The Clearing (7 page)

I have met with Byron, and physically he seems strong, is well
tanned and clean-shaved. I don’t know what to tell you of his
mental state yet. The tremors seem to have grown less severe. He
wants nothing to do with any position other than the one he has.
As far as I can tell at this early point, he has the camp well under
control, no mean task as the felling and bucking teams are not all
white, and are as coarsened by their labor as any I have ever seen.
Most have been hired away from east Texas mills and are loners
with no family in evidence. They are generally uneducated, and
while they can’t count their money, they know how to spend it on
bootleg.

I tried to feel Byron out about France, but he gave only general
statements which nevertheless let me know he is still disturbed about
what went on there. I have no idea about what, but I’m sure he will
begin to forget, and I will do my best to bring him back to us. He is
very di ferent from when we last saw him. I o fered him a cigar and
he declined. When I asked if he still played cards, he laughed and
said that nobody had anything he wanted to win. But he is here,
and working daily for us. It felt good to lay my hands on him. As I
learn more, I will let you know.

The mill is, as the reports told us, a good purchase. If prices
hold on siding and joists, we will do very well here because the
stand will take about three years to cut out. I can’t say enough about
the workers, who are rougher in this whole region than any I have
seen in West Virginia or Michigan, having a character that
originates in something I don’t completely understand, some sense of
deprivation or old wrong being done that has gone into their bones.
The men su fer more than our northern lumbermen because of the
heat, which even now is bad, and from the dampness, which
sometimes makes it hard for me to draw a breath. They experience
the usual problems with sunstroke and insects, but with the addition
of alligators capable of taking off arms and feet. Many of the tree
fallers here have teeth marks running up their legs like zippers. I’ve
already seen more snakes than I thought were in the world.

As the transfer states, the millpond is supplied by a narrow-gauge railroad running out on a canal levee into the swamp. Steam
pull boats are in the canal winching the trees out of the woods with
cable, and a little paddle steamer rounds up logs in other waterways,
rafting them down the canal to the mill. The pull-boat cables are
continuous, hooked like pulleyed clotheslines way back off the
watercourse. Sometimes the water is high enough that two men have
to cut trees while standing in little boats floating on opposite sides of
the trunk. They then top them, buck them into twenty-footers and
pole the logs out to the cable while standing on them. In low water,
cabling them out is harder work and requires more ingenuity, even
more than the dryland work with which you are familiar.

There are few women in this camp and almost no children,
which contributes to a rather hard-nosed, uncivilized attitude all
around, I’d say, there being little sense of family order or regularity,
no church or school, and only a vast saloon owned privately on a
postage stamp of land at the back of the mill, also noted in the bill
of sale and survey. I have not been in it, but it sells hard liquor
openly in spite of the law, which is only Byron, who operates under
the authority of our salary and a minor deputy ranking with the
parish sheri f. He hates the building but sees the practicality of it,
for if the men could not blow off steam drinking here at night, they
would somehow get into Tiger Island from where it is obvious that
several of them per week would never return. So the building in
some backward way keeps our board-feet quota met, though it causes
Byron many problems.

It is eight o’clock at night, the third night after I’ve arrived. It
is raining so hard that the little domed ridge on which the mill and
village have been laid out is completely underwater, and now I
know why every building is up high on stumps or piers and why all
the privies have ropes tethering them to saplings. I will stop writing
now and prepare tomorrow’s sales o fers, which I must give
standing in the windy office in Poachum over the baby agent’s
phone.

Please give Lillian this letter and my love. I have not asked Bryon
to write, and he has not o fered, but he does send his regards. I know
you want to hear more about him, but I have found out little and
don’t dare drive him off with my questions. I have written to
Lillian already, and I wish you would send her whatever portion of
my salary she says she requires. As for me, petty cash here will do. If
I wanted to spend money, I’d have to hire someone to figure out how
to do it.

Your son,
Randolph

After he finished the letter, the nine o’clock whistle roared one short blast and the mill’s light plant was shut down, the bulb in Randolph’s desk lamp dimming as the dynamo slowed. The housekeeper, May, brought a kerosene lamp, placed it at his elbow and set the wick, then walked back into the kitchen. He had considered writing his father about Byron’s wife, but his brother had told him not to or he would move on. For now, he would take his brother’s side, simply because Byron needed his help the most.

The first week, he settled into the rhythms of the mill, studying the plant’s details from the leviathan steam engine that powered everything to the least entry in the commissary ledger. He began to memorize the faces and names of sawyers, millwrights, foremen. The horse knew the compound better than he did, and its paces seemed to quicken now that it was taken for long periods out of its dark stall.

One day, at the edge of the rack yard, it refused to walk between tall stacks of drying weatherboard. Randolph gave it a light spur, but the horse turned its head aside and ignored him. Finally a dusty stacker walked out of the maze of boards and noticed horse and rider standing like an equestrian statue.

“Boss man,” the stacker called, “that old hoss won’t walk next to a rack.”

The sun felt like a hot iron on Randolph’s shoulders. “Well, why the hell won’t he?”

“The piles is sittin’ on crosspieces under the mud. If he step on one, the whole pile fall over on top of you.” He was holding a work glove by the thumb, and he saluted the animal with it as he walked by. “
He
know that.”

The workers had come to Nimbus because they were paid two dollars and twenty-five cents a day, a quarter more than at other mills. Though he wasn’t happy about it, Randolph had to expend this salary to keep a workforce out in the swamp. The state government let him pay in brass tokens redeemable for goods at the commissary, and of course in the saloon. The day before, as he’d made an accounting of the financial records, the bookkeeper reminded him that their commissary’s inflated pricing made up for the extra daily quarter. No one could save a nickel, but then, the mill manager had never known a common worker with a bank account.

