The Clearing (6 page)

Walking around watery gouges rippling with minnows, he made his way to the office upstairs in the mill. In an unpainted room made of glowing beaded board he met his assistant manager, Jules Blake, a rough, hungover-looking fellow, who said he was from Trinity County, Texas. Randolph asked him questions for two hours, watching him nervously build the wad of tobacco in his left cheek as he gave answers.

He tried to put the man at ease. “Just because ownership switches doesn’t mean we have to do things any differently. But I do think we need to clean up some.”

Jules looked out a sawdusty window. “I thought that myself when I come on a few weeks ago. But it rains ever afternoon and the weeds grow up faster than you can spare a man to cut ’em. The stumps won’t burn, and we killed an ox trying to pull up a little one in the middle of a road.”

“The last manager, how did he make out here?”

Jules put his boots up on a desk, crackling its loose veneer. “From what I hear he weighed down the incoming order forms with full jiggers. Did what selling he could over the phone there, going through that child at Poachum like we got to do. He counted the lumber when he could see it.” Jules shifted his wad. “Worst thing he done is hire up a bunch of jarhead white trash and single Negroes as big as bulls from those east Texas mills.” He spat expertly into an enameled cuspidor by his desk. “They just like oxes. I moved here to get away from such as that.”

Randolph looked out to where a stray mule stood next to a house, its head in a window chewing on the curtain. “We can’t run the place with schoolteachers. I’ll just do the same paperwork as the last manager. You keep after the men as you’ve been doing, and I’ll watch the mechanics of the place. What kind of engineers do we have?”

“Just good enough to keep from gettin’ blowed up. You got to check on ’em come Monday, see they ain’t workin’ with the alcohol flu.” Jules gestured over toward the boiler house. “The German’s the chief engineer, and he’s fair, but when he gets blue he sure likes that sauce.”

“How’s the fights?” Randolph asked, looking out the window at a rising rain cloud.

Jules stared down at the dried mud under his desk. “We got a graveyard with thirty bodies in it.”

“Good Lord. Who put the most of them there?”

The other man pinched his nose, put his boots down, and sniffed. “Is it true your old man bought this mill because he found out your brother was working here?”

Randolph sat down at a rolltop desk and tried a drawer, but it was swollen shut. “That’s right. Have you seen him today?”

“He’s making rounds.”

“Someone in town told me he’s had a brush with some Italians? We heard about it up North, too.”

Jules leaned over the spittoon for a moment, but held in. “Don’t fool with me.”

Randolph looked away. “All right, then.”

“I hope the hell you’ve come down here to help him.”

The mill manager gave him a look. “Isn’t that what family does?”

Jules thought a moment. “Good family.”

“Tell me about the Italians.”

Jules shrugged. “A bad batch of Sicilians. The saloon’s in their pocket, on a piece of property the last owners let ’em have. They own the thing, so you can’t just run ’em off. Some time ago they wanted to put in two more card games, more slots, a couple new whores, and he’s been bucking ’em.”

“That’s understandable.”

Two floors below the office the band saw began to shriek as though binding in a log, and Jules stood up, stretching his arms. “The damned place just causes us trouble. The married men lose their pay and go home and beat on their women. Some of the kids around here look like sticks they eat so poor. The young bucks, they lose their scrip and start poundin’ hell out of each other.” Jules opened the door, listening to the engineer yell something in German down in the plant. “But you might tell your brother to ease off a bit. Those boys are from Chicago.”

Randolph laughed. “This is a little saloon back in the swamps.”

Jules turned and looked at him. “Mr. Randolph, one thing I know. To a Sicilian, nothing’s a local problem.” He spat into the hallway. “They’re just about like the federal government.”

The mill manager watched him leave, guessing he was wrong. Looking out at the tree line where the land rolled down into black swamp water, he wondered how many people even knew Nimbus existed, this dot at the heart of a great forest-green blur on his father’s map. He got up and found an old pair of high leather boots in a locker and walked down a rutted lane to his house, trying to ignore a man sitting wall-eyed on a stump next to the road and a noisy group playing cards in the shade of a shack, their commissary tokens glittering on scrap planks thrown across sawhorses.

There was not a speck of paint on or in his house. Walking through the rooms touching the naked wood, he felt like a beetle inside a tree. In the backyard an old mulatto man drowsed on the porch of a cabin while next to him a young light-skinned woman washed clothes in a galvanized tub.

“Are you the housekeeper?” he called, looking around the bald yard.

“Yes,” she said. “This is my daddy.” She nodded to the man with a respectful motion.

“I’m the new mill manager. Can you find me something to eat?”

She dried her hands in her apron and walked past him into the big house, glancing across her shoulder at his face.

Randolph found a nearly blind horse in the small stable behind the yard, its eyes the color of a sun-clouded beer bottle; he saddled him, and set out to ride the whole mud-swamped site, aiming to find his brother, and also wanting the men to see him moving among them, laying claim. The horse was slow but the mill manager sensed it had memorized the place, so he dropped the reins and allowed it to take him on a logical circuit. In a half hour he had not seen his brother, so he retook the reins and turned back to the houses near the railroad, riding to the one Jules had pointed out earlier and tying the horse to a porch post. He was surprised to hear a phonograph keening inside, John McCormack, the Irish tenor, singing “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” in an impossibly high voice. When he knocked, a sandy-haired woman in her early twenties came out as soon as his fist touched wood.

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.