William Gay: Twilight

That year the old man fell to beating him when the notion struck him, and it struck him more often as time drew on. Young Tyler grew wary and careful and watchful as a cat. All his movements seemed provisional and subject to change at a moment’s notice, he seemed always poised for flight.

A schoolteacher who’d befriended him came once to visit. She sat for a time under the malevolent gaze of the old man, glancing about with nervous skittery eyes. She never came back. You better quit hangin around them goddamn schoolteachers, he said, wiping a hand across his mouth. Grayyellow stubble flecked with ambeer and spittle. Washedout blue eyes veined with meanness. You won’t amount to a goddamned thing.

It was a summer of storms that year. Lightning walked the ridges all that July and August and conjured out of the night in strobic configuration stormbent trees writhing in the windy rain. Images of heightened reality rendered instantly out of the flickering night then snatched so instantly back into the absolute darkness they seemed never to have existed at all.

After the old man beat him he’d flee into these windtossed nights. Something in all this chaos seemed to find its counterpart in his own chaotic heart and he’d turn a face stained with blood and tears into the remote heavens and defy the lightning to take him, to char his heart and boil the blood hammering in his veins and seize and short the circuits in his head but this was not to be. Once he followed a light through sheets of windy rain, and in the riverbottom a lightningstruck pine burned like a solitary candle flaring down the night. Set there like a sign to read could he but decipher it. Then he quit crying altogether and took the beatings he couldn’t escapewith a kind of stoic and sullen outrage.

In his fourteenth year he heard the old man’s step on the stair and snapped the thumbbolt. The steps ceased and there was no sound anywhere save the whippoorwills measuring out the dark. He was holding his breath and waiting for the steps to start their descent when the old man’s shoulder abruptly slammed against the door.

He was sitting on the cot with his back against the wall and his arms laced around his knees. He figured the lock to hold. The lock did, but on the third stroke of the old man’s shoulder the top hinge gave and the very door itself toppled into the room with the old man athwart it like some demented carpetrider and Tyler was out the window and gone. He went hand over hand down a trellis crept with ivy with the ivy tearing away in handfuls and the trellis itself tilting away from the wall like a toppling ladder, and he jumped the last few feet and was up and gone into the cedars.

The wind that night was out of the south and warm and balmy and there was a smell of freshly turned loam on it. From the sanctity of farther woods whippoorwills were calling each to each and he walked on toward them.

This time he just kept on walking, as if the boundaries of his world had suddenly dissolved and the landscape before him become limitless. He crossed thin dark woods with light falling in broken shards about him and owls calling inquiringly and when the woods ended fallow fields began so white in the starlight they appeared ghostfields. He went on in a straight line, steering by the stars. Through a cornfield so dry with ancient autumns he moved steadily in a conspiratorial whispering of cornblades and finally out of anything at all attended by men and he guessed he was in the edge of the HarrikinHe came to a creek or river and waded into it. When his feet lost the bottom he drifted downstream awhile then dogpaddled to the far side. He climbed a bank strung with honeysuckle slick black in the moonlight and through such a heady reek of their blossoms he seemed drunk on them and he staggered on.

Daylight found him where he’d never been. He went down a bloodred ravine cut out of clay by old floodwaters and came out in a field with the tilted ghosts of old cornstalks leached thin and fragile as ancient parchment. The sun came smoking up out of the mist and hung above the black treeline and it was almost instantly hot. After a while his clothes began to steam. Below him an abandoned farmhouse and fallen barn and fences gone to kudzu and wild roses. There was no sign of life in all that he surveyed, then he looked upward and a hawk wheeled against a flawless void and it glittered in the sun like some sinister contrivance of flesh and chrome.

He wandered aimlessly about the farm, his mind reconstructing old lives. Old long-silent voices told him tales. Beseeched him to remember them and carry them back to the world they’d lost. Folks were born here, grew old here. Died here, for he found tilting tablets of stone and sunken oblong declivities in the earth beneath the sawbriars and orange bells of cowitch. Old rooms papered with newsprint and flour paste, and he’d wander the house reading this surreal mural of old news as if it had something to tell him.

He felt remote, utterly alone. With the cool earth against his back he awoke sometime in his second night and he could feel the earth wheeling on its mitred course through eternity. Here the sky was clear and so strewn with stars there seemed no darkness between them but simply a vast phantasmagoria of light. Weak with hunger he watched loom out of the night strange gaudy constellations like great wheels rolling toward him and turning endless in the void as if here in the Harrikin even the heavens were ancient and strange. They seemed to alter night to night as if the universe itself was still in flux. Once a shower of falling stars that seemed to have fallen prey to some celestial epidemic but instead of them showering around him he felt the pull of the earth fall away from his back and he became weightless, rising toward their streaking light like ofttold tales of souls raptured upward.

On the third day he came upon an apple orchard reverting to wildness. Most of the trees were dead, black twisted trees like the skeletons of profoundly deformed beasts. Yet one was thick with fistsize summer apples. The earth beneath strewn with them and the drone of bees and the musk of apples everywhere. They were sweetly tart and full of winy juice and he wanted nothing better. He seemed to have reached some curious point where he wanted nothing at all save the fall of night and the configurations of the stars to study as if he’d decipher some message there. Some sign.

On the third or fourth night in a dream or vision an old man came to him who would lead him out of this blighted waste. He’d been sent, he said, he couldn’t say by whom. The old man’s flesh had wasted away on his bones and beneath the faded chambray shirt he wore his arms were thin and fragile as sticks. In times past he’d been shackled in irons, hands and feet. He wore them yet but the chains had been sawn away, they were just heavy bracelets at the ankles and wrists with the sawn links appended like fey adornments.

Tyler had a fire going he kept feeding sticks and balls of grass. He on one side of the fire and the old man at the otherlike ancients at council. Somewhere in the night foxhounds bayed then passed in a hollow below them and the wind brought voices or ghostvoices of men. He shook his head and told the old man he guessed he’d find his own way out. He couldn’t be beholden to another. In order to survive in this world and then make a life in it he had to do this on his own. At last he lay back and slept with his head pillowed on an arm. He awoke once in the night and raised up and looked through the smoke of the dying fire and he was alone.

The next day his sister and a schoolteacher named Phelan and a hunter they’d hired as guide named Tippydo found him and took him home. It didn’t seem to matter. All things and all places had come to seem transitory at best and he seemed to have arrived at some idea of where he fit or did not fit into the scheme of things.