William Gay - Provinces of Night

The house sat yellowlit beyond the inked shadow of the great pine and he strode on toward it, the hot pungent smell washing over him as he passed beneath it.

Who are you? a voice asked out of the darkness.

Albright leapt at the sound and turned in its direction. A man was sitting in a metal glider watching him, barely visible in the darkness. Albright had thought he was walking past an empty glider.

My name’s Junior Albright. I’m lookin for Brady Bloodworth.

I thought that was who you was. I’ve seen you around town and out on the roads. What did you want with Brady Bloodworth?

I need to talk to him, Albright said.

You are talkin to him. Get that other chair, set a while. I like to set out here in the early part of the night and settle my mind. I got a restless mind, it don’t always do what I want it to. What can I help you with? If you’re sellin somethin I won’t buy it and if you’re runnin for some office I probably won’t vote for you.

It ain’t nothin like that. I need to hire you for somethin.

I don’t work out much anymore. Did you want the cards read?

Albright had seated himself in the other glider. The night was warm and balmy but the metal was already wet with dew and it felt cool against his skin. I don’t want my fortune told, he said, perhaps feeling that all of his future at once might overwhelm him, he’d rather learn it a piece at a time.

Well, I can see things but you have to run out the cards for me to see them. You may as well break down and tell me what it is you want.

Harwood ain’t carryin the mail no more, Albright said tentatively.

No, he ain’t.

Albright was noticing that the dogs had fallen silent. It seemed to him that they had grown quiet at the moment that Brady had said Who are you? out of the darkness, as if they had been waiting for him to speak and so right the world.

There’s a fellow, Albright began, and while Brady listened in respectful silence and his voice took on an aggrieved quality he told the story of the crimper’s destruction. He was remembering the heat dancing off the metal roof, the weight of Woodall’s arm on his shoulder in the pool room, his own name typed so neatly on the official-looking papers he had been served with.

He’s holdin a mortgage on the rest of my life. I won’t never have eight hundred and sixty dollars at one time, and he’s chargin me interest on that that keeps mountin up. They’ve probably had to take on extra hands over at the courthouse to handle all the paperwork, and they’ll likely be wantin me to pay that. I want him off my back. I don’t want him took with no cancer or nothin like that but I want him to let me alone. Maybe he could just wake up some mornin and realize it was all a bad mistake.

Come on in the house and drink a cup of coffee, Brady said.

They sat at a kitchen table covered with oilcloth so faded and worn he could see the weave of the cloth at the corners of the table, faintly discern lithographed coffee grinders and spice mills on the slick cloth. Once a tiny old woman who looked like an Indian passed through the room but she did not speak, just nodded once birdlike at Albright and went into the front room.

Brady took from a purple chamois bag a deck of cards. He shuffled them. His fingers were long and delicately formed as a woman’s, the nails pink and smooth as if he manicured them. They moved the cards with a liquid dexterity, placed them with a slap on the oilcloth before Albright.

Cut them, he said.

I don’t want my fortune told.

Then I won’t tell it. You’ve got to cut the cards anyway.

Albright cut the deck and slid it back to Brady. Brady rifled the cards into three stacks then fanned each section and sat in bemused concentration. It took him a long time. Albright sat in a strained silence, like a man in a doctor’s office waiting to find out just what it is he’s got. He studied the fading flowers climbing the wallpaper, the windows that instead of showing the world outside turned the room back at him in a tense claustrophobic reflection.

At length Brady scooped them up and restacked them and restored them to their soft bag. He studied Albright in silence, his blue eyes focused and so intense that for a moment Albright felt that he was staring with clinical detachment into his very soul, turning to the back pages where his darkest and most shameful secrets were written in cryptic notation, and he turned slightly in his chair, as if he’d in some manner impede Brady’s view.

It’ll be tricky, Brady said.

What?

I said the cards when I run them out showed me it’d be tricky. When Harwood run over the dog he done it on purpose. He told me to put the dog up and I didn’t and he run over it. That’s black and white, left and right, up and down. Your situation is blurrier than that. You did break his whatchamacallit, his crimper, and he did pay money for it. Whether he paid eight hundred and sixty dollars for it I can’t say. The cards are uncertain and I’m thinkin he’s tryin to make money off you. He don’t like you. I believe he’s had it in for you for a long time.

Then you can’t do it?

Oh, I can do it all right. I just said it’d be tricky.

Say, how come you can do things like this, anyway?

I don’t know. I always had secondsight. I was born with a caul, I always knowed things. It seems natural to me, a better question might be how come you can’t. I reckon I just see a wider range of things than most folks. Other people can just see the things, I can see the connection between them. Once when I was eight years old I was choppin cotton for a feller down on Grinder’s Creek. This dog I had met me when I was halfway home and walked the rest of the way right beside me. I found out later he had been dead for two days, but what does that mean? He was as real as me or you. He was a collie and had long hair and there was cockleburs in it. I stopped on the way home and pulled them out, I can still see them comin off with long strands of his hair wound up in the burrs. Does that make any sense to you? It don’t to me. All I can do is take it and go on. I can witch for water. Pa dug out a hole forty feet deep and five feet in diameter because I told him there was no water where he was diggin. When he finally moved to where I said he hit water at eighteen feet and that’s the well we’re usin to this day.

His voice had taken on the curious singsong quality of a fundamentalist preacher. It made Albright nervous and kept reminding him of his crazy father but he didn’t get up to leave. He had begun to believe for the first time that Brady might actually do such a thing.

What do you mean by tricky?

I can’t control what’ll happen. I had a picture in my mind of Harwood clutchin at his bowels and cryin but this don’t give me no clear picture. Just somethin about a machine. I guess because you say that thing you broke was a machine. It’s like … it’s like there’s a wall, but my hand’ll go through the wood, and on the other side are all these things that can happen but ain’t happened yet. They’re just swirlin around. Might never happen. But when I get hold of one I can’t always see what I’m gettin. You see? When I haul it out through the wall into this world I may not know what it is, but it’s goin to happen, and you can take that to the bank.

Albright sat in silence. Brady was watching him. The silence went on until it honed itself to a thin wire so taut it gave off a faint humming. Brady’s eyes had fixed him where he sat. Albright thought of taking out a cigarette and lighting it, just to have something to do, but he sat without moving.

You want me to hex him?

Yes. I got to get him off my back, get some relief. He’s drivin me crazy, I think he’s gettin a kick out of it. Do it.