Randolph was beginning to sweat, but when his brother turned to look at him, he gulped his drink and said, “Go on.”
“It was a long day, Rando. You sure you want to hear this?” He took a swallow from his glass. “Well, silence means assent. When the men out in front of me were mostly shot up or poisoned, the French generals sent in another wave of thousands, and the new men struggled up to the dead and wounded and just milled around. They couldn’t move forward and were afraid they’d be fired on by their own side if they retreated.” He took a breath and let it out slowly. “So they stayed and were shot to pieces. I saw artillery shells vaporize soldiers into red mist. I saw pieces of men spinning into the sky. And then another wave of maybe five thousand was sent in, and by then there was a pavement of bodies, and in my field glasses I could see mouths working around final words, and I thanked God I was too far away to hear. The third wave came up and began firing from behind the piles of dead, but once the big German howitzers got their range, and listen to me, Rando, because I don’t know if I’ll ever tell this again, I watched whole groups of men disappear body and soul. The shock waves from the explosions were like mallets in the face, even at my distance. Later in the day, another wave of troops went in on top of all of that. I began to vomit from just a whiff of the gas, so I crept back and stayed low, thinking it would end soon and medics would gather up the wounded. But the shelling continued, and toward nightfall the roar became more intense. For days they kept it up in that part of the field, and for weeks and months afterward the whole place stank of corpses. By the next year, they told me, men fighting on that same ground in new-dug trenches hung their canteens on the hands of skeletons sticking out of the walls.”
Randolph turned his head as though he’d been slapped. “By, this won’t—”
“I want you to be quiet,” his brother told him. “You and Father have always begged me to talk about this. It’s why we’re here, isn’t it?” He put down his empty glass and filled it from the bottle. “I stayed away from the front after that trip, until late 1917 when my services as an observer were no longer necessary and the whole country was filling up with Americans whose eyes worked as well as mine. Then I started to receive long letters from Father, each proclaiming my duty to enlist—to make the family proud. And because of his allfired pride I did, as a private. I think I felt guilty because all I’d done was watch people die, and somehow, I thought I’d get used to it, you know, to things like the entire British Fifth Army being slaughtered in one offensive. But I got more frightened with each engagement. Watching, I found out, is nothing like being in battle.
“And then there was my big one, the night thousands of us moved along a rutted road, filling it from fence to fence, and I could see our close-packed helmets moving on the hills in front like the scales on a snake. In the dark we filed into mud-swamped traverses, and before dawn everyone was packed into the forward line of trenches. The Argonne forest looked like this place here will look when we’re finished with it. I heard there were four thousand pieces of artillery on our side only, and when they opened up, well, I don’t have the words for that sound. The concussion from a siege gun behind our trench split the seam of my canteen and the water wasted down my leg. As quickly as the barrage started up, it stopped, giving us an awful few minutes of dark empty silence. In the middle of it I heard hail hitting an iron roof far off to the east, but the sound traveled toward me, growing louder in the blackness. I asked myself, What is that rattle? The hair on my neck stood straight up when I realized it was men fixing bayonets. Tens of thousands of bayonets. Whole cities putting knives on their guns. The order was given at the distant end of the line and the noise itself continued the command as men heard it and understood what to do. The fellow next to me clicked his over the muzzle of his Springfield, and I slammed mine on and turned my head to see pale hands rising and falling in the dark, the clatter diminishing all the way down toward the Meuse River. Next to me, my best old buddy, Walter Liddy, a Pennsylvania man, began to pray aloud. The sergeant came down the line lugging a box and stopped next to me. Without a word he began to hang grenades about my coat by their spoons, stuffing them in my pockets, until he’d given me twenty or so. The weight was staggering, but I felt protected by all the bombs I had to throw. Then the cannons kicked the air out of our lungs and the sergeants began screaming and pushing and we went over the top right as the German artillery laid down a wall of shrapnel in front of us. A man behind me took a shell all by himself and flew off like a rag doll in a tornado. I went down then, my back on fire with bits that had blown through my pack and clothes. It was Walter Liddy who’d got it, they’d told me later, old joking, pipe-smoking Walter. After twenty minutes, getting angrier by the second, I gathered my strength and plunged on, as they say, a hundred yards or so, to the first coil of wire where three or four dozen men hung dead and those coming up behind were stepping on their backs to get over. Some bent down to the bigger corpses and started plucking grenades from them. I saw that our loaded-down first wave was supposed to get shot and tangled in the wire, our bodies serving as depots for the other waves coming up, you see. That’s when I learned the worth of one life to a damned general. I threw all my grenades away unexploded, picked up my Springfield, and went over the wire myself, stepping square on the back of a fellow from Aliquippa, an excellent harmonica player named Angeloz. Bodies were twisted on the ground like trash paper, everywhere you could see. We all should’ve gone crazy, I guess, but there wasn’t time to go crazy, with the air around us flying with Mauser bullets. Crazy came later.”
