The Clearing (37 page)

The reporter was both cocky and heat-addled. “Says who?”

Judgment held up a new Blue Grass ax handle, said nothing, and the reporter turned around.

The Poachum agent sent down a copy of the
Picayune
that ran an account on page three of a squabble between deputies and bootleggers, noting two fatalities, one of them Merville, and an unspecified number of wounded. Randolph thrust the paper into the cold woodstove and lit it. The next day he, Lillian, and Jules traveled to Tiger Island for the marshal’s funeral. Though he was not a regular parishoner, Merville received a funeral Mass, old Father Schultz singing the Latin in a strong but sorrowing voice that should have broken but did not. They rode out to the graveyard for the burial, and afterward, as Randolph and his wife were getting into the hack for the ride back to the station, Minos walked up. He didn’t look like himself in his pressed suit and bare combed head.

“Seems like they’s somethin’ we all ought to say that ain’t been said yet.” He looked over at a pile of dirt and the men leaning on shovels behind it. “I can’t make the words, you know? But can you follow me and Father Schultz to the old man’s house? We want to show you something that says it all.”

They rode back into town and parked in front of a galleried frame house shedding paint, its green shutters latched shut. Randolph got out and told Lillian she could wait in the cab if she preferred. Father Schultz and Minos went in first and held the door. The hall floor popped and squawked as they walked down to the marshal’s room, and Randolph noted that the place already smelled empty, carrying an odor that was the history of every cooked meal mixed with tobacco, sweat, and the dusty emanations of the housewood itself.

“You see that?” Minos pointed toward a broad walnut armoire, ten feet tall, shoved against the corner of the room. “Help me move it.” The priest put his shoulder against a side panel while Randolph and Minos pulled a corner. The armoire was stuck in the varnish of the floor, sunk into the original coat and glued to the spot with subsequent layers. Eventually they rocked it loose and swung it shuddering away from the wall.

“Good Lord,” the mill manager said, stepping away from an avalanche of weaponry so dense and dust-bound that he hardly knew what it was—a coral of straight razors, skinning knives, spiked knuckles, break-action Smith & Wesson, Iver Johnson, Hopkins and Allen pistols, pocket shotguns, machetes, ice picks, hat knives, cabbage knives, corkscrews, lever-action rifles, slapjacks, scalpels, pump guns, giant scissors, single-shot shotguns bound together with string and tape by men poor in everything but revenge, pieces of metal shaped to stab or slice, innocent pipe and tie-rod sharpened to death.

Minos looked down at the heap. “Every week he’d throw these things behind there. When we was kids, if we tried to get at it, he’d wear us out with a belt, let me tell you.”

Father Schultz bent over and examined a bayonet. “What will happen to these things?”

Minos kicked a cotton hook back into the pile. “A long time ago, he told me what to do. I’ll get a couple men to help me put it in skiffs and we’ll throw it in the middle of the river.”

The mill manager sat on the edge of Merville’s bed. An arsenal, he was thinking—enough to equip a crazed, primal army. He watched the priest place a finger on the razory edge of a hatchet, and with a shudder Randolph began to imagine all the things that had never happened.

After ten days, the mill phone jingled only with orders for siding and not with the concerns of judges or reporters. Randolph understood the cliché that news, like fish, becomes less valuable with age.

LaBat still called every day to report on his efforts to find Crouch, the one-eyed snake carrier and killer of housekeepers. And he informed the mill manager that the railroad’s investigation into the raid was stopped dead in its tracks when a Southern Pacific accountant discovered a combined total of $52,000 in the train crew’s bank accounts. The one morning LaBat did not call, Randolph was relieved, as though beginning to believe the subject no longer worth a daily consultation. But after lunch, he stood in his kitchen and stared long at the swirling linoleum before the stove, deciding to use the new phone on Lillian’s desk to call the sheriff himself. A deputy told him the sad news, how LaBat had somehow cart-wheeled down his stairs at home and broken his neck.

“It was an accident?” the mill manager asked, his voice sailing up.

