Twilight
TWILIGHT
By William Gay
ebook ISBN: 978-1-59692-996-8
M P Publishing Limited
12 Strathallan Crescent
Douglas
Isle ofMan
IM2 4NR
via United Kingdom
Telephone: +44 (0)1624 618672
email:
[email protected]
Originally published by:
MacAdam/Cage
155 Sansome Street
Suite 550
San Francisco, CA 94104
www.macadamcage.com
Copyright © 2006 by William Gay
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gay, William.
Twilight: a novel / by William Gay.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59692-058-3 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-59692-058-0 (alk. paper)
1. Undertakers and undertaking–Fiction. 2. Funeral rites and
ceremonies–Fiction. 3. Southern States–Fiction. I. Title.
PS3557.A985T86 2006
813’.54–dc22
2006019865
Paperback edition: September, 2007
ISBN 978-1-59692-264-8
Book and jacket design by Dorothy Carico Smith
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The rest is silence.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
How compliant are the dead. You can arrange them, like
cut flowers.
Fenton Breece, 1951
TWILIGHT
A NOVEL BY WILLIAM GAY
Contents
BOOK ONE
BOOK TWO
BOOK ONE
INTO THE TERRITORIES
The wagon came out of the sun with its attendant din of iron rims turning on flinty shale, its worn silvergray fired orange by the malefic light flaring behind it, the driver disdaining the road for the shortcut down the steep incline, erect now and sawing the lines, riding the brake onehanded until the wheels locked and skidded, then releasing it so that wagon and team and man moved in a constantly varying cacophony of shrieks and rattles and creaks and underlying it all the perpetual skirling of steel on stone.
Patton’s store. A grinning man would halt the wagon with an upraised arm but it would not halt. When he noticed the quiltcovered cargo the wagon transported, he called, What you got there, Sandy?
The driver turned and spat and wiped his mouth and glanced back briefly but he didn’t stay the wagon. Dead folks, he said. The wagon went on and vanished like some ghostwagon in the vaporous mist rising from the river.
Coming into Ackerman’s Field the wagon and its curious freight accrued to itself a motley of children and barking dogs and a few dusty turtlebacked automobiles and such early risers as were stirring and possessed of enough curiosity to join the macabre parade to its ultimate end on the courthouselawn.
Before he even stepped down from the wagon the man said, Get Sheriff Bellwether out here.
A fat man in overalls had approached the wagon. Bellwether’s done been sent for, he said. Who all is it, Sandy?
The man pulled back the quilt covering with the faintest flourish, not unlike a nightmare magician offering up for consideration some sleightofhand.
Goddamn it, Sandy, that girl’s half naked. Did you not have enough respect to cover her up?
The man they’d called Sandy spat. I ain’t Fenton Breece, Hooper. All I undertook to do was bring em in. That’s all the undertakin I aim to do. You want to handle em, then you cover em up.
The dead exhibited in the strawstrewn wagonbed. A man or the bloody remnants of one. A rawboned middleaged woman with one bare and dirty foot protruding from the makeshift shroud. A girl with hair the color and sheen of a bird’s wing. About her throat an arrowhead tied to a leather thong, and the thong wound tightly into the bluelooking flesh. A boy of fourteen or fifteen and another younger yet and over all a welter of congealing blood.
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