William Gay - Provinces of Night

I was huntin a hog, not a river, Albright said. That shoat’s worth thirty dollars, what she told me. I need to court this lady I know over in Clifton and I always take her a present.

What sort of present? the boy asked.

Well. Generally I take her twenty dollars.

Old Mrs. Halfacre, Neal said.

Who? the boy asked.

She ain’t old, Albright said.

Hellfire, she’s older than you and me put together. She must be getting on toward fifty years old. That’s old from where I’m sitting.

She keeps herself up, though, Albright said.

Well. If stumbling around drunk on blackberry wine is keeping in shape, I guess she does.

Albright looked as though he was about to defend Mrs. Halfacre’s various attributes so the boy said hastily, We’re just driving around looking for some place that’ll let us in long enough to sit down. Neal here’s about got us barred from everywhere. We may have to go clean out of the county.

Barred from where?

Hellfire. Everywhere. The Snip, the poolhall. About two weeks ago they barred us from the Knob. They barred me for being underage and Neal for being Neal.

I never heard of anybody bein barred from the Knob, Albright said in disbelief. They’d let the devil hisself set there as long as he had the price of one more beer.

Not Neal. He started a fight in there that day and they just about tore the place down to the foundation. Broke all the chairs. Somebody tore a piece of boxing off the wall to use for a club and a rat the size of a fice dog run out of the wall. Neal was about halfdrunk and he was trying to go with this woman that was with somebody else. Finally the guy told Neal to get lost and Neal told him the girl was playing with his dick the night before. The guy knocked Neal across the room and it just spread from there.

It was the gospel truth, what I said, Neal said.

He emptied a pistol at us, Fleming said. Neal tried to run him down. Did run over the doorstep.

They Lord, Albright said, as if this was something he deeply regretted missing. You all can go with me, he said. We’ll catch that hog and sell it and head out for Clifton. Mrs. Halfacre’ll let you in, she don’t bar nobody.

I pass again, Neal said.

That daughter of hers, that Raven Lee, she’s about the prettiest girl in a three-county area, Albright said. You ought to come with us.

Fleming thought this an odd way to describe the girl’s beauty, wondered how the three-county area had been canvassed. What the criteria were.

I won’t argue with that, Neal said. He raised a wrist and tilted the dial of his watch to the sun. I know Miss Halfacre well. But I’ve got a date with a redhead from Beaver Dam tonight and I believe I’ve seen all I ever need to see of Raven Lee Halfacre.

Albright glanced at him curiously but didn’t reply. He turned to Fleming. What about you, young Bloodworth? Want to ride over to the Tennessee River? Makes this one look like a spring branch.

Well, I don’t have a date with a redhead. I expect I need to get home, though.

I expect you do, Neal said contemptuously. You’ve got to feed all them stock. Cook supper. Change all them doilies on the coffee table. Why do you remind me of some eighty year old woman?

I wouldn’t mind ridin down there, Fleming told Albright.

All right then. We’ll need my car though. You could ride down and drive it back up here. I doubt Neal’d let me in his car, muddy as I am.

Hell, crawl in here, Neal said. Daddy’s about ruined it. Raised chickens out of it and everything else. Another few trips to the woods up above Early Dial’s and I may just buy me a new one.

They got out at the railroad trestle. You want some of this beer? Neal asked.

Albright was already loading up his pockets. I might take three or four, he said.

I might could take one, Fleming said.

You’ve got the makings of a hell of a Bloodworth, Neal told him. Might could take one. You don’t watch your step you’re going to get drummed out of the whole damned family. Sip on two beers all day long.

They returned to the top of the hill in Albright’s Dodge. Albright got out studying the undergrowth as if the hog might be lurking there awaiting his return. Now let’s round up that shoat, he said. We can’t sell him we’ll stick a apple in his mouth and roast him on a spit.

Fleming gave it a halfhearted attempt but could not get fully caught up in the search for the missing hog. The undergrowth was hot and stifling and absolutely breezeless. Sweat immediately popped out over his entire body and clots of gnats plagued his eyes as if seeking ingress to the skull itself. Mosquitoes buzzed about his ears and he kept slapping at them bothhanded. He stood for a time before the river. It was slow-moving and turgid, viscous as a river of mud easing along. A cotton-mouth dropped from a branch and undulated sluggishly away.

Something was crawling up his leg. He hauled up his breeches legs and he’d been beset by an army of seedticks. Barely visible. His legs were already itching. He shucked off his shoes and socks and waded into the river and began to scrub them off with handfuls of sand.

Hey, he yelled.

After a while Albright came shoatless out of the undergrowth.

I’ve got a little money, Fleming said. How about if I just loan you the twenty?

Where’d you get twenty dollars?

I came into some money. How about it? Does that suit you?

It suits me right down to the ground, Albright said. We’ll go back to town where I can get me a bath and some clean clothes and we’ll head out.

They had been following the Tennessee River for miles, losing it behind enormous stone tablets black as ebony in the darkness, regaining it in the breaks and switchbacks, the car paced by a pale moon that hung over the river, its luminous abstract reflection shattered in the hammered water. The river was wider than Fleming had expected, more of a presence than the road they drove on, it kept drawing your eyes back to it, it refused to be ignored.

The road to Clifton had been long and varied, had consisted of side-trips and dead ends. Albright had been hot and tired and he hadn’t eaten that day and the beer seemed to hit him hard and immediate. He fell to concocting other entertainments as a prelude to the visit to Mrs. Halfacre. Fleming made no protest, he had made a conscious decision to roll with the current, go where the night might take him.

It took him first to Waynesboro, where Albright had heard of a dance. The women were wild there, he said, especially if you came from another county and were therefore foreign to them. He described various acts of intimacy at which these women had no peer. Degrees of abandon to which the women of Ackerman’s Field could only aspire. Fleming doubted all this but he listened anyway and thought with a kind of sardonic amusement that before the night was over life itself might grasp him by the scruff of the neck and jerk him out of the doldrums he seemed grounded in and into its swifter currents. One of these wild women might spring upon him and perform an act so abandoned his life would be altered forever.

Their way was barred at the door of the dancehall by a muscular arm stretched in front of Albright’s chest, a fist clamped on the doorjamb. The man jerked his head toward a handlettered sign nailed to the wall, NO STAGS ALLOWED, the sign said, COUPLES ONLY.

Albright took offense at this. I’ll give you to understand I’m not no Goddamned Staggs, he said. I been a Albright all my life and I got a driver’s license to prove it.

He bought a pint of bootleg whiskey at Goblin’s Knob, sipped it driving while he grew morose and regretful, remembering old wrongs and new done to him as if fate had a dark sense of humor and amused itself at Albright’s expense with every toss of the dice. Fleming rode silently, awash in the raw reek of whiskey that seemed to be rising out of the floorboards, out of the very upholstery itself. While the headlights rolled up scenes he’d never viewed, new configurations of trees and houses and bluffs as if the shifting of their arrangement in the tableau made them new things altogether. A world forever restructuring itself. Strange country rearing up out of the night and subsiding off the dark glass like one of those books whose rapidly flipped pages give the illusion of motion.