Provinces of Night (29 page)

Oh, Death
, he began to sing, a song that in its various incarnations predated even his forebears’ presence on the continent, his smoky sardonic voice half defiance, half entreaty. Get out of the graveyard, E.F., Sharp the fiddle player would call, grinning his gaptoothed grin above the sawing bow. These folks don’t want to hear about the graveyard.

But Bloodworth was not fooled, he had these folks’ number, he’d been reading their mail, walking a lifetime in their shoes. Beyond the mothriddled light their faces were rapt and transfixed, he sang about death as if it was the only kept promise out of all life’s false starts and switchbacks, all there was at the end of the dusty road, his voice told them about calm and quiet and eternal rest. No landlord, no cotton to chop, no ticket at the company store growing like a cancer. Just time itself frozen like leaves in winter ice and nothing in the round world to worry about or dread.

They sold records out of the trunk of the Model A. They sold them with no trouble at all, folks digging up change out of their purses so worn the faces denominating it looked spectral, mere ghosts of themselves. They sold them to folks who did not even own phonographs, who had no prospects for owning one, folks who seemed to regard the records as talismans. Who handled them reverently and turned them to the light and studied the spiraling grooves as if they’d find there some physical evidence of their own provisional existence, as if their very lives were somehow encoded there.

I sure would like to have one of them records, the woman said.

I’ll sell them to most anybody, Bloodworth said.

I don’t have any money.

Money has always been one of the requirements for buying something, he pointed out.

The woman had huge dark eyes that did not look away when he studied her face. They held his own eyes locked to hers and seemed to communicate on some whole other level. The black hair like a shadow
down her back was as straight as if she’d taken a flatiron to it. She stood so close he could feel the heat of her.

We could maybe walk down by the levee and talk about it, she said.

Likely we could, he agreed.

They walked along the side of the road. Between the black honeysuckle and sawbriars the road was white as mica. She carried the record against her breasts as a young girl might carry her schoolbooks. Somewhere out there in the dark beyond the levee the Mississippi rolled like something larger than life, like a myth, like a dream the world was having. Here the land was flat and the stars swung so close to earth they seemed foreign, in configurations he’d imagined but never quite seen. A whippoorwill called out of the musky dark in some language he’d never heard. Sin seemed so evil, so sweet.

You got a drink on you, Mr. Bloodworth?

Of course he had a drink. What would a Fruitjar Drinker be without a drink?

Is anybody goin to be lookin for you? he asked.

Just you, I hope, she said, turning to him.

All this was a negation of death. The taste of her mouth, the feel of her breast, so soft that the feel of a naked breast always surprised him. Her quickened breath was the very affirmation of life.

Death in those days had a tendency to walk past his house at night, cross the yard and peer in his window, bone hand raised to shade black eyeholes that were just night augmenting itself, death fought him every night for the covers, tried to crawl into the very bed with him.

Not tonight, he’d think, hands gentle at the buttons of her dress. Death, you’ll sleep at the foot of the bed tonight.

 

W
ARREN SAT
awkwardly in the old man’s lawn chair, his car parked at the edge of the road. There was a blondhaired woman sitting in the passenger seat drinking something from a paper cup and glancing occasionally toward the trailer.

How you makin it, Pa?

I reckon I’m scrapin by, Bloodworth said. It’s good to be back here.
Seems like it’s peaceful, just bein in a country that lays the way you remember it layin.

Warren was wearing dress pants and a white shirt and his slippers were shined. He took a flat pint bottle out of the side pocket of his coat and offered it to the old man.

I reckon I’ll pass, Bloodworth said. It don’t agree with me anymore.

Then I don’t reckon you’ll mind if I take a drink.

You’re well past the age where what I think about anything matters, Bloodworth said. He sat studying Warren. It was not yet ten o’clock in the morning yet Warren already seemed unsteady on his feet. Perhaps he’d started drinking when the sun came up, perhaps he’d not waited for the sun. The old man was touched by something in Warren’s face and he wished he could make things right. Pick him up out of his tracks and set him down in other tracks going another direction. He could not think of anything to say to him, and since his own life did not lend itself to example he would not have said it anyway.

Warren drank from the bottle and screwed the cap back on and returned it to his pocket. Brady come around much? he asked.

No, he kindly seems to be avoidin me. The time or two I’ve talked to him he’s mostly just raved and ranted about me goin to hell. I reckon him and God Almighty’s got together and worked it all out.

There’s somethin the matter with Brady. I hate to say it but I believe he gets worse ever time I see him. He’s got all that crazy mess about fortunes and hexes on his mind and I don’t think he can think about anything else anymore.

I blame myself some, Bloodworth said. But you can’t walk back to where you was twenty years ago and start over.

There was somethin wrong with him twenty years ago, too, Warren said. You just never noticed it. Does that boy of mine come by much?

No, I’ve not seen him. That boy of Boyd’s speaks of him a lot.

I’ve about give up on Neal. Just throwed up my hands and said let him roll. He’ll probably wind up in the pen. All he studies is pussy and whiskey and I can’t seem to get him interested in anything else.

Reckon how in the world he wound up like that, the old man grinned. Many preachers and Sunday School teachers as this family has turned out.

