Provinces of Night (28 page)

 

I
T HAD NOT
rained for some time and the road lay thick with a dust pale and fine as talcum. It rose light as smoke with the old man’s footfalls and hung suspended and weightless in the air, whitened the cuffs of his trousers and pressed itself covertly into their folds and into the webbing of his shoelaces. It was early but already hot. The sun lay over the eastern horizon and burned its way toward him through the trees with a bluegold light. When he crossed from the road into the edge of the fallow field the earth beneath the trees where the wild oats did not grow was pale and baked hard as clay from a kiln, faulted with cracks and crosshatched lines like defects in the surface structure of the earth itself.

Forty years ago he had set out a row of cedars that extended for over a quarter of a mile, that ran from the road he’d just left and crossed the wide field to the fencerow that had enclosed his garden. He thought for an amused moment that if he was ever remembered for anything it would likely be the cedar row. His wife had finally had enough of his sinful ways and doings and his sons’ lives had followed strange and destructive bents but the cedar row was as straight as if they’d been set to a staked line, and he stood for a moment leaned on the stick and staring down the row cedar on cedar until they diminished before the house he’d built, bluelooking and cool in the deep morning shade of the woods.

He heard a screen door slap to, though he could see no one, and the sound seemed to have a curious quality of timelessness about it, something that had happened years ago with the sound just now reaching his ears.

If she came out, if she came out.

He stood, leaned on the stick, watching. A hawk circled the field in lowering revolutions, its feathers trembling in the sun like light flickering on water, shrill cries falling to earth bright as broken bottleglass.

He remembered the man who had come looking for Warren with such dire intent.

There was the cedar the man had been standing beneath, looking up and batting his eyes in surprise, expecting a seventeen-year-old Warren but encountering instead the old man himself, bad news that morning, hungover and violence moiling about his feet like a vicious watchdog.

He’d sent his emissary to the house and waited with his two brothers.

It’s a man by the cedar row wants to see Warren, the boy said.

What’s he want?

The boy looked away, he just wants to see Warren.

Well just let me get my hat, the old man said. It may be that it’s me he needed to see all along.

The man stood with his cap cocked over one eye, a fistsize chew of tobacco in his jaw, a hawkbill knife printed against his leg in thin worn denim.

The man was on the ground before he could even get the knife out and after a while he forgot all about it. He might just as well have left it at the house.

Motion drew his eye back to the house. A figure crossed the porch. He was so far away he could discern little. The vague illusion of a blue dress, that was all, but what he was had been gone for fifty years, frozen in his mind as if it happened yesterday, a young woman coming onto a porch, a door slapping to behind her, a pan of dishwater slung into the yard. Just that, but the woman, who had been his wife, was so vibrant and alive that she seemed a symbol representing life itself, and the dishwater she threw glittered in the sun like quicksilver.

At length he turned back the way he’d come. Brady seemed to be avoiding him and he thought that perhaps he might catch him out around the house. But dogs had begun to bark somewhere below the house, and he wondered if maybe they’d caught his scent. The dogs he’d seen around the trailer that night had a distinctly dangerous look. Now the dogs barked on and on dementedly as if they would never shut up. The old man had never been much for barking dogs and he wondered how they stood the racket. The dogs were company, Brady had always said, but company like that he would have long ago put on the road.

He was halfway back across the field when something happened that he had never seen before or heard tell of. A rattlesnake fell out of the sky and thudded onto the path six or eight feet in front of him. This so stunned Bloodworth that he froze and just stood staring at it in a kind of slackjawed disbelief. Then finally he looked up as if to see were more on the way. A huge hawk drifted on the updrafts, the white undersides of the wings like polished chrome in the sun.

Got somethin you couldn’t handle, didn’t you? the old man asked, then added, or decided you didn’t want no part of.

He wondered if the hawk had been snakebit but he guessed not for after a moment it began to ascend until it was just a black dot printing itself on the blue void and ultimately vanishing as if he’d just been imagining it all along.

The snake was a diamondback rattler, thick as the old man’s arm. He approached it with caution, brandishing the stick like a club. The rattler was stunned but it was not dead. Its tail moved sluggishly, like a snake caught out in wintertime. He tried to count the rattles but could get no precise count. The snake was making no attempt either to escape or bite him, and he figured it was so addled it couldn’t fathom where it had gotten itself to.

Damned if you won’t have a story to tell the rest of them when you get home, he told it. But nobody is going to believe a word you say.

Copperbrown and black, the snake looked atavistic and evil, its ancient eyes cold and heartless as time itself. Its coils moved on themselves sluggishly, thick and heavy with poison. It seemed to be recovering itself but it still wasn’t crawling away.

He leaned and placed the tip of the carved stick lightly on the rattlesnake’s head, serpent to serpent. He was going to grind it into the earth then he stopped. Somehow it didn’t seem fair. Something flies down and hooks its claws into your flesh and soars away with you, high into the thin blue air, the comforting earth miles away and no more than a remembered dream. Then it drops you, and you slam into the ground and you lay there with your senses knocked out. After you finally start to get at yourself, and marvel at your incredible escape, an old man limps up and shreds your head into the clay with a hickory stick.

All right, he told the snake. I’ll tell you what I’m goin to do. I’m fixin to let you go. But the only people you can go into the world and bite are my enemies. Folks with guns and badges, khaki britches. Prison guards with shotguns. Lawyers, no limit on them. Maybe an undertaker or a insurance salesman every now and then. But no kids. No kids and no folks just tryin to scratch out a livin. You bite one of them, just one, and it’s me and you, I’ll be on your ass like a plague, I’ll finish what I started.

