“Hot damn, I don’t know if I can make it,” he said, collapsing on a chair just inside the door, the fireman backing into the hall with a touch to his sooty cap. “Had to drive the town’s car to Poachum.”
Randolph studied the scarred tin trunk. “What did Byron do in town last night? I tried to see him this morning, and his wife said he wasn’t to be wakened.”
“He pulled Buzetti’s bar into the river with your steamboat.”
The mill manager swallowed hard. “Oh my God, he—”
“Buzetti didn’t complain to no lawman about it.” Merville pulled out a nickel-silver watch the size of a biscuit, yet he still squinted. “In a hour and a half the westbound’s coming in to Poachum with four men on it from New Orleans what gonna put your brother in the ground.” He held up his watch for emphasis. “They’s only one thing that’ll run ’em off and keep ’em off.” He looked at the ceiling and thought a moment. “Maybe.”
Randolph stood up. “What?”
“Get a bunch together, colored and white. With guns. Send them down to stand at the station. The chicken-shit bastards on the train will see it’s not just three or four men they up against.”
The mill manager pinched his lips and wondered how one might do such a thing. “Will you go to the station with us?”
He shook his white head. “No. Hell, no. I got to live next door to them slimy bastards. You way out here in the woods where they just about got to paddle a boat to get at you.” He bent over and opened the suitcase, which held six short-barrel Winchester pump shotguns with full-length magazine tubes.
“Trench brooms,” the mill manager exclaimed, for even he recognized what they were, recalling from magazine articles that the only firearm the Germans complained about during the Great War were these same weapons filled with double-ought buckshot.
“That’s a fact, yeah. The mayor bought these for the city from his brother-in-law. They loaded up with deer shot. Double-ought to start with and two slugs at the end of the row.”
Randolph picked up one of the guns and turned it over. “I can’t put sawmillers out there with these. It could turn into a war.”
Merville stood up. “Tell ’em just to flash these things. Them dagos’ll back off.”
He shook his head. “No.”
The marshal sniffed his mustache, his gray eyes ranging over the mill manager’s rounding shoulders. “Then order your crazy brother’s headstone,” he said, kicking the suitcase closed.
Randolph studied his eyes for a moment, hoping for a way out. “You couldn’t bring deputies to stop them?”
“Who’s gonna volunteer to get they house burnt down?”
“The parish sheriff?”
The old man walked to an open window and spat. “Let’s just say he likes spaghetti. Now, can you spare a colored man to ride me up the track to Poachum on your handcar? I got to get the Ford back to town.”
Walking down the roughcut stairs into the noise and dust of the saw shed, Randolph worried that if he told his brother about the assassins, he’d deal with them himself and get killed. Merville’s plan might short-circuit that threat and demonstrate to Byron that he was far from alone, so he pulled the stop whistle, told the head sawyer to kill work on the line, and began gathering the sweating saw crew, the engineer, assistants and oilers, the trimmers and chip-covered planer crew from the floor below. He told the men to go home and get whatever guns they had, then board the train.
The German engineer stepped up onto the log carriage. “What you expecting us to do?”
“Some of the bunch that spiked the log are coming to give Mr. Byron some trouble,” he said. “I want to show them that we know who they are, and that they can’t get through us.” The men moved uneasily, and no one said anything, sawdust settling like dry snowflakes. The mill manager glowered, momentarily at a loss for what to say, what dollop of self-interest to heap on their plates to convince them to go along. “Of course, maybe you all want to be around when that blade hits the next steel rod,” he told them, pointing to the band saw that was still idling down, trembling like quicksilver.
The head sawyer, a little man, the front of his hat brim pinned back with a box nail, drawled out, “All right, then.” He turned to his crew. “Let’s show the tree-spiking bastards some of our own iron.” The crews broke up without enthusiasm, but in a half hour the flatcars were loaded with nearly seventy workers: the cutoff men, a woods crew, millwrights, stackers, and pond monkeys.
