Provinces of Night (13 page)

Where the field ended they lurched out onto a roadbed and turned right. After some distance Fleming caught the glint of the sun on metal and then he could see it, a short cigar stub of a trailer with two rounded ends. Brady parked before it and cut the switch. Home sweet home, he said.

Fleming got out trying to rub feeling into his backside. Where’s the rest of it? he asked.

What?

There doesn’t seem to be much to it.

Well, he’s not but one old man. Likely he won’t live long anyway. Beggars can’t be choosers, can they?

How’s he begging? I thought you said he sent you the money to buy him a trailer.

And you see it before you, Brady said. Let’s get this stuff unloaded. I’ve got more to do than set up this mess. Find a shady spot somewhere for that water jug.

Shade seemed hard come by here, and he wondered, but did not ask, why Brady had chosen this spot. There were no trees surrounding the trailer, nothing but chesthigh blackjack scrub.

Why don’t we clear some of this brush and move it back in there where the trees are?

Move it? Pick it up and set it back there?

We could maybe move it back in there with the truck.

Maybe. Or maybe turn it over and bust it like an egg. Don’t worry about it. Maybe the Lord will take mercy on a sinner and miracle an air conditioner into that front window yonder.

Brady set him to digging a hole for a makeshift septic tank and positioned a jack at the low end of the trailer and began to raise it, shoring up with concrete blocks as he went, checking the underside of the trailer from time to time with a spirit level. After he’d dug through the top layer of clay and chopped out the tree roots Fleming found the going easier and actually began to enjoy the work, loosening the earth with a
mattock and throwing the dirt out with a shovel. By midmorning he had an enormous amount of earth mounded on the rim above him and he was standing chestdeep in a hole he could have buried a horse in.

Hey.

Brady came over to look.

How deep does this thing have to be?

Some deeper than that. We can’t have a worldfamous musician doing his business in the woods like a heathen.

Where’s he going to get water?

I guess I’ll have to haul his water. Unless you want to fly in when you’re through with that hole and dig him a well.

Fleming wiped sweat out of his eyes and stood leaning on the shovel. He could think of nothing worse than being trapped in this eggshaped tin can dropped down in the boiling sun and dependent on Brady to haul his drinking water.

That old man is going to singe and draw like a spider, he said. He went back to shoveling.

At noon the heat felt malefic and they walked through the brush behind the trailer into the shade and ate the lunch the old woman had prepared, roast beef sandwiches and hardboiled eggs. The boy finished with a fried apple pie he washed down with tepid coffee from a Mason jar.

How come you’re so down on the old man, Brady?

If you’d ever been around him you wouldn’t need to ask me that.

Well, I wasn’t, so I do. None of you talks about him, or none of the family anyway.

Boyd and Warren ain’t so down on him. Let him come on back, they said. You’ll notice Warren’s in Alabama and Boyd’s traipsed off God knows where and I’m the one out here sweatin over this mess.

I’ve learned more about him from listening to other old men talk than I ever did from you or Pa, Fleming said. You act like he just stepped through a hole in the ground and vanished.

Well, Brady said, that’s about what happened. Except now he wants to crawl back out of the hole. If it was left up to me I’d stand on the edge of the hole and stomp his fingers ever time he tried to get a handhold. He just left Ma settin and walked off. Just walked. Not havin a car never stopped him. He’d rather ride but he’d walk if he had to. He always
had these trashy people he could turn to. He had all the company he wanted, of one kind or another. But blood is never left up to you, blood will call to blood. You can’t deny your own kin.

He was silent for some time, his sharp intent face locked in concentration. I expect it was mainly that music, he finally said. I’ve thought about it a lot, and for a while I thought it was the whiskey. But I’ve come to see it was them old songs. They was real to him in a way they wasn’t real to nobody else. Whenever he’d take that old banjo out of the case and go off by himself, you’d know in a few days he’d be gone. Like a man goin on a drunk, except it’d be them old songs he’d be drunk on. That old lonesome-soundin banjo. His voice sounded like a fingernail on a blackboard. They say he’s made some money at it but Lord I’d like to know who spent it. It never sounded worth fifteen cents to me.

The boy sat and listened in silence. He tipped the last of his coffee onto the ground. The earth was dry and baked white and fissured with cracks like miniature faults in the earth. Like the embryonic beginnings of some ultimate cataclysm. It sucked the coffee instantly into itself and left no trace. He thought about what Brady had said. He felt instinctively that every coin had two sides and that this was only one of them. In the poolhall and on Itchy Mama Baker’s front porch he’d heard another story. Once people knew who he was they always had a story to tell him about his grandfather. They seemed to regard him as somehow larger than life. As if in living life on a larger scale than they were permitted or perhaps permitted themselves he had somehow redeemed them. He’d heard stories of a man who’d sometimes lived outside the law but had forded a swollen river on horseback to pay back a two-dollar loan. But, the man amended, it might have been that E.F. just wanted to see if he could swim the river. He was a man who had had trouble adjusting himself to the expectations that other people, particularly people in authority, had for him. He seemed to have some difficulty playing the role that life had cast him.

The last time he left, Brady said, he had just got out of the pen. He was making whiskey then and he wound up shootin a deputy sheriff. I wasn’t there but he must have just walked in the front door and out the back. And then that was that.

He sat for a time without speaking. He seemed to be studying his
shoes. He was studying them intently, as though they were some make of shoe he had never encountered before.

I ought never to have let you get me started on this line of talk, he finally said. Things run along smooth when I don’t think of him at all. My mind’ll smooth off. Then I get started on him and it’s like somebody jabbed a stick down inside my head and stirred everything up. My mind’s like muddy water. There’s times I could have killed him like a copperhead I seen in the woods and just walked off and left him. Let’s get this mess done and get out of here.

