railing and went streaking for the kennel. He didn’t see Brady about but he judged him somewhere around the place, for he could see the sun hammering off Brady’s black Buick, turtlebacked and gleaming, parked beneath the huge pine tree that shadowed the house.

  He rose, in no haste, and ambled down the slope, letting the day sink into his pores as he went, cataloging the smells and sensations. The warm weight of the sun on his back on what might have been the first day of summer. The citrusy smell of the pine woods, the raw loamy earth smell of a field turned darkly to the sun by Brady’s tractor, the faint call of distant crows that was all there was to break the silence.

  He came up past the kennel in a wild cacophony of noise, the dogs yelping and throwing themselves in a frenzy against the heavy wire netting stapled to the two-by-four studding. Unconfined dogs milled about him and he kept turning to kick them away savagely and to watch his back. Some of them would bite and some of them wouldn’t but he had never gotten it straight which were which. The dogs shifted about his feet like dirty water, a tide of dogs that bore him past the pear orchard and the grape arbor with its knotted armsize vines and crested at the kitchen doorstep.

  The old woman had come onto the back porch to ascertain who’d authored this bedlam and stood watching him with her hand raised to shade her eyes from the sun. She fixed Fleming with a look of mock ferocity.

  You get yourself in this house, she said.

  He went through the back door into the long narrow kitchen, feeling as he always did the sudden onslaught of time, enthralled by the myriad smells of the kitchen: coffee and cloves and cinnamon, the heavy fruity odor of basketed apples and the faintly sour smell of dried peaches, and some other odor, rich and dark and mysterious, that was the odor of time itself, of days the old woman had stacked into years as carefully as a mason lays one stone atop another to construct a wall.

  The old woman had come through the house from the front porch and she grasped him into a rough embrace and he could feel the wiry strength of her though she appeared frail and the top of her head only reached to the level of his breast.

  What’s the matter with you? I ought to take a withe to you. I’ve sent Brady after you twice and he come back both times emptyhanded claimin you wasn’t there. I’d thought maybe you had more sense than Boyd but I’m beginnin to wonder about you.

  She had released him and flustered about the table, setting out a plate and silverware, peering into covered dishes as if to see was there anything worth serving him. Get around here and eat, she said. I can feel ever bone in your body. You was always a skinny child but turned sideways you just ain’t there atall.

  I’ll eat in a while, Grandma. Where’s Brady at?

  I reckon he’s out there in the barnlot makin that dog a rock. There’s peach pies in that safe in the pantry.

  Makin that dog a what?

  A rock, a rock. A tombstone, you know what a tombstone is, don’ you? The mail carrier run over that Brownie dog and killed it and he’s been havin a fit ever since. He’s had me so nervous I’d strike out for Detroit myself, if I knowed which way it was.

  The old woman claimed Cherokee blood and Fleming studying her now had no reason to doubt it. The thin gray hair pulled tightly into a bun behind her head had once been as black as shoepolish, her eyes fiercely alive, her tiny body barely containing the energy that animated her every waking moment. With her leathery face and beaked nose she looked less like an Indian woman than some old chief, the repository of the summed knowledge all his forebears had passed on by the flickering light of council fires.

  I
might get a piece of that pie and go out and talk to Brady a while.

  Don’t aggravate him. He’s bad enough as it is.

  Looks like he still has plenty of dogs underfoot.

  We’re about to founder on dogs around here. They’re takin the place. I believe they’re mixed with rabbit the way they litter ever few days. But that Brownie dog was about his favorite. He raised her from a pup with a baby bottle.

  He got a wedge of pie from the safe and crossed through the living room and out into the bare earth yard beneath the pine tree, smiling to see the broommarks in the smooth earth where the old woman had swept it as you’d sweep a room.

  On the shady side of the barn he found Brady kneeling before the tombstone, troweling grout onto its already smooth surface. His thin intent face gave no sign that he acknowledged the boy or was even aware of his existence. His congested blue eyes were focused on his work, a red curl had come uncombed and lay across his freckled forehead. He sprinkled water from a bowl delicately as an artist might, troweled smoothly around the letters BROWNIE. The rectangular form lay to the side, the reversed letters laboriously carved into the wood.

  I get it slick and then when the water dries off it don’t look like I want it to, Brady said.

  You’ll have to let it dry and then polish it with a grinder.

  Brady laid aside the trowel and studied him. I reckon you’ve made a world of these things.

