Provinces of Night: A Novel

ACCLAIM FOR WILLIAM GAY AND
Provinces of Night

 

“A writer of striking talent.”

—Chicago Tribune

 

—Barry Hannah

“Almost a personal revival of handwork in fiction—superb—must be listened to and felt.”

 

—The San Diego Union-Tribune

“This is a novel from the old school. The characters are truly characters. The prose is gothic. And the charm is big.”

 

—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Writers like Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner would welcome Gay as their peer for getting characters so entangled in the roots of a family tree.”

 

—The Miami Herald

“[A novel] about the preciousness of hope, the fragility of dreams, interwoven with a good-sized dollop of biblical justice and the belief that a Southern family can be cursed.”

 

—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Provinces of Night plumbs the larger things in life. … The epic and the personal unite seamlessly”

 

—Elwood Reid

“An old-fashioned barrel-aged shot of Tennessee story-telling. Gay’s tale of ancient wrongs and men with guns is high-proof stuff.”

 

—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“A finely wrought, moving story with a plot as old as Homer. Sometimes the old ones are the best ones.”

 

—Esquire

“William Gay is the big new name to include in the storied annals of Southern lit.”

 

—Rocky Mountain News

“A plot so gripping that the reader wants to fly through the pages to reach the conclusion … but the beauty and richness of Gay’s language exerts a contrary pull, making the reader want to linger over every word.”

 

—The Plain Dealer

“Gay is a terrific writer.”

 

WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night

William Gay is the author of the novel The Long Home. His short stories have appeared in Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, GQ, and New Stories from the South 1999 and 2000. The winner of the William Peden Award and the James A. Michener Memorial Prize, he lives in Hohenwald, Tennessee.

ALSO BY WILLIAM GAY

 

The Long Home

 

This book is for Lee, Chris, and Laura
and William Blake
and for
Renee Leonard

 

Were there darker provinces of night he would
have found them.

 

—CORMAC MCCARTHY,
Child of God, 1973

 

Sometimes I think you’re just too sweet to die
Sometimes I think you’re just too sweet to die
Another time I think you oughta be buried alive.

—RICHARD “RABBIT” BROWN,
James Alley Blues, 1927

 

PROLOGUE

THE DOZER TOOK the first cut out of the clay bank below Hixson’s old place promptly at seven o’clock and by nine the sun was well up in an absolutely cloudless sky and it hung over the ravaged earth like a malediction.

The superintendent walked over to a white flatbed truck and leaned his numbered gradepole against it. He filled a Pepsi-Cola bottle with ice water from a cooler on the truckbed and drank. He took out a red bandanna and mopped his face and throat. Behind him the scraped bottomland stretched as far as the eye could see like a dead wasteland, a land no one would have. A blue pall of smoke shifted over it and no tree grew, no flower. A bird would not even fly over it.

A swamper named Risner came up carrying a widemouth Mason jar. Its surface was impacted with earth and Risner was mopping at it with the tail of his shirt.

What’d you find, Risner?

Dozer cut it out on that slope yonder, Risner said. Likely it’s money. These old folks always used to bury their money in fruit jars.

These old people never had any excess money to put up in fruit jars, the superintendent said. Likely you’ve found you a antique jar of green beans.

Risner was holding the jar beneath the cooler’s spout and running water over it.

You’ll want that water long about three o’clock, the superintendent said.

Risner was mopping the jar with his shirt again. The shirt came away muddy. He was squinting into the jar then the wet jar seemed to slip in his hands and shattered between his workboots.

What the hell is that, the superintendent said.

In the splintered glass of this transparent crypt lay diminutive human bones of a marvelous delicacy. Bones fragile and fluted as a bird’s, tiny skull with eyeholes black and blind, thin as paper, brittle as parchment. Scattered as if cast in a necromancer’s divination, as if there might be pattern to them, order.

It looks like there was somebody in there, Risner said lamely.

BOOK ONE

JUST AT TWILIGHT Boyd came up the graveled walk, the chain with its plowpoint weight drawing the gate closed behind him, before him the shanty black and depthless as a stageprop against the failing light. On the porch the old man in the rocking chair sat staring burnt-eyed at him like some revenant out of his past.

Which he was, but Boyd went on anyway. Behind the shack the horizon went left and right as straight as a chalked line and as far as the eye could see, the furrowed earth tending away toward a hammered sky that looked like turbulent waters at land’s end. The old man just watched him come, sepia felthatted old man 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 awaiting invitation to sit and when none came sitting anyway, taking a bag of Country Gentleman smoking tobacco from his shirt pocket and uncreasing papers and beginning to construct a cigarette.

Looks like they about plowed you under, he said. He’d not had occasion to speak aloud 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 could sense it, dank and yellow-smelling, rolling somewhere out of sight in the gathering dark.

They claim they need all the land for cotton, the old man said.