William Gay - Provinces of Night

He leapt onto the sidewalk still holding the knife and without slackening his speed. He went down a narrow alley between buildings that rose on either side like the limestone bluffs rising from the banks of Grinders Creek where he’d been raised, and the concrete he ran full tilt on, arms pumping, seemed to be a creekbed. He dreamed a fan of water that rose before him, that diminished behind his churning feet. He could see light at the canyon’s mouth, pale green diffused light like a May sun in willows, and he ran on toward it.

ON AN EARLY Sunday morning Fleming left the street and went up a driveway toward a white stucco house set back in a grove of pecan trees. The house was flatroofed and low and the windows had ornate shutters of wrought iron painted black that made the windows look barred when they were closed. He went up wide concrete steps to a patio where from a chaise lounge a great marmalade cat lying in an oblique square of yellow sunlight watched him with disinterested and insolent eyes.

He opened a storm door constructed of the same iron as the shutters and knocked on a dark wooden door. After a while it opened and an old man stood regarding him with a friendly quizzical expression. He came onto the patio and closed the door behind him.

Could I help you this morning, young man?

I’m Fleming Bloodworth, Mr. Marbet.

Ah. Boyd’s son.

Yes sir. We live down on the creek on that place you own.

Marbet took off his glasses and began wiping the lenses on a handkerchief he took from his jacket pocket. He seemed dressed for church. His cheeks were ruddy and shiny from being freshly shaven and he was wearing a white shirt and a necktie. The tie was maroon silk figured with tiny regal lions rampant across it.

How is Boyd getting along these days?

I don’t really know. He’s up north, working up there making cars or something.

Well. It’s a shame when a man has to leave his home to find a way of making a living. Is there something I could do for you? Would you come in and have a cup of coffee with us?

No, thank you. I just wanted to ask you something. I was back toward the river the other day talking to a man cutting timber and he was telling me something about the TVA planning to build a lake back in there.

Oh yes. They plan to build a dam on the river, they tell me for flood control. It’s going to be a huge lake, enormous. Most everything not underwater they’ll use for a recreation area. Camping, and so forth.

Will it affect your property down there?

It’s not going to be my property much longer, Marbet said wryly. As soon as we come to terms it’ll all belong to the TVA. No papers have been signed, but it’s just a matter of time. The way it was put to me, it’s not something I have a choice in. Not my decision at all. If I don’t sell they’ll just pay me what they consider a fair market price and take it.

Can they do that?

Oh yes. Certainly. They’ve done it a lot in the past, and I expect they’ll do it a lot more in the future.

Where does it come to?

Where does what come to?

The land they’re taking, or buying up. My grandmother lives back across the ridge there and I was wondering if she would be affected.

Oh, I know that place well. No. It’s a long way back through those woods. As I understand it, the TVA line will be on my property somewhere about that old crossroads. Do you know that place?

Yes.

I should have driven down there and had a talk with you, but to tell the truth I had forgotten about that house even being there. I never charged Boyd any rent, in all honesty I never considered that house worth renting. I have so much to look after, and that place just slipped my mind.

Well. I guess I’ll get on, then.

You’ve probably got a few months, but I’d certainly be making other arrangements. That’s all going to be underwater. If you need a place to live come see me. I’ve got a farm down there on Cane Creek I could use another cropper on. There’s an empty tenant house on it, and we’ll find something for you to do.

Well, I’ll think about it.

You’re well spoken and you look as if you’d make me a good man. Don’t think too long, I’ve got people asking about houses all the time.

All right, Fleming said. He turned to go.

We’d be glad to have you out at the church this morning, Marbet called.

Fleming raised a hand and went on.

THE DOG DAY HEAT held into the tag end of August, and there were days when they’d just head out in the communal taxicab with no destination in mind save sufficient speed to engender a breeze through the rolled-down windows. Albright and Fleming would pick up the old man at the trailer, Bloodworth coming out wildeyed with the heat and fanning himself with the Stetson, reeling on his stiff leg like some casualty of the malevolent heat itself, a celluloid man left in the heat too long.

They might sit in the shade of itchy Mama’s front porch with others like them but not quite, old men who treated Bloodworth with the sort of deference they might accord exiled royalty or a man living under the edict of death. The old man holding one warming beer for hours and listening to the tales the old men told, telling some himself. Fleming and Albright sitting among these garrulous old sots like acolytes or apprentices, as if they were picking up the fine points of being old.

You need to let your chauffeur there take you deer huntin, E.E, Cater Hensley said.

Who’s that, young Albright here?

When they first started bringin deer into this part of the country Junior took it into his head he had to kill him one.

Hellfire, Albright said. I’ve heard this till I’m sick of it.

He just lived in the woods there for a while, Hensley went on. But he never did come up on one. Then he was drivin up Riverside one day and there was a eight-point buck standin right in a fencerow Junior got his rifle out and took a rest on the trunk and cut down on it. It never so much as blinked. He shot again. It didn’t even look around. Junior couldn’t figure how in the world he’d missed it. Clyde Tennison was with him and Clyde said it looked for all the world like that deer had heard how bad Junior wanted to kill one and was offerin itself up for a sacrifice. Clyde had done seen what it was but he said Junior shot up a whole box of 30–30 cartridges and that deer just wouldn’t fall. Junior kept sayin his sights was off. Shot off one of its horns and it never moved a muscle. Finally they walked out there to the fencerow and somebody had skinned one out for the meat and hung the head and hide over that fence. Clyde said that hide looked like it had been stood up before a firin squad.

Clyde Tennison is as black a liar as ever drawed a breath, Albright said. I never shot up nowhere near a whole box of shells. It could of happened to anybody.

It could happen to anybody one or two times, Hensley said. How many shells is in a box, twenty? It could only happen twenty times to you.

He killed two concrete deer off old Judge Humphreys’s front yard, old man Breece said. Humphreys shoveled them deer up and rolled em off in a wheelbarrow.

Or they’d late in the day head out in the cooling air for a breath of the river, sit hours on the high gallery of Goblin’s Knob where you could look out across the river and mingle with the revenants of men who’d been knifed there or shot or simply clubbed to death with the hickory truncheons the men of Beech Creek were told to carry. A place of almost mythic violence, the haunt of men so confident in their ability to push things past their limits they could empty a lesser bar by coming through the door and sizing up the clientele. Men who killed each other over being called a son of a bitch with the inflection of the voice a shade wrong or over looking at the wrong woman the wrong way. Men who would for a kind of twisted honor kill each other over a woman who did not care which lived and which died and would before the matter was settled have taken up with another man altogether.