The Clearing (8 page)

Much later that night, the housekeeper came into his room, a gauze nightcap on her head. “Mr. Aldridge,” she said, resting a hand on his shoulder. Always slow to wake up, he responded gradually to the heat in her palm, opening his eyes to a lantern globe hanging like a molten noose from her fingers. Randolph saw her flimsy robe and was struck by how slim she was.

“What?” he croaked.

“You better get down to the saloon.”

He came up on one elbow, sleep shedding off his eyes like sparks. “I don’t . . . why?”

“Mr. Byron’s in there, and I hear a lot of yelling coming out.”

He got up and dressed, walking blindly out into the street, stumbling around a broad puddle lying like a filthy mirror, the moon imbedded in it like a vandal’s rock. He fell out of step to avoid a mule dropping, and the pile moved, uncoiling toward the canal.

The saloon was almost invisible, darkness within darkness, the green planking reflecting no light, the windows kerosene-dim. Rising shouts rang out of the Negro side and mixed with the sounds of bodies drumming the floor. The entry was blocked by white mill hands looking in. Randolph elbowed through the stinking crowd and into the heat and smoke. Razors winked in the lantern light, and four big men were squared off, beaded with sweat, bleeding, stunned with drink, their eyes showing that the mind had been turned off and something else was in charge. The mill manager looked around him and was afraid. Every Negro in the place—at least fifty of them—was arm-flapping, hollering, toe-walking, whooping drunk and ready for blood, anyone’s.

He saw Byron standing against a side wall, staring and motionless. “Talk to them,” the mill manager shouted.

His brother motioned with a hand to the center of the room, where fighters were circling, waiting for an opening, blinking their eyes free of sweat. “This is the result of my talk,” he called back. All four combatants were lumped and scuffed, as if they’d spent the whole night beating on one another.

Byron pulled his pistol and fired a shot through the floor, calling out for them to stop. A tall wave of surprised cursing broke over the room, and one of the fighters swung his razor at the man across from him. The concussion of the pistol’s second shot bent every back in the saloon and the worker fell dead, a bullet hole through the bandanna on his forehead. Byron holstered the Colt automatic, walked over to where the mill hand was jerking facedown in the sawdust, and gathered a fistful of his triple-stitched shirt, dragging him to the front door like an overloaded suitcase. He looked back at a man who was folding up his razor and told him, “If it wasn’t for me you’d be holding your windpipe together right now.” A cloud of quiet settled over the building then. Even the white onlookers said nothing as he dragged the corpse out to the porch and set it on the splintery boards. “Who knows him?” he called out. No one said anything. The men seemed to be concentrating on the bottoms of the dead man’s boots.

Then a saw-sharpener, the target of the dead man’s razor, wavered through the doorway. “He go by Griggs. His mamma work for the Palmers over in Shirmer.”

“You owe me,” Byron said, reaching out an upturned palm. “What’s your name?”

“They calls me Pink.” He gave up an ivory-handled weapon.

Byron looked down at the body and then at his brother, who was standing speechless on the porch. “If you can find a sober carpenter, tell him to make a box to ship him in.” He walked off the porch toward his house, slogging through a lake of rainwater spread out like black fog alongside the commissary.

The mill manager turned to Anthony Galleri, a small, dark man with a tarry mustache. “For God’s sake, cover him up.”

“All I got’s a tablecloth,” he said, looking down at the body.

“That’ll do. Please.”

“Okay.” Galleri said, raising his shoulders. “But everybody seen him already.”

Randolph returned to his house and sat on the bare porch steps, struggling with visions of the killing. He’d been there a full five minutes before sensing a delicate movement of cloth behind him, and he turned and saw the outline of the housekeeper sitting with her back against the wall at the end of the porch. The thought that it was too hot for her to sleep crossed his mind and kept on going.

“Mr. Aldridge, how bad was it?”

“The constable had to kill a man.” Saying this made it real, and he closed his eyes.

