The Clearing: A Novel Page 5

  She wore a patterned housedress and her hair was pinned up in back. Looking at his clothes, at the way he carried himself, she began wringing her hands. “He’s resting up,” she said. “He just came in.”

  Randolph smiled, thinking the woman a rascally surprise Byron had kept from them all. “I’m his brother, the new manager. And you?”

  Her mouth dropped open and she glanced behind her, then gave him a shy look. “Well, I reckon you’ll find out soon enough,” she said. “I went and married him.” She had the direct gaze and chapped hands of a farmwoman. “My name’s Ella.”

  “I’m happy to meet you,” he said, at a loss. “This is, well, it’s nice to . . .”

  “He’s right inside.”

  She stepped back and then disappeared into the rear of the house, so he entered the front room where his brother was seated in a Morris chair, his eyes closed, a large Victrola quaking before him. His brother’s upheld fingers trembled in the air along with the exaggerated wavering in McCormack’s throat. He was, at thirty-six, already graying, the scoring along his eyes and mouth showing all the bad weather of France and Kansas. His hair was close-cropped, as though the woman had cut it with a big pair of shears. Randolph felt a lightness in his chest, just as he had as a young child when his brother came home from horseback riding or hunting.

  When the record finished, the automatic cutoff clicked and the turntable stopped with a whistle. “Byron?”

  He did not turn, but finally said, “I wondered how long it would take for him to send someone.”

  “It’s Randolph, By.”

  And then the lawman, showing his big teeth, stood and grabbed his brother’s hand, squeezing it too hard, not shaking but vibrating it like a man being electrocuted. Randolph stepped forward and gave him a hug, taking in the scent of him.

  “My own little board-measuring brother,” Byron said, backing away. “The best of a good lot has come to lay eyes on me at last. Well, gaze upon this ruin.”

  “You look good,” Randolph said, taking back his stinging hand and putting it carefully into his pocket. “You’ve gained weight. Married life must agree with you.” He still felt small around his brother, always too naïve and simple. “How’s the life of a policeman?”

  Byron sat down and pointed to a chair. “I’ll bet you want to know a lot of things, don’t you? Why won’t I go home and work for father and get rich, right?” He leaned toward his brother, his eyes pulsing like a flame in an opened firebox. “Let’s get this straight right now. I didn’t want to join the army. Even though I was already working over there, I’d seen enough of it. When Wilson declared war, Father wrote and told me it was my duty because I was the fittest of his sons.” He made a mocking, backhanded sweep. “Little Randolph was a bit portly and had flat feet, so I would have to be the family’s glory. I turned off my brain and believed him. He made me a patriot.” Byron glanced toward an interior doorway where the tip of Ella’s nose was visible. “I shouldn’t blame him, not really. His head was full of patriotic songs. After a while, so was mine.” His shoulders rose and fell in his denim shirt. “I guess it still is. Once you start singing the damned things, it’s hard to stop, you know.”

  Randolph straightened in his chair. “You made it through. You came back.” He tried to keep accusation out of his voice.

  “He still had the songs in his head when I came back, but you don’t want to know what was in my head, Rando. You couldn’t imagine.”

  “By—”

  “When I got wind of the fact he’d bought this mill, I started to light out again. I thought he was planning to get me back in a suit and under his thumb.” He laughed then, a booming laugh. “Can you see him coming down in these swamps, as much as he hates dampness? No danger of that. I figured he’d send you.”

  “You knew about the purchase?”

  “Rando. I’m a policeman.”

  The mill manager looked again to the hallway door, which now was empty. “Your wife. She’s pretty.”

  “I’ll never inflict the family in Pittsburgh on her, that’s for sure.” He jumped up and wound the Victrola twenty times. “You asked about the police life.” His voice wobbled with the turns of the handle. “Well, they ran me out of a town where I wouldn’t kill a man, and they ran me out of another where I did. I ended up riding fence out West and chasing off rustlers until the marshals and their damned cars arrested them all and put me out of business.” He sat back and seemed to try to think of something else to say, putting a hand to his forehead, then taking it down quickly. “The rest you don’t want to know about. I just bang around from badge to badge trying to make fellows do right, that’s all.” His voice was too loud, and Randolph remembered that his hearing had been damaged.

