The Clearing: A Novel Read online

  Minos bumped the mill manager’s elbow. “Here come Judgment Day,” he said, pointing.

  Randolph looked and could make out a little man with uncombed white hair advancing quickly from a side street. A badge winked on his coat and a double-barreled shotgun dangled at his side, but when he stepped up onto the dock and yelled at the men, his words might as well have been puffs of steam. So he pulled the forearm off the shotgun, dropped the barrel from the stock, grabbed the twin tubes on the smaller end, and swung hard against the skull of the nearest man, sending him to the dock like a stunned cow. A few dark faces went up at that, and he swung again, his white hair shocking up on impact, and then again, sending a third man screaming into the river, and the others began to scatter and run. Five men lay sprawled on the dock, and the one who’d been cut across the stomach was not moving. The marshal straightened up over him, put his shotgun back together, and dropped two shells into its barrels.

  “Alors, quoi c’est son nom?” he asked.

  The engineer yelled down in French that he was not on the Newman’s crew.

  A rouster sat up, holding his bleeding head as if afraid it might roll off his shoulders. “Don’t shoot me, Mister Merville.”

  The marshal slid the gun into the crook of his arm. “A high-brass shell costs seven cents, and the bastard of a mayor we got would charge it against my pay.” He pointed to the dead man. “You know him?”

  “He on the Drew with us.”

  “He got a family?” Merville checked the corpse’s pockets, found a silver dollar, and put it in his vest.

  “He from way up the country.” The rouster took a hand away from his face and looked at the blood. “He ain’t got no people.”

  The marshal slid his shotgun under the shining waist, lifted, and rolled the corpse over, repeating the motion until it tumbled into the river. He looked toward the wheelhouse and shaded his eyes. “You can kill that light, yeah,” he said.

  The engineer spat over the side and turned to Randolph. “So much for that.”

  The mill manager finally closed his mouth. “Is that how you have to operate around here?”

  “It is now.” Minos looked down. “In ten years or fifteen years, maybe it’ll be different.”

  “Who’s the policeman?”

  Minos turned his head to where the old man herded three limping men back to their boat, the bloody shotgun sideways against their backs. “Him? That’s my daddy.”

  Randolph climbed onto his thin mattress and lay awake and sweating until he heard a tap on the door at five. Speck, doubling as porter, cleared his throat and the mill manager told him fifteen minutes. He got up and washed at the basin, shaved, and put on a fresh dark wool suit. In the narrow main salon he sat at a naked table in the dark, smelling the enamel and tobacco latent in the air, imagining the carnivorous swamp he was traveling toward and wondering how all the fine books his brother had read could have prepared him to police its mill saloon. He remembered the thump of the shotgun barrels on the skulls of the roustabouts, then looked up to where first light spangled in the textured glass of the clerestories, sooty greens and golds flaring dimly like fire seen through mica. He moved through the tinted light down onto the foredeck and stood among the freight boxes and sacks to wait for his luggage. Hearing a noise he turned to see the rouster who’d been cut in the face. He was sitting back against a pile of rice sacks, moaning like a record played much too slowly, and the mill manager lifted a deck lamp off its hook and walked back among the crates, thinking that it would be a shame for such a worker to be ruined.

  He raised the light. “Is someone going to get a doctor for you?”

  A pair of eyes opened, boiled eggs floating in a tabasco of pain. “Ain’t one’ll come.”

  Speck, the waiter, suddenly loomed at Randolph’s back. “You want me to carry these bags up to the depot on the dolly, sah?”

  The mill manager stooped down. “Do you have any alcohol and bandages on board?”

  Speck sniffed. “Seem like some niggers done had enough alcohol.”

  “He needs some for the outside. And bring me a roll of gauze and a strip of salt meat from the galley.” He looked up and couldn’t make out the man’s face, but he could smell his sour black uniform. “There’ll be more than a nickel under a plate.”

  “Sah,” Speck said, turning for the staircase.

