The Clearing: A Novel Read online

  Randolph had heard a great deal about suffering but had experienced none of it and discounted even his father’s tales of his own hard youth; it was his grandfather who had built the company, starting with a third-hand steam engine after the Civil War and cutting crossties for government contracts. Randolph bent down to the broad mahogany table and set his brandy glass on a corner of the map. Below this Louisiana mill was a spongy green area, a cypress swamp that had been explored mostly by snakes, and below that a thin picket of marsh above the pale blue waters of the Gulf. Twenty-five miles to the west of Nimbus, the map showed a town they’d inquired about, a hard-drinking place called Tiger Island, a port on the Chieftan River and a small railroad hub. Some twenty miles to the east of the mill tract was Shirmer and the sugar cane plantations of the Terrebonne region. Directly north by five miles was a particle on the Southern Pacific main line named Poachum, and north of that was seventy miles of uninhabited land visited only by survey crews planning its destruction, for it was pregnant with oil, timber, natural gas, sulfur, and fur-bearing animals.

  He had read Jules’s much-misspelled but lengthy report and knew that this country was packed with soaring tidewater cypress, bug-proof, rot-proof shafts of butter-smooth grain, trees nine feet thick at the base, waiting to be made into boards that would outlast by three hundred years the bankers and lawyers sitting on their lake-cottage porches and smelling the sweet, peppery wood taken off the earth to furnish their leisure. Randolph put a forefinger down below Poachum but could not picture this teeming sponge of land, nor could he imagine his brother in such a place, serving law and making enemies at the edge of the world. He picked up his glass and took a drink. “This is two birds with one stone. A good mill and Byron both.”

  His father straightened up and pinched off his glasses. “I’ve given instructions that the purchase not be noised about that camp until you arrive.”

  “Think he’ll bolt?”

  “He will if he hears about it before you step up on his porch.” His father touched him briefly on the shoulder the way a waiter might. “You’re the one who can bring him back to us. You’ve got to remember that.”

  “My wife—”

  “You’re the one,” the old man repeated, turning and leaving the room.

  Randolph walked over to the piano and pressed down a C chord. His older brother was well educated, big, and handsome, and in spite of a disposition oscillating between manic elation and mannequin somberness, he’d been destined to take over management of the family’s mills and timber. Then he’d gone off to the war, coming back neither elated nor somber but with the haunted expression of a poisoned dog, unable to touch anyone or speak for more than a few seconds without turning slowly to look over his shoulder. Randolph saw on the mantel the sepia photograph of a young man with dark hair laid over to the side, a sharp-eyed fellow who looked as though he had a politician’s gift for talking to strangers and putting them at ease. After France, Byron spoke to people with his eyes wide, sometimes vibrating with panic, as if he expected them suddenly to burst into flames. Late in 1918 he had joined the police force in Pittsburgh, his father angry and ashamed that his eldest son would rather wrestle with the city’s thugs and factory trash than come to work in the business he’d been born to.

  After six weeks Byron disappeared, and Randolph was given the task of finding him, but none of the investigators he hired turned up a trace.

  When letters began arriving in 1919 from Gary, Indiana, his father sent a detective to find him, but without success. Two months later, a postcard appeared from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, then a one-sentence note from Heber Springs, Arkansas. After that came a long silence when the family could speak of him only in the polite evening language of holidays and Sunday dinners. In 1921 a paragraph from a little town in Kansas told of police work and jail tending, followed by a penciled note from farther west in Kansas, and a month later one from a New Mexico town that didn’t appear on any map. Then, for a year now, they’d received not a word, as though Byron had at last found a place in which he was the only citizen, and somehow had gone beyond even that in his solitude.

  In his brother’s absence, Randolph began to understand that most of what he knew about music, women, or the business, he’d learned from Byron. He and the old man brought out detailed timberman’s maps, running their fingers down canyons, across state lines, out of forests and into the white space of deserts, guessing at where he was. Now they knew, and their spirits lifted.