“Who was it?” she asked quickly.

“A Griggs boy from Shirmer.”

“I don’t know him.” He heard her stand up. “But Mr. Byron, he didn’t need that.”

He thought about what she meant. When he turned around, she was gone like a fragrant smoke.

He began to wonder if his brother couldn’t have stopped the fight in some other fashion. And why, after the death, had he been so calm? He remembered his grandfather, who had helped Sherman to kill many a Confederate. He was a bilious and crowing old man, crying for every crook mentioned in the newspaper to be reformed on a gallows. He could have passed on some flaw in the Aldridge bloodline, the ability to kill a man as if he were a fly biting an ear. Looking out between the dark locomotive shed and the sleeping mill, he saw the kerosene light in his brother’s windows, and wondered if Byron could sleep after what he’d done. As though in answer, from that direction came the thin and scratchy vibrato of a violin pleading in the unforgiving woods, and a cloying, nasal voice singing of a postman whistling up the walk:

He little knew the sorrow that he brought me
When he handed me a letter edged in black.

CHAPTER FIVE

The next morning Randolph walked to the mill, determined to see only the ground and not the saloon porch where a body lay covered with a red-checkered oilcloth, its dread-naught boots jutting out into the sunlight. In his office he cranked the wall phone and raised the agent.

“Southern Pacific Railroad speakin’.”

He looked at the floor. “This is Mr. Aldridge. I want you to call Mildred Griggs at the Palmer House in Shirmer and tell her that her son that works at Nimbus has died. Can you do that?”

There was a long pause on the line. “I’m writing all that down,” the agent told him.

“Can you load a coffin on the one o’clock?”

Another pause. “Are you paying the freight?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I guess you’ll send the box up on the log train.”

“No, you ninny, I’m going to fly it out in an aeroplane.” He hung up hard, and even though the sun was not strong yet, he went to his desk for a drink of brandy. The office door opened and his brother stood in the frame, unshaven, his hat in his hand.

“Rando. You call out yet?” The voice was cheerful, but the face was not.

“Just now. Have a seat.” He motioned him into a chair near his desk.

“I saved that other man’s life, you know. The one that calls himself Pink.”

The mill manager chose his words carefully. “I was sorry you couldn’t have stopped it earlier.”

Byron shook his head and looked at his hat. “When they’re that drunk, almost nothing will stop them.”

Randolph tried to see into his eyes. “You couldn’t have done something else?”

“The card dealer had said aloud that Griggs was cheating.”

“What dealer?”

“Buzetti’s man. I think
he
was cheating and just blamed it on Griggs. He slipped out before you got there.” Byron was turning the hat in his hands. “It doesn’t bother me that I shot him. I had to do that.” He looked up. “What if that roomful had turned on us?”

Randolph remembered the press and smell of wild, drunk men. “My Lord.”

“I didn’t feel anything after I did it, if that’s what you’re wondering. Right now, I’m ready to go to the dance.” He made a horrible smile, showing all of his teeth at once.

His brother didn’t know what to say. If lumber was miscounted, or a steam engine broke down, he could tell someone what to do, but Byron’s broken self was beyond his ken. Still, he knew he couldn’t give up on finding some way to reach him. He looked over at the assistant manager’s spittoon and asked, offhandedly, “By, tell me about France.”

His brother flipped his hat on askew. “You read about it in the papers, didn’t you?”

Below them in the mill, the big saw cut into the day’s first log, and the building trembled, the office windowpanes buzzing in the sashwork.

The weather turned markedly hotter, giving the woods the motionless heat of an oven, and extra boys had to be hired to lug fresh water out to the crews. The camp was overrun with water moccasins, and a box of cheap pistols was sent out to the woods foremen.

