William Gay - Provinces of Night

SHE CAME for two more nights and then the following night she didn’t. Finally he went to bed but he kept getting up and going outside and standing on the top step listening. He imagined her feet clinking the stones climbing the hill, when a cloud shuttled from beneath the moon he thought he saw her crossing the bridge. At last he went to bed but it was a long time before he slept.

The next morning he was about early and he crossed up through a stony sedgefield and a growth of halfgrown cedars. Dee Hixson’s house sat at the mouth of a hollow, its tin roof rusted to a warm umber. The only vehicle parked in Dee’s yard was his pickup truck. Dee himself was sitting on the edge of the porch shelling fresh garden peas into a bowl.

Come up, young Bloodworth. What you up to?

Fleming seated himself on the edge of the porch. I was headed down around the old McNally place. Thought I’d see if ginseng was up yet.

It’s up. Starroot too. Blackroot, there’s a world of that back in there.

I’m about to run out of money. I thought I might make a few dollars that way.

Dee was a wiry little man wrinkled and dark as a shriveled apple. In his younger days he was supposed to have been mean but to Fleming he didn’t look big enough to have accumulated the reputation that mantled him. Yet his face was a roadmap of old violence. A knife cut on his cheek had been crudely stitched so that the healed scar and the dots where the stitches had been looked like a pale fleshy centipede crawling toward his hairline. Long ago a man named Scrapiron Steel had held him down and cut off the end of his nose with a pocket knife. A week later Steel had disappeared, never to be seen again in Ackerman’s Field or anywhere else. The way Fleming had heard the story he was at the bottom of a cistern covered by the stones that Dee had rolled in to cover him, but studying this old man shelling peas he had trouble believing it.

Fleming unfolded himself from the porch. Well, I guess I better start looking if I aim to dig any.

Well. You’ll need you a sack. Get one of them tow sacks out of that corncrib back there.

All right. Say, what happened to your company?

They’ve loaded up and headed out. Gone back north.

I’ll see you, Mr. Hixson.

You come back anytime.

CAME THEN plague days of desolation when loss ravaged him like a fever. The house was empty and dead without her. A place of ice, of perpetual winds. He heard her voice at odd times, echoes of things she’d said. He awoke once in the night and her soft laughter had just faded into silence. Once he distinctly felt her hand lie on his shoulder. Before she’d shared his bed, life had been pointless, but now it had become unbearable. She had appeared from nowhere and returned to it, but she’d taken over his life, left with a lien on his body, a mortgage on his soul.

He tried to remember what she had said about writing, about Christmas vacation. To replay it word for word. I’ll snow you under in letters, she said. You’ll dread to see the mailman coming. He heard the clipped Yankee cadence of her speech tell him how much she loved him. He’d been haunting the mailbox since Boyd left but now he redoubled his efforts. The barren mailbox mocked him. He wasted long hours computing distances, estimating the length of time it took a letter to travel from Detroit, Michigan, to Ackerman’s Field, Tennessee.

In the final throes of desperation he began to check Dee’s mailbox as well, sorting through the letters for one with a Michigan postmark, a firm girlish hand filled with curlicues, the i’ s dotted with little circles.

Then one day as he approached Dee himself was coming down his driveway toward his mailbox. Fleming fell in with him, as if they’d check the mail together.

You ever hear from Merle since she went back north? he asked casually.

Who? Oh, no, Merle ain’t never been much of a letter writer. Tell you the truth I’m sort of glad that bunch is gone. I reckon I’ve lived by myself so long I got used to the peace and quiet. Leastways her and that Randy got back together before they left.

Who?

Randy. Her husband. Big old redheaded boy. They set into fightin like cats and dogs for about a week there. Then she laid out on him somewheres a night or two and I reckon it taught him a lesson. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other by the time they left. It would about turn your stomach.

Fleming had simply walked away. He was crossing the bridge before he even knew where he was. He turned and Dee was standing by the mailbox staring after him.

Why that undermining little bitch, he said aloud. There would be no letters, no Christmas vacation. O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come hack again! But by the time he had reached the foot of the hill he was feeling better and his face was a curious mixture of anger and rueful amusement. He took a small and bitter comfort in knowing that Randy was at least as big a fool as he was.

NO GOOD ever comes of having a police cruiser pull into your yard and park. This was not something that Albright had to learn, it had been bred into generations of Albrights all the way back to the days when the law rode up on horseback. It was part of his genetic makeup.

If in addition to parking a khakiclad deputy gets out with a paper in his hand and compares the name on the mailbox with the name on the warrant then everything is simply compounded, trouble multiplied by itself to an incalculable power.

By the time the curtain fell against the glass Albright was lightfooting it toward the kitchen, by the time he heard the official step at his hearth and the first peremptory rapping he was out the back door and gone, past the hogpen and the woodlot in a desperate stretch for the woods, the jagged line of pines bobbing in his vision with the pounding of his feet, the darkness beyond their trunks a land that offered its own kind of absolution, a land of timber and hollows so deep they threatened no extradition.

YOUNG FLEMING BLOODWORTH, with the proceeds of two weeks of herb gathering folded in the toe of his right front pocket, stood before Breece’s Variety Store staring at a huge old Remington typewriter enshrined behind plateglass. After a while he went in past rows of hangered clothing and bins of toys and shelved cosmetics to where a salesgirl was marking prices on tiny white tags and stapling them to the sleeves of blouses.

How much is that typewriter in the window? There’s no price on it.

I don’t know how much he wants for it, you’d have to ask Mr. Breece. He’s never said anything about it to me.

Is he not here?

He’s somewhere there in the back. The storeroom. Just go to that door and holler at him.

Breece was a tall cadaverous man in wire-rimmed glasses and thinning gray hair worn long in the back and combed carefully forward in the forlorn hope it would cover his baldness. He was unpacking glassware from a cardboard carton filled with shredded paper and when Fleming told him what he wanted he nodded and pulled on a gray sweater and buttoned it and clipped a black bowtie to the collar of his shirt. Let’s go up to the front and look at it, he said.

I’ve learned there’s not much call for typewriters here in Ackerman’s Field, he said. If one tears up over at the courthouse they get a new one through some wholesale office supply. Same thing up at the school.

How much is it?

I’m asking sixty dollars. It’s a eighty-dollar machine but I’ve had it too long and I’d like to move it. It’s a top of the line machine. Crafted like a Swiss watch.