William Gay: Provinces of Night

His face burned with the light of the redeemed. He was redeemed, but the old man was the redeemer; see him, Brady’s face said, see what it has come to. He used his life as a weapon and when there was no one left to hurt he turned it on himself.

FROM THE HILLSIDE where he sat he could hear faint singing. He had his father’s binoculars trained on the white double doors of the church and when they opened outward he watched the pallbearers come down the steps with the casket. Albright to the right front, his fair hair like a torch in the winter sun. Sharp on the left. Brady following behind the pallbearers, the grandmother on his arm. She was wearing a hat with a veil and the wind cartwheeled it away across the graveled parking lot and a child ran to fetch it. In the spare sun the hearse was a deep sinister mauve and it seemed to be drawing all the light into itself.

They progressed toward the dark rectangle beneath the canvas awning. He followed them with the binoculars. They assembled about the grave. A man with a Bible read words Fleming could not hear. In the stiff wind the preacher had to hold the pages flat with both hands. Fleming wondered what he read. He smiled to himself. I seen a pretty woman in a red dress, the old man had said once. And then I seen her take it off. What else is there? The awning flapped in the bitter wind. Women clutched the hems of their dresses, men their hats.

He lowered the glasses and the scene distanced itself to animate dolls at some undisclosed rites. He sat for a time in the cold, in the quiet. Trees moved above him, tossed in the wind. When he looked through the binoculars again they were filling in the grave. He rose to go. He did not want to be the last mourner to leave. He did not want to be the one to leave the old man alone on that lonesome hillside with night coming on the way it was.

—

He lay on the bed and he felt he might never rise from it. He lay in an enormous torpor. The world was too heavy to bear and it was settling itself onto his chest. He felt old, old. Civilizations had risen and fallen in the brief time that he had lived. He felt that when the old man’s head exploded across the snow he should have turned the gun on himself.

He felt he should rise and make a pot of coffee, cook a meal, build a fire. Instead he lay without volition listening to the house whisper to itself. It whispered in the voice he had used as a child, it took on the sibilant murmur of his mother’s voice, Boyd’s burred monotone. Old imprecations and recriminations and placating words rose and fell and trembled in the dead air as if words once sequenced into phrases were never done with but recycled themselves in perpetuity. Ghosts went about their preordained rituals. The house was full of the dead, of the dead in life. The windows lightened, they darkened. He heard banjo music that seemed to be rising out of the earth itself like ground-fog.

Brady came. He was still wearing his dark suit, as if he were becoming a professional mourner, hiring himself out for the solemn occasions of others.

You’ve disgraced the family by not showin up at your own grandaddy’s funeral, he said.

The boy just lay with his fingers laced behind his head and watched with cold eyes. Leave me alone, he said. Get away from me.

Why don’t you have a fire in here? Brady’s breath smoked in the cold air. What’s the matter with you? Are you sick?

I’m sick.

What’s the matter? What are you sick with?

I’m sick of you, Fleming said. I’m sick of all of you, of all your crazy bullshit. I won’t put up with it anymore. I want you out of my house.

Brady seemed not perturbed by this outburst. In fact he seemed almost amused. How does it feel to be a cat’s paw? he asked.

What?

How does it feel to be a tool that does my bidding, Brady said. That I can pick up and use to do something I want done but don’t want to dirty my hands with. How does that feel?

I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about. I doubt that you do.

That old man never killed himself. I shot him, with you for a cat’s paw. Do you remember that cigarette butt I showed you that time? That Harwood thumped out?

The boy noticed for the first time that Brady was carrying a paper bag. Brady opened the bag and withdrew a book. Fleming sat up on the side of the bed. Is this yours? Brady asked. He reached Fleming the book. Thomas Wolfe, the spine read. Of Time and the River. The boy flipped the pages. The only word his eyes registered was October. He suddenly drew the book back and slammed it as hard as he could into Brady’s face. It struck with the force of a fist. It burst Brady’s nose and opened a cut at the corner of his left eye. It staggered him back against a sewing machine cabinet and he fell, hands splayed out to break his fall. Fleming was up instantly from the bed to recover the book. He threw it again. It struck Brady in the forehead, the red waves of hair springing up, his glasses spinning away and skittering across the floorboards.

Brady was trying to cover his eyes with his hands and he was working his way in an awkward backward crawl to the door. You’ve gone as crazy as he was, he said.

Fleming picked up the book and laid it on the cabinet. He stood breathing hard and he was dizzyheaded with the effort it took not to fall upon Brady and kick him to death with his boots. He could not rid his mind of the image of Brady somewhere watching the old man dying like an animal in the snow. If he’d not seen it in fact he’d seen it crouched behind and peering through the twisted bracken his mind was clotted with.

Brady was up and fumbling with the doorlatch. Don’t think this is the end of this, he said. He raised a hand and pointed a quivering forefinger at Fleming. I’ve got other possessions of yours, he said. Don’t think you can abuse me and talk to me like a dog and get away with it. I own the rest of your life. I’ll cast spells day and night so that nothing goes right for you, the rest of what little time you’ve got left. I’ll thin your blood till it seeps out of your pores like water. Your seed will dry up and you’ll be as useless to a woman as a gelding. You’ll die in one of the wars with your lungs filling up with salty water.

Fleming so wanted done with this madness that he rushed Brady and turned him and shoved him through the open door onto the porch. He slammed the door and latched it then hooked the chain that secured it and went back and sat for a time on the side of the bed. Brady did not leave immediately. Fleming sat listening for the sound of footsteps crossing the porch. They didn’t come. He imagined he could hear Brady breathing through the boxed walls of the house. Time passed. When he had begun to think that Brady had covertly eased off and gone Brady suddenly shouted, Don’t fall asleep in there. I’ll set this mess afire and it’ll fall in your face while you sleep.

He lay watching dust dance in the mooted light from the window. After a while Brady seemed to come to some decision and Fleming heard him get up and descend the steps. It seemed an interminable time before he heard a car engine crank at the bottom of the hill.

Then he rose himself and began to build a fire in the woodstove. When he had it crackling cheerily he put the coffee pot on to boil and dumped coffee into it. He took up the Wolfe book and one other and he took from beneath the bed the leather satchel containing the records the old man had given him. He unlatched the door and went out and stowed the books and records some distance from the house and then he went back in.

By then the coffee was made and he poured himself a cup and holding it in his left hand with his right stripped the covers and sheets from the bed and piled them on the floor by the heater. He threw on magazines and newspapers and dumped the picture box on for kindling, photographs drifting like dry leaves, folks frozen for an instant in some curious life that no longer bore any relevance to his own. There was a kerosene can on the porch with perhaps a quart of fuel in it and he brought it in and poured it all over this tinder. He set the can aside. He looked about once as if he’d commit this place to memory for good and all then he tilted the wood heater over into the floor. Stovepipes fell in a clatter, in a rush of soot that drifted like anthracitic snow. The kerosene caught immediately and flames leapt up and the paper on the ceiling began to curl and smolder.