Randolph, recovering from an ambush of diarrhea, decided to get away from the mill yard, riding the narrow-gauge steam dummy a mile south to watch a team of cutters take down trees near the canal. At the end of the line he watched two Negroes in sopping shirts smear kerosene on their thin felling saw and swing it against the base of a notched cypress five feet in diameter, working the blade into the trunk until the metal jammed as if welded. They drove wedges into the cut with blunt-backed axes until the blade was free again. A boy gave them several dippers of water each, and they finished the cut, their eyes on the tree, listening for the first deep cracking sound. They backed off as the wood groaned and the body fell away, smacking the swamp like a tugboat dropped out of the sky.

The men looked as though they’d been sprayed with fire hoses, and the mill manager saw mosquitoes riding their sweat. One man pulled a rock of salt from his pocket and put it under his tongue like a lozenge. Two shorter men carrying a wide saw, glossy as a gun barrel and stippled with silver-tipped teeth, topped the tree and bucked it into sections, stopping to blow and drink between cuts, their felt hats sagging to their eyes. Randolph watched a filer wade up through calf-deep water to sit on the stump and sharpen the felling saw, polishing each cutting tooth with a small file and swaging the rakers with a little hammer, his care telling that unless the teeth were like razors, leaving woody ribbons on the ground instead of sawdust, the fallers would work themselves dead on but a few trees.

Randolph felt feverish and slumped against a trunk as his mind juggled and flashed. It was a good thing, it occurred to him, that his brother hadn’t killed a saw filer. Immediately his face flushed with the mean truth of the thought, and he slogged back to the wheezing locomotive, instructing the engineer to return to the mill. “I need a drink of cold water,” he explained as he climbed into the cab.

“Be sure to check it for wigglies,” the old man said, pulling the Johnson bar against his thigh and cracking open the throttle. The locomotive bunched up its train of four loads and lurched backwards. The engineer left his throttle and bent down to toss several wood slabs into the firebox. “When you going to send me another fireman?”

Randolph drew out a yellowed handkerchief and wiped his face. “What happened to the man you had?”

The engineer didn’t turn from his fire. “Your brother kilt him.”

For days after the shooting, the mill manager spent a great deal of time looking out the high window of his office into the trees. His dead worker had been shipped off like a faulty machine returned to the manufacturer, and no one seemed to question what had happened. He expected that eventually somebody would come to interrogate him—no worker could be that powerless, that unloved—so he was not entirely surprised one day when he finally saw, after the lumber train had whistled its return from Poachum, a short man with wild white hair shambling through the mill yard toward the Negro quarters. When the noon whistle shook the windowpanes, he heard a knock at the door and Merville, the town marshal from Tiger Island, walked in, his elbows turned out a bit from his sides, imparting a locomotive-like oscillation to his corky arms. He was hatless, even though the day was white hot.

“Aldridge, that right?”

The mill manager nodded. “You’re the law in Tiger Island.”

“Today,
oui et non
. The parish sheriff called and deputized me on the phone.” He put his hands in the pockets of his baggy gray pants. “He asked me to come check on that colored boy what got shot. I been down in your quarters talking to the people.”

Randolph waved him to a chair across from his desk. “Why didn’t you talk to some white workers first?”

The old man’s eyes were little gray balls quick with elemental judgment. “It wasn’t no white man got killed.”

“What did they say?”

“They said the boy got what he had coming. If
they
say that down there,” he pointed to the Negro side of the mill, “then, me, I don’t have to ask nobody else.”

The mill manager reached into his desk and retrieved two glasses and a bottle of brandy. He wanted to cut his mind loose from its moorings. “Here’s a drink, if you want it.”

The marshal saw the glass and pulled his chair close. “Colonel Palmer, he called the parish people from over in Shirmer. The momma wanted to know for sure what happened. I’ll tell her what the men back there said about the damned dago dealer, and she’ll have to live with it.” He took a sip of the brandy and shook his head. “
Mais,
you got to tell your brother to take it easy. Ten years ago he could of shot up the whole place and the news, it wouldn’t travel much.” He motioned with his glass to the telephone. “Now, some people can ring up a newspaper, and it’s getting harder to hide every little thing.”