Provinces of Night: A Novel - Softcover

Gay, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385499280 ISBN 13: 9780385499286

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2002

Synopsis

It’s 1952, and E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackerman’s Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, he’s been gone ever since he gunned down a deputy thirty years before. Two of his sons won’t be home to greet him: Warren lives a life of alcoholic philandering down in Alabama, and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with. His third son, Brady, is still home, but he’s an addled soothsayer given to voodoo and bent on doing whatever it takes to keep E.F. from seeing the wife he abandoned. Only Fleming, E.F.’s grandson, is pleased with the old man’s homecoming, but Fleming’s life is soon to careen down an unpredictable path hewn by the beautiful Raven Lee Halfacre.

In the great Southern tradition of Faulkner, Styron, and Cormac McCarthy, William Gay wields a prose as evocative and lush as the haunted and humid world it depicts. Provinces of Night is a tale redolent of violence and redemption–a whiskey-scented, knife-scarred novel whose indelible finale is not an ending nearly so much as it is an apotheosis.

About this title

About the Author

William Gay was the author of the novels The Long Home and Provinces of Night. His fiction appeared in Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly, among others, and he won the William Peden Award and the James Michener Memorial Prize. He passed away in 2012.

From the Inside Flap

952, and E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackerman s Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, he s been gone ever since he gunned down a deputy thirty years before. Two of his sons won t be home to greet him: Warren lives a life of alcoholic philandering down in Alabama, and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with. His third son, Brady, is still home, but he s an addled soothsayer given to voodoo and bent on doing whatever it takes to keep E.F. from seeing the wife he abandoned. Only Fleming, E.F. s grandson, is pleased with the old man s homecoming, but Fleming s life is soon to careen down an unpredictable path hewn by the beautiful Raven Lee Halfacre.

In the great Southern tradition of Faulkner, Styron, and Cormac McCarthy, William Gay wields a prose as evocative and lush as the haunted and humid world it depicts. Provinces of Night is a tale redolent

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Provinces of Night

By William Gay

Anchor Books

Copyright © 2002 William Gay
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780385499286

Chapter One

Just at twilight Boyd came up the graveled walk, the chainwith its plowpoint weight drawing the gate closed behind him, before him theshanty black and depthless as a stageprop against the failing light. On theporch the old man in the rocking chair sat staring burnteyed at him like somerevenant out of his past.

Which he was, but Boyd went on anyway. Behind the shack the horizon went leftand right as straight as a chalked line and as far as the eye could see, thefurrowed earth tending away toward a hammered sky that looked like turbulentwaters at land's end. The old man just watched him come, sepia felthatted oldman like a curling Walker Evans photograph, brittle and fragile as memory.

Come up, Boyd, the old man said.

Boyd strode up to the edge of the porch. He stood for a moment as if awaitinginvitation to sit and when none came sitting anyway, taking a bag of countryGentleman smoking tobacco from his shirt pocket and uncreasing papers andbeginning to construct a cigarette.

Looks like they about plowed you under, he said. He'd not had occasion to speakaloud for two days and the sound of his own voice seemed almost to startle him.He struck a match and lit the cigarette. He could not see the river but he couldsense it, dank and yellowsmelling, rolling somewhere out of sight in thegathering dark.

They claim they need all the land for cotton, the old man said. His voice wasthin and whispery, like cornhusks rustling together. I reckon when I'm gonethey'll doze this mess down and plant it all.

Boyd smoked in silence. The momentum that had carried him for days, for miles,settled upon him like an enormous weight, and he was seized with weariness. Nowthat he was here he saw that he had reached not some final destination butsimply a waystation that had drawn him miles in the wrong direction. If she washere he would have read it in the old man's face, but nothing at all was writtenthere, not even what Boyd had expected; bitter recriminations, who knew what.All there was was a stoic calm he didn't know what to make of. As if the old manhad come to some kind of terms. Then he studied the face closer. The yellowedskin was drawn tight across the cheekbones, the face sunken and caved, the bladeof nose like something an undertaker had sculpted of wax then studied with acritical eye. All in all the old man looked like something recovered from theearth in gross resurrection and set a rock on this porch in the middle of acottonfield.

