Provinces of Night (39 page)

In times to come he would decide he made it back simply because he didn’t care if he made it back or not. The world came and went through
the headlights, freezing rain blurred the road until it finally vanished and every so often he’d have to get out and scrape a porthole to see through. Then coming off the long hill before the river bridge the car went into a slow drift, the rear wheels spinning sidewise, the car drifting off the hill in eerie freefall, the headlights limning the steep dropoff into darkness, telephone poles strung with ice like strands of crystal, the topmost branches of trees that beckoned like a haven that promised a warm place to sleep, to rest forever. He took this foot off the brake and just let the wheels roll on their own. Little by little the car drifted around and righted itself, the black highway like a mitered track that slid toward the cold iron trestle of the bridge rising out of the dark like a tunnel’s mouth. In his mind the unseen water below it was steelgray and choppy and hard as stone.

He drank the last of the whiskey and tossed the bottle into the floorboard. He did not know what time it was but he judged it late. He saw no other fool on the road save a highway patrolman he met who was paid to be there but he saw cars slid down embankments and cars abandoned by folks who’d decided walking might be safer. Still the snow and freezing rain fell. He lost count of the times he had to stop and clear the glass.

All this was nervewracking drive he’d had in the back of his mind the grail of hills Ackerman’s Field lay within and the knowledge that if he got up them it would be on foot. He thought longingly of Mother Halfacre’s vomitflecked couch, cheery waves of heat rolling off the woodstove. But when he got to the long hill on Highway 13 it had been salted and there were black strips of macadam visible through the ice like remnants of an ancient and more temperate world. He drove on and finally into the ghosttown of Ackerman’s Field, the town square white with blowing snow and so utterly deserted it might have been beset with plague and abandoned.

He called from a payphone but the phone rang endlessly somewhere in a house he’d never seen and he finally gave it up. He guessed everyone of right mind was somewhere covered with blankets asleep. Only fools abroad this night and apparently only one of them.

When he could make no further headway in the frozen night he had fetched halfway to the top of a steep hill with the ice coming straight at
him out of heavens so black they negated the headlights, the rear wheels spinning impotently and the car sliding sideways and backward onto the shoulder of the road. The door would not budge. Finally he turned in the seat and kicked bothfooted until it opened in a hail of flying ice and he got out cautiously, hanging onto the door, his feet skating crazily on the slick incline.

Here was a world so alien he seemed to have taken a wrong turn somewhere and wound up in an arctic wasteland, the wind howling down through the frozen trees like wind through the strings of an enormous illtuned harp, the rain coming slant and hard and freezing upon everything it touched. The earth glowed with an eerie blue phosphorescence that seemed to be flickering somewhere beneath the transparent ice and tended away into the blurred mauve trees. He’d seen childhood snows every winter of his life but nothing that had quite prepared him for this. He reconsidered the wisdom of the derelicts huddled in Itchy Mama’s parlor, and he thought, a man could die out in this shit. Really die, wake up stiff as a poker in some other world. You’d have to thaw to even ease through the golden portals.

He had a thought to stay in the car but immediately abandoned it. He had to keep moving. No move is the wrong move, Warren had said that night, and Warren though drunk may have stumbled upon some philosophy that had escaped Sophocles or Plato. Life is motion, stasis is death.
Got to keep moving, got to keep moving, blues falling down like hail
, he remembered his grandfather singing in some old bottleneck blues. Another, perhaps more applicable,
I’m the man that moves with the icicles hanging on the trees.

He hammered on the trunk with the jackhandle until he shattered the ice in the lock and finally got the key to turn, fully expecting it to break off in his fingers. His hands felt useless as blocks of wood. He’d have liked to shove them deep into the cleft between Itchy Mama’s enormous breasts where she’d heated the whiskey to its body-accommodating temperature. He’d have wallowed in her arms, drunk the heat from her body like blood. Lain in her stricken grasp like a man fallen asleep in the warm embrace of a grizzly.

He found the blanket and wound it about himself as best he could
and staggered off into the night toward home. With the blanket about him and cowled over his face he looked like some crazed young monk or an acolyte testing the temper of his faith against the elements.

He cut through the woods over terrain he’d known all his life but even this familiarity was perilous. The weight of ice and snow caused huge branches to split away from the trunks of trees and they fell all night with sounds like highcaliber riflefire. His feet were beyond cold, finally beyond feeling, clumsy chunks of insensate matter trudging woodenly through the snow. He fell and got up and went on. Once he sat leaned against a tree and thought he’d rest a while then go on. Somehow it seemed to be warmer here, a more temperate part of the blizzard, perhaps the eye of the storm. The room where its heart was housed. His mind seemed to be shutting down as well, coming and going, shorted voltage dancing across the circuits in flickering blue light.

Once he thought Boyd and his mother had returned in his absence. They’d built up a huge fire and the walls of the house were amber with its glow and the heat-saturated air jerked him inside like a warm embrace. Your supper’s in the warming closet, his mother said. We eat while you were traipsin around in the woods like a crazyman.

When finally he fell through the door the cold and darkness rolled on him wave on wave like black water. He wanted heat worse than light and before he’d even lit the lamp he crammed the stove with paper and pine kindling and by feel found the kerosene can and threw on oil as well. He kept breaking matches or dropping them but finally he had it lighted. He could hear the heat from the kerosene roaring in the flue and he sat before the stove with his hands upraised to it like a supplicant.

