Provinces of Night (31 page)

He was a right presentable old gentleman, Coble said. Big man, held hisself kind of straight. Went with a stick, told he’d had a stroke of paralysis. That was likely a lie too. Had kindly long black hair, dyed, I figured, and a gray Stetson hat he wore. Had these real black, kind of meanlookin eyes.

For a moment he thought he saw something flicker in Bellwether’s
eyes but he wasn’t sure. If he did it was gone almost before it registered. I’ll keep an eye out for him, Bellwether said.

You’ll keep an eye out for him. All right. What do you people do in this county, watch each other’s backs? Sweep one another’s tracks out? I’ll tell you what I’m goin to do. I’m goin to find him, and when I do he’s goin to rue the day he made a fool out of me.

Bellwether stood up. He stabbed his cigarette out in an ashtray. Well, he said, I rue the day he made a fool out of you too, because I don’t see much I can do about it. What do you want me to do if I could find him, lock him up? What crime is that? I don’t know, extortion? It looks to me like he owes you for your time, or mileage, or something, but that’s about all.

All the time he’d been talking Bellwether had been crossing to the door. I don’t mean to be abrupt with you, he said. But I’ve been over on the Hickman County line where we had a head-on carwreck. Three killed outright, two of them kids, and another little boy that opened his eyes and looked at me while I was helping get him loaded into the ambulance. All the time I was listening to you complain I was thinking about calling Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville. To see if he made it, or he didn’t make it. That’s why I couldn’t give the proper attention to your little story about some cows.

He opened the door and made a sort of sweeping gesture, as if he meant for Coble to go through the doorway.

Coble was fumbling for his cowboy hat. He squared it on his head and went through the doorway without speaking.

 

L
ET ME
show you something, the old man said one day. He rose and set the tumbler of whiskey on an orange crate he was using for a coffee table. From beneath the bed he drew a suitcase, scuffed and battered black leather with brass plates at the corners. He unlocked the clasp and opened it. Inside there was a sort of leather satchel, and the old man opened that too. Like a Chinese box, Fleming was thinking. Inside there’ll be another one. Instead there were four 78 rpm records with
squares of cardboard placed between them for packing. They looked new, their sleeves crisp and clean, as if the old man had just run them off a few minutes before. He withdrew one from its thin paper housing and handed it to Fleming. He was hunkered on his knees on the floor of the trailer and a long strand of his thin black hair had fallen across his forehead.

Fleming studied the record. Okeh Records, the label said. Race Records. The name of the song was
James Alley Blues.
E. F. Bloodworth, the name below the title said. He turned the record over.
I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground
was the title on this side.

I don’t guess you’ve got any way of playing these, Fleming said.

I’m afraid not. The old man arose with some effort and seated himself on the side of his iron cot. He raked his hair back with his fingers. That’s four I saved back, he said. They ain’t never been played. Never had a needle set on them.

What’s this mean, Race Records? What’s a Race Record?

The old man laughed. Back then they made records for different races of folks, he said. They made Okeh and then they made Okeh Race Records. They was for the colored. Blues singers, that kind of stuff. I reckon there was some kind of confusion about me, I was long gone when they pressed the records and made up the labels. Somebody I reckon thought my voice sounded colored. Or maybe the way I picked a banjo, I didn’t frail a banjo the way most of them oldtime pickers did. I picked the notes, in a different key than most of them songs was in.

The old man took a tiny sip from the whiskey, set it aside. He took up the guitar, held it loosely across his lap. It never bothered me to be taken for a colored singer, he said. To tell the truth, it kind of tickled me. I never liked them old ballads a lot of the white singers used to sing. Somebody grieves theirself to death for love and a rose grows up through their rib-bones. I never cared for that. But them old blues songs cut right to the quick. Says it all in very few words. Like it was … like it was boiled down, concentrated. All that feeling. One says,
Sometimes I think you just too sweet to die, another time I think you oughta he buried alive.
That’s
James Alley Blues
, and it’s old, old. Always been here ever since the first man set on the side of the bed with a halfpint of whiskey in his hand wondering where his old lady was.

You mind if I take these somewhere sometime and play them?

You do what you want with them. Play them or throw rocks at them. I’m giving them to you.

I can’t take them. You kept them for souvenirs.

I don’t need souvenirs, the old man said. I remember everything I ever done, I don’t need keepsakes to remind me. I kept them because I figured someday I might run up on somebody that was interested in all that old stuff. Them old times.

I’ll keep them then. I’ll take care of them.

Give them to your kids. You don’t have any kids yet do you?

No.

You got you a girlfriend?

I guess not.

What’s the matter with you? You look tolerable presentable.

I just don’t get out much, the boy grinned. I met this girl back in the spring because she busted a hornet’s nest with a rock. Dee Hixson’s granddaughter. She turned out to be already married though.

