Provinces of Night (37 page)

 

J
UST AFTER
dark the red cattletruck parked where the chainlink fence stopped it and Coble got out. He stood squaring the straw hat on
his head, looking at the house, listening to the raucous barking of dogs. Brady rose from the lounge chair beneath the pine tree. Hush, he said. The dogs fell silent. Coble came through the gate and Brady crossed to meet him. Pools of shadow lay like dark water beneath the pine and Brady limped nimbly around them. Without an inkling of who Coble was or what he wanted Brady knew intuitively that this was someone he needed to know who possessed knowledge he needed to acquire.

 

T
HAT NIGHT
E. F. Bloodworth had difficulty in falling asleep and he lay in bed for a time thinking about the horse named Cisco that he had once owned. A small spotted stallion gaudy as a circus poster that he had traded for in Mississippi. The night of Cisco’s demise Bloodworth had been trying to keep a mare and the stallion apart. He had penned them in separate pens. Between the pens and joined to them on either end was a barn with a sloping tin roof.

Sometime in the night he woke to bedlam. He could hear a horse screaming, dogs barking madly. He jumped out of bed and ran into the moonlit yard. The stallion was screaming and thrashing about inside the barn. Bloodworth saw with a stunned disbelief that the stallion had climbed a stack of haybales at the end of the barn and somehow managed to clamber onto the roof; the tin and two-by-four lathing had not held, and the spotted horse had fallen in a jumble of tin and broken lumber. The horse looked like a unicorn struggling wildly to free itself from a snare and he saw with horror that a sharp section of rotten lumber had imbedded itself in one of the horse’s eyes like a horn. He’d struggled in the darkness dementedly with Cisco trying to remove the splintered board until he finally noticed that one of the stallion’s front legs was broken and he gave up and went to the house for his gun.

What the spotted horse had done awed him a little. He thought then and he thought now the cry of flesh calling to flesh must be the strongest thing in the world.

Finally he slept but woke to a din of barking dogs and for a moment he was caught in a deadfall he’d laid in time long ago himself and he knew he was going to have to struggle with the stricken horse again,
sick at heart he was going to have to go on shooting it until it stayed dead. Then he remembered where he was and picked up the gold pocket watch from the table. It was just past two o’clock in the morning. He laid the watch back and closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep. It was useless. Hellfire, the old man said. He lay listening to the dogs and staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. One dog after another or the same dog repeating itself was running up the steps, barking furiously all the while, slamming against the door, running back down into the yard.

He got up and poured himself a shot of Early Times and stood looking at it for a while and then he drank it. He took the pistol out of the Martin’s case and checked the loads and stood beside the door. He turned the doorknob but when he did the door was jerked roughly from his hand and he had a German shepherd in the trailer with him. He wasn’t using his stick and when the door leapt backward he fell. He didn’t even think. He fired three times as fast as he could squeeze the trigger and the dog was jerked backward and tumbled howling down the steps. He sat on his haunches holding the pistol bothhanded before him as if expecting the onslaught of other dogs.

He struggled up cautiously and peered into the yard. The dog lay by the doorstep, its legs working slowly as if it were swimming. He fired the gun at random into the yard until both gun and yard were empty. The dogs had fallen silent. They seemed to have vanished into the woods, slunk back up the road to the field. He reloaded the pistol and sat for a time on the doorstep. For no reason he could name he felt as if someone was watching him from the edge of the woods.

 

A
FTER HE LOADED
the dead German shepherd Brady sat hunkered by the side of his juryrigged pickup truck. His hand held a length of stick he’d sharpened with his pocket knife like a stylus and he was scrawling the earth with meaningless hieroglyphics, random scratchings. You ought never to have shot my dog, Brady had said by way of preamble. Bloodworth didn’t ask him how he knew the dog was dead. He didn’t want to know. He sat on the doorstep staring at the pickup truck,
on whose side long ago he had painted JOLIE BLON in some other lifetime.

I don’t want to even be around you, Brady said. All I want to know is why you told all those lies on me.

The old man was dumbfounded. Hellfire, boy, I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Lies to who? I can’t remember saying anything about you, truth or lies either one.

That’s funny. That cattle buyer, Coble, he remembers it word for word. How crazy I am. Babtizin cows and chickens. Preachin to stumps. Where’d you come up with all that mess? I knew you were evil and worthless but I never knew you were totally insane.

The old man was silent a long time, hands on knees, stick propped against his leg. How to begin. Finally he said, Boy, that wasn’t about you. That didn’t have anything to do with you. I don’t really know why I made that stuff up, but it wasn’t even about me. It was about a man named Rutgers who wanted a ride to Tennessee.

