The Clearing (11 page)

“What in hell did the saw hit?”

“We’ll find out.” Randolph walked over to an oak display case filled with bright tools and chose a pair of needle-nose pliers.

Jules’s glossy eyes followed him. “Can I cuss you?”

The mill manager clicked the pliers once in the air and studied the fit of the jaws. “If it helps.”

The small pieces came out while Jules bunched and hollered under him. A mill hand came over with a second lamp, holding it high above the wound, as the clerk mopped the counter to keep blood from running under the cheese. When Randolph found a purchase on the large fragment and pulled, Jules called him things that made the toothless clerk laugh. But the hook of Disston saw steel would not come out straight, and the assistant manager began to pant and flail and curse. Randolph motioned for two filers to come over and hold down his arms.

“Maybe I ought to go into Tiger Island after all,” Jules gasped.

“Well, we’ve started in on it now. If it takes several hours to find a doctor over there I’m afraid you’ll get an infection. Hang on.” The mill manager pushed the blue steel pliers deep into the welling blood, grabbing and then twisting the sap-stained tooth out of the muscles. Jules crossed his eyes, arched his back above the counter, and screamed out like a mill whistle, all of which gave more urgent strength to Randolph’s hands. When at last he tugged a bright, corkscrewed shaft out of a rill of blood, two black firemen behind him laughed out loud.

“Turn him on his side and let him bleed a while,” the carriage operator suggested, cupping his ruined knuckle, and Randolph watched the wound wash itself out. The clerk fetched gauze, patches, and a little war-surplus suture kit while the mill manager washed his hands in alcohol.

“This sewing is going to sting some,” Randolph told him.

Jules was still panting. “How much is some?” he croaked. And when the clerk showed him the soft top of a woman’s boot, he gripped it between his teeth. Randolph threaded the hooked needle and decided that seven coarse stitches would hold the big wound shut. As he forced the first suture through, the only sound in the room was Jules’s ragged breathing as his teeth ruined the boot. The mill manager took his time, figuring the better job he did, the sooner Jules would be back at work. After bandaging the wound tight, he handed his patient a big soda to drink all the way down, and a half hour later, Jules was sitting up, and the clerk was using handfuls of cotton waste to mop the sides of the counter. Tending the man with the wounded ear, Randolph ran a wad of alcohol-soaked gauze through the hole and told him to go back to the mill and help install a new blade. Meanwhile, Jules’s wife, who had just returned from town on the log train, walked her husband to their house with the help of one of the filers. After doing what he could for the sawyer’s knuckle, Randolph took a long time cleaning blood from under his own fingernails, looking through the window at the mill, then back at his trembling fingers. He decided to walk to his brother’s house.

Byron was at the saw shed, Ella told him through the screen door. He could smell that she’d been drinking.

Putting his face close to the screen, he asked, “He hard to live with?”

She looked past him to the mill. “You ever see a big fine passenger train run downhill without any brakes? It’d be a sad sight if you’d see that, now wouldn’t it?”

“I’m sorry.”

She looked at his coat, which his housekeeper pressed each day after supper. “You come down to help him?”

“Yes.”

“You better get to it. I can’t do a thing for him.” She raised an arm, and started to say something else, but gave up.

“He’s a good man,” he said.

She pushed her sandy hair from her eyes with both hands and held it at the sides of her head. “Let’s just say he’s worth the effort.”

He found Byron standing on the log carriage, digging with a long pry bar in a slab of cypress, working a round metal shaft out of the wood. He picked up the steel and banged his left palm with it. “Looks like a case-hardened transmission shaft, ground to a point. Someone drove this into the tree and countersunk it so nobody would notice.”

The mill manager remembered the note left under the firebrick, and told him about it. “When I found the message, I thought it was from the German.”

“You know who it’s from now, don’t you?”

Randolph looked over at what was left of the ruined saw blade. The millwrights were already truing up a new one. “Just because of maybe a hundred-dollar take on a Sunday?”

“It’s not just about money with some people,” his brother said quietly.

“What, then.”

Byron smiled a wide, wide smile that was even more frightening than a shattering saw blade. “It’s a little habit a man picks up or is born with. He can’t be told no.”

“Well, I’m telling him. That damned saloon’s staying closed.”

“You want to wait around for another accident?”

The mill manager regarded his fingernails, still faintly outlined with dried blood. “Maybe you’re right. We can’t do to him the things he can do to us.”

At this, Byron walked off, stopped in the bright doorway, then turned and pointed the shaft at his brother. “You want me to talk to him, at least?”

“I think you better stay in camp, By, where you’re safe.”

Byron motioned to the holes in the roof. “Safe?”

Randolph thought about saw blades, nights in the howling saloon, his brother’s midnight rounds. “But you can’t talk to men like that. Talking won’t do a damned bit of good.”

“It depends on how you talk.”

The mill manager looked up at the whitewashed patch on the ceiling. Jules said the boy had been a careful worker who didn’t take chances. “So talk to him, then.”

After supper Randolph had the housekeeper heat water for the washtub, where he sat and scrubbed his assistant’s blood off of him. It had run up his wrists, ruining his shirt, and his face was speckled with it. He threw the water out the back door himself, put on an undershirt and a pair of khakis, then sat down in a hide-bottom rocker on the porch. The housekeeper came out with a damp hemp sack, lit it with a kitchen match, and threw it on the ground to smoke away the mosquitoes. He looked at her as she came up the steps and passed into the house and saw that her features were white. Her old father, he’d noticed, was not a dark man, his skin a smooth butter-scotch. She was thin and elegant, precise in everything she did. He guessed her bearing came from intelligence and the fact that she knew she was smart. When he was finished with the two-day-old newspaper passed to him every morning by the log train’s engineer, she would take it to her cabin porch and read every article, some of them out loud to her father, who suffered from arthritis and rarely did so much as walk a circuit in the yard.

