William Gay - Provinces of Night

He took off his hat, a pearlgray Stetson fedora, and ran a hand across the long black strands of his hair. The sun was in his face and he shaded it with a hand. He had a craggy, hawklike face. His black eyes were heavylidded and sleepylooking, but watchful as a predator’s. He sat for a long moment watching her out of these hooded eyes.

She was as square and solid and unlovely as a wooden packing crate. Her high-complexioned moonshaped face bloomed with the high blood pressure she suffered from and her hair was dyed a hard bright orange that nature would have been hard put to replicate. But she sat in the shade of a rose trellis and the shadows of roses and the shadows of their leaves climbed her clean white nurse’s uniform onto her face and her eyes were a clear bright blue that reminded the old man of Indian summer skies he had seen long ago as a boy. On top of that she was as kind a human being as he had ever encountered and he had thought long and hard before deciding to make this move.

You are a fool, she told him. But then you don’t need me to tell you that.

Where were you fifty years ago? he asked. If you’d told me that then it might have done some good. I might have straightened right out.

You couldn’t be straightened out with a block and tackle hooked on each end of you. The only way you’ll ever be straightened out is when they arrange you in the box and clasp your hands together.

Damned if you wouldn’t cheer a feller up, he said. I bet in your spare time you set around making up sayings that would look good carved on tombstones.

I spend too much of my time taking care of people who die in spite of all they can do, she said. It aggravates me to see a man with a choice just set out to kill himself. You’ll die on that bus. They’ll take you off on a stretcher in some place where nobody gives a damn about you. It looks to me like if a man’s set on dying he’d want to do it where there’s somebody cares something about him.

I don’t want to do it nowhere, Bloodworth said. And ain’t about to.

You know I care something about you. I’d take care of you. And I can do it right, that’s what I do for a living.

The amount of care I need has been way overstated, the old man said. I believe I’m capable of taking care of myself.

He fell silent, watching her. He didn’t want to tell her that what she did for a living was part of the problem. Cora worked in a hospital in Little Rock, in the wing where patients were sent to die. It was Cora’s job to help them, and he guessed she was good at it, they all died, but he didn’t want any help from a professional. An aura of death hung about her like a plague. The smell of dying folks had soaked into her clothes, her lungs were saturated from breathing the last breaths of too many men, when she got up to cross the floor the unquiet dead she’d helped ferry across the Styx struggled up and followed obediently after her. She moved always encumbered by a legion of the invisible dead.

The tunes and words to songs ran perpetually through the old man’s head and he thought of one he used to sing: who’ll rock the cradle, who’ll sing the song? and he wondered when the time came who would bind Cora’s slack jaws, who would lean to close her eyelids forever.

It’s just somethin I’ve got to do, he said. I want to see the country where I was a boy. And I guess maybe I want to see how long hard feel-ins can last.

They last a long time, she told him. I’ve no doubt that you’ll learn that, at least.

He stood up, took up the banjo. I’ve got to get this thing shipped, I can’t set around here jawing with you all day. I’m not even leaving till I get a little more of my strength back. Likely the way it’ll go is I’ll stay a month or two and come back before winter. Or maybe send for you, Cora, how about that? Would you come if I sent for you?

I’d go to wherever you sent for me from, Cora said, half amused and half angry. But God, what kind of fool do you think I am? You never needed anybody bad enough in your life to send for them.

I’m goin to town before this heat gets worse, he said, taking up the stick from where he’d leaned it against a porch stanchion.

You wait up, she said. If you’re so set on going I’ll call you a cab.

He went on. He did not want to die here in this boarding house. Cora was a good woman but he did not want his last vision of the world to be her moonshaped face floated down to his, leaning to whisper the password that would permit him access to a world that was in all probability even stranger and darker than this one.

TWO DAYS LATER just as he was falling asleep Fleming heard Boyd whistling his way down the footpath from the barn. The whistling was fiercely evocative, an artifact out of his childhood, and he thought at first he had dreamed it. He was out of bed and lighting the lamp when he heard Boyd’s heavy step on the porch. The room leapt into yellow relief as the door opened and Boyd came in. The room was suddenly smaller, the house less empty and dead. Boyd filled it with raw and jagged-edged life.

Who cut all them weeds? Looks like the place was attacked by a bunch of mowin machines.

I did. I ran out of anything to do.

You’d do better to be in school unless your plan is to set your ass in the same seat next year. It does look some better, though. You’ve probably run up property values all up and down Grinders Creek.

Fleming didn’t reply. Boyd had a bundle wrapped in white butcher’s paper and a loaf of bread. He set all this on the cooktable. Build up a fire and let’s cook some of this beefsteak, he said. I’m about starved away to nothing.

He removed a paperback book from the back pocket of his dungarees. I brought you this. I don’t know whether it’s any good or not.

Thanks, the boy said. He turned away from the cookstove where he was lighting kindling and took the book and tilted its cover toward the light. Yellowhair by Clay Fisher. The cover showed a yellowhaired man the boy judged to be George Armstrong Custer beset by a horde of marauding savages. It looks pretty good, he said. I may start on it tonight.

Let’s get this steak floured up and fried. I’ve toted it halfway across the country and we might as well get some good out of it.

While the stove heated up Boyd sliced the steak and tenderized it with the edge of a saucer and breaded it with flour and pepper and salt. He sliced potatoes into a skillet of melting grease. The boy watched him. He was waiting for Boyd to ask the question he knew he was going to ask and finally Boyd asked it.

You not seen nothin of your mama?

No.

I ever catch the son of a bitch she run off with I’ll cut his throat. I aim to catch him, too.

Fleming didn’t say anything but he heard this with a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. Another man might say these words and have them mean any number of things but if Boyd said it it just meant he was going to cut somebody’s throat.

Where were you at?

I been through hell and just barely got scorched. I learned that hell is real flat and somebody has planted cotton all over it. How come you ain’t over at Ma’s like I told you to be?

I don’t know. Brady’s a little hard to take at times.

He is that. At most times. Any clean shirts around here?

In that box by your bed. Old man Overbey was by here looking for you. He wants us to set out some pines.

Pines, Boyd said. He was turning the sizzling steak, stirring the potatoes. It’ll be hard times indeed when I work for that stingy son of a bitch. Is there any coffee left?

We’re about out of everything.

Something’ll turn up.

They ate the steak and potatoes by lamplight, fending away one-handed moths and candleflies the light drew through the window. Boyd wiped his plate with a slice of lightbread and rose still chewing and filled the wash basin from the water bucket. He pulled off his shirt and balled it up and raised the stovelid and dropped the shirt onto the coals.