Provinces of Night (20 page)

Weekdays he’d lounge around the front of the Snowwhite Cafe for the occasional fare. He knew a waitress who worked there and sometimes she’d take phone calls for him or refer customers his way. He was
sitting out front on Tuesday reading a funny book when she came out the door with an agey-looking fellow wearing a gray hat and a black suitcoat in all this heat. The waitress’s foot was malformed in some way and she went with a limp and they looked like a matched set of cripples coming down the sidewalk.

Junior, this is Mr. Bloodworth. He was wantin to talk to you.

Albright wondered why she hadn’t just sent the old man out to the car without limping out with him. A bright yellow car with red lettering on the side was not what you’d call inconspicuous. Then he looked again and saw that Doris seemed taken with the old gentleman. She was normally foulmouthed and sharptongued but she seemed to be deferring to him as if he was the president or something or other.

The old man was looking the cab up and down. I reckon you’re the proprietor of the yellow cab company, he said. He’d swapped hands with his walking stick and was holding his right out stiffly for Albright to shake. Albright grasped it and pumped it a time or two briskly as you might a hand pump.

I believe I knowed your daddy, the old man said. Ain’t you Tut Albright’s boy?

That’s me, Albright said. I don’t see him much anymore since he run me off. Daddy’s a little crazy.

We’re all a little crazy to various degrees, Bloodworth nodded. What I need don’t require a great deal of sanity. I just need to go down to the freight office and pick some stuff up and then I want took out to where my people live. The Bloodworths.

You any kin to Fleming and them?

I couldn’t say. What’s his daddy’s name?

He’s Boyd Bloodworth’s boy.

I reckon that’d make him a pretty close relative then since Boyd’s a son of mine.

He had taken out two one-dollar bills and turned and handed them to the gimplegged waitress. I thank you for your help, young lady, he said, tipping the brim of his hat. You buy yourself somethin pretty with this.

She protested but the old man waved her protests away and after a moment she limped reluctantly away toward the restaurant.

I thought for a minute she was goin with us, Albright said. You wantin to go out to where Brady’s set up that housetrailer?

For starters I do, the old man said. We’ll ride out and look it over. The old man had opened the rear door of the Dodge and was climbing in. He had trouble getting his left leg in and finally he just picked it up bothhanded and set it inside. I’m about wore out, he said. I’ve walked a little more than I meant to today. Cattle farmin’s hard on a man my age.

Albright drove slowly down toward the railroad where the freight depot was. He kept stealing covert looks at the old man in the rearview mirror. All his life he’d heard people talk about E. F. Bloodworth. Bloodworth would kill you if he had to, Bloodworth would kick your ass even faster than that. He could make a banjo talk, he had served time in the Brushy Mountain state pen, he had once shot a deputy while the deputy was using Bloodworth’s wife as a shield when the laws had come to arrest him. His reflection in the rearview mirror did not look like any of this. Bloodworth had taken off the Stetson and closed his eyes and leaned his head back. He just looked like an old man who’d finally found a soft spot to rest his head.

Fleming had not seen Albright’s Dodge since its transformation into a taxicab and he was somewhat surprised to see a bright yellow car pull into the yard and Albright alight and go around and open the door for an old man. The old man got out with no more luggage than a walking stick and approached a step or two favoring his left leg and halted and pushed a gray fedora back from his forehead and stood regarding the boy.

Fleming had been sitting on the doorstep to the trailer reading a book and now he closed it and arose and approached the car. Albright had unlocked the trunk and was at unloading what appeared to be a trunkload of musical instruments.

Steadying himself with the stick, Bloodworth turned about in the yard, as if he’d get his bearings, a fix on where he was. Then he told the boy, the house’d be about a quartermile up that road then across that long field where the cedar row is.

Fleming nodded. The old man was bigger than he had expected, and
less of a cripple. In the back of his mind he had pictured a wizened little man twisted by a stroke of paralysis, but Bloodworth struck him as something of an imposing presence. He had fierce black eyes that looked right at you, or through you to whatever you were standing in front of, and the hair that lay on the collar of the white shirt was as black as a crow’s wing. He wondered if Bloodworth dyed it, decided after a moment that he did not. Somehow the old man just didn’t look like a man who dyed his hair.

The old man had jabbed a big weathered hand out and seemed to expect it to be shaken. He took the hand and shook it. The old man had a hard grip for a cripple.

My name’s E. F. Bloodworth. From the looks of you I take you to be a grandson of mine.

How’d you know that?

I ain’t always looked like this. You favor some the way I looked when I was a young man. You’d be Boyd’s boy.

Fleming nodded. Albright had come around with the guitar case in one hand and the banjo in the other and seemed to be awaiting instructions.

Just put them in the trailer there, Bloodworth said. Let’s just all go in and get acquainted. The old man halted and stood regarding the trailer, his face showing the first intimation of misgivings. It’s not real big, is it?

No, the boy said. And it’s hot in there. Brady left a key and I went in there this mornin and brought some water. But it’s about too hot to stay in there until the day cools down some.

Along about October, the old man nodded, and fell silent, studying the silver trailer with the sun hammering off its roof, the absence of any sort of electrical wires running to it. Brought some water, he mused, as if the implications of this phrase had just sunken in. Well, we can’t stand here in the yard all day. Let’s go in, I ain’t put off by hardship. I could live in a brush arbor if I had to. And have, once or twice. I can have it real homey in a week or so.

Fleming sat on the couch in the living room and studied the old man. Bloodworth seemed ill-prepared to stay so much as a night here. He had brought no food, and there was nothing to cook it on if he had. Dark was already seeping out of the woods and there was not so much
as a kerosene lamp in the trailer. He was mulling over the idea of asking the old man to spend the night at his house when Albright spoke.

