William Gay: Provinces of Night

Hush, she said, touching his face. You hush, now.

He got out of the car into the cold air. A wind with ice at its edge was blowing off the river. He went around and unlocked the trunk. She opened the car door and called him to wait. Get back in here, she said.

He sat behind the wheel.

So are you asking me to marry you, or what? I can’t quite follow all this, it’s a little confusing. Is that something like what you meant?

Yes. That’s exactly what I meant.

Could you maybe say it then, in actual words?

I want you to marry me.

All right, I’ll marry you, see how easy that was? When?

When I get out of bootcamp. Three months. I’ll get leave then and we can get married. We can get the allotment papers filled out so that you can be drawing some money. If I get stateside duty you can come wherever I am.

Wherever you are, she said. I like the sound of that, unspecific as it is. Of course you know that we could get married first.

Out of all this I’ve only learned one thing. If I don’t go now I’ll never go.

Is that so important? Just for you to go?

I’ve got to go.

I guess you know there’s a war on.

Folks keep telling me about it.

You know, Fleming, in all our wandering around at night we never did manage to spend all of one together. We could use some of this money and rent one of those tourist cabins down by the river. What would you say to that?

You know what I’d say. But could we do that, I mean could you do that? With the baby and all?

I would say that you could, she told him.

HE HEADED OUT just at twilight, the Greyhound bus rolling toward Memphis past barren endless fields stitched together with powerlines bellying pole to pole. He watched the known world fold under purple dusk with a cold unease.

He had no faith in the permanence of any of this. What he’d seen of life had shown him that the world had little of comfort or assurance. He suspected that there were no givens, no map through the maze. Here in falling dark with the world rolling simultaneously toward him and away from him everything seemed no more than random. Life blindsides you so hard you can taste the bright copper blood in your mouth then it beguiles you with a gift of profound and appalling beauty. There were things that he had to do that he could not even begin to articulate but the hunger for the taste of her mouth was an addiction he could not be shut of. Nor did he want to be. But there seemed little chance he could have them both, no guarantee that he could get or hold onto even one.

The glass was darkening and his face was appearing over the drowning landscape like an image in a slowly developing photographic plate and he closed his eyes against it. Of all the things he’d been told of life there was little that seemed salvageable. Just do the best you can and let it roll, the old man said one time. The slap of Brady’s cards on an oilcloth tabletop told of a future preordained but the boy suspected that future events swirl like smoke and are as hard to hold in your hand for every event is connected to every other event like the veins in a leaf. He could not wash blood out of snow and the undone curl on Raven Lee’s forehead formed with her left eye a question that he could not decipher, let alone answer.

In the end he was left only with the fireflies he had seen that summer night in Clifton, their fragile and provisional light endlessly echoing the movement of the dark water, visionary and profoundly mysterious as a glimpse he’d been permitted into the secret clockwork of the world itself.

FOR SOME TIME now Boyd had been journeying through a land so despaired of by men that they had decimated its trees and they had labored over the earth itself as if to shape it to more manageable contours then torched their homes and fled. Taking their dead with them or pursued by them for he had passed by where the graveyard had been. It was a wonder to him. Even the dead were gone. In a world of variables and perpetually shifting horizons he’d thought death the one constant but apparently this was not so and even the most fundamental givens of existence seemed to invite skeptical reconsideration.

These days he was traveling much under the cover of darkness by inclination as well as necessity and he had been forced to leave where the fences began an automobile not registered to him but which he now numbered among his few possessions. All this land was posted keep out with strong no-nonsense warnings and threats but Boyd had so distanced himself from the ways of men and their laws and makeshift order that he regarded them as invitations with the wording slightly altered and so went on.

When he came to the foot of the hill there was no poplar where the mailbox had been nor was there a mailbox. He crossed the ditch and began the hill’s ascent with his feet so ingrained by habit and by the un-reckonable number of times he’d climbed it in the past that they seemed to adhere to the footpath with no help from him so that he was looking ahead into the semidarkness with something that was almost apprehension. At the point where the roof of the house should have intersected with the horizon it did not. There was a sharp intake of his breath, no more.

He kicked through the rubble where the house had been. As if he’d unearth bones, artifacts from the curious folk who’d lived here. Pieces of a puzzle that would compose themselves into a coherent whole that would explain how a world could so alter itself. For a superstitious moment it seemed to him that by turning his attention elsewhere and his back on the place of his past he’d doomed it to fade to a point that was now useless to man as a dusty stagesetting for a show that had closed long ago.

He sat for a time on a foundation stone and smoked a cigarette. He’d have liked to know the outcome of all that had transpired here but all he could find were more questions and he had enough of these already to last him a lifetime. He toed out the cigarette in the ashes and rose. This desolate moonscape of ash and charred rubble filled him with a restless unease. His life was motion now and the world was wide with horizons beyond numbering that shaped themselves against the sky in ever intriguing ways and roads that wound toward them like veins in a leaf. He could not let this place detain him. He went on. Approaching where in another world and time the crossroads had lain he increased his pace, as if someone was pursuing him or as if dark and silent water was already rising to engulf him.

THE DAM WAS finished in the fall and the creek rechanneled into the basin the concrete guarded, and the waters swirled and eddied against its huge footing. The creek flowed in but the water rose so slowly the eye would not remark it. Only when the lower end of the creek slowly began to vanish, to drown itself, could you see the water begin to deepen.

The last of the dead were being moved. The area was chainlinked and secured by the government so that these grave robbers worked sanctioned by law and unremarked by prying eyes. The newer graves were dug up by backhoes; Bloodworth’s casket seemed scarcely touched by the abrasions the earth inflicted. It was loaded onto a flatbed truck and covered with a tarpaulin and the securing straps winched down and just at twilight the truck moved out through the shifting dust, nighthawks rising redeyed in the headlights, and it was down the line and gone, as if E.F.’s affinity for roads was impervious to death itself.

The older caskets must be handled with care, the earth carved away by men with shovels, and the cheap fiberboard caskets were not there at all, and the bones lay formal and serene and expectant as if they’d been waiting all along for just such a resurrection. Finally the graves were emptied of all save a fine dust you could not hold in your hand, and the earth on the hillside was pocked and ravaged as if the dead themselves had risen in desperate haste and clawed away the earth and fled. The stones still stood and when the moon, breathlessly perfect and unchanged, swung over the rim of the lifeless landscape, they gleamed dully as if they emitted some internal light of themselves.