William Gay: Provinces of Night

She had long been a silent woman, in her early thirties but old before her time, life passing her by, the world going its way without her. She had grown stingy with words, whole days spent in sullen silence, as if her supply of words was being exhausted and she must parcel them out one by one.

He had watched the sallow mask she wore for a face and wondered what went on behind it. A year ago he came upon her burning a box of his books, feeding them one by one to the wood heater. They struggled for a moment over the book she was proffering to the fire. He wrested the box away from her and she threw the book she was holding and slammed him hard in the side of the head. You dreamyeyed little fool, she spat at him, expressing once and for all her contempt for the written word, those who would read it and those who would attempt to transcribe it in spiralbound notebooks.

The night she vanished Boyd had shaken him awake, holding aloft the kerosene lamp, something strange in his face that was echoed in his voice when he spoke.

Where’s your mama?

Fleming didn’t know anything to say to this. He got up and followed Boyd into the front room. Boyd was searching all about the room though there was no place for her to be. He seemed in the throes of a grief so grotesque it was almost comic, and Fleming watched him with a dispassionate emotion approaching contempt.

If this don’t beat any damn thing I ever seen, Boyd said.

The boy went back to bed. After a while he heard the door close when Boyd went out and then close again when he came back in. He waited for the sound of the bedsprings creaking when Boyd went back to bed but he never heard it. At length he turned his face to the wall and went to sleep.

BOYD WAS half asleep when the cars were coupled to the engine, a loud metallic shunting and a series of jolts he could feel in his teeth. He raised up from the straw he’d been lying in when the cars began to move, the dark landscape of light and shadow sliding past the open door. He drank from the opened bottle and put it back inside his shirt with its brother where he could feel it cold and smooth against his belly. He took out his tobacco and began to build a cigarette, watching past the flare of the match sleeping houses streaking past like islands afloat in the moving sea of night, the train’s speed increasing, so that he was caught in a rising tide of exhilaration at its sheer movement.

I wouldn’t mind one of them smokes, a voice said.

Boyd leapt involuntarily at the sound; he hadn’t known there was anybody else in the world. At length he could make out a shape, a darker shadow among other shadows.

I ain’t goin to bring it to you.

The shadow stirred, and Boyd could smell the man, a rank sour compound of perspiration, whiskey. He reached the tobacco across when the man hunkered before him, the man separating out a paper and sifting tobacco into it, light slant across his bearded jaw, long lank strawcolored hair that fell like a shadow across his eyes.

I had some money I’d buy a sack of my own. You ain’t got a quarter you’d let a man have have you?

All I got is a dollar bill and there ain’t no way of breakin it. If I had some change I’d give it to you.

That dollar’d work, the man said. His face was wolfish in the orange flare of the match, somehow unreal through the exhaled smoke, not like a man but the malevolent embodiment of one, just another obstacle the angry fates had stood in Boyd’s path.

Boyd was gauging the man’s size and he didn’t reply. He was confident of his own size and strength, once when he’d worked at the tie yards he’d on a bet shouldered and walked off with a seven-by-nine crosstie on each shoulder. He could feel the tensing muscles of his thighs, the rockhard biceps, and he drew comfort from them. Boyd was as fastidious in his personal habits as circumstances permitted and he thought, if I can get past the smell of him I’ll be all right.

How about a little drink of that whiskey?

I ain’t got no whiskey.

The hell you don’t. If there’s one thing I ain’t never mistook about it’s the sound of a whiskey bottle lid bein screwed off. There ain’t nothin else in the world sounds like it.

Why don’t you just get away and leave me the hell alone? I ain’t botherin you.

Let’s have that dollar you been braggin about.

Boyd shoved him hard backward but the man seemed to have been expecting it and when he came up he was opening a hawkbill knife that just appeared from nowhere. Boyd crouched and waited for the thrust of the knife and when it came he grasped the arm as hard as he could and broke it across his knee. The knife spun away. As he stooped to pick it up the man gave a cry of animal rage and butted him so hard he went backpedaling away until his feet ran out of surface and he was falling, a nightmarish vision of the door receding not only upward but jerked hard to the right, the wheels clocking and gears gnashing like hell’s jaws and abruptly he was rolling knees over head down a stony slope, pain that was liquid fire flaring in his sides and strange lights flickering behind his eyelids. He fetched up at the bottom of the slope sitting on his haunches and watching the vanishing train with a stunned disbelief.

At length he rose and pulled his shirt off and shook the glass out of it. Blood black as tar in the starlight was tracking down his ribcage from myriad cuts. He studied his wounds as best he could to gauge the seriousness of them and when he was satisfied stood picking the shards of glass out of his skin. The shirt was soaked with blood and peach brandy but there was nothing for it. He pulled the shirt on and buttoned it.

He turned left, right, trying to pinpoint the four points of the compass in all this dark. This world was flat as a pool table and as featureless. He wasted a few minutes searching for the tobacco and on the faint hope that only one of the bottles had shattered but gave it up when he found both bottlecaps.

It seemed a long time before the faintest wash of light appeared in the eastern sky and when it did he rose and walked off toward it.

WHEN E. F. BLOODWORTH came up the concrete stairway from the basement carrying the cased banjo she was sitting in the swing on the end of the porch waiting for him the way he had known she would be. He could hear the peas she was shelling begin striking the tin bucket set beside the swing but she had commenced only upon hearing him close the door to his rented room. The thought of her sitting there with unshelled peas held at the ready and waiting for the sound of his footfalls was a little disquieting, and he began to feel boxed in, a way he did not like to feel. And never had for long.

The day he had carried the guitar to the freight office to be shipped to Ackerman’s Field she had been at work but she had missed the old Martin double-F immediately and inquired about it. He had shipped the guitar first because he could not carry both instruments at once, and he hated worse being separated from the banjo.

You’ll fall out in that sun, she said. You know what the doctor told you.

Bloodworth was coming around the end of the porch, fending his way through the box elders with a walking stick. He only told me that because I was about broke, he said. If I had had twenty more dollars I could of got a more favorable report.

He crossed between the box elders and the porch. You planted all this mess so I couldn’t fight my way through it and escape, he told her. He set the banjo case down on a cracked and wonky sidewalk and seated himself with some difficulty on the edge of the porch.

She went on shelling peas. It don’t seem to be working too well, does it? she asked.