William Gay - Provinces of Night

Here was a world so alien he seemed to have taken a wrong turn somewhere and wound up in an arctic wasteland, the wind howling down through the frozen trees like wind through the strings of an enormous illtuned harp, the rain coming slant and hard and freezing upon everything it touched. The earth glowed with an eerie blue phosphorescence that seemed to be flickering somewhere beneath the transparent ice and tended away into the blurred mauve trees. He’d seen childhood snows every winter of his life but nothing that had quite prepared him for this. He reconsidered the wisdom of the derelicts huddled in Itchy Mama’s parlor, and he thought, a man could die out in this shit. Really die, wake up stiff as a poker in some other world. You’d have to thaw to even ease through the golden portals.

He had a thought to stay in the car but immediately abandoned it. He had to keep moving. No move is the wrong move, Warren had said that night, and Warren though drunk may have stumbled upon some philosophy that had escaped Sophocles or Plato. Life is motion, stasis is death. Got to keep moving, got to keep moving, blues falling down like hail , he remembered his grandfather singing in some old bottleneck blues. Another, perhaps more applicable, I’m the man that moves with the icicles hanging on the trees.

He hammered on the trunk with the jackhandle until he shattered the ice in the lock and finally got the key to turn, fully expecting it to break off in his fingers. His hands felt useless as blocks of wood. He’d have liked to shove them deep into the cleft between Itchy Mama’s enormous breasts where she’d heated the whiskey to its body-accommodating temperature. He’d have wallowed in her arms, drunk the heat from her body like blood. Lain in her stricken grasp like a man fallen asleep in the warm embrace of a grizzly.

He found the blanket and wound it about himself as best he could and staggered off into the night toward home. With the blanket about him and cowled over his face he looked like some crazed young monk or an acolyte testing the temper of his faith against the elements.

He cut through the woods over terrain he’d known all his life but even this familiarity was perilous. The weight of ice and snow caused huge branches to split away from the trunks of trees and they fell all night with sounds like highcaliber riflefire. His feet were beyond cold, finally beyond feeling, clumsy chunks of insensate matter trudging woodenly through the snow. He fell and got up and went on. Once he sat leaned against a tree and thought he’d rest a while then go on. Somehow it seemed to be warmer here, a more temperate part of the blizzard, perhaps the eye of the storm. The room where its heart was housed. His mind seemed to be shutting down as well, coming and going, shorted voltage dancing across the circuits in flickering blue light.

Once he thought Boyd and his mother had returned in his absence. They’d built up a huge fire and the walls of the house were amber with its glow and the heat-saturated air jerked him inside like a warm embrace. Your supper’s in the warming closet, his mother said. We eat while you were traipsin around in the woods like a crazyman.

When finally he fell through the door the cold and darkness rolled on him wave on wave like black water. He wanted heat worse than light and before he’d even lit the lamp he crammed the stove with paper and pine kindling and by feel found the kerosene can and threw on oil as well. He kept breaking matches or dropping them but finally he had it lighted. He could hear the heat from the kerosene roaring in the flue and he sat before the stove with his hands upraised to it like a supplicant.

THE WEATHER had been holding below a viable painting temperature so Albright had decided to do all the scraping and caulking then paint when the weather moderated. He had scraped cornice and gables and shutters and caulked everywhere cold might gain entry around the windows. Some of the windows had long needed reglazing and he was finishing that when Mrs. Woodall came out the front door.

Mr. Albright, I’d like to see you a few minutes when you get time off from your work.

Well, to tell you the truth I’m about through here. I’ve about got her except for paintin and it’s too cold for that. It keeps tryin to sleet or snow or somethin but I didn’t see any need of comin back tomorrow to glaze three or four windows, I thought I’d just knock her out tonight and go.

Well, you’d know more about that than I would. We have plenty of time. At any rate, I want to talk to you. Just come in the front door, it isn’t locked. Don’t bother knocking, there’s no one here except me.

When he’d finished the windows he capped the can of glazing and stowed his tools in the bed of the truck and went up the flagstone walk to the front door. The door was an ornate entrance of mahogany that had been let go almost too long. But Albright had stripped and sanded the wood and the carved cherubim that mantled it and sealed everything with preservative and he was well satisfied with the way it looked.

He went into a living room with a floor of pale polished oak. Rugs thrown about here and there. Pictures on the walls. He looked about cautiously as if his mere presence might begin breaking things. The room looked cozy and comfortable and he could feel a warm rush of air blowing discreetly from somewhere.

Have a seat in that easy chair in there and warm, she called from another room. I imagine you’re about chilled to the bone.

He seated himself in the chair as told. He was cold indeed and the soothing heat seemed to be soaking itself into his pores like some rich oily liquid. He leaned back and closed his eyes.

When he opened them again she was standing before him with a squat glass of icecubes in one hand and a decanter of amber fluid in the other. Are you a drinking man, Mr. Albright? she asked.

He was eyeing the decanter. I been known to, he said.

She poured two inches or so into the glass. Gene would never drink anything but this Kentucky bourbon, she said. It’s supposed to be mighty smooth.

He sipped the bourbon and slowly began to be warmed within and without. He needed to be off and gone while he was still feeling good about the progress he was making in squaring himself with the widow Woodall, but he lingered over the bourbon and she seemed ever ready to replace each sip as he removed it from the glass.

Supper will be ready in just a moment, she said. You’ve worked so hard around here recently I wouldn’t feel right about things sending you off without feeding you.

He protested weakly about getting a sandwich at home but she would not hear of it and presently he was ushered into a dining room where on a gleaming cherry table service was laid for two and a crystal chandelier lit the room with a pale diluted light. When he was seated at the table with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other she dished up grilled steaks garnished with fried onions and mushrooms, baked potatoes dripping with butter and sprinkled with chives, a crisp garden salad.

There’ll be pie later, she said, attendant at his shoulder.

Pie later, Albright thought in a bourbon-diffused wonder, slicing into his steak. It seemed to fall away in tender strips before the actual touch of the knife and at its center it was the exact shade of pink he would have chosen had he a say in the matter. He sliced off a section and chewed. He closed his eyes and for once seemed at a loss for words to express himself.

I can tell you’re pleased, she said. She had seated herself at the other end of the table and spread a napkin over her lap and was forking salad onto her plate.

It’s the beat of anything I ever put in my mouth, Albright said.