Provinces of Night (42 page)

 

T
HE TRAILER’S BACKYARD
was windswept ice trackless as a wasteland but after he’d crossed its expanse snow was drifted in the woods and he found the old man’s tracks. It had snowed more since he’d made them but still they were there to read, the right footprint firm and clean, the left dragging, not even clearing the surface of the snow. Pockmarks in the ice where the walking stick had gone. He went on around the slope through a childhood fairyland of ice. Each fork filled with snow, each leaf encased in ice. He moved through utter silence save the carillon tinkling of the icy leaves. Small black birds flitted about the ice with a curious decorum, their tiny bright eyes unreal as bits of obsidian from a taxidermist’s hand.

He went on through the woods, and the going grew heavier. The old man seemed to have just forged a straight path into the woods, taking what came, places where the wind had driven the snow into kneedeep drifts, windfall branches he’d had to work his way across. Of course the first thing he’d noticed was that there was no return set of footprints. He knew they had to stop somewhere and he was beset with a rising dread about what he’d find when they did.

When he began to come upon dog tracks he paused and studied them with some interest. They crossed and recrossed, huge tracks like the spoor of wolves. The tracks bore left and they bore right but followed the same general course the old man was taking.

He paused to rest, breathing hard, the icy air like fire in his lungs. He couldn’t fathom how the old man had done it. Here the earth sloped so steeply the old man must have dragged himself from the trunk of one poplar to the next. A hare erupted by him in an explosion of snow and when it topped the slope Fleming turning to watch its flight suddenly saw the old man’s hat. It was lying on the ridge crested with an inch or so of snow on the crown and tipped slightly sidewise with the brim frozen in the ice. He clambered up the slope, falling, his feet sliding on the ice beneath the snow, rose and struggled on.

The old man’s black coat was what Fleming saw first, stark against
the snow. He was lying on his left side, his face in the snow, his knees drawn up toward his chest.

Fleming whirled to run. Brady, he was thinking. Brady was closest and there was a telephone. Before he had even started his descent there was a sound, a groan, then a low keening moan that went on and on without cessation or variation. He saw that Bloodworth was trying to turn himself in the snow, clawing at the ice with his right hand in an attempt to wheel himself around facing Fleming. He’d start to turn then cease with his head lolled back and Fleming saw with horror that the long black strands of his hair had been frozen into the ice.

He ran to him. He didn’t know what to do. He tried freeing the old man’s hair, flailing at the ice with a fist. At last he took out his pocket knife and began to saw the hair off above the ice. The old man was trying to talk. His mouth frothed with spittle. He walled a terror-stricken eye up at Fleming, a wild black eye with the yellowlooking cornea shot with clotted red. Once when he was a child Fleming had with Boyd come upon a wreck in which a trailerload of horses had been capsized. The horses were screaming in voices nigh human and one horse trapped on the bottom had rolled upon Fleming a wild outraged eye that demanded that he do something, anything, and that eye had looked like this.

Bloodworth kept trying to talk. He sounded as if he were cursing, praying, calling upon someone for something. Then help me, help me, Fleming understood. He kept trying to move around, to get up. Fleming noticed for the first time that the old man’s pistol was lying in the snow. Bloodworth kept trying to pick it up and lift it toward his face but he couldn’t work his fingers. They were frozen or he’d lost the use of them or both and he’d bring the arm up and the pistol would tilt away and once he managed to bring the barrel against his temple but the finger through the triggerguard lay lax and useless. Help me, he was trying to say.

Listen, the boy said, laying a hand on Bloodworths shoulder. I’m going after help, we’ll get a doctor, it’ll be all right.

Bloodworth struggled to look at him. His entire face had slackened, all the muscles dead, no more animate than cold wax. With his wild eyes and lolling mouth and long hair hacked off by the pocket knife he looked like something that would come at you out of a nightmare.

No, he said quite clearly. Help me.

I can’t, the boy said. Goddamn it, I can’t.

Bloodworth looked away, toward the treeline. The trees were brittlelooking and cold and they looked like surreal and patternless ironwork some crazed sculptor had wrought against the heavens.

He saw that the old man was crying silently, tears welling up and coursing onto the ice. Fleming lowered his face to the rough wool of the old man’s shoulder. He could not bear this. He could not bear this. Through the thick coat he could feel the old man shaking with the cold. Then he raised his face and wiped an arm across his eyes and without forethought or hesitation picked up the pistol and wrapped Bloodworth’s hand around it and rested the barrel against Bloodworth’s temple.

He was looking away through the trees when the explosion came and when it did a soft avalanche of snow fell like an afterthought and blackbirds scattered with wild startled cries from all the frozen trees.

