The Clearing

Table of Contents

ACCLAIM FOR TIM GAUTREAUX’S
THE
CLEARING

“A compelling look at one man and his family, barely alive but deeply human. In him, it is not hard to recognize ourselves.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

“A postmodern masterpiece. . . . Gautreaux has created, out of antique characters and a 1923 Louisiana backwater, a parable about coping with modernity. About us. And he reminds us that great writing is a timeless art.”
—The Miami Herald

“
The Clearing
is his very best yet, and to say that of Tim Gautreaux’s writing is to say something is very fine indeed. . . . Wit, wisdom, and heart are all combined in perfect proportion in this astonishing and unforgettable novel.”

—
The Times-Picayune

“Tim Gautreaux’s
The Clearing
presents the reader with an interesting dilemma: do you give in to the stifling suspense and read quickly, to find out what happens to the novel’s vivid characters, or do you go slow, savoring each delicious sentence, and thereby risking, by the climax, a nervous breakdown?” —Richard Russo, author of
Empire Falls

“Inventive, carefully conveyed and energetic. . . . Tim Gautreaux has written a somber, serious, historical novel that assures us all that he is a rising force in fiction.”

—Chicago Tribune

“There’s a terrible beauty to the novel. . . . It stands up well in comparisons with
Cold Mountain
, Charles Frazier’s Civil War bestseller. Word for word, it’s my favorite novel so far this year.” —Bob Minzesheimer,
USA Today

“Gautreaux unfolds a story of love and lawlessness against a backdrop of swamp so vivid that it will have you checking the floor for coiled-up water moccasins.”

—
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“A haunted and heartbreaking portrait of 1920s Louisiana. . . . Gautreaux has emerged as one of our most graceful writers, an openhearted explorer of life’s tiny beauties.” —
Esquire

“A fine and exciting novel. . . . Tim Gautreaux is a literary writer unafraid to tell a brisk and jolting story that keeps the pages turning.” —Charles Frazier, author of
Cold Mountain

“An astonishingly good novel, impressively and convincingly situated both in time and locale. . . . The way the author weaves music organically through this tale of redemption is yet another remarkable artistic and human achievement of
The Clearing
.” —
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Gautreaux is a master at painting the swampy backwaters of eighty years ago, as well as the people struggling to survive there. His characters are all too human at best, and at worst as poisonous as a water moccasin; but like fine wood, there is still good grain in many of them.”

—
Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“Gautreaux’s insightful glimpses at human nature, unforgettable characters and total-immersion settings poise him for induction into the pantheon of great Southern writers.”

—
Rocky Mountain News

“The finest American novel in a long, long time.”

—Annie Proulx, author of
The Shipping News

“At once tender and unrelentingly exciting. There are enough ghastly creatures slithering through this swamp to hold anyone’s interest, and enough moral insight to enlighten anyone’s conscience.” —
The Christian Science Monitor

“Set in backwoods Louisiana after the First World War, this taut and unsettling novel . . . uses prose as rich and teeming as the swamps he brings to life.”
—The Baltimore Sun

“As a reader passes through the contagion of violence within this story, what is remembered are the tendrils of compassion and tenderness, small but enduring. Tim Gautreaux is a wonderful writer, and
The Clearing
is a unique and fascinating story.” —Rick Bass, author of The Hermit’s Story

“You can cut the atmosphere with a knife. . . . Exotic and electric.” —The Denver Post

“Classic Southern storytelling, hallucinogenic intensity of description, and obsessive and authoritative attention to historical detail.”
—Elle

“Extraordinarily compelling and unsettling.”
—Chicago Sun-Times

“A dense, masterfully written story of filial ties and a struggle for decency and redemption in a heart of darkness. . . . The tale is imbued with such delicacy and even beauty that it not only affects but astonishes.” —
Entertainment Weekly

TIM GAUTREAUX

THE
CLEARING

Born and raised in Louisiana, Tim Gautreaux is Writer-in-Residence at Southeastern Louisiana University. His work has appeared in
Harper’s
, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, and Zoetrope, as well as The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American
Short Stories
annuals. His first novel,
The Next Step
in the Dance
, won the 1999 Southeastern Book-sellers Award, and he has also published two collections of short fiction.

ALSO BY TIM GAUTREAUX

Same Place, Same Things
The Next Step in the Dance
Welding with Children

To Winborne

I’d like to thank my editor, Gary Fisketjon, who does his job the right way, with precision, hard work, and heart. Nobody does it better. Thanks to my agent, Peter Matson of Sterling Lord Literistic, for his excellent advice and guidance. Much gratitude goes to my mother, brother, and sister, Florence, David, and Lyn, for facts given and love shared, and especially my father, Minos, who took me into the swamps to show me the remnants of things. For Clarence Adoue, who suffered in France and lived to tell the tale. My thanks to several old men, now dead, who didn’t know I was listening.

