The Clearing (27 page)

Byron and Galleri waded toward the canal. “A man been pulled down by an alligator,” the saloon keeper said, his voice rising. “Just this minute.”

“Give me a flashlight,” Randolph said. “Maybe I can see him from up here.” Galleri tossed him his, and the mill manager urged the horse to step off the hundred yards to the canal, where he called out and swung the light and finally dismounted. The three men wandered for a long time, mid-calf in the bitter water, swinging their flashlights until the bulbs shrank to mean, coppery eyes. Galleri ran back to the saloon for another lantern, but when he returned and held it high, the light blinded them and they could see nothing but themselves, dirty and half-dressed, impotent against the great teeming swamp.

At dawn the wind died down and Randolph sent out skiffs to look for the lost man. The mill manager stood on the bank and listened to the oarlocks rattling over in the main pond and around the bend in the black canal, but by afternoon, no one had seen any trace of Sloan, a forty-year-old bucker who had lived in the bunkhouse. The mill manager walked to the man’s room to look for the name of a relative or an address, but all he found were four changes of work clothes, a saw file, a pair of dress shoes with one of the heels gone, a bottle of Milk of Magnesia, one work glove, and, under the thin mattress, an autographed four-by-five picture of a naked New Orleans whore.

The camp drained, leaving behind mud-coated snakes and cantaloupe-sized bullfrogs that destroyed everyone’s sleep with their bellowing. Gasping choupique lay in shrinking rounds of water, mouthing air for days, trying to swim through the baking sunlight.

On Sunday, the preacher prayed for the lost mill hand inside the packed little church and even preached to the windows, below which a hundred people stood reverently on a fibrous black mudflat as though they thought themselves lucky and blessed to be where they were. The mill manager fidgeted in the second pew, trying to think of his blessings, remembering only that the man who had been eaten was not very important to the mill’s operations. Feeling guilty about that thought, he wondered if he should give all the buckers a fivecents-a-day raise. While in church, Randolph understood that he had a small soul, but he also knew that it had been bred and taught into him by his father and by teachers who stressed that every chip of wood was currency and every minute was salary paid out, and that a manager who saved a penny a man per day could live an easy old age, at least as far as money was concerned. When the preacher shouted out that death came like a thief in the night, the mill manager closed his eyes and thought of the cardsharp and the devoured bucker, men who’d met their ends on his watch. He sang the final hymn as best he could, unable to find the tune, but he’d be damned if he wouldn’t try.

Not many days later, Randolph was in bed collapsing into a circle of welcoming, dreamless sleep when suddenly, painfully, as though a rope had been drawn around his neck, he was pulled back toward the troubled sounds of the world. He opened his eyes to the dim bedroom, and Lillian’s hands were shaking his arms.

“My God,” she said. “You’re harder to wake than a statue.”

“What?” He blinked at the silhouette of her head.

“Listen,” she cried. “What does it mean?”

It was the mill whistle, a big Lunkenheimer triple-chime, droning deep, harmonizing tones. “There’s no signal like that,” he said. “This is nonsense.”

The sound seeped into the wood of the house, into his bones. As he got up and dressed in the dark, he accidentally kicked the bedpost and cursed. The whistle grew louder, rising slightly in pitch as it warmed up, setting the windowpanes buzzing like huge insects. Out on the porch he looked toward the mill, but the moon was down and he couldn’t make out a thing. The ground everywhere was slop, so he went out back and bridled the horse, throwing on a saddle without a blanket and climbing up, giving the animal its head.

The whistle cable was above the main catwalk in the boiler room. Randolph rode up to the door of the boiler house and just inside found the watchman unconscious next to his lantern, facedown in the sawdust. When he rolled him over, one of his eyes opened but began roaming as if in search of the thundering whistle. Byron came in, along with Minos and a fireman, all of them shirtless.

“What’s wrong with the whistle?” Byron shouted.

Randolph cupped his hands toward Minos. “Do something.”