He moved the stick. After a while the snake began to crawl slowly away. It went into the cedars, finally vanished as if it had been no more than the coppery cedar needles and a trick of the light.

The old man went on, glancing skyward every now and then. He was no believer in signs and portents, but if the Almighty was going to rain serpents on him out of a clear blue sky he figured he might as well be indoors.

 

W
E PULLED INTO
Blythesville, Arkansas, one time, Sharp told Fleming. He opened the bottle of Coca-Cola and slid it across the bar to him. We was flat broke, he went on. Not a cryin dime between us. Hadn’t eat in nearly two days. We run out of gas right past the city limits sign and had to get out and roll the car out of the street.

It was on a Saturday mornin and there was a lot of folks stirrin about. People haulin cotton into town on wagons to the gin. Folks come in on Saturday to trade. Saturday was a big day back then. Saturday was what got you through the week. What do we do now? I asked E.F.

He got his banjo out of the trunk and by the time we got up to the square we had folks followin us. Kids, everybody. We looked like a parade. He had folks hollerin at him, Hey E.F, and as far as I know he’d never been in Blythesville, Arkansas, before. I played fiddle for him then, and I know I hadn’t. How about a tune, E.F, they was hollerin. Play a little for us.

By then we was on the courthouse square. E.F. set his banjo down but he never took it out of the case. I’ll tell you how it is, he told them. Our car’s out of gas and we are too. We ain’t eat since yesterday mornin. I don’t mind pickin, but it’s goin to cost you a little change. By then somebody was passin a bottle around and E.F. took a good horn of it. I may have too, I was bad to drink back then. I passed the hat around before E.F. ever uncased his banjo. Passed it around again while he was tunin up. It beat everything I ever saw. We’d took up over ten dollars before he ever commenced the first song. Hell, it plumb put workin in the shade. A man might make a dollar a day back then, if you could find anything to do.

By the time he was through with
Goin Down the Road Feelin Bad
he had em in his hip pocket. They would have followed him off a steep
bluff, into a house on fire. The cops come and was goin to break up the crowd cause it was blocking traffic and before you know it they was just like anybody else. I seen one take a drink out of a bottle somebody handed him. Time we went down to the cafe to eat E.F. could have run for mayor and been elected hands down. They thought he ought to be on the Grand Ole Opry.

The old man drank beer and wiped the foam off his upper lip. He laughed. I did try out for the Opry one time, he said. And they was goin to hire me. But by the time they sent a man around I’d got caught makin whiskey and done been in Brushy Mountain penitentiary three months.

Bloodworth was already forty years old when he heard that a man from a New York company was auditioning performers in Knoxville. He rode there on a bus, a pint of his own whiskey in his coat pocket, the cased banjo held upright between his feet because he did not trust the bus company to keep up with it. Watching the countryside ascend into mountains he’d never seen he tried not to think of the crop that needed laying by, Julia’s eyes that looked through him or around him when he came into a room. There was a hunger in him that he did not trust and could not even come close to explaining.

In Knoxville he played on streetcorners and passed his hat. It always came back with money in it. After a while he’d grow cocky and pass the hat before he’d even uncased the banjo. There would still be money in it. Even then there was something about him. He had a tale to tell. He made you believe it was your tale as well. Police came to tell him to move it along and stayed to listen. Sometimes they even dropped their own half-dollars into the hat. Bloodworth sang songs he’d heard and songs he’d stolen from other singers and songs he’d made up. He sang about death and empty beds and songs that sounded like invitations until you thought about them a while and then they began to sound like threats. Violence ran through them like heat lightning, winter winds whistled them along like paper cups turning hollowly down frozen streets.

The auditions were held in the Norton Hotel and it was full of pickers and singers from all over the south. From North Carolina, Tennessee,
Arkansas. The old man sized them up. Even with a halfpint of his own whiskey comforting him he felt intimidated. Here were folk who played and sang for a living. They had bands, they toured and played county fairs, dances, church functions. They were professionals. Bloodworth was a sharecropper, a whiskey runner, whatever fell handy. A man named A. P. Carter was there. He failed the audition. Bloodworth did not.

He rode a train to New York City and cut eight sides, four 78 rpm records. All the way to New York what he wanted to do most in the world seemed to follow above him just out of reach. I can do this or I can do that, he thought. There seemed to be no way he could do them both.

He seemed to be betting his life on the fall of the next card and even if he won he’d lose.

The record company wanted more sides cut but E.F. put them off. We’ll see how these do, he said. He had the countryman’s fear of being taken by these city slickers. He did not become famous but the records sold well enough so that he was asked to cut four more. By then he was part of a band called the Fruitjar Drinkers and they were touring the rural south in a Model A Ford. A fiddle player, a guitar player, Bloodworth and his Gibson banjo. Playing little towns that were hardly more than a grocery store and a couple of churches, shotgun sharecropper shacks, red roads that did not seem to go anywhere anyone in his right mind would want to be.

They’d set up on the long porches of country stores, stores that might have all been constructed from the selfsame blueprint. There’d be electric lights strung up and moths drifting in and out of their arc so thick they seemed some curious by-product of the electricity itself. Before Bloodworth had finished tuning up folks would be drifting toward the lights, at the first driving notes of the banjo, the old man squaring his shoulders and leaning into the din of noise like a boxer coming out of his corner, folks would have clustered the porch as if they’d risen out of the dusty red clay itself.

Tubercular revenants in overalls and a week’s beard, their wives and stairstep children, old men on canes and ole women in pokebonnets hanging on to them and boldeyed women staring up at him out of the
hot electric dark who seemed to be hanging on to nothing save the night itself.