William Gay - Provinces of Night

The flat wooden bed of the truck was loaded with concrete blocks and shovels and picks and jacks and all the tools they might need to set up the old man’s trailer. Fleming had been conscripted to help and he was curious to see how this job might be accomplished.

Where the field ended they lurched out onto a roadbed and turned right. After some distance Fleming caught the glint of the sun on metal and then he could see it, a short cigar stub of a trailer with two rounded ends. Brady parked before it and cut the switch. Home sweet home, he said.

Fleming got out trying to rub feeling into his backside. Where’s the rest of it? he asked.

What?

There doesn’t seem to be much to it.

Well, he’s not but one old man. Likely he won’t live long anyway. Beggars can’t be choosers, can they?

How’s he begging? I thought you said he sent you the money to buy him a trailer.

And you see it before you, Brady said. Let’s get this stuff unloaded. I’ve got more to do than set up this mess. Find a shady spot somewhere for that water jug.

Shade seemed hard come by here, and he wondered, but did not ask, why Brady had chosen this spot. There were no trees surrounding the trailer, nothing but chesthigh blackjack scrub.

Why don’t we clear some of this brush and move it back in there where the trees are?

Move it? Pick it up and set it back there?

We could maybe move it back in there with the truck.

Maybe. Or maybe turn it over and bust it like an egg. Don’t worry about it. Maybe the Lord will take mercy on a sinner and miracle an air conditioner into that front window yonder.

Brady set him to digging a hole for a makeshift septic tank and positioned a jack at the low end of the trailer and began to raise it, shoring up with concrete blocks as he went, checking the underside of the trailer from time to time with a spirit level. After he’d dug through the top layer of clay and chopped out the tree roots Fleming found the going easier and actually began to enjoy the work, loosening the earth with a mattock and throwing the dirt out with a shovel. By midmorning he had an enormous amount of earth mounded on the rim above him and he was standing chestdeep in a hole he could have buried a horse in.

Hey.

Brady came over to look.

How deep does this thing have to be?

Some deeper than that. We can’t have a worldfamous musician doing his business in the woods like a heathen.

Where’s he going to get water?

I guess I’ll have to haul his water. Unless you want to fly in when you’re through with that hole and dig him a well.

Fleming wiped sweat out of his eyes and stood leaning on the shovel. He could think of nothing worse than being trapped in this eggshaped tin can dropped down in the boiling sun and dependent on Brady to haul his drinking water.

That old man is going to singe and draw like a spider, he said. He went back to shoveling.

At noon the heat felt malefic and they walked through the brush behind the trailer into the shade and ate the lunch the old woman had prepared, roast beef sandwiches and hardboiled eggs. The boy finished with a fried apple pie he washed down with tepid coffee from a Mason jar.

How come you’re so down on the old man, Brady?

If you’d ever been around him you wouldn’t need to ask me that.

Well, I wasn’t, so I do. None of you talks about him, or none of the family anyway.

Boyd and Warren ain’t so down on him. Let him come on back, they said. You’ll notice Warren’s in Alabama and Boyd’s traipsed off God knows where and I’m the one out here sweatin over this mess.

I’ve learned more about him from listening to other old men talk than I ever did from you or Pa, Fleming said. You act like he just stepped through a hole in the ground and vanished.

Well, Brady said, that’s about what happened. Except now he wants to crawl back out of the hole. If it was left up to me I’d stand on the edge of the hole and stomp his fingers ever time he tried to get a handhold. He just left Ma settin and walked off. Just walked. Not havin a car never stopped him. He’d rather ride but he’d walk if he had to. He always had these trashy people he could turn to. He had all the company he wanted, of one kind or another. But blood is never left up to you, blood will call to blood. You can’t deny your own kin.

He was silent for some time, his sharp intent face locked in concentration. I expect it was mainly that music, he finally said. I’ve thought about it a lot, and for a while I thought it was the whiskey. But I’ve come to see it was them old songs. They was real to him in a way they wasn’t real to nobody else. Whenever he’d take that old banjo out of the case and go off by himself, you’d know in a few days he’d be gone. Like a man goin on a drunk, except it’d be them old songs he’d be drunk on. That old lonesome-soundin banjo. His voice sounded like a fingernail on a blackboard. They say he’s made some money at it but Lord I’d like to know who spent it. It never sounded worth fifteen cents to me.

The boy sat and listened in silence. He tipped the last of his coffee onto the ground. The earth was dry and baked white and fissured with cracks like miniature faults in the earth. Like the embryonic beginnings of some ultimate cataclysm. It sucked the coffee instantly into itself and left no trace. He thought about what Brady had said. He felt instinctively that every coin had two sides and that this was only one of them. In the poolhall and on Itchy Mama Baker’s front porch he’d heard another story. Once people knew who he was they always had a story to tell him about his grandfather. They seemed to regard him as somehow larger than life. As if in living life on a larger scale than they were permitted or perhaps permitted themselves he had somehow redeemed them. He’d heard stories of a man who’d sometimes lived outside the law but had forded a swollen river on horseback to pay back a two-dollar loan. But, the man amended, it might have been that E.F. just wanted to see if he could swim the river. He was a man who had had trouble adjusting himself to the expectations that other people, particularly people in authority, had for him. He seemed to have some difficulty playing the role that life had cast him.

The last time he left, Brady said, he had just got out of the pen. He was making whiskey then and he wound up shootin a deputy sheriff. I wasn’t there but he must have just walked in the front door and out the back. And then that was that.

He sat for a time without speaking. He seemed to be studying his shoes. He was studying them intently, as though they were some make of shoe he had never encountered before.

I ought never to have let you get me started on this line of talk, he finally said. Things run along smooth when I don’t think of him at all. My mind’ll smooth off. Then I get started on him and it’s like somebody jabbed a stick down inside my head and stirred everything up. My mind’s like muddy water. There’s times I could have killed him like a copperhead I seen in the woods and just walked off and left him. Let’s get this mess done and get out of here.

There’s not going to be any electricity?

Not unless you want to box it up and tote it to him. Do you see any wires run in here? Then let’s get to work. We can run them septic tank lines and cover the tank over without it.

They stood up. You reckon you could really find water around here? Fleming asked.

I could if it’s here. Back on a dry ridge like this here it’d be a long way down if you did find it.

Let’s see you try.

Why? You wouldn’t know anymore if you watched than you do right now. It ain’t somethin you see. You feel the fork jerk and tremble in your hands. If the stream’s strong enough it’ll draw it straight down, like a magnet draws iron. I’ve seen it twist the bark off.