There’s not going to be any electricity?

Not unless you want to box it up and tote it to him. Do you see any wires run in here? Then let’s get to work. We can run them septic tank lines and cover the tank over without it.

They stood up. You reckon you could really find water around here? Fleming asked.

I could if it’s here. Back on a dry ridge like this here it’d be a long way down if you did find it.

Let’s see you try.

Why? You wouldn’t know anymore if you watched than you do right now. It ain’t somethin you see. You feel the fork jerk and tremble in your hands. If the stream’s strong enough it’ll draw it straight down, like a magnet draws iron. I’ve seen it twist the bark off.

I never saw anybody witch for water before. If it wasn’t too far down me and Junior Albright might dig him a shallow well.

I’d almost pay money to see a well you and Junior Albright dug, Brady said. In fact I’d see it if I had to borrow the money to get in.

He walked about the clearing, stooped and cut a forked sprout. Folks’ll tell you it has to be a peachtree sprout. Or a willow, or some such. That’s rubbish. It ain’t the stick, it’s you. If you’ve got the gift you could find it with a jack handle just as easy.

He walked about the clearing, the stick held before him by the forks. Once at the corner of the trailer it jerked spasmodically, as if a slight current of electricity had coursed through it. He walked away, began covering the area in a gridlike pattern. When he approached the same corner of the trailer the forked stick trembled again.

You mind if I try?

Brady halted and offered him the stick. This here’s the only nibble I got, he said. And it’s doubtful at best. You may do better. We may be just drownin in water a foot or two down.

Fleming held the stick in his hands as he’d seen Brady do. He crossed to the woods, back again. The fork held steady. But at the corner of the trailer it jerked in his hands, seemed almost to be vibrating. Brady was watching. He shook his head in amazement. We may have somethin here, he said. You may be on to somethin.

Fleming walked away. When he returned the stick twisted again. Brady had approached, was following along behind him. You may have the gift, he said. It shows up in ever generation of the family, I’ve run it back. You may be the one in this generation.

I may well be, the boy agreed.

He approached the deeper timber. At a clump of sweetgum the witching fork seemed taken with some kind of fit. It jerked and struggled, seemed to be trying to wrest itself from his hands. Then the point sprang earthward.

The boy tossed it aside. He stood and withdrew the water jug from the thick shaded greenery. Not too far to this, he said. Brady was watching balefully Fleming unscrewed the lid and drank. He lowered the jug. Pretty fair water too, he said.

You’re a cruelhearted little shitass, Brady told him. It’s no wonder your whole family moved off without tellin you where they were goin.

 

O
N HIS WAY
to the bus station E. F. Bloodworth was caught up in a surging tide of humanity that had turned out for some sort of festivities. He had gone only a few blocks from Cora’s boarding house when he found himself borne along whether he wanted to go or not, so dense were the folk here. Every strata of Little Rock’s society seemed represented, from sharecroppers to prosperous farmers in Panama hats. Even the jaded merchants themselves were standing in the doorways of their shops, fondling their watch chains and watching the streets expectantly as if something of enormous significance was on the verge of happening.

He finally made the shelter of an awning that shaded the front of a jewelry store, a pocket of calm backwaters eddied in the lee of swift water. He leaned on his walking stick, a handcarved length of hickory emblazoned with stars and moons and enigmatic hieroglyphs and the carved handhold carved to represent the neck and head of a serpent. The old man stood at least a head taller than anyone in the crowd milling about him and with his ferocious eyes and irritated demeanor he looked like a weary old bear beleaguered by a pack of hounds. He took out a handkerchief and wiped the perspiration off his neck and folded the handkerchief carefully and slid it into the pocket of his black suitcoat. Aside from this coat he wore a baggy pair of biglegged gray slacks and a starched white dress shirt. He wore an enormous maroon tie with the likeness of a longhorn bull adorning it. He wore the pearlgray fedora with the brim slightly rolled and cocked at a jaunty angle, and with his height and demeanor and the Stetson he would have been an imposing figure anywhere but in this sweating throng of humanity.

A short ducklike woman had been swept into the shelter of the awning. She was hanging on to three wildeyed children like survivors she’d snatched from floodwaters.

The old man had begun to hear music, the brassy strident sound of a marching band. He searched his mind for some holiday this might be that would call for a parade but could not think of one.

I was as tall as you I might be able to see something, the ducklike woman said irritably to the old man, as if she held him responsible for the disparity in their height. What do you see out there?

The tops of folk’s heads, mostly, Bloodworth said. What is this mess?

Can you not see any mules yet?

Mules? he asked in disbelief.

Yes, mules. This is Arkansas Mule Day and I’m tryin to get these kids closer so they can see better.

Why anybody would want to see a mule closer is a mystery to me, Bloodworth said.

These is all champion mules, she said dismissively, as if he’d taken leave of his senses.

A champion mule ain’t nothin but a mule with a ribbon tied on it.
You walk behind as many turnin plows as I have you’d be well satisfied to never see a mule again. Or even know there’s one left in the world.

But she had no ears for such heresy and she jerked the children back into the packed wall of humanity and began to struggle toward the street.

Mules had indeed now swung into sight, a trio of them decked out in red, white and blue bunting, ridden by girls in sequined swimsuits that glittered in the sun. Behind them a phalanx of baton twirlers and a band playing a just-recognizable version of
Stars and Stripes Forever
and behind the band cavorting clowns on tricycles and even one riding a unicycle and waving bothhanded at the crowd. Then mules and more mules like some vast migratory herd headed westward into Oklahoma. Bloodworth ignored the mules and watched bemusedly the smooth tanned thighs of the strutting baton twirlers, his leathery face impassive and sleepy eyelids blinking occasionally like some ancient turtle basking on a rock in the sun.