The mill manager was waiting next to the drizzling locomotive when the engineer, a rawboned man named Rafe, hung out of the cab window and spat next to him on the ground. “You sure you can run this show?” the engineer asked.
“It looks like I’ll have to.”
Rafe looked doubtful. “No offense, but you ain’t no lawman, Mr. Aldridge.” He turned to check the water level in the boiler, then leaned back out of the window. “And you ain’t been in the war.”
Randolph didn’t answer for a long time. The locomotive’s air pump thumped six strokes, stopped, and a safety valve began sizzling steam. Everything seemed ready for release. “Mr. Merville told me how to set it up,” he said, feeling weak for saying so.
“Well, that’s something.”
He felt the blood rise in his face. “It’ll have to do, won’t it?”
“If you say so, Mr. Aldridge.” Rafe leaned into the engine to adjust the lubricator.
At Poachum station the frowning agent stood at the west end of the platform holding aloft a willow train-order hoop with a message attached. His arm shook as a westbound locomotive barked down on him, hot and mountainous. The fireman hung off the cab steps, squinting through the steam, and put his left arm through the hoop as the engine coasted five car lengths past the station and stopped with a hiss and a squeal. The engineer read the order and hung his questioning face out of the gangway, scowling back at the agent, who nodded his head and scurried inside.
The platform was empty, and when the conductor put down the step stool, four men slouched off with their hands in their pockets, looking as if they’d just bought Poachum for a great deal of money and didn’t think much of it. They wore new suits and white shirts, their pants shoved down into sleek black boots. The hats were right out of the box, round, felt, with a deep chop in the middle that seemed to go into their skulls. As they walked toward the waiting room, the mill manager stepped out, Merville’s borrowed revolver stuck behind his buckle. “Do you have business around here?” he asked.
The men stopped, rolled back their shoulders. One of them wore a patch over his right eye, and he held out a hand, the fingers bunched and pointed up. “Yeah,” he said. “We got the business.”
“If you work for Buzetti,” the mill manager said, his hands at his side, “you have no business out here. You’d better keep on riding.”
Another man unbuttoned his coat. “We tired of riding.”
There was a shuffle of boots as five white workers and the largest black faller in the mill filed out of the station holding the Winchester pump guns, the hammers pulled back on each, sunlight sparking on the cyanide-blue frames. The men in suits looked at one another, then back at the lumbermen, licking their lips as they thought out the math. When Randolph saw this counting in their eyes, he knew they hadn’t seen enough and probably were very good killers, former Chicago men maybe, and a thrill of fear spread through him. He’d thought running them off would be easy, but now, in a sudden spell of dizziness, he suspected he might be wrong. The train orders that the agent had handed to the engineer, Randolph had written himself. The crew was not to pull out after the passengers disembarked, and they were to do one other thing. He looked west, raised his hand, and the fireman gave a jerk on the bell cord. From the other side of the station’s roof came a rumble of hob-nail soles, and forty men appeared on the peak carrying .22 rifles, rabbit-eared double-barrel shotguns, lever-action Marlins, rusty Bisley revolvers, break-action Smiths with half their nickel plating eaten off. From around the east and w
est sides of the station came big overalled men carrying more long guns, a few holding axes and adzes overhead like Vikings. A man off the train turned his head slowly to the one wearing the patch. “Hey,” he said.
“Shut up,” the other said calmly.
“Get back on the train,” the mill manager told them. “Don’t let us see you around here again.”
Passengers in the seats next to the station began to slide below the windows. The conductor stepped back down out of the vestibule and replaced the step stool without a sound. He stared west at nothing and said very gently, as if a yell would fracture the sugar-shell calm that encased the station, “All aboard.”
The big locomotive hissed like a fuse, and the four men in the new hats slid their eyes along the roofline as though still figuring odds. Randolph worried about all the cocked guns behind him; if just one accidentally went off, what hailstorm of lead would envelop him? After a moment, the man wearing the eye patch extended a forefinger and thumb and made a brief pointing gesture toward the mill manager, then turned to board the coach.