The engineer yelled to the fireman, a young man with blond hair, and he bounded off toward a ladder leading up to the main catwalk. In a few moments, the whistle stopped with a yodel and the fireman came back holding up a twenty-four-inch Stilson wrench for the engineer’s inspection. “This here wrench was hung on the cable, Mr. Minos.” He held it high for the men to look at like a mystery.

“It’s a joke,” Minos said. “A son-of-a-bitchin’ joke.”

Byron bent down and jiggled the watchman’s face, trying to bring him around. “A jokester doesn’t coldcock a watchman.”

“Oh, my God,” Randolph said. He and his brother looked at each other and the connecting glance was electric.

Byron drew his pistol and raced toward his place. His brother ran for the horse, which was confused and began to stutter-step until a pistol shot ripped across the dark mill yard, and the animal, now that it had something to aim for, began trotting toward Randolph’s house, where a woman’s scream rose more frightening than the unbidden whistle. The horse picked up its pace without being spurred, and Randolph was afraid it would run into the side of the house and kill both of them. When he splattered into the yard, he reined up hard and jumped off.

Lillian ran off the porch in her nightgown, screeching, her hands clamped around her temples. Bounding past her into the kitchen, her husband saw the yellow tongue of flame in a lamp on the counter and, below it, the housekeeper sprawled on her back.

He cried out and knelt next to her, his heart falling like a dove shot out of the sky. Her eyes were closed, her lips barely parted, and in the center of her clear forehead was a small bullet hole. He picked up her arm to feel for a pulse, then put his fingers on her neck, but she was inert, empty, no longer there. Looking up, he caught his brother’s eye as he came in. “She’s dead, By.” He could barely say the words.

Byron’s unshaven face was the color of lead. “We should’ve known,” he said slowly.

Randolph’s head lifted. “Where’s Lillian?”

“Ella’s got her now.”

In the canal a rackety engine fired up, and Byron flew through the back door and across the yard, leaping the fence. He saw the boat cutting toward the main channel. It was a fast skiff, and Byron realized at once there was nothing at the mill that could catch it. The deckhand on the rafting steamer turned on the big carbon arc light and swung it across the water, missing the skiff but giving Byron enough backlight to see that a single man was running the boat. He flicked off the safety on his .45 and tried a shot, then another, but the boat was a hundred yards away. The first slug banged a barrel on the steamer, the second raised a geyser next to the skiff, and Byron emptied the clip, hoping at least to save some future victim, but the engine didn’t waver, and in a few seconds the boat rounded a bend out of sight, its two-cylinder engine rattling into the timber.

Randolph didn’t look up when he heard his brother shooting. He knew nothing about the woman on the floor, yet he had taken root in her, and she had made a son for him. He felt this now, fully, a feeling that had come at last simply because she was dead. He’d always thought of the child as hers alone, so responsibility had not blossomed in him. But now, as Walter began to cry out from the back bedroom, he knew he was the one to go to the boy, take his arms, and pull him onto his shoulder. Walter rubbed his face on Randolph’s neck, then turned his head away, his arms going slack and trailing down his father’s chest.

Byron came into the room and snatched a blanket off the bed to cover May’s body, and when he’d finished he stood next to his brother, whose eyes were wet.

“Why her?” Randolph asked. “Why not me or you, or Lillian?”

Byron looked down. “You know why.”

He shook his head and put a hand on the child’s neck. “I don’t.”

“She’s colored, and they won’t chase him hard for that,” he said, like a fact. “You or me, or the women, Father would send down money and lawyers to force the sheriff to act.” He rested a hand lightly on the child’s back. “Put him down, Rando. He’s out like a light.”

Once the child was in his bed, Randolph began to search for reasons, and when he remembered the day Buzetti had stood on the back porch of the kitchen and looked through the screen at them, a new type of anger swelled under his breastbone like a flaw in his heart. She was dead because Buzetti had seen her hand slide from his grasp, that odd motion that always catches the eye, like Vincente’s cousin dealing from the bottom of the deck. He turned to his brother. “He wanted to hurt me deep and close to home.”