Byron put down his glass and it fell off the table, bouncing away from his shoe, but he seemed not to notice. He turned to his brother, whose hands were covering his face. “I killed a lot of men that day, Rando. I got good at putting a 30.06 round right under the rim of a helmet, and that afternoon it was like shooting pumpkins in a field, but every pumpkin was a Dieter or a Fritz with thoughts in his head just like mine.” He stared down at his spilled glass, and his face seemed like something carved by wind out of the side of a mountain.
The mill manager put down his hands and gazed through the front door toward the saw shed where each puff of steam told of a board cut out of the heart of things. “Is that the day you took your worst wounds?”
Only his lips moved. “I passed out at sundown from loss of blood. My pack was soaked and I didn’t realize it.”
“Shrapnel?” his brother asked.
“In the hospital tent,” Byron said, moving his face fully toward him at last, “what they cut out of my back was five of Walter Liddy’s teeth.”
They heard the back door open as Ella stepped out into the muddy yard. Randolph could imagine her there, hoping for a heron to fly, a whistle to blow, for anything to move through the burdened sky and distract her from the things she knew.
CHAPTER NINE
One Saturday night, the mill manager sat on his porch, playing the accordion in the dark, annoyed that the only songs he could remember were Italian. He found the left-hand buttons for “Come Back to Sorrento,” and the deep reeds of the instrument lamented against his chest. May was sitting on the edge of the porch floor, listening silently. Randolph thought of the code down here, that if he spoke first, it would give her permission.
“Do you have a request?” he joked.
She answered as though she’d expected the question. “Do you know ‘Sweet Hour of Prayer?’ ”
He ran his left fingertips over a town of ebony domes. “Is that a favorite?”
“It’s what they sang when my husband was buried.”
He played the hymn cautiously, thinking about the long anguished letter he needed to write his wife. She had threatened to separate from him because he’d gone where she couldn’t follow, and he planned to tell her once again that after this mill cut out its incredibly rich tract, and after he’d somehow drawn his brother back into the family, he would return to her permanently. The mill manager pulled a lonely chord out of the instrument and won
dered if he was creating a fairy tale for his wife. Maybe Lillian could not be made happy, nor his brother sane. His wife was a slim woman with silky dark hair and intelligent eyes, a loving person who could not function living alone. Just the memory of her light perfume made him want to board a northbound train and leave behind his brother’s haunted face, this brother he loved, who’d pulled him from under the ice of the family pond when his cyanic heart was one beat away from stopping. He understood his wife’s need, but thought, too, that she must respect how much money his family was making from this tract. The accordion breathed out its old breath, and he closed all the stops but the highest reeds, pushing the start of a German waltz. As he trilled the bee-like notes, Randolph remembered the touch of his wife, the hand of his brother on his pond-wet shoulder.
A single gunshot thudded down at the saloon, followed by a gumbo of fiery voices. Across the mill yard, the door of Byron’s house swung open, and Randolph slid out of the accordion’s straps and jumped off the porch, running to intercept him. “By, hold up,” he called. “I want you to give me your gun.”
His brother, who’d just reached the little street heading out of the white section, stopped and looked back. “It’s two trappers causing trouble. I saw them when they came out of the woods.”
Randolph put out his hands, palm up. “Try and handle it some other way.”
Byron stared into the open palms, his eyes pulsing. “You know, the angel of death is still an angel.”
“Good Lord, don’t say things like that.” The mill manager did not know what to think or even how to think about such a statement.
Byron suddenly handed over his pistol, muzzle down. “Sometimes there’s no other way,” he said simply, then moved on through the dark toward the rising flurry of voices, his shoulders pushed forward like a man chased by a cold wind.
The next morning the mill manager sat quietly at the table while May prepared his breakfast. “You heard?” she finally asked.
“Lord.” He put his hands in his lap.
“Before he went in the white side, they say he got him a short-handle shovel. They were fighting like cats in a sack in there, and he made two big round swings and laid them out. The strangers didn’t wake up till sunrise.” She poured the coffee and glanced at his eyes. “He threw their guns in the millpond, and those men are long gone. You want some bacon with your grits and eggs?”
Because the room was bright with sunlight, he looked at her closely. Her greenish eyes showed flecks of yellow, and her complexion was so close to ivory, and her features so small, that up North she would be a different person. To have a new life, all she needed was a train ticket. “You get your gossip at the fence?”
“I know a little colored water boy. He tells me what’s going on.”
“Which one is he?”
“Floyd. He’s got curly hair and wears what you call a golf cap.”
Randolph looked through the window at the mill, which was starting up, long ribbons of white smoke rising from the boiler-house stacks. “That little boy’s white.”
“News to him,” she said, flitting by his elbow on the way to the stove.
In July the heat bore down hard on the woods gangs. The mill manager traveled to New Orleans to hire a doctor, knowing that only a derelict or a graybeard poorly read in recent medicine would consent to work in a place like Nimbus. Sydney Rosen, who’d been an army surgeon in the Spanish-American War but had lost his commission for saving a general’s life without benefit of anesthesia, climbed down creakily from the log train one hot afternoon, wearing under his felt campaign hat the sagging, gentrified face of a Confederate commander too long in the field. The carpenters had built a boxlike surgery on the side of the commissary where the man could deal with heatstroke, flu, pneumonia, malaria, broken toes, and severed fingers, and he set up his instruments there and waited inside the open door, out of the sun.
