The Clearing (3 page)

“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 name 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.

“Mind if I come in?” Randolph asked.

The little man looked up from his chair, then down at Randolph’s expensive shoes. “
Mais,
you can come in if you want, yeah,” he said.

The mill manager stepped into the smell of hot enamel and the oaty essence of saturated steam, looking over at the generator and its attendant electrical panel, a black porcelain expanse containing meters and knife-blade switches and one rheostat the size of a small drum. He reached out and rotated its handle an inch, and the lights came up, their pulsing diminished. “Some of the contacts are dirty.”

The engineer looked away.

“Where’s your home?”

The man looked back and saw the suit, the gold watch chain, the clean collar. “My house is in Tiger Island.”

“You must know the other licensed engineers in town.”

He nodded. “I know some. At the mills.”

“What about at Nimbus?” Randolph blinked at the tap of a gong bolted to a beam above his head. The engineer stood up, gave a gleaming steel wheel a half turn, and the port and starboard piston rods slowed.

“That’s way out in the swamp. I don’t hear much about him, me.”

“He’s a German, I believe.”

“That’s what I hear,” the engineer said, giving the throttle wheel another nudge. “A damned hun.”

“You hear any news about that mill?”

“What kind of news you want, you?” He leaned on the hot wheel and narrowed his eyes.

“My brother is the lawman for the mill town. I haven’t seen him in four years.”

A small bell hanging overhead on a spring coil rattled, and the engineer slung the valve wide, the engines paying the wooden pittman shafts out to the paddle wheel faster, the polished valve gear clacking up and down. “Wish I hadn’t seen my brother in four years,” he said. “I’d still have me a bank account.” He walked over and said something in French to the oiler, who nodded and walked out into the night.

Randolph stood next to the starboard engine, watching the seven-foot piston shaft play in and out of the cylinder. “Are the valves always this noisy?”