  They talked for an hour, Byron at times evasive and even incoherent, especially about the war, as though he didn’t have a firm grasp of his own history. “I was there too long,” he said, running a thumbnail over his eyebrows. “Remember, Father got me a job with the powder company, which sent me to Verdun as an observer.” He lifted a hand and let it drop. “I saw the French go in and in, when they shouldn’t have. You remember the lemmings the old man told us about? How that’s what would happen to you if you didn’t think?”

  Randolph took a cigar from his coat and offered it, and Byron waved it away. “By, Father’s worried about you. It’s been years.”

  “Yes,” he said, but he was shaking his head, no. “He needs me to run one of his damned mills.”

  “You could do it.”

  Byron gave his brother a rocky look, then glanced away. “I want you to hear the new records I just got in. John McCormack, damn his eyes, singing like an angel. Caruso, the dago bastard, tearing up la donna mobile. Riley Puckett doing “Silver-haired Daddy of Mine.” He picked from a container of needles a bright point and inserted it into the arm. “Listen to this thing. It’s a model fourteen I brought in from Tiger Island.” Randolph thought it was indeed a good machine, and there was no hiss on the new record. Soon a brass group began playing, heavy on cornets, saxophones under that, and John McCormack began a patient, understated beginning: “There’s a little bit of heaven floated down to earth one day. . . .” Byron threw out an arm and in the Morris chair began to pantomime the song with great feeling, weaving from the waist up, his head rolling. Ella appeared in the doorway and leaned against the frame, looking at her brother-in-law. After a while she placed a finger below a dry blue eye. At first Randolph didn’t understand, but then he turned and saw that Byron was crying, his lips formed carefully around each note of the song issuing thin and one-dimensional from the mahogany cabinet. Randolph sat as still as wood, his lips parted, his disbelieving breath coming lightly between his lips. Out in the mill yard, rain began to fall, and the house shook as the blind horse bumped its head against the porch post.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  March 9, 1923

  Nimbus Mill

  Poachum Station, Louisiana

  Father,

  I wanted to call you to let you know I finally arrived, but we as yet have no direct telephone line out of the mill, and I’m not sure what the network is like beyond Poachum. The phone we do have is a local battery unit connecting me to a grown child of a railroad agent who has to take everything down by hand and relay it over his own direct line or send it out by telegraph. Some of the managing workers have to dictate personal letters to this boy when urgency is an issue, which he repeats aloud to the entertainment of whatever trapper or farmwife is in the waiting room.

  I have met with Byron, and physically he seems strong, is well tanned and clean-shaved. I don’t know what to tell you of his mental state yet. The tremors seem to have grown less severe. He wants nothing to do with any position other than the one he has. As far as I can tell at this early point, he has the camp well under control, no mean task as the felling and bucking teams are not all white, and are as coarsened by their labor as any I have ever seen. Most have been hired away from east Texas mills and are loners with no f
amily in evidence. They are generally uneducated, and while they can’t count their money, they know how to spend it on bootleg.

  I tried to feel Byron out about France, but he gave only general statements which nevertheless let me know he is still disturbed about what went on there. I have no idea about what, but I’m sure he will begin to forget, and I will do my best to bring him back to us. He is very di ferent from when we last saw him. I o fered him a cigar and he declined. When I asked if he still played cards, he laughed and said that nobody had anything he wanted to win. But he is here, and working daily for us. It felt good to lay my hands on him. As I learn more, I will let you know.