All that crazy stuff about me marryin bulls and cows. Readin at them out of a Bible. Did that man really sit there and believe all that nonsense?

Bloodworth permitted himself a small smile. He eat ever bit of it and set there holdin his bowl and spoon wantin more, he said.

Well. I believe he’s about had a bait of it now. He’s makin trouble.

I figured after a while he’d just laugh it off.

No. For some strange reason he don’t see the humor in it. You took him hundreds of miles out of his way and worse than that you made a fool out of him.

Hell, I didn’t make him, Bloodworth said. He was a fool when I got there.

He thinks you’re crazy and he’s goin to do all he can to get you into trouble. He thinks you ought to be put away somewhere, and I agree with him. All the lies you told about me, then that remark the other day about company. I knew what kind of company you meant, you never needed but one kind. Women. Shooting off a pistol like you was doing last night. You are crazy.

I’ll just pay him his ride bill and be done with him, the old man said.

That’s not what he wants.

Then to hell with him. The only reason he done it to begin with was because he thought my back was against the wall so hard I was goin to practically give him a herd of Black Angus cows. Damn them cows anyway. I wish I’d never even thought of them.

In truth the old man felt a certain amount of guilt about the story he’d concocted. Long after telling it he’d remembered that Brady as a youngster used to preach funerals for runover dogs, writing sermons in tablets to read at them, said prayers over roadkill animals. He wondered if all this hadn’t in some manner seeped up out of his memory and colored what he was saying to Coble. The hell with it anyway, he thought. If it did it did. It was just one more misstep in a long line of missteps and there was nothing he could do about it now.

His idea was for us to get a lawyer and have you declared incompetent. Have the court appoint somebody to see after your business.

I guess you’d be a fine candidate for that, the old man said. You couldn’t see after the business a settin hen could accumulate.

None of it matters anyway, Brady said. You’re fixin to die. You’d be dead before the ink could dry on the paperwork. I run it out in the cards. Worse yet, you’re goin straight to hell. When I look at you settin there now it’s like you’re already on your way. Comin into the city limits of hell. Your hair’s startin to singe and little blue flames are flickerin all over you. Smoke boilin out of your ears. Your blood’ll boil and your brain snap and pop like grease in a hot pan. Your bones’ll burn white-hot and just burn through your flesh.

The old man struggled up. Get away from me, he said, and although he tried to keep the contempt out of his voice he could not.

 

W
ITH THE SHIFT
in the seasons Fleming brought saw and axe and began to cut the old man’s winter wood. He felled blackjack and red oak and cut them to length with the bucksaw and split the cuts and ricked the wood behind the trailer. Working in the woods seemed to bring purpose to the days, a sense of order. He cut dead pine for kindling and a red cedar whose closegrained oily wood gave off a rich exotic odor that evoked some vague memory he could not get a fix on.

Finally the old man stopped him saying he’d never live long enough to burn such a pile of wood as the boy was accumulating. It was just as well for the rains of November began and the world turned bleak and somber, the woodsmoke from Bloodworth’s heater clinging to the ground in the damp heavy air. It seemed to rain every day and the days shortened and seemed to be perpetually dimming so that it was impossible to tell the exact moment that night fell. There were days he sat in the house watching rain string off the eaves and he was touched with a desperate and growing unease. The rain fell with an unvarying intensity until it seemed that the weathers of his world had coalesced in this mode and it had become a rain without a proper beginning or end and crossing through it to check on Bloodworth he moved always with the rushing of rain in the unwinded trees like a dark unmetered poetry of the woods.

 

W
HEN
F
LEMING
got out of the cab in Itchy Mama’s yard he closed the car door and stood for a moment staring past the hills toward the southwest. It was no more than midafternoon but the world had darkened save for a band of light that lay above the horizon. A bitter wind had swept the drunks from Itchy Mama’s porch and it rattled beercans hollowly against the stone steps and blew scraps of paper like dirty snow. Birds alighting about the trees were soon off again restlessly as if they’d had word of ill weathers that had not reached the world at large.

He went up the steps and crossed the porch and rapped at the loose screen door. Come in here, Itchy Mama yelled. Everybody else has. When he went in he saw that the cold wind had blown the sots and derelicts not to homes if they had them but to Itchy Mama’s front room, where they were ill-contained on ragged couches and easy chairs and even hunkered against the walls. He went past them acknowledging their greetings and comments about the falling temperature with an upraised hand and to the kitchen where Itchy Mama was slicing ham into an enormous iron skillet.