  Leaving Pittsburgh, Randolph kept his face at the window of his sleeping car as it rolled down through the ordered farms whose crops covered the low hills like squares in a quilt, through modern towns and their scrubbed and turreted brick stations, their electric streetcar lines, their corn-rows of automobiles parked in front of stores burgeoning with anything an American could want. His efficient eye noted the just-built macadam roads, and he imagined a view of the region from an aeroplane, the new avenues spidering out to highways and turnpikes, webs of pavement binding tight the prospering soil.

  He changed trains in Richmond, boarding an older coach furnished with plush seats and varnished wood worn to a satin finish, and then watched the night country fly by as the station buildings became smaller and more decrepit, the roads behind them now made of graded gravel. The next day further south he changed trains again and saw gaunt men standing in the fields as if sunstruck, their clothes a sagging second skin of denim and copper rivets, their tobacco crops bug-bitten and jaundiced in the heat. Here were no stone houses at all, no paved thoroughfares, and only a few factory smokestacks divided the horizon. Randolph wondered if the sun-blistered barns of Georgia could offer some clue to his brother’s wanderings. Why this direction, he kept asking himself. Away from money, and from people like him? He stared out at this strange country, the South, at the dark heat, and the used-up, coppery soil scratched over by mules.

  At dinner a steward seated him with a woman wearing a stylish drop-waist dress, whose young daughter fidgeted at her side. Randolph envied the energy and quickness of children, and for six years had tried with his wife to produce a baby. He ordered, then fixed the child with a flat look. “Tell me a joke,” he said.

  The girl looked at her mother, who shrugged politely. “Don’t know one, mister.”

  He was stuck by her accent, backwoods, whiny. “Sure you do. Smart girls like you can remember all sorts of jokes. Think of one your grandpa told.”

  The girl rolled her eyes under her bangs and said nothing. The waiter brought salads balanced up his arms and refilled the water glasses with long streams that took on the sideways jostle of the coach. The mother said little, only that they were going to a funeral, and Randolph worried that neither of them was very bright.

  After the lettuce and the pork chops, the apple pie and coffee, the mill manager looked at his check and stretched a foot out into the carpeted aisle.

  “A lady asked a farmer,” the girl blurted out.

  “What?” He was in the act of hoisting himself out of the chair. The mother turned her face to the dark window, and her reflection was not amused.

  “She asked him how deep was his pond.” The girl’s pink hand flipped through her blond hair like a butterfly, then dropped into her lap.

  “And what did he tell her?”

  She straightened in her chair and drew a line with one finger along her collarbone. “He said, ‘It comes up to here on my ducks.’ ”

  At first, he was too startled to laugh, and then did, excessively, complimenting the woman on her daughter’s sense of timing before wishing them a good evening and heading back to his compartment. He knew he’d behaved oddly, acting too surprised, but the joke was one his brother had told twenty years before, when they were lying in the big carpenter-built tree house behind their country place south of Pittsburgh. Byron had been a natural joke teller, easing a listener into what seemed just a bland story and then springing the punch line like a slap on the back. The mill manager stared down out of his window at
the edge of roadbed racing past in a rectangle of light, remembering other answers the farmer had given about the depth of his pond. “Why, it goes all the way to the bottom,” and “Deep enough to walk away because it’s got at least two feet in it.” He saw each line formed in his brother’s mouth and closed his eyes as the words came back to him.

  At first light in Alabama, he saw that the stations were mostly board and batten, indifferently whitewashed, and the rouge-colored mud fields fit only for making brick. He changed trains again—the coaches older, the locomotive smaller—and watched the field workers as they bent between the cotton rows or sulked away from the sun, lounging on loads of melons in dung-spattered spring wagons. In Meridian, Mississippi, stepping out into the humidity, he recalled that his grandfather had been a captain there with Sherman. Meridian was where war had been invented, the old man had told him, where the general had first ordered his troops to dismantle every machine they could find and beat the gear teeth with mauls, pound open the boilers, fracture the castings of steam engines, bend rails around trees, and roll all flywheels into rim-cracking fires until the town held not a single working mechanism. Randolph noticed only two sets of factory chimneys before he was called back aboard, and as the train snaked south into even denser heat he wondered what industries would have been steaming along in town had there been no war, what prosperity would have graced its people, what forest of black iron stacks would have risen into the sky like the masts of ships in a harbor.