All the squalling machinery was shut down, and he rocked, enjoying the quiet. From out of the twilight came the sound of the Victrola, a male opera singer’s voice winding out of place over the stumps and mule droppings. Later, a hillbilly song strummed the air faintly, followed by—given enough time for the box to be wound thoroughly—a military band and Billy Murray’s declamatory plea:

Keep your head down, Fritzie boy,
Keep your head down, Fritzie boy.
If you want to see your father in the fatherland,
Keep your head down, Fritzie boy.

And then an anguished roar cut across the mill yard, his brother crying out, “A joke! Nine million skulls spread out like gravel, and it turns into a joke sung through the nose and sold for a dollar.” A record sailed out of a window like a bat, and Ella ran from the rear door and stood in the yard, staring at the house as though it might explode.

June 12, 1923
Nimbus Mill
Poachum Station, Louisiana

Father,

Lillian has written to say she is not happy with my being gone
so long. I hope you can tell her to be patient, that when there is an
inevitable decline in the market I’ll come to see her and make
substantial plans. Of course, I have written as much to her, but it
always helps to hear it from someone else. As of now, however, sales
are very strong, and the stands we are cutting out are some of the
purest grades I’ve seen, fine grained, easy on the equipment, each
board a coin for us. We are taking everything down that a blade
can cut.

As for the incident with the spiked log, Byron is investigating.
Something has turned him mean, and I wouldn’t want to be the
man found out by him. The spike was a warning, and I am
beginning to wonder if I should let the saloon reopen on Sunday.
That would not sit well with Byron, though. He is very unhappy
about the saloon causing workers so much trouble. I had him over to
dinner two days ago (May, the housekeeper here, is a preternatural
cook) and he was sociable enough, but is still not my old brother, the
one who taught me to ice-skate and ride a horse. Gradually I am re-cementing the family connections, but as of yet he won’t begin to
consider a return north.

I have to send into town for a cage of chickens, since a large
alligator has broken down the back fence and killed nearly all I had
here. Tomorrow I meet with a representative of the Yazoo and
Mississippi Valley Railroad, who will pay a premium price for
200,000 crossties. It seems a shame to put such beautiful wood under
a greasy railway, but that money will spend like any other.

Your loving son,
Randolph

The housekeeper was fueling the stove with cypress lath while the mill manager sat at his kitchen table watching her hands move above the flames. He looked up when his brother came in through the screen door wearing a dress shirt and a .45 automatic in a shoulder holster. “Go back and tend to your old man for a minute,” Byron told the housekeeper, who read his eyes and left.

Randolph motioned to the stove. “By, had breakfast yet?” He was trying to pretend everything was normal, that his brother was not shaking and white-fingered.

“I’ve eaten.” He tightened his hands on the back of a chair. “The man who runs the rafting steamer, I want you to order him to do what I tell him to for the next twenty-four hours.”

Randolph’s eyebrows went up. “What do you need the steamboat for?”

“You really want to know?”

“It’s not that important, By. We can let them open on Sundays.”

Byron slammed a fist onto the table, the blow turning over an empty coffee cup. “It
is
that important. I know they’re going to put another game in and more slot machines. And two Negro whores to add to the two white girls in the cabins. You think you have cut-up and dizzy workers on Mondays now? Wait till they expand.”

Randolph held up a hand and said quietly, “By, I just want you to be safe. But I need you to calm down.”

Byron threw his arms out from his sides and began speaking in a preacher’s voice. “Little brother, I’m calm as can be. The only thing I want is to talk to the Sicilian gentleman in Tiger Island so we can
all
be safe.”

“Talk?” Randolph flicked his eyes down to the pistol in Byron’s armpit.

“In their language.”

“Oh, damn it.” Randolph turned away and stared at the stove.

“Do you know that Negro I saved, the one who calls himself Pink? Out along the canal today, before daylight, he saw a man spiking a tree. He came right in and told me on the sly, and I went to the woods and drew it out, just an hour ago. It was the same as the last one.”

“Did he recognize the man?”

Byron shook his head. “Not enough light. But it was a white man, he could tell that, and he had some kind of bandage on his face.”

Randolph stood up, poured himself a cup of coffee, and walked to the back door, looking out into the yard at his new chickens, Dominicks, their feathers patterned like mattress ticking. “You ought to be glad you weren’t in the saw shed when that band saw exploded. We were lucky on that one. Another time we’ll have dead men.” He watched the chickens peck the ground between each other’s yellow legs, then turned around. “What
do
you need the steamer for?”

“Just a boat ride, maybe. Buzetti’s boys might be chasing me home.” He walked close and stooped as if in submission, a joke from their childhood. “He calls them soldiers.”

Randolph smiled, shook his head, and put a hand up on his brother’s shoulder, starting to say something, then changing his mind. “The pilot’s wooding up at the lower end of the pond. I’ll speak to him on the way in.”

“Rando,” his brother sang out, bolting upright to squeeze his neck so fiercely that his eyes flashed with pain and he spilled his coffee across the linoleum.

Five minutes later, May came in through the back door and saw him on his knees with a dishrag. “Mr. Byron’s going to town?”

“That he is,” he said, standing up and tossing the rag next to the dish bucket.

“You going to let him?”

He looked at her. She was staring past him out the front window. “He’s got business there.”