Byron nodded his head, once. “It’s how they work.”

They went out and comforted the women, and much later walked toward the mill office to make the call to the sheriff. Halfway there, they realized that the women and child were alone, and Byron turned back, reloading his pistol as he walked.

Merville showed up after daybreak, his white hair tufted up in crazy angles, his mustache drooped over his mouth. As he stepped out of the splintered skiff, its wood not painted but stained dark green with copper sulfate, he squinted up at Randolph. “How’d you know to come out and meet me?”

“A watchman spotted you coming up the canal and phoned the house.”

He pulled a white flag of a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. “Phones,” he said. “They gonna change every damn thing.”

“Where’s LaBat?”

“He commissioned me to handle it.”

“He doesn’t come out for Negro deaths, is what you mean.”

Merville drew a pipe out of his vest and lit it as they walked to the house. “I don’t have to see nothin’. What you told on the phone last night was plenty.”

“You can’t find the man with the patch?”

The marshal frowned into the bowl of his pipe. “Did you see him?”

Randolph looked back toward the canal.

“You don’t know nothin’, do you? Except who did it and who paid him.”

Randolph raised his arms and let them slam against his sides. “Is there no law around here at all?”

Merville sniffed. “Yep. We all guilty, and everybody got a death sentence.” He went through the porch into the kitchen, bent to the floor, his knees cracking like kindling, and picked up the blanket. “She got any people?”

“She told me no.”

“Get a man to make her box, then. Get somebody to clean up the blood off the linoleum and make the women come in and cook a meal.” He turned his head and looked into May’s face. “If the women don’t do it right now, right this minute, they’ll never come in here no more. The place will haunt up in their minds.” The old man sat down in a kitchen chair and stared at the blanket. “Lord, but she was something pretty.”

Randolph glared at him. “I want to get the bastard.”

The marshal pinched a hand on his eyes. “You know, some bastards can’t be got.”

“I’ll pay whatever it takes.”

Merville took down his hand and put it on a knee. “Money can’t do it. Law neither.”

“You want me to wait for him to die of old age?” He got up and pinged the back of his middle finger against the marshal’s star. “Do
you
want to die, with him still running loose and killing?”

The old man gave Randolph a long, offended look. “You know, they’s a lot of dead people what never finished their jobs.” He looked to the floor.

“I’m sorry.”

Merville stood up carefully. “Let me see what I can find out for us in town,” he said. Hobbling over to the corpse he again folded back the edge of the blanket until only the wound showed. “Small bullet,” he said. “It’s what they use, nowadays, the ones they pay to do things like this.” The two men looked down and, had they spoken of it, would have admitted to being haunted by the future, by everything taken out of it because of May’s death. She’d believed she could escape. Randolph suspected she was trapped for life, but now there was no hope of seeing what she might have done, and that was the saddest part. He’d wanted, all along, to be wrong.

After a long time, Merville stuck out an elbow, and Randolph helped him up from the floor, easing the breaking stars of pain in the old man’s knees.

By noon Lillian was in the kitchen, her jaw set, her hands darting like birds to fire up the cookstove, to pull down pots and skillets, to exorcise the kitchen with activity.

After a few minutes Ella came in warily, wearing her apron like armor over a loose housedress. She found a potato and began to peel it savagely. After a minute, she asked, “Did you ever think why you weren’t the one he shot?”

Lillian closed the firebox lid with a stove key. “He knew who he wanted. You heard what Randolph said.”

“Still, I believe you’d better carry your little pistol in your apron pocket.” She finished the potato and quickly grabbed another, desperate to keep busy.

“I wouldn’t even know where to shoot a man to knock him down. And do you actually think a killer who had it planned out, some expert who knows how to do these things, couldn’t come in here right now with us both standing with cocked pistols in our hands and not shoot us dead?” She dragged a cast-iron skillet onto a stove lid. “I don’t know the first thing about it.”