The old man laughed, sat staring at the floor for a moment as if lost in memory. That Hixson family was wilder than a bunch of cats in heat. Every one of them acted like they was on some kind of medicine that kept them crazy. Come to think of it, though, I remember haulin some of it to them in gallon jugs. What I started to say, though, about four or five of them Hixson girls come in about the same time and it was high times twenty-four hours a day. If they couldn’t sell it they’d give it away. If they couldn’t give it away they’d pay you to take it. Saturday nights there’d be so many wagons and cars they’d run out of yard to park them in. They’d be strung out on the road. I never heard of anybody bein turned away. They’d take anything. Sometimes Dee’d go out in the front yard and fire off his shotgun a time or two just to calm things to a manageable level.

The boy sat holding the records. He wondered how much was left out of the old man’s stories, he wondered if his grandfather had been observer or participant at these mad revels.

Then the babies started comin, the old man went on. They never heard of rubbers, I reckon, or maybe they figured that that would be cheatin. One of the youngest of them girls told me one time, she was
drinkin a little or she never would have told it, she said her sisters would bury them babies in widemouth Mason fruit jars.

In what?

In fruit jars. I reckon she meant the ones was born dead. Or maybe if they wasn’t dead they’d help them along. Said they never wanted them. She told me there was several buried on that bank up from the creek below Hixson’s garden spot, where they had a cat cemetery when they was little girls. I never asked if the cats was buried in fruit jars or not.

God, the boy said. Do you suppose it was so?

I’ve often wondered. I’d hate to think it was. I don’t know why she would have made it up, though. Or even how, how would she think of that, a fruit jar? Back at that time there was no place for meanness like Hixson’s farm. That bunch of men would take to fightin each other like dogs fightin over a bitch. Which was about what it amounted to. Likely it’s folks buried on Hixson’s place you never could of fitted into a fruit jar. They had everything from killins on down. The devil had to let things slide elsewhere to keep an eye on that place. Take on an extra demon or two. Oh things run on overtime for a while around there.

Whatever happened, then? I don’t remember any of that from the time I was a kid.

There’s a balance to things, things got their own way of balancín out. What happened this time was that two of them girls, one of them was the youngest one I spoke of, that told me about the fruit jars, she was pretty as a China doll, she was in the car with a couple of wild boys off Beech Creek and they straightened out some of the curves over by Riverside. They had a Packard wound out as far as she’d wind and took to the air comin down that long grade. Just flew off. I can take you to where the mark’s still on the whiteoak that Packard hit. Higher off the ground than you’d believe, too. It throwed folks everywhere. Killed all four of them and froze that Packard on the peg, it was like that old song, whiskey and blood run together. Then one of the girls got married and the others went north. But it was that Packard that shut it down. Like flippin a lightswitch. That quick.

 

F
LEMING CAME DOWN
through a tangle of elderberry and sumac, wild pokeroot taller than his head, its poisonous-looking berries a deep virulent purple. Blackberry briars that latticed the hot windless cage of dying greenery. Nothing moved. He looked up, the sky was just broken shards of blue bottleglass glittering through the sumac berries. He could hear the creek trilling over the stones. He came out of the thicket where the earth sloped itself toward the creekbed.

He studied the earth here, curious young archaeologist appraising the shape of the earth, looking for folks buried among the cats. Timeless glass coffins amongst the rotted shoe boxes of cat bones. Here were the juryrigged gravestones of a children’s pet cemetery. Small depressions in the ground long grown over with weeds, tall virile pigweed thrusting through the tilted husks of summers past. He sat for a time on the roots of a beech. Gnats had come to trouble his eyes and he kept trying to slap them away.

If he closed his eyes he could imagine them coming down the slope with the cardboard box, solemn, perhaps tears in their eyes. Here was a hole Dee had spaded in the black loam. They came single file, the first in line carrying the box before her, the other three following like acolytes at some ritual they’d not mastered yet. Their thin legs browned by the sun and crisscrossed with the pale scratches from sawbriars, their hair plaited into pigtails. Imbued with a Sunday decorum, playing at being adults, something of ceremony about them.

He could not imagine one of them covertly interring a fruit jar and its bloody freight into the earth. How did you get from one burial to the other, there was too much distance between, windy gulfs of darkness that lay between the child with the shoe box and the woman with the glass jar in her hand. Surely it could not happen by accident or even by a multitude of wrong choices, you’d think it would take an act of sheer will to plummet so far.

When the sun tracked behind a cloud the light turned strange and green like light through smoked glass and the air felt dense and oppressive, too thick to breathe. He rose and descended the bank into the creek. The sun came back out and the shadows of the clouds moved about his feet like vague shapes moving beneath the surface of the water. Where the creek deepened he lay down in it, the sudden cold like a jolt
of electricity coursing through him. He lay on his back and felt the gentle tug of the current, closed his eyes and let the water rise above his face, his hair fanned out in the moving water like a drowned man’s. The creek felt cold and clean, and he stayed beneath the surface until his lungs felt like fire in his chest and lights like fireflies drifted gently across the black expanse of the underside of his eyelids and he came up gasping and sucking air into his lungs.