William Gay - Provinces of Night

Great God, the boy said.

I fell off a train, Boyd told him.

Fleming judged there was a story here could he but hear it but Boyd was a man whose fences you broached at your peril and he guessed if Boyd wanted him to know he’d tell him.

NOTHING TURNED UP and Monday morning they came out of Hubert Overbey’s barnlot and climbed a hillside to the edge of the woods where night still hovered, their shoulders laden with great burlap bags of pine seedlings, mattocks swinging along loosely in their hands. They fell to work on a slope of ravaged red clay, a blasted heath where nothing seemed to thrive save sawbriars and ditches.

An ascending sun burned off the early chill and as he warmed Fleming fell into an easy rhythm of working, a blow with the mattock, a dropped seedling, earth raked and tamped with a booted foot. Boyd worked savagely as if he bore each separate seedling some bitter grudge, as if he’d inflict pain to the earth each time he sank the mattock to the eye in the hard red clay.

At noon they ate a silent lunch of leftover breakfast bacon and biscuits and watched clouds form in the west, a thunderhead that rose and lay above the lowering hills like a tumor. Boyd threw away the rest of his lunch and poured out his coffee and got up. We’d better get it before that rain blows in here, he said.

By midafternoon they had covered scarcely a quarter of the slope and Overbey’s supply of seedlings seemed to have diminished not at all. They laid aside their tools when all the sun there was was a fierce chromatic rose flaring behind the thunderhead and by the time they reached the roadbed night was seeping down out of the trees and nighthawks came slant out of the mauve dusk like flung stones. When they reached the house full dark had fallen and the house was cold and dark and enigmatic, like some house abandoned, like some house where no one lived at all.

The boy was cooking when they heard a car door slam at the foot of the hill. Boyd started at the sound and Fleming said, it’s not her. Likely it’s Dee Hixson.

I don’ believe I feel like fightin them pines all day and contendin with that nosy old loafer all night. I believe I’ll just run him off.

Fleming was standing in the doorway peering into the darkness where a figure was climbing the hill, shoeleather clicking on stones, a shape gaining corporeality as if it were forming itself out of shadows.

It’s Brady, Fleming said.

On the other hand Dee might not have been so bad, Boyd said.

Brady Bloodworth was Boyd’s younger brother though you would not have known it to look at him. He was small and freckled and intense. Slightly hunched as if something inside him was winding itself up and as it tightened drawing him toward his own center. His curly red hair sprang out wildly from beneath the felt hat he wore and his eyes burned incandescent as a cat’s eyes in the lamplight. Childhood polio had marked him with a warped leg that limped still when he walked and left him perhaps as well with other warpings not as visible to the naked eye.

He sat on an old replevied car seat that served as a sofa and took off his hat and hung it on his knee. He ran a hand through his tangled hair. Still bachin, I see, he said.

Still bachin, Boyd told him.

What’s that boy cookin up?

I don’t know. We won’t know till it’s done. We’d ask you to supper but our grub’s probably a little rough for you. You used to Ma’s cookin and all.

It’s just as well. I believe he’s fryin up candleflies and everthing else. I seen a big one fly into that pan and I ain’t seen it fly out yet.

We’re a little loose in our ways around here. We wasn’t expectin company.

What I come about was Pa. He’s finally comin back.

That’s a little hard for me to believe.

Believe it. He’s had a stroke of paralysis and he ain’t got nowhere else to go.

Well, hell, Boyd said, with a curious note in his voice that made Fleming turn and look at him. It must have been a bad stroke to make him do that. Pa always had more pride than was good for him and he never was one for backtrackin. How bad is he?

He ain’t goin to die, if that’s what you mean. I talked to him on a telephone, long-distance from Little Rock, Arkansas. He just called right up on the telephone. Lucky I was in the house and answered it. It could just as easy have been Ma.

That wouldn’t have been the end of the world, Boyd said dryly. I expect she’s noticed by now he’s gone. It has been twenty years.

He’s stove up but he’s got all his senses and everything. His faculties. Got a limp on one side and goes with a stick but he says he’s gettin better. He thinks he’s goin to die, but he’s not.

He’s not? It must be nice to know stuff like that that other people wonders about. To have God lean down and whisper secrets in your ear.

Well. I run it out in the cards and he ain’t fixin to die.

Jesus Christ. You run it out in the cards. Everbody dies sooner or later.

Brady had taken the packet of cards from his shirt pocket without noticing, slid them from their satin slipcase, rippled them smoothly from one hand to the other. He seemed to draw strength and confidence from them.

The cards don’t lie, he said, apologetic but at the same time a little condescending. He may die later but he won’t from this stroke.

I believe you’re glad he’s had a stroke. You seem to relish the idea of him bein a cripple, a broken old man.

The Bible says as ye sow so shall ye reap. He sowed it, not me.

It also says fortune tellers and soothsayers are an abomination before God.

Then it turns right around and says don’t hide your light under a bushel. He gave me this secondsight, which is light in a way, and I ain’t about to hide it.

I give up. How come him to call you, knowin the way you’ve felt about him for twenty years?

You ain’t got a telephone. I guess he didn’t know Warren’s runnin that show in Alabama. He must have made a little money all them years he was pickin the banjo and singin all that crazy stuff nobody wanted to hear. He’s wirin me the money to buy him a little housetrailer and set it up somewhere on the place.

Oh Lord. He’s sendin you money and trustin you to do that?

Well, Pa always favored me over the rest of you. Always petted me, right up to the day he walked off and not a word out of him for twenty years. He done me and Ma sorry and you know it. Walkin off like that without a word. Not goodbye, not kiss my ass. Nothin.

Nothin to us, you mean.

Nothin to anybody. I can’t believe he’s got the nerve to come back. The gall. He probably expected to move right into the house with me and Ma.

Well. It’s a pretty big place, two hundred and seventy acres. And I believe he bought and paid for it.

He’d have lost it over that penitentiary business if it hadn’t been for Warren. I paid the last of it off myself.

He stood to go. I just thought you’d want to know he’s comin back, he said. That boy there ain’t never even seen his grandpa.

Don’t rush off, Boyd said. I was just teasin you about the food, it’s fit to eat. Just stay and eat with us.

I eat hours ago. I have to see about Ma. I have leavin her by herself at night. She’s gettin old and childish. Absent-minded.

She’s got more sense than me or you either one.

She’s also over seventy years old and ain’t realized it yet. I’m always afraid she’ll fall or somethin. I’ll let you know when I hear from Pa again.

Well. Come back, Brady.

When Brady was down the hill and they heard the car start Boyd said, That stroke must have kicked the hell right out of Pa. For him to swallow his pride and call Brady on the telephone.