“You know, it’s a funny thing,” the deputy said. “A man goes up and down the same stairs for twenty, thirty years. One day he misses that top step, maybe. How do you suppose that happens?”

Randolph found Byron on his porch, his legs crossed, his bandaged stump propped over a knee. He received the news with no expression. Turning in his rocker, he yelled through the screen, and the nasal hillbilly voice that began to unwind on the Victrola sang of a railroad engineer’s head burning up in the firebox of his engine. Randolph thought of the image. A head in a firebox, flames for eyes.

Ella came to the screen. “This is the sixth time,” she announced, shifting her gaze to Randolph as he eased into a chair. “He cried through the first three. He’s getting used to it, I reckon.”

“I went over to see little Walter,” Byron said. “He’s recovered almost all the way. Amazing how they are at that age.” He looked at his brother for the first time. “I got him up in my good arm.”

“By, what do you think?”

“About what?”

“That last man.” Just saying the words made him tired, because he wanted to be through with it all and think only about his wife, Walter, sawing timber, and moving home. It scared him the way his brother looked when he talked about the boy.

“He’s got to do whatever’s in him.”

“What will that be?”

Byron frowned. “You’re asking me to predict him like a line in a song I’ve never heard before.” He closed his eyes and listened again to the keening record. From the woods came the call of a pull boat’s whistle, far off, pained, like a white egret caught in the jaws of an alligator.

Ten days later, August came in damp and airless, capturing the camp in heat. Machinery sweated at sunrise, beads of condensation rolling like bugs off every iron thing, and the millwrights stepped up lubrication as the air itself washed oil from the mill’s many bearings. The locomotives required more sand on the water-slick rails, the women spent more time at their wash pots as towels and bedsheets soured overnight and never seemed to dry on the beaded clotheslines. On some days, clothespinned and spiritless overalls gathered more water from the atmosphere than they gave up. Jules and the mill manager worked orders and figures in their shirtsleeves, a series of lacquered engine nuts holding down their paperwork against a battery of oscillating fans. Randolph was happily distracted, calculating profits on an unexpected order for water-tank lumber. He was engaged like a machine in his mill, a moving part of the process leading from stump to farmstead in Minnesota. His work shut out worry, became again life’s real adventure. He remained on his guard, but nothing could happen in the mill yard, which, after all, was being watched like a fortress.

One day in mid-month he walked home for lunch, ravenous, empty of care, looking forward to a conversation with his wife, and came through the rear door into the kitchen, whistling, just in time for Crouch to step from behind that same door and call out “For Buzetti,” as he fired a shot into the mill manager’s back with a .30 caliber Luger. Randolph felt a narrow spear of fire in his heart and then the floor struck him like an onrushing train, the busy and blurring design of the linoleum forming the connected shards of his great final catastrophe. He arched his back and turned his head in time to see another slug shock through his left forearm and to hear his assailant calling out a rhythmic and spiraling string of Italian punctuated by another ear-splitting pop that gouged splinters out of the baseboard, a deliberate miss, he knew, to make him suffer through a last few moments of hope. Randolph saw a soft flow of white cotton at the door leading into Walter’s room and then a red blossom as his wife’s little .32 loaded with black-powder shells banged a slug into the one-eyed man. She fired the pistol four more times, once missing her target and spearing Randolph in the back of his left hand, this bullet causing the most painful wound of all. Feeling for a moment the warmth of safety, he then heard Crouch raring in pain and scuffling with someone, cursing, flinging words like
bitch
and
stupid fucking whore
and worse, his wife screaming under blows. He tried to turn over, and after two attempts, air rushing out of his mouth with a cupful of blood, he did, only to see the one-eyed man looming above, grinning like a death’s head, the dark Luger pointed straight down at him. “Have a look where you going,” Crouch said, bending closer and with his bloody fingers raising the black leaf, revealing a tortured, waxy ball, a fat yellow worm on its surface, some infected scar caused by a flame, perhaps gunpowder poured in and lit by a man wearing absurd epaulets and a gilded sword. Randolph stared at the eye, this jaundiced pain that Crouch carried with him like a fiery coal to burn whomever it could—and he was not afraid, but simply sorry. His hand ached so much that he was distracted from his approaching death, and he opened his mouth to speak—of what, he had no idea—when a church bell tolled and the yellow eyeball revolved completely back into its skull, Buzetti’s cousin falling onto him and rolling off, as slack as jelly.