  The rouster raised his head and the gash in his face opened like a long, red mouth, spreading from above the temple, across the cheek, down to the chin. When the waiter returned with a bottle of straight neutral spirits, the mill manager poured it onto the cut, some trickling into the man’s left eye, and he hollered out to God Almighty, thrashed his arms, and fell back against the sacks, trembling like a mule shaking off flies. Randolph wiped the wound clean, then he disinfected his penknife and cut a strip of salt meat out of what Speck had brought, laid this on the gash, and tied it in place with five separate bands of gauze looped around the man’s head. Each time he drew a knot closed, the rouster cried out.

  The mill manager put two fingers on the bloody neck to check the pulse. “Tomorrow, pull all this off at daybreak and throw it in the river. Burn the cut out again with this alcohol and tie on another strip of salt meat, just like I tied this one. Don’t strain your face for three days or it’ll split like a tomato, you hear?”

  “I hear,” the man whispered.

  Randolph pushed the cinched chin sideways and examined his work. “If I had a suture kit I’d try to sew you up.” He wiped a clot from the man’s neck with a wad of gauze and threw it overboard. “Keep your face washed every day for ten days or they’ll wind up rolling you into the river like they did that other fellow. The waiter here will give you the meat and gauze when you need it.” At this, the rouster settled onto his side and closed his eyes.

  Speck hoisted a trunk onto his shoulder. “Got no mo’ manners than a hog.”

  The mill manager looked up at him, slipping the cork back in the bottle. “I don’t think he’s feeling very civil at the moment.”

  “No, sah.”

  “You take care of him and next time I see you, I’ll remember.”

  “I bet you will, sah.” Speck ducked his head at the rouster, then turned away, swinging the heavy trunk wide.

  At six Randolph climbed onto a sun-peeled wooden coach tacked to the end of an eastbound line of freight cars. Across the aisle sat two men wearing long boots and holding taped-together shotguns between their knees, and behind them an Indian man and three hatless women in faded housedresses made of flour sacks swayed with the motion of the coach. The men stank, but so did he, a fact of life, he realized, in a place where a man could break a sweat by walking to the privy. He put a hand out of the window and hefted the air. The train rattled past the edge of town, its five-chime whistle scolding road crossings until there were no more and the little locomotive entered a sun-killing forest of virgin cypress, the rails running into a slot capped by a gray ribbon of sky. Drifting back from the engine a sooty mist coated the cars, and the mill manager considered Minos’s predictions regarding the decline of steam machinery. He wondered what smokeless boxlike machine, easy on the ears and clothes, might pull the trains in fifteen or twenty years.

  At a quarter to seven, the brakes came on with a jerk, and the train stopped at the dozen houses that made up Poachum. The baggage handler cast Randolph’s fine trunks onto the platform of the little plank station as if they were boxes of trash. The train whistled off, and after the last coach passed, he looked across the tracks at the swamped, axle-bending road that led back to Tiger Island. Eight trapper’s shacks built up on cypress stumps and four shotgun houses of raw wood were arranged with the logic of an armload of tossed kindling. A siding west of the station was loaded with flatcars of pale aromatic cypress planks waiting to be shipped, and a spur track plunged south from the main line, into the swamp toward Nimbus.

  The mill manager entered the station where a dark-haired boy was sitting under a clock, wearing a green visor.
The agent told him the mill had just phoned, and that the lumber train would arrive soon. Randolph watched him struggle to fill out waybills for a minute, then asked if he knew the lawman down there.

  “I don’t see him much,” the boy said without looking up, his thin arms moving over his forms.

  “He doesn’t send messages out?”

  “He keeps his business back in the woods.” The agent began to sort invoices, frowning at each in turn.

  Randolph walked out and looked down the kinked railroad to Nimbus that led into a tunnel of bearded cypress trees, the shallow water on either side carpeted with apple-green duckweed. In the distance he heard the exhaust of a locomotive, and in twenty minutes the train came wobbling into sight, dragging cars of kiln-dried one-by-twelves, six-by-six timbers, beams fourteen inches square, and racks of weatherboard, all red Louisiana cypress, fine grained and fragrant in the heat. After the engine drew the loads out onto the main line, then shoved them back into an empty siding, the mill manager pulled on the grab irons and mounted the locomotive.