  That just seems the way you’d do it. I don’t know anything about it, and I never meant anything by it. I know how much you thought of Brownie.

  I doubt you do. She was just a dog to you. To me she was family. She was like my child. When I seen the carwheels run over her stomach it was like they was runnin over mine. I felt somethin twist in me, and it ain’t untwisted yet.

  How come him to hit her?

  Harwood never hit the brakes or nothin. Just drove across her. He’s been onto me about my dogs before. He even had a feller from the post office come out here and talk to me about it. I reckon Harwood thought he’d teach me a lesson. But we’ll see. We’ll see.

  What do you mean, we’ll see?

  You’ll see too. It’s a omen anyway, bad luck. All because of that old man makin plans to come back here.

  It was on the boy’s tongue to say that a person who claimed clairvoyance as strongly as Brady did should simply have gotten up yesterday morning and penned the dog up but he remembered what his grandmother had said and so kept his silence. Then he said: When’s the funeral?

  Brady searched his face for guile or irony but Fleming’s face held only a studied bland innocence.

  I buried her and said a few words over her this mornin. A few words of scripture then I told her how she’d be avenged. She can rest easy on that score.

  Avenged how? You taking Harwood to court?

  I’m takin him to a higher court than old Judge Humphreys. I’m puttin a hex on him, already got it in the works. He’s got some hard times ahead of him.

  What kind of hex?

  He run over Brownie’s stomach and busted her all up inside. She died and died, takin on. I’m goin for Harwood’s stomach, too. His stool will set up in him like concrete, his insides will petrify like wood turnin into rock. If you don’t think that’ll give him reason to think about what he done, then you don’t know nothin about the workins of the human body.

  Hellfire, the boy said.

  Hellfire is right, Brady said. I don’t know if he’ll die or if he’ll finally get well. I can start em but I can’t stop em. It’ll be out of my hands.

  He’s crazy as a shithouse rat, the boy was thinking. And if I don’t get out of here I may catch it myself.

  Brady rose and unpocketed a small glass vial. He held it before the boy’s face but did not relinquish ownership of it. Do you know what this is?

  It looks to me like a pill bottle.

  What’s in it?

  The boy looked closer. A Lucky Strike cigarette butt, he said.

  Yes and no. It’s Harwood’s cigarette butt. I seen him when he flipped it out and I was on it like a duck on a June bug. It was still afire. Harwood touched it, it’s got his essence all over it, and it’s all I need to put a hurt on him.

  The boy rose, simultaneously angry at Brady and yet touched by the grief that ravaged his face. Remind me not to leave anything of mine around where you can find it, he said.

  You don’t own anything to leave, Brady pointed out.

  For supper the old woman had fried country ham and made red-eye gravy. There were baked yams and huge cathead biscuits that threatened to float out of your hand and tall cold glasses of buttermilk. The boy took a deep breath and buttered up one of the biscuits and fell to and fairly outdid himself eating. Even the old woman seemed mollified by his performance. If I can keep you around for two weeks I’ll have you lookin very nearly like a human bein, she said.

  And the rest of us knockin at the poorhouse door, Brady said sourly.

  After supper they sat on the front porch and watched a long purple twilight descend on the world, swallowing the distant treeline first and sweeping across the fields toward them like mauve clouds. The boy watched the known world of shape and form vanish like something slowly dissolving in acid.

  You mind if I listen to the radio?

  Why Lord no, boy. You just help yourself.

  He found the Grand Ole Opry out of Nashville, fiddles and guitars and advertisings for miraculous patent medicines. Country comedians that made him smile faintly, his eyes closed, sitting in an old willow rocking chair, here in this house of the dead and dying. Here within these walls time was of no moment. The walls were adorned with calendars but they had measured years already immured in memory, five years old, ten years old. The house was full of clocks but some of them were stopped and of the ones that worked no two kept a similar hour. A simple request for the time of the day was a cause for consternation, for much comparing of the accuracy of one clock with another to arrive at some approximation of the hour. Here time did not matter. Here another set of rules was in order, out of another century.

  Right out that window’s where I seen that warnin that night, the old woman said. He opened his eyes. She had come in silently and she was reaching a cup of coffee toward him and in her other hand she held one of her own. The coffee was black and so strong it seemed to have its own thick viscosity. He imagined the spoon he stirred it with vanishing away to nothing.

  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.