The Clearing (41 page)

Day after day the brothers watched something else leave. The boilers were pulled to the canal and skidded up onto a steel barge. The mules were taken by a sooty steamboat with cattle rails nailed around her unpainted deck. The privies were chopped up to fuel the locomotive on its run west to Shirmer and its buyer, the track to be pulled up by the Southern Pacific in a month.

Byron and Randolph slept in the agent’s extra room in Poachum, and on the last day they borrowed a hand-pumped track car and labored down the rails to Nimbus, which by then was just a flat tract of engine foundations and house piers, broken boards, stacks of cast-off furniture, timbers, cable, dragged-over mud, and the hollow vault of the drying kiln looming above a vast plain of stumps. They were to receive a buyer’s check for the sale of the pull boats, which were the very last things to go. As they rolled to the end of track, the mill manager noted that the blind horse’s stall had been knocked apart for its boards, and he was surprised to see the animal standing in a gray square of earth where the building had been. When the horse heard the ringing wheels of the track car, it spun like a compass needle and faced the men.

Byron gestured with his nub. “I thought it was sold with the mules.”

The mill manager looked at the horse and felt accused. “The dealer didn’t want it once he saw its eyes. One of the stackers said he might take it, but I guess he changed his mind.” The animal had listened to everything coming apart and knew what was happening, that the human world was a temporary thing, a piece of junk that used up the earth and then was consumed itself by the world it tried to destroy. When Randolph understood what the animal knew, a bottomless sadness crawled over him like a winter fog come out of the swamp at night. He thought of the cottages and shutters made out of this woods and of the money in his Pennsylvania bank account, but looking at the horse he could see no worth in any of it.

“If we had a gun,” Byron said, “we could put it out of its misery.”

“I’m not sure it’s miserable,” Randolph said sharply. “It’s just blind.” He whistled but the horse ignored him, as if obedience was now beside the point.

“There’s no way we could walk him out over those little trestles,” Byron said. “He’d fall through and break his legs.” He looked to the canal bank, where deckhands had lashed together two barges and three steam pull boats, ready to be towed away by the gasoline tug. “Maybe they’d put him on a barge?”

“They’re not going to any place different from this one, By.” The purchaser—a bearded man from the Texas border-lands, where they were taking down longleaf virgin pine— walked over and paid them for the pull boats and the tug, then motioned for his deckhands to cast off. The tug revved its engine, pulled the slack out of the towline, and the greasy flotilla straightened out and headed up the canal, disappearing around a westerly bend.

Byron looked around at all the silence. “Looks like France when I left it.”

“My God, is that a joke?”

“Sometimes a fact
is
a joke.”

Randolph scanned the site. “It’ll grow back,” he said.

“Sure. In fifteen hundred years it’ll be just as we found it.”

Randolph put the check in his wallet and then took off his coat because he was sweating. He started back to the handcar, stepping around a coiled water moccasin sunning itself on a broken flywheel. He and his brother mounted the car and faced each other on the pumping handles. They both looked at the horse as it turned its head and listened for them. They became quiet and watched the animal pivot.

“He can go into the kiln to get out of the weather,” Byron whispered. “There’s no lack of green things to eat.”

“Don’t go softhearted on us.”

Byron looked up the track where it pared through the stumps. “Come on, that old thing’s trying to look at us.” He pressed down on his handle, putting all his weight on his one arm, and the car began to jingle down the track. The horse heard and came toward them at a trot. They stopped, and the horse did the same, listening, and the men wondered what to do to keep him from following and getting killed. Finally, Byron stepped off, motioning for his brother to follow, and walked two hundred yards to a stack of twisted tin that had been thrown over a heap of crippled tables, water-ruined pie safes, and a huddle of porch stools.

“What are you looking for?” Randolph asked, wiping his face and neck with a handkerchief.

“Here. Help me pull off some of this tin.” Underneath, tangled up with kitchen chairs and a rabbit cage, was the hulk of the Victrola. They stood it upright, its four legs sinking into the mud, and heard a few records rattling in its case. The doors had swelled shut, and Byron pried them open with his pocketknife and cocked up the top. “Let’s see, we’ll need a good while to get on up the track.” In the cabinet he found “Love’s Perfume,” a twelve-inch Columbia record, and read the tune’s length off the mildewed label. “This one will give us four minutes.” The machine balked at first, but once it was wound as tight as it would go, a death rattle of a waltz began to escape its grille, a rising dirge of clarinets and trumpets, tubas and French horns. The horse, which had followed the men within fifty feet, picked up its head, its ears rotating toward the music. The brothers walked away in an arc as quietly as they could, got on the handcar, and began pumping the handles hard. Randolph’s last glimpse of Nimbus was over his brother’s bobbing head, and he saw the horse staring at the leaning machine, deceived and abandoned, but with a bright sun gleaming in its coat and a reedy grass springing up around its legs out of the demolished world.

The mill manager threw all his strength down against his handle, pressed until his feet left the deck, as if to outdo his brother. Byron saw the game and bore down on his side of the handle, then pulling up as best he could with his one arm. After a hundred yards the men rose and fell like pistons, building velocity and putting their backs into the rhythm for more, the wheels singing and jittering along the track, the brush and trashwoods a green blur, the wheels banging the rail joints like gunshots, and they kept at it, equal in strength, grimacing or grinning, who could tell, trying their hearts, gaining speed on a straightaway for a whole mile until they gave up the handles together, sweating like rain, flushed, panting, and heartsore as the handcar coasted out of the swamp. Byron threw back his head and hollered like a train whistle down the track to Poachum, where the main line’s rails ran east and west to the rest of the nation, all the way to their hates and loves, toward what they would have and what would have them.

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MAY 2004

Copyright © 2003 by Tim Gautreaux

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and
Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Gautreaux, Tim.
The clearing / Tim Gautreaux—1st. ed.
p. cm.
1. World War, 1914–1918—Veterans—Fiction.
2. Wilderness areas—Fiction. 3. Lumber Trade—Fiction.
4. Brothers—Fiction. 5. Louisiana—Fiction. 6. Psychological fiction.
7. Historical fiction. 8. Domestic fiction.
PS3557.A954 C56 2003
2003065956

eISBN : 978-0-307-42825-7

www.vintagebooks.com

www.randomhouse.com

v1.0