  The engineer studied his suit and shoes. “What?”

  “I’m Randolph Aldridge.”

  “The devil you say.”

  “No, the mill manager. You and your fireman get down and put those trunks on the tender.” He watched as they stepped down and considered his luggage a while before pulling off their oily gloves.

  Randolph ran the locomotive himself through the hundred-foot trees back to Nimbus. The wood slabs the fireman tossed into the firebox were free fuel, and the smoke smelled like efficiency. The reports he’d received about the site had not drawn him a picture, but he hoped for an adequately maintained property that he could fine-tune. However, when the train clattered into a clearing of a hundred stumpy acres, the settlement lay before him like an unpainted model of a town made by a boy with a dull pocketknife. Littered with dead treetops, wandered by three muddy streets, the place seemed not old but waterlogged, weather tortured, weed wracked. He stopped the engine and blew the squalling whistle once, gazing out from the engineer’s seat, his feelings sinking like the crossties under the locomotive’s axles.

  A two-story barracks for the single workers rose against the western tree line, and in front of it, on both sides of a rain-swamped lane, ran two rows of shotgun houses, paintless, screenless, not a shutter on a single one of them. South of this row by a hundred yards he spotted the manager’s house, a square, porched, steep-roofed structure of raw, pink-tinged weatherboard, to the rear of it a cabin and tiny stable, then a short crude fence of cypress bats, and beyond that a wide canal, its surface broken with trunks drifting like reptiles in ambush. Between the house and the mill was the looming commissary with its muddy porches, and a good distance behind it was the low saloon, carelessly built and rangy, sagging back from a wide gallery bearing a dozen scattered hide-bottomed chairs. To the rear of the saloon three cabins and a line of privies perched at odd angles on the berm of the canal. On the other side of the soaring mill was a longer double row of forty shacks without porches or steps—the black section, he supposed—and two more of the featureless, rain-streaked barracks. Not far from Randolph’s position in the locomotive’s cab, he could see a line of low houses with screened windows and balustered porches facing south. In one of the backyards he noted a broken steam-engine flywheel, a set of rusty handcuffs dangling from a spoke.

  In the middle of the clearing roared the mill itself. Out of every metal roof rose jetting exhaust vents or hundred-foot black iron smokestacks streaming flags of woodsmoke. Randolph figured that some five hundred people worked in the mill and in the woods beyond. He stepped down from the engine, felt the unsettled land devour his shoes, and suddenly understood something about this place: two years before, the loudest sound had been the hollow calls of slow-stepping herons.

  Walking around watery gouges rippling with minnows, he made his way to the office upstairs in the mill. In an unpainted room made of glowing beaded board he met his assistant manager, Jules Blake, a rough, hungover-looking fellow, who said he was from Trinity County, Texas. Randolph asked him questions for two hours, watching him nervously build the wad of tobacco in his left cheek as he gave answers.

  He tried to put the man at ease. “Just because ownership switches doesn’t mean we have to do things any differently. But I do think we need to clean up some.”

  Jules looked out a sawdusty window. “I thought that myself when I come on a few weeks ago. But it rains ever afternoon and the weeds grow up faster than you can spare a man to cut ’em. The stumps won’t burn, and we killed an ox trying to pull up a little one in the middle of a road.”

  “The last manager, how did he make out here?”

  Jules put his boots up on a desk, crackling its loose veneer. “From what I hear he weighed down the incoming order forms with full jiggers. Did what selling he could over the phone there, going through that child at Poachum like we got to do. He counted the lumber when he could see it.” Jules shifted his wad. “Worst thing he done is hire up a bunch of jarhead white trash and single Negroes as big as bulls from those east Texas mills.” He spat expertly into an enameled cuspidor by his desk. “They just like oxes. I moved here to get away from such as that.”

  Randolph looked out to where a stray mule stood next to a house, its head in a window chewing on the curtain. “We can’t run the place with schoolteachers. I’ll just do the same paperwork as the last manager. You keep after the men as you’ve been doing, and I’ll watch the mechanics of the place. What kind of engineers do we have?”