Above Randolph hovered the rocky face of the Irish housekeeper, the big woman holding an eleven-inch Griswold skillet with her two chapped hands. “Sure I’ve sent the poor fellow to blazes,” she cried, turning to Lillian, who Randolph could see was also down on her back.

The doctor, drawn yet again by gunfire, cautiously stepped in through the screen door, looked around, and touched his chin. “Well,” he said, kneeling down next to Randolph and opening his shirt, glancing the while over to the still figure next to him. “That one’s head is completely flat. What’d she do, drop a stove on him?”

The mill manager opened his mouth and tried to answer, but the air for his voice was coming out somewhere else. The doctor became more focused, thumbed his patient’s eyelids, counted his pulse, watched the blood spread out from his shoulder across the olive and red curls of the linoleum. Randolph could hear his wife’s healthy crying, then doors rattling open and the sound of boots and a despairing, angry flux of voices above him in the failing light. It occurred to him that he was listening but not seeing, that the great pain welling up inside him had nothing to do with a bullet.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Many of the sawmill’s workers seemed bogged in a relentless hangover for days, as if caught up in the misery of the people who controlled their lives. Minos moped along to the commissary for cheese and bread, then came out to sit on the steps next to the doctor, who was eating sardines and crackers off a blinding square of waxed paper, neither man speaking as they washed down the food with swigs out of sweating soft-drink bottles. From down at the saloon came the sirenlike howl of a drunk. The doctor rolled his sallow eyes. “Damnation.” He bit a cracker as if he meant to hurt it. “It’s a trapper in there with Big Norbert’s cousin. I saw them go in earlier.”

Minos threw his cheese under the steps and stood up. “I’m surprised the place hasn’t been fought to pieces the past week, what with no law.” They walked to the corner of the commissary and looked over at the saloon, each understanding that the low, odorous building had lost its invisible power the minute Buzetti died. Only the momentum of the camp’s hard drinkers kept the place open at all.

The doctor put his hands in his pockets. “You know, that place’s a menace to health.”

The engineer spat into a wheel rut. “Galleri done run out of bonded and beer both. He’s down to a couple oil drums of moonshine.” He looked back to his house, down the row from Byron’s. “Wait here a minute while I check on something.” In ten minutes he was back, carrying a twenty-four-inch Coe’s wrench. Another round of hollering came up from the saloon.

“You can’t do better with a shovel?”

“It’s all I could find in the house. If it don’t work I got the old man’s pistol in my britches.”

At the saloon door, they were met by a millwright, coming out, who looked at the wooden-handled wrench. “Better not, Mr. Minos.”

“Let’s just see,” he said, sliding past, followed by the doctor. The trapper was a dark Indian who was straddling Big Norbert’s cousin, sitting on his back and drawing hatch marks on his neck with a skinning knife. Several men were trying to stop the fight, but whenever one pulled on the Indian’s arm he was met with a whistle from the blade.

“All right,” the doctor hollered, his face filling with blood. “I’m tired of fixing you dumb asses.” He grabbed the wrench from Minos and raised it high, addressing the Indian. “Drop that knife or I’ll wind up digging this out of your skull.”

The Indian turned his red eyeballs toward the doctor and stood. As the wrench came down, he grabbed the handle with his left hand and threw it spinning across the room, as though it were a playing card. “You couldn’t whup me with no two wrenches,” he said, pushing the doctor backwards through the door and off the porch, where he fell to the ground onto his back. He tried to get up but felt a brogan on his shoulder, not heavy, and looked up into a face frowning under a steamboat man’s cap.

“Stay down,” Minos told him. He wheeled and hollered at the trapper, who was turning on the porch to go back after Big Norbert’s beaten-down cousin. “Ay, muskrat.”