Boyd drew on the cigarette. You been sick, Ira? His voice was blued and furredby the smoke.

I'm fixin to die. I got a cancer.

Well I reckon you finally got something everbody else didn't get one of first,Boyd thought. I hope you're satisfied.

What's it of?

I got it in my lungs. I wish you'd put out that cigarette. I ain't let to smoke,and it makes me want one.

Boyd toed the cigarette out in the packed earth yard, a small vicious blacksmear. A lamp was lit inside, he could smell the smoky burning kerosene. He hadforgotten about the old woman, but now he could sense her presence, see her bulkvaguely outlined against the screen of the door.

You afoot, the old man said. I knowed your walk the minute I seen you. Youalways walked like you had the world in your hip pocket. You ain't though, haveyou? Last time I seen you you was in a fine car. You had big plans.

Times is hard, Boyd said.

Times is always hard for some, the old man observed.

They sat in silence. Boyd was watching a blur of cypress past the cottonfieldand beyond the cypress soundless lightning flickered the sky to a pale metallicrose. After a while a whippoorwill called out of the trees like something Boydhad been listening for without knowing it, or even some sound he'd summoned bysheer will, and he felt he'd crossed the entire state just to hear this lonewhippoorwill mocking him out of the falling dark, and now he must turn aroundand go back the way he'd come.

How's that chap? the old woman said through the screen door. He must be aboutgrown by now.

He's right at seventeen.

Who's he favor? We never had no picture nor nothin.

He looks a right smart like his mama.

She ain't here, the old man said suddenly. I reckon you've made a long trip fornothin.

If she ain't here I have. And you ain't seen her?

The last time I seen her her belly was swole up with that boy you spoke of andyou was helpin her into that fine car. Looks like several hings has changedsince then.

Boyd stood up. He brushed dry flakes of tobacco off the front of his dungarees.He looked back the way he'd come. A dim wagon road fading out in thecottonfield. I got to get on, he said. We'll see you.

You take care of that chap, the old woman said. You need to be worrying abouthim stead of traipsin around the country.

Boyd raised a hand in farewell, dismissal, and took the first step away from theporch. No one bade him stay.

You do find her tell her I got a cancer, the old man said.

Boyd didn't say if he would or he wouldn't. He trudged on woodenly. He lookedback once and no one had moved, the whole scene fading into a mauve dusk thatseemed to be rising out of the earth itself like vapors, bluely transparent,slipping into invisibility now that it could no longer serve him anypurpose.

Dappled by the first warm light of the season Fleming Bloodworth lay on hisstomach on a shelf of limestone that formed the summit of a bluff overlookingGrinders Creek. He was propped on his elbows watching the road through hisfather Boyd's binoculars. This road was red chert and it snaked in and out ofsight through the cedars shrouding the bluff. A wooden bridge on concrete pylonscrossed the creek downstream from where he was lying and through the powerfulbinoculars he could discern the heads of the forty-penny spikes the timbers weresecured with, trace the grain that ran through the weathered wood.

He was waiting for the mailman. In actuality he was waiting for a lot of things:he was waiting for his father to return from wherever he had gone and for hismother to turn up from wherever she had gone and for himself to decide whetheror not he was going back to school. His immediate concern, though, was for themailman, for the U.S. Mail adhered to a schedule the rest of his life did not.The rest of his life seemed to be in limbo, waiting for one event to take placeso that other events would sequence themselves behind it, a recognizable patterncoalesce from swirling chaos.

He had been up and about this day before good light. The day gave promise ofbeing warm, and the remnants of a dream still swirling in his head touched itwith portent.

He had dreamed that the mailman brought a check with his name on it, a checkfrom a magazine called Country Gentleman, and he had little doubt that somewherein the mailman's sorted box of fertilizer ads and burial plan duns such a checkexisted, needed only the delivering to bring into his possession a typewriter hehad seen in the window of a five-and-dime store in the town of Ackerman'sField.

