Provinces of Night (27 page)

So quick it would jerk your breath away I went from bein a man with six hundred dollars in his pocket to a man twelve hundred dollars in debt, the old man said. You couldn’t see over the top of twelve hundred dollars, it was just too big. Julia had a bad sickness and before I knowed it I owed what was then a small fortune to doctors and hospitals. A man might make two or three hundred dollars cash money a year sharecroppin. I said hundred, and I said year.

Then I had a fallin out with the landlord and he took the crop. Lookin back on it I can see it was as much my fault as it was his. I was
always quick to get mad and slow to get over it. The way I saw it he cheated me, not just me but everybody that scooted a chair up to my table. I beat hell out of him, and there we went with all our plunder roped to the wagon. Winter not too far off. Not just one winter to get through, I could see that, but a long line of winters. One winter after another. I went to makin whiskey. Julia thought banjo playin was the road to hell but with whiskey makin she figured I was off the back roads and on the blacktop highway.

He fitted shells into the cylinder of the gun watching through moted glass Bradshaw sitting the wagon seat erect and proud as a deacon sitting a church pew. Look at the old son of a hitch, he thought, spinning the cylinder as smoothly as a barrel whirling in water. Let’s see if he sets that straight when I clip his spine, let’s see if he keeps that head cocked to hear whatever it is Jesus is whisperin in his ear.

He’s here because I sent for him, Julia said.

I don’t know why anybody would send for a dead man, he told her.

He had to fight her and he had to do it without hurting her. He could have killed Bradshaws, fathers and brothers, all day long like ducks popping up in a shooting gallery but he could not hurt her. He held her finally back to his chest and the soapy smell of her hair in his face and clamped in arms that would not constrain her urgency.

If you do you’ll have to kill me too, she finally said, and he knew that she was telling him the truth.

Did I ever hurt you? he asked.

You hurt me ever breath I draw, she told him.

He laid the pistol aside and watched the door close behind her and watched her climb aboard the wagon and watched the old man speak not to her but to the mules, popping the lines and turning the wagon into the dusty roadbed, watched the wagon diminish into the white dust until there was nothing to see but dust settling, and watching even that.

You hurt me ever breath I draw.

The house was so silent it gave off a faint humming, like a banjo string turned relentlessly toward the breaking point. Madness and self-loathing hung over him like a plague, violence moved in him like another sinister self moving
under his skin, trying to adjust itself to the shape of Bloodworth’s body or adjust the body to itself.

All right, he thought, if they can’t quit tolling her off I will kill them all. If she can’t quit going when they toll her I’ll kill her too. I’ll stretch out Bradshaws till they hold each other up like trees felled in a thick woods, Bradshaws hung up in each other’s tops. They ain’t quit makin shells. They ain’t quit makin caskets. I’ll stretch out Bradshaws from the biggest to the least, till they have to import caskets out of other states, till they run dry on that and bury them without caskets, till they finally throw up their hands and let em lay where they fall.

When did you quit?

What? Quit what?

Quit making whiskey.

Oh Lord, I never quit. Well, I guess I’ve quit now. I quit a thousand times. I’d quit when anything else come along. One time I got a shot at makin some records. Another time I’d make a cotton crop and do all right with that. A few times I got caught. You’ll damn sure quit when they send you to the penitentiary. A few times I quit to get Julia to come back.

When she left word at the store for him to come get her he rode there with a pistol shoved down in the waistband of his trousers and the grip and hammer exposed and handy. The Bradshaws had told around what they were going to do to him. Shoot him and let him lay where he fell, just a windfall for the undertaker.

The house lay like a house in a dream, empty and silent, utterly devoid of motion. Not even light moved on the windowpanes. A hawk hung in the cloudless blue like a hawk frozen forever by the eye of a camera.

He waited. When the door opened inward he could feel the checks on the pistol grip against his palm. It was her. No one else showed a face, no hand drew back a curtain. Lifting her onto the wagon seat she had seemed weightless, he could have set her down on the moon just as easy.

She saw the pistol stuck in the waist of his pants. You never needed that, she said.

I had it if I did, he told her.

You started in again when you got out of the pen? Fleming asked.

I always started in again, the old man said. You couldn’t tell me anything. Couldn’t beat sense into me with a log chain. I was shot at more than I was hit, I guess that made me think I was ahead of the game. I
couldn’t run off a few gallons like everybody else. I had to make more of it, sell it over a wider territory. It had to be the best, I had to make good whiskey. Once they laid for me on Indian Creek, hid out in the bushes. Never showed theirselves, or anyway not where I could see them. Just shot through the weeds and brush. The air was full of little chopped-up green weeds. Killed both my horses and shot me four times and left me for dead. Shot me clean off the wagon. I was layin there and I was half in and half out and I could hear the glass jars rattlin when they unloaded my wagon. I could smell their horses, and I was layin in bitterweed, I could smell that, I just couldn’t open my eyes. I thought I was dead.