Randolph continued to watch his brother and to visit the saloon like a bored sawyer, though always alert for the flash of a shovel blade. Saturdays spawned fights the way a hot afternoon brewed thunderstorms. The men were young and strong, so built up from the daylong swinging of saws that nothing could stop them once they were drunk and brawling. On the last Saturday in July, the white side of the saloon was noisy with boots and skidding chairs as thirty or so men cursed aloud, played cards, and drank in a burled fog of hand-rolled smoke that stuck in the room like backlit cotton. Everyone was sweating in the soppy air, the floor was slick with sloughed-off mud, and the bar, a long, roughcut cypress plank thirty inches wide and set up on metal barrels, showed a puddled jumble of bottles and wet hats. At a big table in the corner, Vincente, a man with sleek, olive hands, ran the poker game, smiling thinly at the men as he raked in their tokens and drew the cut for the house, smiling even when he lost. He was drinking too much, and so was everyone else. Around eleven o’clock, a furniture-breaking contest erupted, a big ham-fisted faller slapping a stool to fragments. When a sawyer broke a chair back over his knee, a spindle popped out and struck the dealer on the ear. Vincente jumped up and shouted something that nobody understood, pulled a Colt automatic, and fired in exclamation, the slug striking a slot machine across the room.
The mill manager was nursing a hot beer at a corner table by the door when he saw his brother step in from the porch and bring up the little D-handled shovel. He walked to the back of the long room, ignoring two fistfights, and rested the tool’s point on the poker table. “Let me hold that gun for a while,” he said.
The gambler’s eyes were Tabasco red and small. “I no think so.”
Byron raised the shovel and buried it three inches into the center of the table, cutting a clay chip in half. “I think so.” The Italian looked at the blade a moment, then handed over his blue pistol in a fey, mocking manner. Byron walked to a window, ejected the shells into the dark, then tossed the gun back on the table as a bottle neck flew past his head and gouged the wall. Turning to the fighters, he grabbed the nearest one and hurled him halfway through a window, pulling out the prop stick; the heavy sash banged down on his back and pinned him squalling in the frame. The other pair stopped trading punches and stumbled out to the porch and down the steps. A boiler fireman climbed onto the table, rocked out the shovel, and tossed it to Byron, who used it to pry up the window and retrieve the fighter, a big cross-eyed boy who cursed him and took a drunken swing. Byron jerked on the straps of his overalls and threw him down in the spit and ashes, then grabbed a boot and dragged him into the yard, where he dinged him with the flat of his shovel. “Calm down, you son of a bitch, or I’ll flatten you like a dollar watch.” The boy yowled and held his head.
Randolph returned to his chair inside and sat alone watching the room come to rights, men ordering new rounds and rolling fresh smokes. No one acknowledged that he was present, and he wondered how many of them knew who he was, since Jules did all the hiring and supervising.
Galleri came over with another beer and set it down. “On the house,” he said, kneading his thin fingers in his filthy apron.
Randolph bobbed his head.
“I’m glad he didn’t hit the dealer.” Galleri swiped at the table with his bar rag.
“Why?” The saloon keeper was Italian, but according to Byron, his family had emigrated a hundred years before from northern Italy, and he hated Sicilians.
“For one thing,” Galleri said, “his damned shovel didn’t need oiling.”
The next morning Randolph awakened feeling slow and dizzy, sat up in bed, and rubbed his skull hard with both hands, still tasting Galleri’s beer, which must have been brewed in a rusty drum. He looked through a curtain across to his brother’s house. In the backyard, a sleeping man was chained sitting against a one-ton flywheel.
A water boy passed by and threw a potato at the prisoner, hitting him on the head, the man waking with a yelp and twisting around like the sick, confused thing he was. Byron came into the yard holding a coffee mug as his brother walked up.
“What yo
u got here, By?” He smiled at his brother, figuring that someone needed to.
Byron looked down at the prisoner and took a sip of coffee. “A slow learner.”
The man on the ground, who was very young, Randolph realized, looked at the dirt between his legs. “My head’s fixing to blow up.”
Byron dumped out his cup. “You’re lucky I didn’t snap it off and roll it into the privy.”
The prisoner held up his shackles. “What’d I do to get locked up?”
“I think you owe Galleri something for broken furniture.” He looked over at Randolph. “This is his second fight this month.”
“Do you know who I am?” the mill manager asked.
The man raised his head as though it might topple off. “You the boss.”
“And you’re fired. Draw your pay and get on the train to Poachum.”
The chain jingled. “Hey, I won’t fight no more. You need good buckers like me, Mr. Aldridch.” He squinted up, showing his bruised face, the olive lakes of blood pooling under his leathery tan.
“But I don’t need trouble in the saloon.”
The man wagged his shaggy head and held up one manacled hand. “I got to keep work to send money home. Hey, give me another shot, mister. I won’t go nowheres near that dago’s bar.”
The mill manager was ready to turn away, but something in his brother’s face stopped him. “What do you think?”
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