Some months back he had come into ownership of a stack of back numbers of thismagazine Country Gentleman. He had read them cover to cover and written a storyso cynically devised that he did not see how it could fail. This story hadeverything. It had a love story involving a boy and girl from two feudingfamilies, a collie dog falsely accused of killing sheep, a sentimentalresolution wherein the accused dog saves a child from drowning. It was Romeo andJuliet moved to the backwoods with a sheepkilling dog and a flood thrown in forgood measure, and it would not have surprised him to learn that his name wasbeing bandied about editorial offices in Atlanta, Georgie where the magazine waspublished.

The mailman's car hove into view in a stretch of road between the cedars andalmost immediately it began to honk its horn. The boy scrambled up. He was anhabitual joiner of book clubs and requester of catalogs and sample copies ofmagazines but he couldn't think of anything he'd sent for that would not fit ina mailbox. Perhaps a check from a magazine required a signature.

He was scrambling down the shale bluffs going tree to tree. All right, allright, he yelled. The mailbox was set up by an enormous poplar tree at the footof the hill and the mailman's car had parked before it and continued to honkdementedly until Fleming arrived out of breath at the driver's side window.

Young Bloodworth, the mailman said. Got a package here for you. He was holding aflat manila envelope and now he scanned the return address. The boy wasregarding it with a dull loathing. Country Gentleman, the mailman said. Didn'tknow they took to boxin em up like this.

Fleming received the package with some reluctance, stood regarding it balefullyas if he did not quite know what to do with it.

That all you got?

That's it, the mailman said. Your mama ever come back, Fleming?

Thanks for the package, Bloodworth said, turning away toward the hill. The carremained still for a few seconds then the mailman raised a hand and droveaway.

Crossing the ditch before the hill began its steep ascent he opened the flap ofthe envelope. The first thing he saw was his own handwriting, the second a notethat had been paperclipped to his manuscript. We regret that we are unable toread handwritten manuscripts, someone in Atlanta had written. Allsubmissions must be typewritten. He threw the manuscript into the ditch andwent on up the hill but after a few steps returned and recovered the manilaenvelope and went on.

To reach this house you came from either of two ways. If you came by the chertedroad you left it at the foot of the hill and climbed up through patches oflimestone and a grove of cedars where the footpath led. It was an almostvertical ascent and the house came into view by increments, first a greentarpaper roof, tripped from the four corners of the house to a peak in thecenter, then weathered board walls, a house cobbled up from odds and ends,homemade, as happenstantial as something left by the recession of floodwaters. Ireckon it'll do till we find somethin better, Boyd had said, but the boy hadbeen six years old then.

If you approached from the rear, came down from the heavily timbered woods, youfollowed a footpath that in turn followed the spectral shadings of an old wagonroad, a ghost of a road, a rumor of a road. This house had been constructed byand for folk for whom a footpath would serve as well, folk who did notacknowledge the invention of the internal combustion engine, to whom the valueof the wheel itself was still in question.

The day that had begun with such promise now yawned like an enormous vacuum thathe was called upon somehow to fill. He took down a slingblade from the porch andbegan to cut weeds, clearing the yard then progressing on toward the gardenspot, the air full of bits of weeds like anomolaec snow. The day warmed as itprogressed and he took off his shirt and resumed work as if he'd rid the worldof weeds once and for all.

In the late afternoon he finally put up the slingblade and went into the house.The house was dark and cool, cavelike, scarcely lit by the windows. He took up abook and with it and a cold cup of the morning's coffee went to a chair wherelight fell through a windowglass and began to read.

The day drew on, was swallowed in dusk, No bird called, no insect. Life inabeyance, the world itself grinding to a halt, who knew what would follow. Lightthrough the glass grew dim but he read on as if the passage of day into nightwas of no moment. The world was winding down, and young Bloodworth wound downwith it.

Continues...

Excerpted from Provinces of Nightby William Gay Copyright © 2002 by William Gay. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385499280
• ISBN 13: 9780385499286
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304