You could bunk with me, he said. As long as you’re not too particular. We could fly in on this thing tomorrow and maybe shape it up in a day or two.

The old man appeared to think this over. Finally he said, I thank you for the offer, but I ain’t never been much at movin in on nobody. Anyway this place is where I aim to live, around here where I was raised. But I’ve got to have a bath, seems like I been livin in a cattle truck a week. Has this place got a motel? It didn’t when I moved off.

Yeah, the Cozy Court’s right on the north side of town.

Well, that sounds like my best bet for a bath. Let’s lock this place up and find somebody willin to sell us some supper.

In the cab Bloodworth asked Fleming about Warren and Boyd, and the boy figured he’d been expecting them to meet him. If he was he never said so, and he did not ask about Brady at all.

I reckon it’s worked down to me and you then, he told the boy.

Within a week the old man, with the help of Albright and Fleming, had wrought a considerable change in his holdings. Albright fell into the role of chauffeur and general handyman as easily as he had assumed the mantle of cabdriver. Fleming found the old man’s company agreeable and improvements on the trailer a way to use up time, a commodity this summer he seemed to possess too much of.

Bloodworth learned of a man at Beaver Dam who had benefited from the rural electrification program to the extent that he had a Delco unit for sale cheap. This Delco was a system of storage batteries and a generator that charged them. It furnished direct current for lights and small appliances and since the farmer had no further use for them he sold Bloodworth as well a fan and a refrigerator and a small stove designed to operate on direct current.

The old man said his pockets weren’t deep enough yet for a well but he was mulling over plans for a cistern and pump. In the meantime they found a steel tank that had done service on a dairy farm and laboriously mounted it on poles so that Albright could juryrig a gravity flow of
water to the plumbing of the trailer. A county truck with a water tank was hired to fill it and with water in the pipes and lights to defray the darkness the trailer was approaching the comforts of home.

The first night there his sleep was broken and chancy as an old man’s often is and sometime in the night he dreamed of wolves. The dream was so vivid it was almost tactile, he could have brushed the silver ruff at the wolf’s throat with his fingers. He was looking across an expanse of ice and snow toward a huge wolf baying at the moon. The wolf was silhouetted against the moon which was full and hung low in an indigo sky strewn with curdled clouds the color of foam on seagreen water and the wolf’s breath smoked coldly in the air.

He woke knowing that something had slammed against the front door, a sound that vanished the instant he was awake to hear it. Dogs were howling. They seemed to be all about the trailer and he rose and turned on the light. The cacophony of howls and barks did not diminish with the light and the old man crossed the room and opened the front door. A dog sprang from the doorstep into the yard. You hush that up, the old man yelled. There was no moon and all he could see was the vague shape of dogs like revenantial dogs cobbled up out of night and shadow crossing and recrossing the yard. Now I’m not about to put up with this mess all night, he said to himself.

He pulled the guitar case from beneath his bed and opened it and removed the guitar and from the storage compartment meant for picks and extra strings withdrew a shortbarreled .38 Smith & Wesson revolver. He crossed back to the doorsill and stood on the top step with the pistol held beside his leg. The dogs were still milling about the yard and at the edge of the woods he could just discern a spectral human figure, a vague paleness against an indecipherable darkness, perhaps a man wearing a lightcolored shirt.

Who’s out there? he called.

He could hear the soft almost furtive sounds of the dogs fading toward the woods. No one answered him and even as he watched the figure vanished, not abruptly but like something sinking slowly backward into deep blue water, like a light dimming down until finally there is nothing there at all.

Brady? he called.

 

S
HE HAD BEEN
brought up hard but not that hard. Not as hard as it was to live in an uncertain state of fear, knowing each day that the law would sooner or later come with government warrants and going to bed at night with that knowledge somehow intensified because it seemed even more apt for them to come at night. Even E.F. had to sleep sometime.

Not as hard as the door being kicked from its hinges behind her as she crossed from the stove to the table, a hot pan clutched bothhanded before her, the door caving inward and the room abruptly filling with stumbling men, Julia halfturning, the pan tilting, and she remembered the hot bright spatters of scalding soup on her ankles.

Julia sat in the shade of the pine in the metal chaise lounge. A broom stood tilted against her knee and there were fresh broommarks on the earth where the straw had gone. The air was winey with the smell of the sun in the hot pineneedles, a breeze arose and the smell intensified, a dust devil spun lazily down from the barnlot like a ghost and across the driveway and passed over her, her clothes rustling, the whirling wind cool against the drying sweat on her face.

She took off the goldrimmed glasses she wore and polished them on the hem of her apron, old feedsack material so often laundered it had gone patternless and soft as chamois. A catbird called from the tree but the bird’s cry had no more reality than the sounds of deputies in her kitchen long ago, a raincrow called from a distant field but what she heard was the castiron kettle striking the hardwood floor, tomato soup spattering the wall like blood.

E.F. was sitting at a wide pine trestle table that bisected him above the waist and cut from view the pistol shoved into his trousers. All this was caught in a moment, etched her memory like acid filigrees on steel: there was a bowl of milk before Bloodworth, he was holding cornbread he was in the act of crumbling into the milk. His eyes widened but only momentarily, then narrowed to slits, the face gone at once sleepylooking and intent, and she knew him so well his thoughts were almost audible to her, what to do, what to do.

She was grabbed hard from behind, her throat and head caught in
the crook of an elbow, she could see part of a blued rifle barrel extending into the upper corner of her vision, feel the rough serge overcoat sleeve against her throat. She clawed at the arm but it was strong and adrenalinecrazed, it was like struggling against a steel band. She felt her throat close, she was gasping for one more breath.