“Pittsburgh money, know what I mean? Whitebread from smoketown.”
“No mixed breeds.”
Buzetti looked away. “You really do to that banker what they said?”
“What. What lies you heard?”
“The snake thing, which I didn’t believe. I can’t touch no fuckin’ snake.”
Crouch dropped his gaze and looked at his shoes. “Oh, that.”
“You want a drink?” Buzetti finally asked.
Crouch waved the offer away with the back of a hand.
“A cigar?” he asked nervously, then added, when Crouch looked at him, “Ah, of course, you don’t want that. The smoke gets in your eye.”
The tall man stood up and put a hand on Buzetti’s shoulder. “Cousin,” he said, in a voice terrible to hear, “don’t try to make me laugh.”
The saloon had been closed on Sunday for two weeks straight. The next Monday morning, the mill manager saddled the horse and splashed to the office through a foot of tea-colored tidal backwash blown up out of the swamp by a south wind. The horse stepped into a shallow ditch, stopped, rotated its ears toward the planer whining behind the office, got its bearings, and walked according to the sound. Randolph could handle the horse easily during the day, when all the machinery was steaming along and telling it where things were, but at night the animal would balk in the baffling silence. Galleri had said that the horse was blind because it had been poisoned. A mill hand who had been fired by the previous manager had fed it seed treated with mercury. Sometimes the mill manager envied the horse because it was never spooked by sudden motion and couldn’t worry about things it could no longer see, its life simplified by tragedy.
Randolph reined up at the office door, noticing a piece of paper on the step held down by a firebrick. The typed note read, “Open up the saloon. If you not going to do this, you pay.” At once he suspected the hard-drinking chief engineer, a comical, red-faced German who wore a little plug hat and roamed the plant studying steam lines for leaks, and who kept a typewriter in his closet of an office. The mill manager balled the note up and tossed it toward a wire basket inside the door. The German would have to think of some other way to get his whiskey.
A week later he was making his daily round through the roaring mill instructing Jules, who listened and nodded while working a half plug of tobacco around his mouth. In the boiler shed they stopped to watch the men throw slabs into the furnaces, and Jules called the German over, slipping a finger under one of the man’s suspenders. “Why you got the water level so high in the boilers?”
The engineer pulled off his canvas gauntlets. “Die Schwartzen forget sometimes to run the pump. You want I should let the water go under the firetubes so they melt?”
Jules looked again at the water gauge and then jerked at the suspenders, pulling the engineer toward him. “Listen up, Hans, I don’t need to be lied to by no rummy. You’re carrying water high so you don’t have to watch and can sneak off for some schnapps.”
“It is no problem with the boilers,” the German said. “I watch them viel genug.” He backed away from Jules’s hand. “And I am not drinking on your time.”
“It’s all my time, Hans. You got to stay sharp.”
“I got to be happy. Here is not a happy place. I sweat and my clothes stay wet all day. The waterways stink and look like dark beer.” He straightened his suspenders and turned his back on them.
Leaving the boiler room, the mill manager and Jules climbed into the howling saw shed, where the atmosphere was not air but an excited mist of wood particles. The log carriage flew back and forth, running a trunk against a toothy loop of lightning, a band saw powered by a Corliss steam engine straining below the floor. Overhead, line shafts roared in their cast-iron hangers while a shirtless boy crawled on a timber above the noise, continually filling the oilers and placing his fingers next to bearings to feel for overheating. This boy had replaced another twelve-year-old who had gone up among the pulleys wearing a floppy triple-stitched shirt and was grabbed by a foot-wide belt and dashed against the saw shed roof; the mill manager could not bear to look at the freshly whitewashed section of cypress above him.
The lumber flew out of the saw blade, all the men talking in hand signals since no voice was equal to the thunder of the room. They drew pictures in the air and mouthed simple words through the sawdust snow. Randolph had heard that when sawyers went to the silent movie in Tiger Island, they could read the actors’ lips.
The head sawyer examined an invoice that must have called for a special order, for he held up a forefinger and pinky, a call for 2½-inch cuts. The man riding the carriage adjusted his grab dogs and began slicing a pink slab of cypress three feet wide. The mill manager’s skull vibrated like a bell, and he started up the stairs to his office when the band saw suddenly exploded into a clattering mass of shrapnel, its teeth whistling around the shed like scythes. Someone pulled a cable to stop the main engine.
Randolph turned to Jules, who suddenly was not there but lying facedown on the floor in a spray of blood. When he knelt and rolled him over, he saw a red blossom spreading across his white shirt.
Jules spat out a cud of tobacco and gasped, “What? What?”
“Let me look you over.” The mill manager brushed sawdust off him and searched for bleeding. “You’ve got one bad penetration and a few small places. Is anything hurting on your backside?”
“Naw. Just my chest.”
Randolph looked around at the crew. “Anybody else hurt?” The carriage operator, a short man wearing a bandanna, held up a streaming hand. “I lost the top of a knuckle is all. But I sure nuff ought to be dead.”
Someone down the carriage track hollered that he’d taken a saw tooth through an ear. “What kin I do about it,” he squalled, holding a handkerchief against his cheek.
“Aw, get yourself a earring,” the carriage man told him as he slung blood off his fingers.
Workers began to stand up and to crawl from under the walkways, and the mill manager saw that things could have been much worse. Two dozen shafts of light fell from the tin roof where pieces of band saw had knifed through. When he bent down and ripped open the front of Jules’s shirt, he saw several shallow cuts, and nested in the middle of them was a blue hole over an inch long. Spreading the wound with his fingers, he could make out the pebbled butt of a shard of blade steel.
He and two edgers carried him to the commissary and laid him on a counter between the cheese cutter and the accounts ledger. Randolph scissored off the bloody shirt and poured whisky into the hole.
“Son of a bitch,” Jules hollered.
“Yell all you want to.” Randall called for a light and the commissary clerk brought over a gooseneck desk lamp. “I think it’s just in the meat of you. Now, we can do this here, or you can go into Tiger Island in the next baggage car that goes by.”
Jules draped a forearm over his eyes. “Aw, God,” he said. “There’s more goes in to that place than comes back out.” He dropped his arm and looked at the manager. “You like this doctor stuff, don’t you?”
“Maybe I’m in the wrong business.” He wiped the chest down with medicinal alcohol the clerk had found for him. “But my father wanted a lumberman.”
“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 f
lail 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.”
The Clearing: A Novel Page 8