William Gay - Provinces of Night

The old man said his pockets weren’t deep enough yet for a well but he was mulling over plans for a cistern and pump. In the meantime they found a steel tank that had done service on a dairy farm and laboriously mounted it on poles so that Albright could juryrig a gravity flow of water to the plumbing of the trailer. A county truck with a water tank was hired to fill it and with water in the pipes and lights to defray the darkness the trailer was approaching the comforts of home.

The first night there his sleep was broken and chancy as an old man’s often is and sometime in the night he dreamed of wolves. The dream was so vivid it was almost tactile, he could have brushed the silver ruff at the wolf’s throat with his fingers. He was looking across an expanse of ice and snow toward a huge wolf baying at the moon. The wolf was silhouetted against the moon which was full and hung low in an indigo sky strewn with curdled clouds the color of foam on seagreen water and the wolf’s breath smoked coldly in the air.

He woke knowing that something had slammed against the front door, a sound that vanished the instant he was awake to hear it. Dogs were howling. They seemed to be all about the trailer and he rose and turned on the light. The cacophony of howls and barks did not diminish with the light and the old man crossed the room and opened the front door. A dog sprang from the doorstep into the yard. You hush that up, the old man yelled. There was no moon and all he could see was the vague shape of dogs like revenantial dogs cobbled up out of night and shadow crossing and recrossing the yard. Now I’m not about to put up with this mess all night, he said to himself.

He pulled the guitar case from beneath his bed and opened it and removed the guitar and from the storage compartment meant for picks and extra strings withdrew a shortbarreled.38 Smith & Wesson revolver. He crossed back to the doorsill and stood on the top step with the pistol held beside his leg. The dogs were still milling about the yard and at the edge of the woods he could just discern a spectral human figure, a vague paleness against an indecipherable darkness, perhaps a man wearing a lightcolored shirt.

Who’s out there? he called.

He could hear the soft almost furtive sounds of the dogs fading toward the woods. No one answered him and even as he watched the figure vanished, not abruptly but like something sinking slowly backward into deep blue water, like a light dimming down until finally there is nothing there at all.

Brady? he called.

SHE HAD BEEN brought up hard but not that hard. Not as hard as it was to live in an uncertain state of fear, knowing each day that the law would sooner or later come with government warrants and going to bed at night with that knowledge somehow intensified because it seemed even more apt for them to come at night. Even E.F. had to sleep sometime.

Not as hard as the door being kicked from its hinges behind her as she crossed from the stove to the table, a hot pan clutched bothhanded before her, the door caving inward and the room abruptly filling with stumbling men, Julia halfturning, the pan tilting, and she remembered the hot bright spatters of scalding soup on her ankles.

Julia sat in the shade of the pine in the metal chaise lounge. A broom stood tilted against her knee and there were fresh broommarks on the earth where the straw had gone. The air was winey with the smell of the sun in the hot pineneedles, a breeze arose and the smell intensified, a dust devil spun lazily down from the barnlot like a ghost and across the driveway and passed over her, her clothes rustling, the whirling wind cool against the drying sweat on her face.

She took off the goldrimmed glasses she wore and polished them on the hem of her apron, old feedsack material so often laundered it had gone patternless and soft as chamois. A catbird called from the tree but the bird’s cry had no more reality than the sounds of deputies in her kitchen long ago, a raincrow called from a distant field but what she heard was the castiron kettle striking the hardwood floor, tomato soup spattering the wall like blood.

E.F. was sitting at a wide pine trestle table that bisected him above the waist and cut from view the pistol shoved into his trousers. All this was caught in a moment, etched her memory like acid filigrees on steel: there was a bowl of milk before Bloodworth, he was holding cornbread he was in the act of crumbling into the milk. His eyes widened but only momentarily, then narrowed to slits, the face gone at once sleepylooking and intent, and she knew him so well his thoughts were almost audible to her, what to do, what to do.

She was grabbed hard from behind, her throat and head caught in the crook of an elbow, she could see part of a blued rifle barrel extending into the upper corner of her vision, feel the rough serge overcoat sleeve against her throat. She clawed at the arm but it was strong and adrenalinecrazed, it was like struggling against a steel band. She felt her throat close, she was gasping for one more breath.

E.F. rose, facing the men, his hands raised, turning suddenly to kick away the chair behind him. The chair slammed into the wall, careened impotently across the floor.

Suddenly she slid downward toward the floor, the serge scraping across her cheek, felt her face distort against the clamped arm, eyelid stretched and distended until the eye opened against her will, the sandpaper of serge across the ball of the eye itself. The floor seemed somewhere she had to be. Her hair was caught in the buttons of the man’s overcoat then he seized her hair in his fist trying to haul her back up to shield him.

She was no more than halfway down the man’s body, descending him like a ladder, when E.F. fired. The hollow boom was enormous and the concussion came wave on palpable wave and the fist released her with her hair stringing away and she could feel strands of it plucked from her scalp. Her head slapped the floor and when she rolled over onto her back the man loomed above her, enormous but wounded, like a stricken god. He clutched himself where neck and shoulder joined then moved the hand away and stared at his bloody palm in a kind of wonder. A haze of smoke drifted.

She now saw that there were three of the men. She’d thought the number greater and she wondered were there more outside. The deputies seemed frozen, the rifles at port arms across their chests. She could read in their faces that they had just wanted to arrest him without killing or being killed and the faces showed how unlikely that possibility had become. E.F.’s face just showed that he didn’t care if he killed them or not and maybe he’d a little rather kill them. He had the pistol pointed at the man’s head and she watched the cylinder’s slow turn and the hammer go to halfcock.

Lean them pieces against the wall, E.F. said. No, throw them out that door into the yard.

They did.

Get over in that corner, he said, or one at a time I’ll punch three tickets to hell.

He was helping her up, leading her through the doorway into the bright sun. A wind had risen and shadows moved across the yard like something the wind was blowing before it.

No, she said, tugging against his arm, wondering what he was thinking. Fight one man off and there’s always another one, she thought. The boys were in school, they’d be along. To an empty house that smelled like gunpowder, blood on the walls, blood on the floor.

No, she said, I can’t live like this no more, I won’t do it. Go on and go wherever it is you want to.

I can’t leave you, he said.

You left me a long time ago, she told him.

He released the cock on the hammer of the revolver and shoved it into the waistband of his trousers. It’s none of my doin, he said.