William Gay - Provinces of Night

He took a pan of water off the stove and set it on the table and positioned a mirror by the lamp. He lathered his face and began to shave. Fleming could hear the faint scrape of the straightrazor against Boyd’s beard.

Poor old Brady, Boyd said. One minute you’re feeling sorry for him and then he’ll start that crazy mess about cards and hexes he’s put on folks and about how the Jews are takin over the world and the Pope’s takin over the world and you just want to wring his neck.

After supper the house was hot from the cookstove and to cool Fleming went outside and sat on the doorstep. The wind was at the trees like something alive and faint light quaked and died, flared and diminished far to the west and he held his breath waiting for the thunder. It finally came, so faint it was like a dream of thunder, a hoarse incoherent whisper, just a madman mumbling to himself in the eaves of the world.

The rain commenced sometime in the night and it was raining when they ate breakfast in a cold damp halfdark and raining still when they fell out with the mattocks. Fleming thought Boyd might wait for a break in the weather but there was no mention of this and they garbed themselves in old coats and hats until they looked like animated scarecrows starting up the roadbed. There was already a yellowish tinge and a quickened urgency to the water in the creek and a steady rushing sound of rain in the trees.

They labored like men demented over the muddy slope. There was no letup in the rain or even a rumor of it and the day seemed to chill as it progressed and the boy felt cold and wooden in his outsize clothing. He was loathe to move against the waterlogged clothes but he felt he’d freeze if he stopped working.

They had brought no lunch but at what they judged to be noon they sheltered beneath a huge cedar and watched the slope go to water, a thousand red rivulets coursing down the muddy hillside. In the ruined hat collapsed about his face Boyd seemed the very embodiment of human misery. A pale wash of hat dye was seeping down his face and he wiped it away and grinned ruefully. I don’t know why it’s so damned cold, he said. Blackberry winter ain’t till May.

Maybe it’s some other kind of winter. Toad frog winter.

Whatever winter it is it’s a cold son of a bitch. And I believe that somehow it’s managin to rain harder under this tree than it is out in that field.

The boy scanned the sky in the faint hope of a lightening but the sky was just cold weeping slate and if there was any sun behind it there was no indication of it. Why don’t we call it a day and go to the house, he said.

We will here in a while, Boyd said. His face was cold and determined, as if he’d set himself some goal beyond the capabilities of ordinary men and would settle for nothing less than its completion.

When only twenty or thirty bundles of seedlings remained Boyd paused for a moment and considered them in speculation. What I ought to do is throw the damned things in a sinkhole and be done with them. But I contracted to set them out and by God I’ll set them out.

They finished the last of them in red sucking mud and shouldered the mattocks and walked toward Overbey’s farmhouse. Climbing the high steps onto the porch Fleming’s legs felt as if they were asleep and his feet felt numb and wooden. They stood on the porch. Boyd knocked and waited. Pools of muddy water formed around their feet. The boy could hear the rushing of the creek somewhere off in the trees.

Overbey opened the door and stood regarding them with a bemused wonder. They looked like refugees, worse, like something exiled from the very fringes of human society. Something chimerical and insubstantial engendered out of the windy rain.

Overbey was cleaning the lenses of his glasses on the tail of his shirt. He looked warm and dry, cozy as a badger in its den. Beyond him a warm hearth, the flickering flames of a fireplace. There was a strong odor of steaming coffee.

I’ve heard of people willing to work but you two are about the beat of any I’ve seen. There wasn’t that much of a rush to it. You get them all?

We got them all.

Well. Wait here and I’ll get your money.

He went back in and eased the door to. Right, Boyd said. We wouldn’t want to drip on your Goddamned carpet.

When Overbey returned Boyd was wringing water out of his hat. Overbey proffered a thin blue slip of paper and Boyd looked at his hands and tried to dry them but there was no place that did not have water running out of it. Finally he shoved them beneath his coat and dried them as best he could in the armpits of his shirt. He took the check gingerly and folded it and stowed it in a glassine envelope in his wallet.

You men want a cup of coffee?

We got to get on, Boyd said.

I do, Fleming told him.

Boyd glanced sharply at him but waited stoically while Overbey brought the coffee and impatiently while it was drunk. Fleming’s hands were shaking and he held the cup with both hands and drank the coffee. It was hot and strong and he imagined he could feel it coursing through his veins and thawing out the parts of him that were frozen.

Overbey just looked at them and shook his head. I’d give you a ride but I expect it’s over the bridge by now. It’s fell a world of water last night and today.

Tell me about it, Boyd said.

Fleming reached Overbey the cup and they went down the steps into the rain. The day was already beginning to wane and they could see past the greening trees white fog rising off the creek like smoke and the very air felt dense as water in their lungs.

When they got to the crossing the creek was far out of its banks and they didn’t even suspect where the bridge might be. The creek was a roiling mass of leaves and tree branches and once an entire tree, its dislodged roots twisting into the bank and the tree clocking around wheellike in the swirling yellow foam. All the sound there was was the angry roar of the water. Boyd stared disgustedly at it as if this was just one more cross to bear, one more obstacle laid in his path.

A drowned cow went by, its legs jutting stiffly upward. One of Overbey’s, Boyd said with satisfaction. You want to try that swinging bridge?

Fleming decided that his father had gone mad. Something had simply broken in his head. Finally he said, I don’t think so.

Then it’s either sleep here tonight or go back to Overbey’s and come around the bluff. Which’ll it be?

The swinging bridge was a quartermile downstream. In the flooded bottomland sycamores rose white as bone out of the turbulent water. By the time they reached the platform the bridge was swung from they were slogging through thighdeep water. The ladder rose dizzily to the top of the platform where cables were suspended tree to tree. A relic of some older time, the bridge was seldom used anymore and sections of its flooring had fallen away and what remained were rottenlooking and questionable.

It seemed a long climb to the bridge. Farther still across the swaying cable to the other shore. Boyd crossed first, as if he’d defy these waters to take him. Fleming went cautiously, trying each board before he entrusted it with his weight, hanging onto the cables that served as handholds while the bridge creaked and yawed drunkenly over the mutated stream that went in a dizzy rush beneath him. He looked down once and the moving water appeared in some perversion of gravity to be tugging the bridge downstream and when his head reeled with the un-spooling water he forced himself to look at the farther side until the shifting trees halted their spinning.

Going down there was water again but nothing to do but wade it and when they again reached the roadbed Fleming felt like some shipwrecked mariner struggling onto the reefs of a lost and barren island.