  “Just good enough to keep from gettin’ blowed up. You got to check on ’em come Monday, see they ain’t workin’ with the alcohol flu.” Jules gestured over toward the boiler house. “The German’s the chief engineer, and he’s fair, but when he gets blue he sure likes that sauce.”

  “How’s the fights?” Randolph asked, looking out the window at a rising rain cloud.

  Jules stared down at the dried mud under his desk. “We got a graveyard with thirty bodies in it.”

  “Good Lord. Who put the most of them there?”

  The other man pinched his nose, put his boots down, and sniffed. “Is it true your old man bought this mill because he found out your brother was working here?”

  Randolph sat down at a rolltop desk and tried a drawer, but it was swollen shut. “That’s right. Have you seen him today?”

  “He’s making rounds.”

  “Someone in town told me he’s had a brush with some Italians? We heard about it up North, too.”

  Jules leaned over the spittoon for a moment, but held in. “Don’t fool with me.”

  Randolph looked away. “All right, then.”

  “I hope the hell you’ve come down here to help him.”

  The mill manager gave him a look. “Isn’t that what family does?”

  Jules thought a moment. “Good family.”

  “Tell me about the Italians.”

  Jules shrugged. “A bad batch of Sicilians. The saloon’s in their pocket, on a piece of property the last owners let ’em have. They own the thing, so you can’t just run ’em off. Some time ago they wanted to put in two more card games, more slots, a couple new whores, and he’s been bucking ’em.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  Two floors below the office the band saw began to shriek as though binding in a log, and Jules stood up, stretching his arms. “The damned place just causes us trouble. The married men lose their pay and go home and beat on their women. Some of the kids around here look like sticks they eat so poor. The young bucks, they lose their scrip and start poundin’ hell out of each other.” Jules opened the door, listening to the engineer yell something in German down in the plant. “But you might tell your brother to ease off a bit. Those boys are from Chicago.”

  Randolph laughed. “This is a little saloon back in the swamps.”

  Jules turned and looked at him. “Mr. Randolph, one thing I know. To a Sicilian, nothing’s a local problem.” He spat into the
hallway. “They’re just about like the federal government.”

  The mill manager watched him leave, guessing he was wrong. Looking out at the tree line where the land rolled down into black swamp water, he wondered how many people even knew Nimbus existed, this dot at the heart of a great forest-green blur on his father’s map. He got up and found an old pair of high leather boots in a locker and walked down a rutted lane to his house, trying to ignore a man sitting wall-eyed on a stump next to the road and a noisy group playing cards in the shade of a shack, their commissary tokens glittering on scrap planks thrown across sawhorses.

  There was not a speck of paint on or in his house. Walking through the rooms touching the naked wood, he felt like a beetle inside a tree. In the backyard an old mulatto man drowsed on the porch of a cabin while next to him a young light-skinned woman washed clothes in a galvanized tub.

  “Are you the housekeeper?” he called, looking around the bald yard.

  “Yes,” she said. “This is my daddy.” She nodded to the man with a respectful motion.

  “I’m the new mill manager. Can you find me something to eat?”

  She dried her hands in her apron and walked past him into the big house, glancing across her shoulder at his face.

  Randolph found a nearly blind horse in the small stable behind the yard, its eyes the color of a sun-clouded beer bottle; he saddled him, and set out to ride the whole mud-swamped site, aiming to find his brother, and also wanting the men to see him moving among them, laying claim. The horse was slow but the mill manager sensed it had memorized the place, so he dropped the reins and allowed it to take him on a logical circuit. In a half hour he had not seen his brother, so he retook the reins and turned back to the houses near the railroad, riding to the one Jules had pointed out earlier and tying the horse to a porch post. He was surprised to hear a phonograph keening inside, John McCormack, the Irish tenor, singing “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” in an impossibly high voice. When he knocked, a sandy-haired woman in her early twenties came out as soon as his fist touched wood.