Provinces of Night (21 page)

E.F. rose, facing the men, his hands raised, turning suddenly to kick away the chair behind him. The chair slammed into the wall, careened impotently across the floor.

Suddenly she slid downward toward the floor, the serge scraping across her cheek, felt her face distort against the clamped arm, eyelid stretched and distended until the eye opened against her will, the sandpaper of serge across the ball of the eye itself. The floor seemed somewhere she had to be. Her hair was caught in the buttons of the man’s overcoat then he seized her hair in his fist trying to haul her back up to shield him.

She was no more than halfway down the man’s body, descending him like a ladder, when E.F. fired. The hollow boom was enormous and the concussion came wave on palpable wave and the fist released her with her hair stringing away and she could feel strands of it plucked from her scalp. Her head slapped the floor and when she rolled over onto her back the man loomed above her, enormous but wounded, like a stricken god. He clutched himself where neck and shoulder joined then moved the hand away and stared at his bloody palm in a kind of wonder. A haze of smoke drifted.

She now saw that there were three of the men. She’d thought the number greater and she wondered were there more outside. The deputies seemed frozen, the rifles at port arms across their chests. She could read in their faces that they had just wanted to arrest him without killing or being killed and the faces showed how unlikely that possibility had become. E.F.’s face just showed that he didn’t care if he killed them or not and maybe he’d a little rather kill them. He had the pistol pointed at the man’s head and she watched the cylinder’s slow turn and the hammer go to halfcock.

Lean them pieces against the wall, E.F. said. No, throw them out that door into the yard.

They did.

Get over in that corner, he said, or one at a time I’ll punch three tickets to hell.

He was helping her up, leading her through the doorway into the bright sun. A wind had risen and shadows moved across the yard like something the wind was blowing before it.

No, she said, tugging against his arm, wondering what he was thinking. Fight one man off and there’s always another one, she thought. The boys were in school, they’d be along. To an empty house that smelled like gunpowder, blood on the walls, blood on the floor.

No, she said, I can’t live like this no more, I won’t do it. Go on and go wherever it is you want to.

I can’t leave you, he said.

You left me a long time ago, she told him.

He released the cock on the hammer of the revolver and shoved it into the waistband of his trousers. It’s none of my doin, he said.

It’s all your doin, she said. And always has been.

She stood leaning against the wall. Her throat felt raw and her right eye hurt. She felt she might faint. The world shimmered, flickered like something halfway between reality and dream. She slid down the wall, sat on legs that had miraculously folded beneath her.

When the engine cranked she looked up. E.F. was turning the old truck in the yard. An old model-T cut into a pickup truck, the likeness of a woman brushed in white on the door, Jolie Blon. The truck bucked and jumped and died when he popped the clutch and he restarted it, his face focused and intent, the eyes already prepared to see whatever it was the road wanted to show him.

She sat on her legs. Light through an intricate wickerwork of branches moved and swayed, moved and swayed. Light and shadow latticed together moved endlessly on the earth and she stared at it, thinking for a time that she could divine pattern there, order. But it moved with the sun and it moved with the wind and ultimately it was as random and unordered as life and she gave up on it and closed her eyes.

She thought she’d just dozed a moment with her head against the wall and the sun on her eyelids but when she opened them the metal of the chaise lounge was hard against the bun of hair on the back of her
head and the sun had gone and looking upward into the thick pine branches was like staring down a tunnel into night itself.

She rose stiffly, still caught in the memory, touched for a moment the sagging crepe of her throat as if she’d expected to feel there the flesh of a girl. She took up the broom and went on toward the house. She wondered where Brady was and why the lights were not on.

On the porch she turned, hand already reaching for the doorknob, at some sound. Banjo music came drifting across the barren field, down through the cedar row, soft and then more defined, louder then almost fading out, as if during its passage through the cedars the trees were performing this alchemy upon it.
Oh my whiskey bill is due, and my board bill is too
, the music said,
and my last gold dollar’s done and gone. And my last gold dollar’s done and gone
, and she was suddenly touched with terror. She didn’t know if the music was in the world or in her head.

Feeding bats crisscrossed in the deep blue dusk. The last of the light throbbed like a distant fire above the treeline. She suddenly heard a wave of sound, cicadas and whippoorwills and crickets that just abruptly assailed her, and she wondered if they’d just begun or if they had already been calling and all she’d heard was the banjo music, ancient and myth-laden and somehow enticing, like sound seeping through the cracks of a place you couldn’t get to anymore.

 

A
LBRIGHT HAD LEARNED
of the widow with the barn roof that needed painting at Patton’s store and had gone immediately to her farm across the river, to the edge of a wild area called the Harrikin. He was hired. The husband had died sometime back leaving three five-gallon buckets of vilelooking green paint but the roofs untouched. When Albright was through with the barn she looked at the level of the paint remaining and decided to paint the other outbuildings as well and she waited until the last of the paint was used and Albright was cleaning his brushes in a bucket of kerosene to tell him that she had no money and had planned on paying him with a halfgrown hog.

Albright was outraged. I need my money, he said. I don’t have any use for a hog.

Well. I don’t have any money.

He suspected she was lying but short of falling upon her bodily he did not know what to do about it. Why didn’t you tell me ahead of time, he asked. I don’t know what in the world I’d do with a hog. I don’t even have any way of haulin a hog.

I figured you knew, she said. It was known all up and down this creek I wanted to trade that shoat for work. That hog’s worth every penny of thirty dollars, and they’ll buy him down at the store.

In the end it was take the hog or take nothing and they went out to look at it.