  The mill is, as the reports told us, a good purchase. If prices hold on siding and joists, we will do very well here because the stand will take about three years to cut out. I can’t say enough about the workers, who are rougher in this whole region than any I have seen in West Virginia or Michigan, having a character that originates in something I don’t completely understand, some sense of deprivation or old wrong being done that has gone into their bones. The men su fer more than our northern lumbermen because of the heat, which even now is bad, and from the dampness, which sometimes makes it hard for me to draw a breath. They experience the usual problems with sunstroke and insects, but with the addition of alligators capable of taking off arms and feet. Many of the tree fallers here have teeth marks running up their legs like zippers. I’ve already seen more snakes than I thought were in the world.

  As the transfer states, the millpond is supplied by a narrow-gauge railroad running out on a canal levee into the swamp. Steam pull boats are in the canal winching the trees out of the woods with cable, and a little paddle steamer rounds up logs in other waterways, rafting them down the canal to the mill. The pull-boat cables are continuous, hooked like pulleyed clotheslines way back off the watercourse. Sometimes the water is high enough that two men have to cut trees while standing in little boats floating on opposite sides of the trunk. They then top them, buck them into twenty-footers and pole the logs out to the cable while standing on them. In low water, cabling them out is harder work and requires more ingenuity, even more than the dryland work with which you are familiar.

  There are few women in this camp and almost no children, which contributes to a rather hard-nosed, uncivilized attitude all around, I’d say, there being little sense of family order or regularity, no church or school, and only a vast saloon owned privately on a postage stamp of land at the back of the mill, also noted in the bill of sale and survey. I have not been in it, but it sells hard liquor openly in spite of the law, which is only Byron, who operates under the authority of our salary and a minor deputy ranking with the parish sheri f. He hates the building but sees the practicality of it, for if the men could not blow off steam drinking here at night, they would somehow get into Tiger Island from where it is obvious that several of them per week would never return. So the building in some backward way keeps our board-feet quota met, though it causes Byron many problems.

  It is eight o’clock at night, the third night after I’ve arrived. It is raining so hard that the little domed ridge on which the mill and village have been laid out is completely underwater, and now I know why every building is up high on stumps or piers and why all the privies have ropes tethering them to saplings. I will stop writing now and prepare tomorrow’s sales o fers, which I must give standing in the windy office in Poachum over the baby agent’s phone.

  Please give Lillian this letter and my love. I have not asked Bryon to write, and he has not o fered, but he does send his regards. I know you want to hear more about him, but I have found out little and don’t dare drive him off with my questions. I have written to Lillian already, and I wish you would send her whatever portion of my salary she says she requires. As for me, petty cash here will do. If I wanted to spend money, I’d have to hire someone to figure out how to do it.

  Your son,

  Randolph

  After he finished the letter, the nine o’clock whistle roared one short blast and the mill’s light plant was shut down, the bulb in Randolph’s desk lamp dimming as the dynamo slowed. The housekeeper, May, brought a kerosene lamp, placed it at his elbow and set the wick, then walked back into the kitchen. He had considered writing his father about Byron’s wife, but his brother had told him not to or he would move on. For now, he would take his brother’s side, simply because Byron needed his help the most.

  The first week, he settled into the rhythms of the mill, studying the plant’s details from the leviathan steam engine that powered everything to the least entry in the commissary ledger. He began to memorize the faces and names of sawyers, millwrights, foremen. The horse knew the compound better than he did, and its paces seemed to quicken now that it was taken for long periods out of its dark stall.

  One day, at the edge of the rack yard, it refused to walk between tall stacks of drying weatherboard. Randolph gave it a light spur, but the horse turned its head aside and ignored him. Finally a dusty stacker walked out of the maze of boards and noticed horse and rider standing like an equestrian statue.

  “Boss man,” the stacker called, “that old hoss won’t walk next to a rack.”

  The sun felt like a hot iron on Randolph’s shoulders. “Well, why the hell won’t he?”

  “The piles is sittin’ on crosspieces under the mud. If he step on one, the whole pile fall over on top of you.” He was holding a work glove by the thumb, and he saluted the animal with it as he walked by. “He know that.”