I reckon he’s a throwback to olden times or somethin. Say that boy of Boyd’s comes by and keeps you company? He seems all right.

He’s around here a right smart. And he is all right. He’s about as peculiar a young feller as I ever seen, but he’s all right. He’s goodhearted. Mostly keeps his mouth shut but he looks like he’s watchin and listenin all the time. Hard to figure what he’s studying about.

Warren we need to go, the woman called from the car. I’m just melting down out here.

Warren stood up. He seemed obscurely relieved to be getting underway. Well. You’re sure you’re all right, Pa?

I’ll make it. That’s not Juanita out there, is it?

Warren turned. The woman was studying her face in a tortoiseshell compact, reworking her lipstick. No, I reckon me and Juanita has come to the parting of the ways. Me and Modine there’s goin down to Florida and walk barefooted in the sand.

He withdrew a moneyclip from his pocket and handed the old man some folded bills. If you need anything just get it, he said. You got any way of gettin to town?

Young Albright hauls me around a lot. I don’t want this money.

Keep it. It’d make me feel better if you’d take it.

Bloodworth slid it into his pocket. I don’t want the responsibility of makin you feel bad, he said.

Well, let’s go where the palm trees grow, Warren said, turning for a moment and shaking the old man’s hand.

You be careful, Bloodworth said, still clasping the hand, not knowing what he wanted Warren to be careful of, but aware suddenly that the road Warren was headed down was fraught with a thousand kinds of peril and it saddened him that he had only noticed this long after it was too late to do anything about it.

It’s too late for that, Warren said in an eerie echo of what the old man had been thinking.

 

H
ALFWAY DOWN
the row of cedars was a tree fairly taken over by muscadine vines and Bloodworth stood for a time beneath it picking
muscadines one by one off the lower branches and eating them. It seemed early for muscadines to ripen but he figured the hot dry summer had caused it. But the muscadines were of a good size and full of juice, he liked the hot winey smell of them and the sharp evocative taste that made him think of wine he had made and drunk fifty years ago.

He was watching the house. It set still and depthless against the blue border of woods, the white weight of the sun thrown on it like a floodlight. The top branches of the great pine stirred with a breeze that never touched the earth and in his mind he smelled pine needles in the hot windless calm.

He filled his shirt pocket with the black fruit and went on down the cedar row, from time to time unpocketing one and breaking the tough skin with his teeth. Well, let’s pay a call on the family, he told himself, something that was almost dread swinging in him like a pendulumed weight.

He was coming out of the cedar row almost at the garden fence when Brady saw him. Brady was coming up from the kennels with a fifty-pound sack of dog food across his shoulder. The old man raised an arm just as Brady saw him and immediately Brady dropped the bag and began to hurry toward him, loping crookedly along on his bad leg. The old man turned to look about as if to see was there some imminent danger Brady was running to rescue him from, a bear stepped out of the woods perhaps but there was nothing, it was Bloodworth himself Brady was closing on.

When Brady grasped his shoulder it was so unexpected he staggered and dropped the muscadines he was holding and stabbed wildly at the ground with the stick to recover his balance. When he did he stood for a moment with the stick held like a weapon he was brandishing.

What’s the matter with you? Are you crazy?

Brady’s red curls had tumbled across his forehead. You got no business over here, Pa. Don’t you know enough to stay where you’re put?

I’ve always been accustomed to puttin myself pretty much where I wanted to be, Bloodworth said.

I don’t want you around Ma, I thought you understood that. Now go back across that field the way you come. No, wait right where you’re at. I’ll get the car and drive you, that’d be faster.

Wait a minute, what do you think I’m goin to do, hurt somebody? Do you think I aim to hurt her?

You done that long ago and I’m not about to stand by and let it happen again. She’s old and her mind’s gettin bad and as far as I know you’ve been forgot. It’s my plan to see you stay that way.

Boy, you’ve got me all wrong. I just walked across here to see what you was up to.

You wait right where you’re at till I get the car, Brady said. I don’t want her seein you and me havin to explain all this mess and I don’t ever want you back over here again.

I don’t recall ever signin this place over to anybody, Bloodworth said. You got a deed to it in your shirt pocket?

Wait right where I told you, Brady said.

For reasons he could not understand the old man waited until Brady brought the car. There was something in Brady’s face that did not brook argument, something in his congested eyes that scared the old man a little. He looked for something of the boy Brady had been twenty years ago in the pale freckled face but if any of the boy remained he could not find it.

When Bloodworth was seated awkwardly in the front seat by Brady instead of driving up the road the way a normal driver would go Brady drove along the cedar row through the wild oats and broomstraw, the car lurching wildly on its shocks, Brady peering at the house in the rearview mirror. He kept raking his hair out of his eyes with his long freckled fingers. The old man watched him, thinking for a surreal moment that Brady might not even stop at the trailer, just put the pedal to the floor and drive him farther than he ever meant to be, drive him deep into the Harrikin and shove him out like a man dropping an unwanted dog.

Let me ask you something, Bloodworth said. Why did you ever agree for me to come back here? Why didn’t you just pocket the money and forget it, or just refuse to talk about it in the first place? I never pushed it on you. I had a place to be, and somebody that would have looked after me.