  That afternoon the train left the last belt of pine and slid down into a marshy lowland, rocking over a series of longer and longer wooden trestles until it broke out over the inland sea of Lake Pontchartrain. On his way to the dining car, Randolph passed through several day coaches where passengers wore bandannas around their sweating necks to keep the soot off their collars. The windows were wide open in the heat, the locomotive’s stack trailing a roil of cinders that flurried down the lurching coaches, blowing in the eyes of anyone foolish enough to hang his head out in the waterlogged breeze.

  His sleeper rolled into New Orleans, and he got off in a warm rain. In the station he was told by a ticket agent wearing an enormous mustache that the railroad trestle at Lafourche Crossing had collapsed into the bayou and he would have to take a steamboat all the way to Tiger Island, then double back east on the train to Poachum, the town at the end of his ticket.

  The little man made a show of pulling out forms and pounding them with rubber stamps. “You can wait four days for the line to open up, or I can call and book you on the E. B. Newman for Tiger Island.”

  Randolph put a thumb in a vest pocket. “I want to go to Poachum, and not by boat. Isn’t there a bus?”

  The agent glanced up. “You not from around here.”

  “Pennsylvania.”

  The man jerked another form from a slot. “Mister Pennsylvania, we don’t have too many paved roads. It’s rained every day for three weeks and Highway 90 is no better than a slop jar. A bus can’t hardly make it over that swampy stretch in good weather.”

  Randolph looked at his porter, who was balancing his luggage on a dolly, ignoring the conversation, and then turned back to the agent. “I thought passenger steamboats were a thing of the past.”

  The man studied Randolph’s clothes, as if trying to figure out what the place he called home might be like. “Mister, we still got towns down here with no roads going to ’em.” He pulled a scissors phone away from the wall, and booked passage on the E. B. Newman, stamped another sheaf of papers, and handed Randolph an elaborate green ticket running with the filigree of currency. “When you get off at Tiger Island, you can make a connection with a mixed train for the last twenty-two miles to Poachum.”

  The mill manager looked over his tickets, unable to read the tiny print. “Is there a station building there?”

  “You could call it that.”

  “And there’s a lumber-company train from there to Nimbus?”

  The agent glanced down at Randolph’s gleaming leather luggage, then laughed meanly. “Nimbus,” he said. “I hope you got boots.”

  The E. B. Newman was a ghost of a boat, a listing stern-wheeler buckled in the hull, its paint sliding off like burned skin. Two rusting smokestacks stood in front of a pilothouse edged above the eaves with sooty gingerbread. In Randolph’s dark and boxy stateroom he removed his shirt and scrubbed the train’s grit off his face, soaping his underarms using a pitcher of river water and a varnish-colored bar of soap. He brushed back his hair and dried off with a limp towel stained by the imprint of a rusted nail driven into the wall above the washbowl. The air in the room was thick with mildew, so he went out and stood on the boiler deck, resting his elbows on the rail and looking down to the stage plank where roustabouts were carrying on their backs wooden boxes marked BLACK IRON ELBOWS, and sacks of cottonseed the size of stuffed chairs.

  “Go on you crippled sows,” the big chief mate hollered when the line of sweating men backed up on the plank. “You load like mammys slipping in pig shit.” The mill manager was impressed by the man’s businesslike anger, since efficiency of any type—long his father’s obsession—turned his head like the clink of a silver coin on pavement. Efficiency was the one thing his father had ingrained in him. He studied the men straining up the stage plank through a sweating cloud of profane guidance and graded them like lumber, knowing these to be hardwood, twisted in the grain.

  After the freight was brought on board, it was time for a herd of mules and donkeys to come over the stage and step into a roughboard pen ahead of the boilers. The first mule balked at the ramp, and Randolph was amazed when four blocky young rousters put their shoulders next to the animal’s legs and lifted him up, eight hundred pounds of live weight. The lead man arched an arm over his head and twisted the mule’s ear like a dishrag while it pissed a splattering stream up the ramp. The rousters loaded six more plow mules and then five of the donkeys without trouble until the sixth backed down, braying, his eyes rolling up in a wooly gray skull. Two men hoisted him along and threw him like a loaf into the straw and droppings of the pen.