The hog was lying in a dry mudhole in the shade of a fence encumbered with virulentlooking poison oak. When Albright climbed over the fence the hog fixed him with a look of unalloyed malevolence and scrambled upright. The hog had a razorous mouth and a frayed ear and malignant little piggy eyes.

A dog done that to his ear, the old woman said. Just clamped down and hung on while that hog drug it over half the county.

How do I get him in the car? he asked. I don’t know anything about hogs.

Well, she said. She gave him what was almost but not quite a shrug. I guess you could do it ever how you want to. He’s your hog now.

He sat down on his heels and thought about it a while.

I believe there’s an old dog collar and a leash in that stable back there, she said. I’ll go look. Or you might try tollin him.

Tollin him?

Leadin him with an ear of corn or somethin. Callin him.

Let’s try all of it, Albright said.

She came around and opened a gap in the fence Albright hadn’t seen. It would be a sight easier if you brought your automobile down here, she said. I don’t know much about automobiles but I do know they got wheels and hogs don’t.

He gave her a sharp glance. A different tone seemed to have entered her voice since the last roof was painted. That’s a good idea, he said. I was just about to do that.

He went and got the taxicab and backed it to the edge of the gap and got out and opened one of the rear doors. She had the leash and
collar in one hand and an ear of corn in the other and she was waiting on him.

He finally managed to get the collar on the hog but it bit him once in the calf of the leg and once on the forearm. Collared and leashed like some degenerate breed of dog the shoat lay down in the dusty mudhole and put its chin on its paws and watched him arrogantly. He pulled as hard as he could on the leash but all it did was draw the hog upright. It positioned its sharp little hooves and leant against the leash and Albright couldn’t budge him. It didn’t want the corn, either.

Maybe you could push on him or somethin, he said. You push and I’ll pull and maybe he’ll get the idea.

She just shook her head. I believe he’s already got the idea, she said. Anyway I never liked that hog. It had the worst turn of any shoat I ever raised.

He threw the ear of corn as hard as he could at the hog and walked around behind it and encircled its chest with both arms and heaved with all his might. The hog lurched upon its hind legs and began to squeal. He waltzed it toward the car this way and that and with his arms about the hog and both upright they looked like two lascivious drunks trying some new kind of crazy dance. Bemused perhaps by this approach the hog allowed itself to be pushed to the car and Albright put a heavy foot against its haunch and kicked. The hog went scrambling over the seat and Albright slammed the door and stood against the Dodge breathing hard. He could hear the hog squalling in outrage and lurching about inside the car. He was wishing he’d left shoatless half an hour ago, wishing he’d never heard about the old woman at Patton’s store.

He didn’t even look at the old woman. He got into the car and started back toward the river. He looked back once and the hog was studying him with something akin to speculation. Halfway across the railroad trestle over the river the hog seemed taken with some sort of fit. It began to whirl about and slam against the doors and leap from seat to floorboard and back again then it made a razorous slash in the upholstery and dragged out a mouthful of stuffing. Shit, Albright said. He slammed on the brakes and turned in the seat and began to beat the hog about the head and shoulders with his fists. Quit it, he yelled. He climbed out of the car and opened the rear door but when he did the
hog leapt against it desperately. The flung door caught Albright on the temple and he fell as the hog bolted across him and struck out for the end of the trestle. Albright scrambled up and managed to grasp the end of the leash. He ran fulltilt after the hog trying to get slack in the leash then slid in the gravel at the trestle’s end. Somehow he managed to hang on to the leash. The hog dragged him six or eight feet then turned in the roadbed facing him and just stood there gasping.

He closed on it. They fell together in the road like the very essence of degeneracy and struggled up with Albright cursing and the shoat grunting in short explosive bursts and upholstery gummed hydrophobically around its mouth. Albright had a long slanting cut on his bicep and man and hog alike were crazed with dust and blood.

That trestle ain’t but one lane wide, a voice said. You was to move your car I’d get on out of your way and let you go about your business.

Albright whirled. An old farmer in faded overalls and a baseball cap was looking down at him. Perhaps slight amusement in his craggy face.

What the hell do you mean by that? Albright asked. The hog seemed to sense this moment of indecision and jerked hard on the leash and streaked desperately toward the line of woods bordering the road.

If that’s your hog, and I got no reason to suspect it ain’t, then you can do whatever you want to, he said. But you’re holdin up traffic here.

My hog is gettin away, Albright said. If we wasn’t standin here arguin you could be helpin me run that hog. It got out of my car back there.

I’m a little too old and brittle to be runnin hogs through the woods, the old man said. I never knowed anybody to hogfarm out of a taxicab anyway.

He hunted the hog for what must have been hours, letting time get away from him, pausing at last to study the sun through the trees and get some sort of fix on the time. The sun stood past its zenith, perhaps halfway down the western quadrant. He didn’t know how far he’d come or for sure in what direction but he knew where the river was and he felt that ought to be enough.

The hog seemed to be playing with him, drawing him ever deeper into the lush riverbottom undergrowth. Just when the realization of
how crazy this all was began to sink in the hog would show itself or slow tantalizingly and permit him to almost but not quite catch it. Once in a stand of wild cane it had completely stopped, not even breathing hard, and waited for Albright to get his own breath back, Albright resting hands on knees watching beads of sweat drip off his nose and listening to the harsh rasp of his breathing. When he’d judged the hog off guard he sprang forward and got two hands on the hog’s haunches but the hog just squealed and leapt away into the cane.

He had come to hate the hog. He had come to loathe it and the old woman who foisted it upon him. He began to think of the hog as the old woman’s bastard offspring, the result of a misbegotten crossroads alliance between her and some porcine representative pushing the devil’s wares.