Time Done Been Won't Be No More by William Gay Read Free Book Online Page A

but was afraid to. The old man didn’t want to be here. He wanted to be ten thousand miles away, in some world so far away even the constellations were unknowable and the language some unintelligible gobbledygook no human ear could decipher. He wished he’d retired yesterday.
    For The Jeepster looked bad. He was waterlogged and crazed and the pistol was outside his shirt now and his eyes were just the smoking black holes you’d burn in flesh with a red-hot poker.
    He laid a hand on the pink metal casket. Above where the face might be he thought he could detect a faint, humming vibration.
    I can’t see her, The Jeepster said.
    The undertaker cleared his throat. It sounded loud after the utter silence. No, he said. She was injured severely in the face. It’s a closed-casket service.
    The Jeepster realized he was on the tilted edge of things, where the footing was bad and his grip tenuous at best. He felt the frayed mooring lines that held him part silently and tail away into the dark and he felt a sickening lurch in his very being. There are some places you can’t come back from.
    He took the pistol out of his waistband. No it’s not, he said.
    When the three deputies came they came down the embankment past the springhouse the scrub brush, parting the undergrowth with their heavy, hand-cut snake sticks, and they were the very embodiment of outrage, the bereft father at their fore goading them forward. Righteous anger tricked out in khaki and boots and Sam Browne belts like fate’s Gestapo set upon him.
    In parodic domesticity he was going up the steps to the abandoned farmhouse with an armful wood to build a fire for morning coffee. He’s leaned the girl against the wall, where she took her ease with her ruined face turned to the dripping trees and the dark fall of her hair drawing off the morning light. The deputies crossed the stream and quickened their pace and come on.
    The leaning girl, The Jeepster, the approaching law. These scenes had the sere, charred quality of images unspooling from ancient papyrus or the broken figures crazed on shards of stone pottery.
    The Jeepster rose up before them like a wild man, like a beast hounded to its lair. The father struck him in the face and a stick caught him at the base of the neck just above the shoulders and he went down the steps sprawled amid his spilled wood and struggled to his knees. A second blow drove him to his hands, and his palms seemed to be steadying the trembling of the earth itself.
    He studied the ground beneath his spread hands. Ants moved among the grass stems like shadowy figures moving between the boles of trees and he saw with unimpeachable clarity that there were other worlds than this one. Worlds layered like the sections of an onion or the pages of a book. He thought he might ease into one of them and be gone, vanish like dew in the hot morning sun.
    Then blood gathered on the his nose and dripped and in this heightened reality he could watch the drop descend with infinitesimal slowness and when it finally struck the earth it rang like a hammer on an anvil. The ants tracked it away and abruptly he could see the connections between the worlds, stands of gossamer sheet and strong as silk.
    There are events so terrible in his world their echoes roll world on distant world like ripples on water. Tug a thread and the entire tapestry alters. Pound the walls in one world and in another a portrait falls and shatters.
    Goddamn, Cloeave, a voice said. Hold up a minute. I believe you’ve about to kill him.
    When the father’s voice came it came from somewhere far above The Jeepster, like the voice of some Old Testament god.
    I would kill him if he was worth it but he ain’t. A son of a bitch like this just goes through life tearin up stuff, and somebody else has always got to sweep up the glass. He don’t know what it is to hurt, he might as well be blind and deaf. He don’t feel things the way the rest of us