  The last mule was a big hinny, long in the pastern, a bridled riding mule that stopped dead halfway up the ramp. No amount of bootblows or lashes with a deck rope could convince it to board. The chief mate, bearded, sunburned as a brick, pulled a hickory shaft out of a capstan and struck the mule a blow between the eyes that brought it down in a rumble of skidding knee bone. Randolph heard a sash slide open above him and looked up to the pilothouse, where the captain leaned out in a blue deepwater uniform. “Mr. Breaux, has that animal hurt himself?”

  The chief mate pushed up one of the mule’s lids with the hickory. “No sir,” he called. “The big screw’s just been educated is all.” The animal drunkenly tried to stand, but two legs went over the edge and it fell thrashing into the river, detonating against the water’s surface. “Lollis,” the mate hollered, and a black rouster crabwalked down the canted wharf and jumped onto the mule’s back, fishing up the reins and slapping its rump until his mount’s forelegs caught lumber and pulled them both from the current. The rouster gave a whoop and rode the bleeding mule around a pile of coffee sacks in a barrel-race sweep and thundered up the stage plank into the deck pen, where the animal skidded on his iron shoes across a glaze of shit and slammed broadside against a bulkhead.

  Randolph turned to the main cabin, where he was seated at once by the Negro waiter, and ordered a meal. He was sipping lemonade when the drone of the whistle sent his table’s china into a sympathetic buzz, and he saw the dock drift away as the boat backed out, the paddle wheel biting water in a susurrant rush.

  The waiter set down a plate of chops and potatoes with a little mocking bow of the head. “You need something else, sah?”

  The mill manager looked up. From a distance, the man’s navy, brass-buttoned uniform had appeared immaculate, but on close inspection it was like everything on the steamboat, carefully patched and dull with wear. “You’ll be waiting on me for a day and a half. My n
ame is Randolph Aldridge. What’s yours?”

  The Negro’s face, nettled with a short stubble, did not change. He bowed closer. “They calls me Speck, sah.”

  “What’s your real name?” Randolph spread a cloth napkin in his lap.

  “I reckon that’s it,” he said, his eyes taking on the throb of the yellow electric light that pulsed under a dusty ceiling fan.

  “Do you live around Tiger Island?”

  “Not that place. No indeed.” He shook his head glumly. “The engineer stay there, though. That be all, sah?”

  The mill manager took a sip of his drink. “How much do you make, Speck?”

  The man’s dark eyes flicked toward the far end of the cabin, where a large gilded mirror doubled the room, to make sure the head steward wasn’t watching. “About a dollar a day, plus a crib and my eats, sah. And some people’s nice enough to leave a nickel under they plate if I gives good service.” He tucked the tray under an arm and backed off, ending the conversation. After Randolph finished eating, he drew out a handful of pocket change and slipped a coin under the edge of the plate. Four quarters remained in his palm, and he closed his hand into a fist and thought about the man he held there, for a day.

  The next morning the E. B. Newman discharged its animals at a dirt landing called Vane, where a band of half-naked drovers caned them up the levee in a struggle of flying mud. The boat waddled back out into a high river and the pilot began searching for easy water along the insides of the bends, as though the engines hadn’t the strength to fight the current coursing midstream in mud caps. About sundown the boat drifted into the stained concrete vault of the Plaquemine lock. Randolph watched the chamber pump out and the boat go down like a coffin after prayers. He entered the cabin for supper and found only three other tables occupied and those by men without ties, their oily pants hitched up by suspenders. The lights burned infirmly, pulsing with every turn of the generator. After his meal, Randolph stared at the bulbs’ convulsions above the filigreed turmoil of the salon, then walked down between the tarnished brass rails of the grand staircase to the main deck, moving aft toward the engine room. Inside, an oiler was filling the brass drip cups on the port engine, oblivious to the tons of machinery flying back and forth an inch beneath his arms. On a chair next to a wall of gleaming bronze steam gauges sat the chief engineer, a short man with a big mustache and hair the color of steel wool. He wore navy-blue pants, a black vest, and a string tie drooping over a white shirt, the cuffs held off his hands by garters.