The workers were told to knock off until three o’clock. After eating the tender fried chicken the housekeeper had left on his desk, the mill manager walked over to see his brother, who was sitting in his boxy front room reading the labels on phonograph records.
“You should have seen them, By,” he reported. “The worst kind of men, down from Chicago, I’m sure, backing onto the train like they thought we were about to blow the coach to pieces.”
His brother took a drink of coffee, spilling a little on his pants leg. “A nice little party. Who told you how to set it up?”
Randolph fell into a chair. “The marshal. Merville.”
He nodded and said, “You could’ve been killed.”
Randolph frowned. “I don’t think so.”
“Then think again.”
“Well, what would you have done? Derailed the whole damned train?” He got up again, put his hands in his back pockets, and walked to the window, gazing out.
Byron held up four trembling fingers. “He sent this many men,” he said quietly, waiting for his brother to look back at him. “So you showed your strength, and they took off. And you think you’ve won?”
“That’s just it,” Randolph said, settling back in a chair. “When they saw we had the guns, the jig was up.” As he said this, he felt like a character in a dime novel, and looking at his hands, he saw that they were pale.
“Well, that’s something,” Byron said in a mocking voice. “It could have been like that in 1914. The Frenchies could have said to the Germans, ‘Boys, look at our guns,’ and everybody would have been home in time for dinner.” He threw his head to the side and closed his eyes.
Ella came to the door and gave Randolph a worried look. “I think I’ll make another pot of coffee.”
Byron opened his eyes and smiled easily. “I’ll have a fresh cup. Bring him one too; he needs to wake up.”
“What does that mean?”
His brother pointed at him. “Did one of those fellows wear an eye patch?”
“Why, yes.”
Byron dropped his hand. “Tell me, did you have any doubts before the men stood up on the roof? Did you think ‘Oh my God, this is going wrong’?”
Randolph looked away. “I wasn’t aware of thinking much of anything.”
His brother stood and put a finger on the turntable. “Those four men were in the war,” he said in a low voice. “They could’ve killed you and fifteen others in about six seconds.” He shook his head. “You didn’t know what you were doing. Everybody should’ve been out in the open when that train pulled in.”
Randolph looked through a window at a bank of cindery clouds coming up from the south. “I suppose that’s what you would have done.”
“Maybe, if I’d known a thing about it.” He gave his brother a baleful look.
“Well, that’s just what I didn’t want. Had you shot them up out of your jurisdiction, you could’ve been jailed.”
“Jail,” his brother said with a bitter laugh. He reached into the cabinet below the Victrola, drew out a disk of “The Prisoner’s Song,” and soon a sorrowful, thin voice began to fill the room, the high notes sharp as a razor. “This fellow seems to like it well enough. It fills him with a sadness that he enjoys.”
Randolph rubbed his hands together, beginning to understand what he had almost done. “By, do you think they’ll come back?”
“Do you still have those wonderful shotguns you told me about?”
“No. The marshall instructed the agent to gather them for return shipment.”
Byron shook his head. “Too bad. We could use some good ordnance to—well, let’s just say it would be good to have them in the closet.”
His brother put his head down and stared at the cypress floorboards. “How in the world did we get into this?”
“Shhh, that’s not important. Listen to the song.”
“But what if they—”
“Hush, now.”
And after that record, he played John McCormack’s “I Hear You Calling Me” and another sad ballad by Alma Gluck. Randolph was fidgeting in his hard chair when a whiff of whiskey snapped in his nostrils, and he turned. Ella leaned against the door frame, pouring liquor into her coffee, and he looked at her pleadingly, holding a thumb and forefinger apart the thickness of a two-by-four. She nodded, returning in a few moments with straight whiskey for all of them, placing the bottle on a small oak table next to the talking machine.