 

I
N ORDER
to get the dead girl into the trunk he had to back the Buick up to the edge of the porch. The Buick came wheeling crazily across the ice, straddling the sidewalk, the spinning wheels peppering the front of the house with bits of black ice. Neal hadn’t been able to lift her. He had her wrapped in the bedspread and he managed to drag it by one corner down the hall, standing on the porch then and looking up the street and down, seeing nothing but the frozen street and trees then hauling her with a thump across the threshold and onto the porch. He sat for a time resting, sick at heart, staring at the still shapeless mass beneath the blanket. Finally he rose and struggled with her, getting her head and torso into the trunk then lifting her legs in but when he tried to close the lid he was left with two bare feet resting on the edge of the trunk opening. Try as he might he could not adjust her so that the lid would latch. At last he sat with his forehead against the icy bumper trying to think what to do.

He rose and went into the house and came back out with a coathanger. He arranged the blanket over the naked feet and drew the
lid as near to closed as it would come and wired it from the inside with wire from the hanger. By now he was in a state of disassociation and the threat of someone walking upon a man loading a dead girl into the trunk of a car did not even occur to him. He was so tired that he thought she was bought and paid for. His state of exhaustion seemed to justify any small wrongdoing he might be guilty of.

He was far out on the Natural Bridge road rolling toward the river when night began to fall on him. He’d thought it morning but the light was just dimming down. Then the day lightened, like the advent of a bleak and cheerless dawn. He drove on. The world darkened again, night fell so that he turned on the headlights but they weren’t working and he drove along in the dark with the brake half in and half out and when day came again he was on the shoulder of the road and the trees he was driving toward looked like trees in an inksketch left in the rain. The first sideroad he came to he cut into it, bumping along over the rough earth, the world through the windshield shifting and fading as if reality itself was out of control.

He drove until the road had deteriorated so that he was driving over brush that stood headhigh in the headlights, stopped where the logroad began to incline toward a hollow. He got out and unwired the trunk. Then he slid down the quarterpanel and sat on his feet, his cheek resting against the corner of the bumper.

When the man in the green coveralls came up out of the woods Neal had managed to get out a cigarette and light it though he was not smoking it. He just sat holding it. You taken drunk a little early in the day, ain’t ye buddy? the man in the green coveralls asked. When he saw the blanketcovered form his eyes went curiously blank for a moment. He did not set the deer rifle down as he’d started to but shifted it to his right hand with his thumb laid across the hammer and with his left turned back a corner of the blanket. They Lord God, he said.

 

E. F. B
LOODWORTH LAY
in state like fallen royalty, like a ruler an assassin’s bullet has stricken down. The undertaker had not been able to make him any more benign or approachable than he had been able to
make himself in life. He was a fierce-looking corpse to the end, doomed reprobate patriarch whose lineage had gone strange and violent, he lay sternfaced and remote, at a cold remove from his seed that had bloomed finally in poisonous and evil flowers.

Everyone seemed to be there save Fleming but if his absence was noted no one commented upon it. Bellwether came. The old men who haunted Itchy Mama’s porch were well represented and they all had pronouncements to make. You won’t see his like again, they said. They broke the mold when they made E.F. The old stories were told again and death made them new, gave them a validity they had not possessed before. Albright came with a woman who nobody knew and who did not introduce herself. She was a boxlike woman with bright orange hair and she stood looking down at E.F.’s scornful visage with a dry and bitter eye. Then she turned away, without looking at anyone, and Albright followed her out of the house.

The body lay in Brady’s front parlor. Forbidden its thresholds in life in death he was hauled forth like an exhibition, like a trophy in an elaborate and expensive showcase. The old woman had drawn a chair near the casket and from time to time she would look at the old man’s face. Brady had permitted her this. This time, Brady’s face seemed to say, he’s not going anywhere at all.

Warren had little to say to Brady or to anyone else. He stood looking down at the enigmatic old man but he was as inscrutable in death as he had been in life. He studied with something akin to detachment the reconstruction of the old man’s temple, wondered what had been used to implement the undertaker’s art. Then he turned away. He leaned and kissed his mother’s cheek and went out the door into the night. He stood for a time beneath the pine tree. It was very cold and he could smell the astringent odor of the pine and it reminded him of when he had been a child. He looked up and through the pine branches the stars looked the same tonight as they always had, from then to now the cold uncaring constellations seemed to have altered not one iota. He took a halfpint bottle out of his hip pocket and unscrewed the lid and canted the bottle against the stars and drank.

In the house Brady was the consummate host, his shoulders mantled with a new and unaccustomed dignity. He spoke platitudes in a low
somber voice. He saw that everyone received a cup of coffee, a slice of cake. He said, yes, it was a shame, but he was thankful that he had brought the old man back to die among his own people. Blood called to blood, Brady said. Blood would not be denied.

His face burned with the light of the redeemed. He was redeemed, but the old man was the redeemer; see him, Brady’s face said, see what it has come to. He used his life as a weapon and when there was no one left to hurt he turned it on himself.