 

T
HE WEATHER
had been holding below a viable painting temperature so Albright had decided to do all the scraping and caulking then paint when the weather moderated. He had scraped cornice and gables and shutters and caulked everywhere cold might gain entry around the windows. Some of the windows had long needed reglazing and he was finishing that when Mrs. Woodall came out the front door.

Mr. Albright, I’d like to see you a few minutes when you get time off from your work.

Well, to tell you the truth I’m about through here. I’ve about got her except for paintin and it’s too cold for that. It keeps tryin to sleet or snow or somethin but I didn’t see any need of comin back tomorrow to glaze three or four windows, I thought I’d just knock her out tonight and go.

Well, you’d know more about that than I would. We have plenty of time. At any rate, I want to talk to you. Just come in the front door, it isn’t locked. Don’t bother knocking, there’s no one here except me.

When he’d finished the windows he capped the can of glazing and stowed his tools in the bed of the truck and went up the flagstone walk to the front door. The door was an ornate entrance of mahogany that had been let go almost too long. But Albright had stripped and sanded the wood and the carved cherubim that mantled it and sealed everything with preservative and he was well satisfied with the way it looked.

He went into a living room with a floor of pale polished oak. Rugs thrown about here and there. Pictures on the walls. He looked about cautiously as if his mere presence might begin breaking things. The room looked cozy and comfortable and he could feel a warm rush of air blowing discreetly from somewhere.

Have a seat in that easy chair in there and warm, she called from another room. I imagine you’re about chilled to the bone.

He seated himself in the chair as told. He was cold indeed and the soothing heat seemed to be soaking itself into his pores like some rich oily liquid. He leaned back and closed his eyes.

When he opened them again she was standing before him with a squat glass of icecubes in one hand and a decanter of amber fluid in the other. Are you a drinking man, Mr. Albright? she asked.

He was eyeing the decanter. I been known to, he said.

She poured two inches or so into the glass. Gene would never drink anything but this Kentucky bourbon, she said. It’s supposed to be mighty smooth.

He sipped the bourbon and slowly began to be warmed within and without. He needed to be off and gone while he was still feeling good about the progress he was making in squaring himself with the widow
Woodall, but he lingered over the bourbon and she seemed ever ready to replace each sip as he removed it from the glass.

Supper will be ready in just a moment, she said. You’ve worked so hard around here recently I wouldn’t feel right about things sending you off without feeding you.

He protested weakly about getting a sandwich at home but she would not hear of it and presently he was ushered into a dining room where on a gleaming cherry table service was laid for two and a crystal chandelier lit the room with a pale diluted light. When he was seated at the table with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other she dished up grilled steaks garnished with fried onions and mushrooms, baked potatoes dripping with butter and sprinkled with chives, a crisp garden salad.

There’ll be pie later, she said, attendant at his shoulder.

Pie later, Albright thought in a bourbon-diffused wonder, slicing into his steak. It seemed to fall away in tender strips before the actual touch of the knife and at its center it was the exact shade of pink he would have chosen had he a say in the matter. He sliced off a section and chewed. He closed his eyes and for once seemed at a loss for words to express himself.

I can tell you’re pleased, she said. She had seated herself at the other end of the table and spread a napkin over her lap and was forking salad onto her plate.

It’s the beat of anything I ever put in my mouth, Albright said.

Gene couldn’t stand the sight of me and he grew to loathe my touch, but he never had a derogatory word to say about my cooking or my money.

Albright could not come up with a fitting response to this and so kept on eating. More bourbon was served during the meal and Albright grew expansive, regaling her with his adventures in the taxi business, his brief career as a metal crimper.

When they had finished the apple pie and cheese he arose when she did and went back into the living room. Albright was making ready to go but she urged him to linger on.

I have so little company, she said. Most of the friends we had were Gene’s friends and seldom come around. And of course Gene was very busy, he had his mistresses.

Albright was seated in the easy chair without quite knowing how it happened. One moment he was eyeing the door and the next he was leaned back into the soft upholstery and she was scooting a hassock in front of the chair.

Would you like to watch television?

No, he said, I’ve seen it before. All them gray folks bouncin around makes me nervous.

Gene bought it to watch the wrestling on, she said. I’d rather read a book, wouldn’t you?

Mmmm, Albright said.

I usually have a cup of coffee or a little cognac after the evening meal, Mrs. Woodall said. Which would you prefer?

I’m not much of a coffee drinker, Albright said.

He sipped the cognac and decided he’d never had anything like it. He was already rehearsing in his mind the story he was going to tell Fleming Bloodworth about this and he was searching his mind for a way to describe the bouquet the cognac had when he lifted the glass to drink.

She refilled their glasses and seated herself across from him in a bent-wood rocker. Albright was noticing that she had done something to her hair. He did not know what, but it looked somehow softer, less like a lacquered wig. Perhaps it was the cognac but she was looking considerably less froglike and more like a kind, well-educated woman.

I don’t understand your obligation to Gene, she said. But these last few days I’ve been thinking how rare a quality honor is. You felt an obligation, financial or otherwise, and you’re honoring it the only way you know how, with the sweat of your labors. Honor is a very attractive quality in a man; it distresses me to admit that Gene did not possess it. Not an iota of it, or any empty space where honor had ever been. When I met Gene I was teaching English in a college up in East Tennessee. My father was well off, a well respected man in that part of the state. Gene was hired to do some work for him. He was just an itinerant carpenter then, building decks, pouring concrete sidewalks. I fell in love with him. He seduced me and married me, which I admit required very little effort on his part, and in no time he was in the construction business.
Truth to tell he was good at it. All he needed was a start. I was that start; he betrayed me almost immediately, and he’s betrayed me a thousand times over.