The Clearing (5 page)

Hours later, awakened by a crescendo of angry hollering, he pulled on his trousers and walked barefoot through the carpeted salon back to the rail. Minos, the engineer, was standing forward, his shirt off. “It’s the rousters,” he said, when Randolph walked up. “They getting in it now with them bastards off the
Edenborn
.”

A crash of drunken shouts sailed up from the wharf, then a single yell and a skitter of boots. On the top deck, someone ran to the wheelhouse and a spotlight fired up, shining on the dock where a dozen black men grappled and rolled, their rotten shirts ripping, loose overalls straps whipping the air. Suddenly, two of them pulled straight razors and began a ritual circling, then another unfolded a long blade and swung into a screaming curse. The captain walked out on the roof of the Texas and hollered down to the big rousters, who were deaf with drink. The hulking mate, yawning and pulling on his galluses, walked up next to the captain, who told him, “Go down there and put an end to it.”

The mate spat over the rail. “Can’t nothing stop them now.”

The captain twisted around and called up to the pilot in the wheelhouse. “Blow shorts and see if that brings the policeman. We can’t load freight with dead niggers.”

The whistle coughed up a gallon of water and issued a series of yelping blasts. Another razor came out of a shirt, and the mill manager’s mouth fell open as the blade drew a long red line across the face of the rouster who’d ridden the mule out of the river. Three men ran over from the downstream steamer and began swinging boots and fists. A man shrieked and fell on his back, bloody fingers pinching his stomach together as the riot closed over him like a muddy surf.

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.