CHAPTER ONE
1923

At a flag stop in Louisiana, a big, yellow-haired man named Jules stepped off a day coach at a settlement of twelve houses and a shoebox station. He was the only passenger to get off, and as soon as his right foot touched the cinder apron of the depot, the conductor pulled the step stool from under his left heel, the air brakes gasped, and the train moved in a clanking jerk of couplers.

Remembering his instructions, he walked south down a weedy spur track and found a geared steam locomotive coupled to a crew car and five empty flats. The engineer leaned out from his cab window. “You the evaluatin’ man?”

Jules put down his bag, glanced up at the engineer and then around him at the big timber rising from oil-dark water. “Well, ain’t you informed. I guess you got a newspaper back in these weeds or maybe a sawmill radio station?”

The engineer looked as though all unnecessary meat had been cooked off of him by the heat of his engine. “The news goes from porch to porch, anyhow.” He spat on the end of a crosstie. “I know somebody better buy this place who knows what he’s doin’.” He nodded to the rear of his train. “Load yourself on the crew car.”

The locomotive steamed backwards into a never-cut woods, the homemade coach rocking drunkenly over rails that in places sprang down under mud. After a few miles, the train backed out of the cypresses into the smoky light of a mill yard, and Jules stepped off the car as it drifted on like a wooden cloud making its own sleepy thunder. Surveying the factory, he saw it was larger than the Texas operation he’d just helped to close down, which was already rusting toward oblivion, marooned in the middle of eight thousand acres of drooling pine stumps. The new mill before him was a series of many iron-roofed, gray-plank structures connected with the logic of vegetation: a towering saw shed sprouted a planing section, and suckering off of it was the boiler house and many low-peaked shelters for the finished lumber. He stood in an evil-smelling mocha puddle, looking in vain for dry ground, then bent to tuck his pants inside his boots. As he straightened up, a man in a white shirt and vest came out of the back door of a weatherboard house and began walking toward him. When he was two hundred feet away, Jules could tell by his star that it was only the constable come to see what outlander had happened onto the property. Beyond him, the sawmill gnawed its trees, and jets of steam plumed high over the cinder-pocked rooftops, skidding off to the west, their sooty shadows dragging across the clearing. A safety valve opened with a roar above the boiler house, a man hollered down at the log pond, and a team of eight fly-haunted mules, their coats running with foam, dragged a mud sled overloaded with slabs bound for the fuel pile. Jules looked at his watch. It was a half hour until lunch time, and everybody on shift was working up to the whistle.

The constable, a solemn-looking man, big in the shoulders, walked up slowly. “Do you have business here?” He pushed back a one-dent Carlsbad hat and stared, deadpan, like an idiot or a man so distracted he’d forgotten to control the look in his eyes.

“I got an appointment with the manager to go over some figures.” Jules reached out and took the constable’s hand but dropped it as soon as he could without giving offense, thinking that if a corpse could shake hands, it would feel like this.

“Some figures,” the man said, as if the phrase held a private meaning. From behind him came a strangled shout and the report of a small pistol, sharp as a clap, but he didn’t turn around.

Jules stepped up onto a crosstie. “I helped ramrod the Brady mill in east Texas until we cut out last month. The owner, well, he lives up North and sent word for me to come over into Louisiana to look for a new tract. Maybe two, if they’re small.” In the distance three men fell fighting out the doorway of what Jules guessed was the company saloon. “This is my eighth mill in as many days.”

“I was from up North,” the constable said, turning to give a brief look at the commotion and then swinging back.

Jules noted how he stood, hands in pockets and thumbs flicking like a horse’s ears. “The hell you say. What you doing down among the alligators?”

On the porch of the saloon, two men were tying the other’s hands behind his back, one making the knot, the other kneeling on his shoulders.

“The mill manager’s office is through that red door over there in the main building,” the constable said.

“Say, why don’t—”

“Excuse me.” He began walking toward the fight, taking his time going around a broad mud hole, and Jules followed for over a hundred yards, stopping in a plinth of shade cast by the commissary. At the saloon, two men, wearing dark wool caps and suits that fit like a hound’s skin, hauled the squalling man off the high porch and over toward the millpond, and the constable caught up with them as they mounted the levee. Jules barely heard him say, “Stop.”

One of the men, barrel-shaped, his bare chest visible under his suit coat, motioned toward the water. “We gonna give the sonamabitch a swimming lesson,” he called. “He owe the house fifty dollar he don’t got.”