William Gay - Provinces of Night

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.

The room he slept in was shaped like a triangle, its sides formed by the rafters that framed the roof. He found a box of magazines and read the second installment of a serial by George Sessions Perry: he could find neither the first nor third segment but he read it anyway. It began to rain gently, he could hear it on the roof, a comforting murmur of faroff thunder. He read on, while his Uncle Warren watched him from a gilt frame on the bureau, until he lowered the magazine and studied the photograph.

Warren handsome in his Army uniform, his Congressional Medal of Honor pinned to his tunic. The smooth wing of his hair, clipped mustache like a nineteen-forties matinee idol. The boy thought of the invasion of Normandy that Warren had told him about, scrambling up the beaches over the bodies that had gone before, mortar fire that lit the night and exploding artillery shells that trailed out of the velvet sky like strings of phosphorus.

He slept but awoke sometime before day in this strange room and for a time he didn’t know where he was. How he’d come to be here. He had no idea what time it was. The room began to feel like an enormous womb that was keeping him alive with its warmth, its comfort. It seemed alive, he imagined its stertorous breathing, he could feel its dark heart’s blood coursing through the wiring, the plumbing. He got up and moved through the sleeping house. In the kitchen he made sandwiches of biscuits and slabs of ham and he cut two wedges of dried peach pie and put all this into a flour sack.

He went outside and struck out past the dog kennel toward home. The rain had stopped. A few of the dogs awoke as he passed and they roused themselves and followed him sleepily for a time. He paid them no mind. His feet were sure and confident on the path his eyes could barely see. They knew every turning, every windfall tree that lay across it. One by one the dogs fell away as if he was bound for some world they wanted no dealing with, and they turned and went back toward comfort and civilization.

SPRING THAT YEAR was a strange and solitary time. There were days when the only car that passed below his house was the mailman, weeks when he spoke or heard no word of human speech. Boyd did not come and he did not come and there was no letter, as if the border of trees he’d walked into had fallen closed behind him like a curtain that shrouded the mysteries of one world from the mysteries of another. Brady was sent to check on the boy but Fleming did not return to his grandmother’s. He was sent again but this time the boy watched from the shade of the woods and did not acknowledge his presence. Brady stood on the porch and knocked and waited a while, the sun like a fire in his bright red hair, and then he went away. If he returned Fleming was not there to see it.

The house was full of odd silences, dark corners. The house seemed to be listening to him. To be waiting. As if he’d begun to tell some tale and the house was waiting for him to continue, listening patiently to hear the end of the story. But he’d lost the thread of the narrative and he could not go on.

The books he’d read no longer comforted him. The progression of the words had been subtly altered so that they deceived him, sentences had been shifted like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle and arranged into lies. He forgot to eat until finally things began to look subtly different to him, their edges shimmering with a bluegold aura. There seemed imponderable mysteries veined in a leaf, he watched light that fell through a gauzy curtain onto a tabletop with a bemused wonder. He watched its sweep across the rough pine grain of the wood as if he couldn’t fathom where it came from, what purpose it might possibly serve. He began to suspect another, deeper layer of time, a time of stone and cloud and tree to which the time of clocks and calendars was a gross mockery cobbled up by savages. He felt the ways of men fall from him like sundered shackles.

He stayed out of the house, he was much of the time in the woods, he felt like some animal half domesticated but ultimately unable to resist the feral ways of the forest. The spring nights were fecund and warm and alive, and there were nights he did not come in at all.

He followed the creek where it wound toward the river and he stayed in the woods for days. He came out in a long stretch of bottomland at Riverside across from which was a country store. He bought candy bars and when he spoke his voice felt rusty and unused, it fell on his ears in a harsh croaking. Such folks as he saw had begun to look at him oddly. With the candy bars he returned to the woods and went on toward the river. He thought when he reached it he might follow to see where it led then follow that. Storms seemed to be following the streams as well and from the shelter of a cave he watched lightning sear the night sky like something irreparably wrong in the vaulted dome of the world itself and walked on over hailstones that lay gleaming like pearls.

He ate the candy bars and when they were gone speared fish in clearwater pools or ate nothing. He seemed to be drawing inward toward some point at which he would be reduced to the fundamental essence of himself. Finally he turned back. He’d reached a border beyond which lay a world he wanted no dealings with. He left the river and went back over hills and ridges he’d never seen but which had a comfortable familiarity about them nonetheless so that they led him without a misstep to the head of Grinders Creek.

Going up the long spine of ridges below Dee Hixson’s he remembered a childhood haunt and descended into a deep hollow wickered in greengold light and followed it past an old whiskey still of which remained only twisted copper tubing and broken jugs and rusted fifty-gallon drums chopped with axes. Past an ancient springbox hewn or chiseled out of the limestone itself and to the ruins of a log cabin almost drowned in riotous honeysuckle and mimosa. The roof was halfcaved and virid with a thick growth of moss.

He stooped to pass beneath a tilted lintel and entered the house. It was curiously cold, perpetually shaded, profoundly abandoned save for a blacksnake that dropped from a ceiling beam and flowed like a moving inkslash through a floorboard and gone. He climbed a steep narrow stairway to the upper floor. The drone of dirtdaubers at their labors was all there was to break the silence. He looked about. Through the missing shakes the harsh trees and unreal sky looked intense and oversaturated, color bleeding into color. In the shadows of a wall an old work shoe cured hard as stone, like some piece of art sculpted from an alien material. Old newspapers pasted to the boxed walls. He crossed and read what he could as if to see was there news posted here for him but the paper was foxed and crumbling and such sentences as he could decipher seemed to be cryptic references to violent deeds splintered from some larger and more violent whole and they bore so little relationship to his life they might have been strange oral accounts filtered down from some older order or just ravings leaked through madhouse walls.