  The workers had come to Nimbus because they were paid two dollars and twenty-five cents a day, a quarter more than at other mills. Though he wasn’t happy about it, Randolph had to expend this salary to keep a workforce out in the swamp. The state government let him pay in brass tokens redeemable for goods at the commissary, and of course in the saloon. The day before, as he’d made an accounting of the financial records, the bookkeeper reminded him that their commissary’s inflated pricing made up for the extra daily quarter. No one could save a nickel, but then, the mill manager had never known a common worker with a bank account.

  When the knock-off whistle roared from the saw shed roof, he looked out the office window and saw his brother step up on the commissary porch, wearing a small, sweat-stained cowboy hat left over from his days in western Kansas. No one greeted him, but the mill manager saw that everyone knew he was there. A few white workers sat on chairs or on the edge of the porch while several Negroes hunched on blocks in a side area paved with clamshells. Randolph’s attention drifted over to where the green-stained bulk of the saloon waited for sundown, its wooden swing-up windows propped open with broken stobs of lath. On its canted porch a man got up from a chair and walked inside, scratching his behind as he disappeared into the smelly dark.

  Leaving his office, Randolph walked down and stood in front of the saloon noting two entrances right next to each other, one for each of the races; peering inside he saw a wall bisecting the building into sprawling rooms, each holding a bar and a thicket of scrapwood tables. In the center of this wall was a narrow opening covered with a curtain for the bar-tenders to pass in and out of the different worlds.

  His brother came up behind him. “What do you think?”

  He didn’t turn around. “It’s a waste of cheap lumber.” He looked at a blood-spotted rag hanging off the back of a porch chair. “When do they start up in there?”

  “Tonight’s just practice. Saturday night comes the main event.” He slapped Randolph so hard on the neck that his hat nearly flew off.

  “What was that for?”

  Byron opened his hand and showed an inch-long horsefly. “You wouldn’t think it, but Sunday night is the worst. Not so crowded, but that’s when the dumb bastards who didn’t learn anything the night before come back.” He dropped the horsefly and turned his boot on it. “Sunday nights are shooting and sticking time.”

  His brother turned away from the building to stare over at the railroad equipment. “The foremen, the enginee
rs and such, are they in there on Sundays?”

  Byron spat. “That old kraut in the boiler room is, sometimes. You’d think that someone who survived German army service would take it easy on himself.”

  “We need that engineer in one piece. Can you keep him out?” He looked up at his brother. “The Italian that runs the place, what’s his name?”

  “Galleri. Somebody Galleri. He might own the building and operate it, but a man named Buzetti controls everything. Galleri is all right. He’s not like Buzetti and his Sicilians.”

  “Can we convince him to keep the German out?”

  Byron shook his head. From inside the saloon came a rasping cough and then a whore’s rising laugh. “I want to close the place down on Sunday. The last mill manager wouldn’t let me. Galleri himself doesn’t want to open on Sundays.”

  Randolph stepped closer and looked into the dim interior, now smelling something sour—beer spilled, passed, or spewed. “Well, why the hell does he?”

  His brother looked at him and laughed. “Little brother, you’re starting to talk like the locals already.”

  “I don’t speak like I’m in the parlor all the time.”

  “We’ll see how bad you get.” Byron pulled up his gun belt. “As far as Galleri’s concerned, the nice fellows that bring in the liquor make him stay open. If he didn’t, they’d come up the canal in their motorboat and pay him a visit, as the oily bastards say.”

  Randolph looked at his brother and frowned. “We do business with Sicilians in Pittsburgh, the Grizzaffis. They’re fine people.”

  Byron shrugged. “Most of them are. But ‘fine’ is not a word I would use to describe Buzetti.”

  Randolph looked down at what appeared to be a small lobster backing out of a cloudy puddle, as though the saloon’s reflection was enough to poison the water. “I don’t like men getting drunk on Sunday nights. They answer Monday’s whistle and then we have accidents. You remember the sawyer at Brinson who passed out in the saw shed?”