It was awkward for the old man to chord a banjo anymore but he’d tune an old Martin double-F guitar into an open E and fret it with a pocket knife, the guitar laying across his lap, the music he made was strange and marvelous and so fragile Fleming would fall silent so the spell would hold.

Here, the old man would say, handing him the glass of whiskey, drink this before I forget and drink it myself. Get something on your stomach before that lemonade makes you sick.

The guitar would be the lonesome wail of a lost train climbing through Georgia pinewoods. Fleming could see the raw earth red as a wound through the trees, see the boxcars flickering in and out of sight.
The longest train that ever I saw
, the old man sang,
went down that Georgia line …
Or,
Clouded up and lookin like rain, round the curve come a passenger train …

Fleming would take tiny sips of the whiskey and let it dilute in his mouth while the guitar faded the old man out, took him down that long lonesome road, to where the climate suited his clothes, to where the water tasted like cherry wine.

 

A
LBRIGHT ORDERED
a Falstaff and rang his thirty cents down on the countertop. He was sprinkling salt onto the top of the can when he noticed three highbinders downbar huddled over a newspaper they’d unfolded on the countertop. He drank deeply from the can then rose
with it and walked past the jukebox to see what was so interesting in the paper. When I’m drinking, I’m nobody’s friend, Webb Pierce sang from the jukebox.

What’s the big news? he asked, leaning down in the poor light to read for himself, but already seeing it all.
LOCAL BUSINESSMAN KILLED IN PRIVATE PLANE CRASH
, the black headlines read.

Woodall run over a mountain, one of the men said with some satisfaction. I reckon the son of a bitch thought Sand Mountain would just duck its head and let him go by.

I heard there wasn’t a piece of that plane you couldn’t have toted off in a shoe box, another said.

He felt lightheaded, his body went weightless, he had to grasp the bar to keep from floating off. Son of a bitch, he said.

He was that, the men agreed.

Albright was halfway down the street before he realized he was still holding the beer. He drank it off and tossed the can into the street without even looking around for the law. Somehow being a coldblooded murderer put the open container law into a different perspective.

He’d walked past his car without seeing it and he had to retrace his steps. He got in and sat behind the wheel. Traffic passed in the street without his hearing it. Dimly he realized that he was free, Woodall would never again knock on his door, he would never swear out another paper. But the ramifications of what he had done were enormous. That Goddamned Bloodworth, he said aloud. He had killed a man as surely as if he had held a pistol against his head and discharged it.

He leaned his head onto the steering wheel. He could feel the hot plastic against his face. He felt like weeping.

 

G
ENE
W
OODALL HAD BEEN
on his way to Valdosta, Georgia, to look over a potential job and prepare a bid on it. He was somewhere over the mountains on the Tennessee-Georgia line when the engine sputtered the first time. A palpable shock of anger ran through him and he thought, Oh, that son of a bitching mechanic is going to hear from me.

He was flying alone but not really alone, because for the last hundred miles he had been thinking of his new girlfriend, Carolyn Spiess, so intently that she was almost a tangible presence in the cockpit. He had only just met Carolyn, but he had big plans for her. She was twenty years younger than his wife, and at least that many times as pretty and when she had opened her mouth under his before he boarded the plane she tasted like Juicy Fruit gum.

He’d lost a little altitude and he adjusted the throttle and tilted the yoke to climb and the pitch of the engine increased and smoothed out momentarily then began to sputter. It misfired, hard, caught again, and when it misfired this time the engine seized.

Almighty God, Woodall said. He began to struggle impotently with the instruments and then ceased, drifting in an eerie silence save the rushing of the wind.

He thought of Carolyn. Within hours she would be on her way to the Maury County airport to meet him. There would be a bag in the floorboard containing two bottles of wine. They would spend the night in the Dixieland Motel and the thought of his frogfaced wife would be far away.

Below he could see moonlight on the rocks, the fleeing shadows of clouds tracking darkly across the pale limestone, the strewn lights of a mountain town like spilled jewelry. The wall of the mountain rising to meet him looked as pale and smooth as a granite headstone.

The plane was spinning now like a carousel that had slipped its moorings and it went through the tops of the firs and cedars like a mowing machine, the air full of chopped greenery and the smell of the pines. He thought very hard of Carolyn, her sharp insistent tongue, the way she’d opened her thighs as she kissed him, the feel of her sharp pelvic bone against the fleshy heel of his hand. The tail section struck first and sheared away and the white stone rising to meet the fuselage looked like something surfacing with dread inevitability from calm clear water and he flung an arm across his eyes.

When the plane exploded fire went streaking down the wall of night like trails of phosphorous from a firework of unreckonable magnitude and cascaded away in a shower of falling stars, touching the velvet balsams with a profound and eerie beauty.