After four more records and a generous glass, the mill manager was ready to weep, and he wondered what solace his brother found in such music. He thought of Byron’s letters from France. He’d gone over in 1914 as an observer for the Zeus Powder Company, which paid him to study ammunition consumption so they could plan their factory expansion and production lines. After traveling in France for two months and watching Germany grind Belgium into meal, he wrote home that the U.S. government, nervous about the expanding, ceaseless slaughter, had hired him to provide intelligence. At this point he began to see much more of the war than any American soldier ever would, and his letters detailed a conflict pinwheeling out of control. Then, for a few months, he stayed away from the front, and his letters contained long messages about the countryside, the cathedrals, the canal boats and ancient fortresses, but behind these descriptions Randolph could sense that something unspeakable was being left out. The accounts abruptly changed back again to graphic dispatches, one describing a train of boxcars loaded with wounded soldiers, stalled for two whole days in the winter weather, blood pouring through the floors, and that train moving off at last only to be followed by another, loaded down, creeping over the red snow.
In Pittsburgh, Randolph and his father watched the mails, but the slow stream of letters froze and shrank to terse notes, little frigid drops of despair: “Still here among the bodies,” one began. When the American army went over in 1917, Byron wanted to come home, but at his father’s rigid insistence he signed up in France, and that was the last the Aldridge family heard of him until he got off a troop train in Philadelphia in 1918.
The record stopped with the click of the turntable brake, and Randolph watched his brother down the last half inch of his drink. “By, will you tell me what happened in the war?”
“What—you think I’m like one of these records?” He wagged his glass before the Victrola. “Life puts the grooves on you and you play them back when you get drunk?”
“I want to know what happened.”
Byron poured another drink. “That would take years to tell.” His voice was coming slower.
“Don’t,” Ella said, pulling up a spindle-back chair next to her husband and resting a hand on his shoulder.
Randolph tried not to look at her. “It would help us understand.”
“Maybe, if you can keep from interrupting me, if you just let me drone on like a bee in a bottle, I could give you a slice, just a sliver of what you might call my war experiences.” He put hi
s head back in the Morris chair and closed his eyes. Ella poured herself another drink and retreated into the bedroom, the floorboards popping once under each of her steps. From across the mill yard came the whine of the planer section coming back on line. “In February 1916 I was ten miles to the rear, as usual, checking ordnance reserves, transportation, and hospitals. Oh, I wanted to get on the front line, even though I saw all the bodies that the fireworks produced, as well as the arm-less, legless, jawless casualties.”
He opened his eyes and sat up suddenly, as though something behind his lids had startled him. “Maybe I wanted to see the men going down. One morning, I struck out on my own. Verdun had been going on like a thunderstorm for two days, and the confusion was nearly total, but in my observer’s uniform I could go pretty much wherever I liked. I walked to a section of the battlefield that night with the seventh and twentieth corps of the French army. I don’t know how many thousands of men. A whole civilization’s worth, if you could call it that. Most of them were pretty young. They were sent out into open country that showed five hundred shell craters to the acre and few trenches or any type of protection, and when the Germans realized what was in front of them, why, they fired their artillery as fast as they could load. At dawn I stuck my head out of a fragment of bunker, and my field glasses showed me what I’d come to see. Naturally, the first French columns were shot down, the bodies like piles of rags, maybe ten thousand piles of rags.”
He put a hand out in front of him, palm down. “You know how a pasture looks with a whole herd of cows spread out across it, down on their bellies before a rain? From the distance, that’s how it was, those French soldiers in their big coats.” Byron drew the hand up to his head. “And the noise. I know you’ve heard a boiler explode. Well, imagine two thousand explosions like that every five minutes, because the artillery was packed in there, eight hundred pieces on that part of the line, and several hundred machine guns and a hundred thousand Mausers, Lebels, and Enfields.” He lowered his hand and rolled his head sideways to look at his brother. “Remember Grandfather telling us that at Cold Harbor the opening volley of the infantry was like—what did he say, tearing silk? At Verdun, the rifle fire was like many pieces of silk ripping and ripping without end, the pistols, machine guns, grenades, and cannons joining in one tearing thunderclap that continued day and night. Shells of phosgene gas formed white clouds on the field, and I saw about a thousand of those French boys gagging out their lungs into little lakes of blood.”
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