When the knock-off whistle roared from the saw shed roof, he looked out the office window and saw his brother step up on the commissary porch, wearing a small, sweat-stained cowboy hat left over from his days in western Kansas. No one greeted him, but the mill manager saw that everyone knew he was there. A few white workers sat on chairs or on the edge of the porch while several Negroes hunched on blocks in a side area paved with clamshells. Randolph’s attention drifted over to where the green-stained bulk of the saloon waited for sundown, its wooden swing-up windows propped open with broken stobs of lath. On its canted porch a man got up from a chair and walked inside, scratching his behind as he disappeared into the smelly dark.

Leaving his office, Randolph walked down and stood in front of the saloon noting two entrances right next to each other, one for each of the races; peering inside he saw a wall bisecting the building into sprawling rooms, each holding a bar and a thicket of scrapwood tables. In the center of this wall was a narrow opening covered with a curtain for the bar-tenders to pass in and out of the different worlds.

His brother came up behind him. “What do you think?”

He didn’t turn around. “It’s a waste of cheap lumber.” He looked at a blood-spotted rag hanging off the back of a porch chair. “When do they start up in there?”

“Tonight’s just practice. Saturday night comes the main event.” He slapped Randolph so hard on the neck that his hat nearly flew off.

“What was that for?”

Byron opened his hand and showed an inch-long horsefly. “You wouldn’t think it, but Sunday night is the worst. Not so crowded, but that’s when the dumb bastards who didn’t learn anything the night before come back.” He dropped the horsefly and turned his boot on it. “Sunday nights are shooting and sticking time.”

His brother turned away from the building to stare over at the railroad equipment. “The foremen, the engineers and such, are they in there on Sundays?”

Byron spat. “That old kraut in the boiler room is, sometimes. You’d think that someone who survived German army service would take it easy on himself.”

“We need that engineer in one piece. Can you keep him out?” He looked up at his brother. “The Italian that runs the place, what’s his name?”

“Galleri. Somebody Galleri. He might own the building and operate it, but a man named Buzetti controls everything. Galleri is all right. He’s not like Buzetti and his Sicilians.”

“Can we convince him to keep the German out?”

Byron shook his head. From inside the saloon came a rasping cough and then a whore’s rising laugh. “I want to close the place down on Sunday. The last mill manager wouldn’t let me. Galleri himself doesn’t want to open on Sundays.”

Randolph stepped closer and looked into the dim interior, now smelling something sour—beer spilled, passed, or spewed. “Well, why the hell does he?”

His brother looked at him and laughed. “Little brother, you’re starting to talk like the locals already.”

“I don’t speak like I’m in the parlor all the time.”

“We’ll see how bad you get.” Byron pulled up his gun belt. “As far as Galleri’s concerned, the nice fellows that bring in the liquor make him stay open. If he didn’t, they’d come up the canal in their motorboat and pay him a visit, as the oily bastards say.”

Randolph looked at his brother and frowned. “We do business with Sicilians in Pittsburgh, the Grizzaffis. They’re fine people.”

Byron shrugged. “Most of them are. But ‘fine’ is not a word I would use to describe Buzetti.”

Randolph looked down at what appeared to be a small lobster backing out of a cloudy puddle, as though the saloon’s reflection was enough to poison the water. “I don’t like men getting drunk on Sunday nights. They answer Monday’s whistle and then we have accidents. You remember the sawyer at Brinson who passed out in the saw shed?”

Byron laughed out loud. “Fell down on the carriage while it was moving toward the band saw, and got made into a six-by-six.”

Randolph looked at his brother hard and took a step away. “The accident shut us down for most of a day. Tell this Galleri he’s closed Sundays. If he refuses, we’ll issue notices to the men to stay away.” He looked into the void beyond the door on the left. “How’d Buzetti get a lot in the middle of the tract?”

“Last owners gave it to him.” Byron threw his head back and watched a hawk kiting over the mill yard. “They were under some duress to do so.”

“How many run-ins with these people have you had?”

“To hear them tell it, too many.” His eyes darted toward a barracks, where a man came out to pitch the contents of a slop jar into the woods.

“Maybe closing them down on Sundays will show for once who’s in charge.”

Again Byron looked up after the bird. “It might result in more board feet.” He laughed and kept his face toward the sky. “Do you realize that it’s finally stopped coming down?” Taking off his hat in a grand gesture, he leaned his head all the way back. “I am washed by the lack of rain,” he cried out.

Randolph put a hand on his brother’s arm, ignoring the stares of two buckers walking by, their saws springing on their shoulders in time to their steps. “Come on, By, let’s get in the shade.”

He ate the housekeeper’s supper, an amazing dark stew made with rabbit meat and served over rice. After she cleaned the kitchen and left, he rummaged through the house, finding a locker in which his predecessor had left a cracked pair of waders, a fishing rod, a half box of shotgun shells, and a Hohner piano accordion, ninety-six ebony buttons on the left-hand side. He sat it on the bed where its pearl inlay and the wavy imitation ivory of its waterfall keys blazed absurdly against the plank-plain room. The mill manager, who could play several musical instruments badly, stared at the accordion a full minute before going to the back door to make certain the housekeeper had blown out her lamp. Returning, he put his arms through the shoulder straps and ran his left hand down the buttons, stopping at the hollow-tipped one that signaled C. He popped loose the retaining straps and drew out a big chord that sounded sweet, like little birds singing harmony. Patting his foot, he began “Little Brown Jug,” playing the first time through in warbling single notes, and then adding fifths and thirds until he gained the feel of the keyboard. He switched to “Over the Waves,” the bass reeds ringing into his chest, and he started to waltz a little, fingering grace notes and rolls, his feet moving across the bedroom as he tried not to sing. Closing his eyes, he began to dance with his wife.