“More or less the same.”
“And then?”
He stood up and adjusted his gun belt. “That’s what we’re all wondering, isn’t it. Maybe I’ll go into vaudeville. I’m learning lots of songs.”
“You already know a lot of songs. You don’t have a piano out here in the swamps, do you?”
“No, a piano would warp shut in all this dampness. Rando has taken up accordion though.” His head jerked toward his brother. “I have to talk to you about something, outside.” He tipped his hat at Lillian, and the men walked out.
“Byron Aldridge, I’ve still got a lot to say to you,” she called after them.
He did not smile. “I’m sure I’ll hear all of it before long. It’s good to see you.”
Randolph followed into the front yard, stepping over a brimming rut into the lane. “She’s really glad to see you.”
“Rando, I know that. God, she doesn’t seem a day older than the last time, and still fiesty. She looks like she could brain a mule with her hymnal.”
“What did you want to talk to me about?”
Byron motioned to the house with his eyes. “Is she staying out here?”
Randolph laughed. “Would you?”
“Then she’s in town? At the Bellanger?”
“Yes, or she will be in a day or so.”
“Word will get around who she is, and that’s something you don’t want. Buzetti will find out.”
The mill manager opened his mouth and looked back at the house. “Good Lord. I didn’t think.”
Byron pulled a cigar from a vest pocket and struck a match, barely able to connect with the flame. His brother reached up and steadied his hand. “If she’s determined to stay, set her up in New Orleans. At least she won’t be nesting down right in the middle of them.”
“How much should I tell her?”
“Enough to make her lock her doors at night.” A shout racketed across the open yard, and Byron turned toward the barracks where two men wearing union suits stood next to a stump, pounding each other in the chest as though chipping ice.
September 7, 1923
Nimbus Mill
Poachum, Louisiana
Father,
The new planers have been installed and the siding that comes out of them is like bu fed red granite and “most pleasing to the eye,” as Mother used to say. After the Gulf cypress is all cut out, no one will ever know such lumber again, unless we send a piece to a museum. The price is up one dollar a thousand just this week.
Byron listens to me. I sense a slow change of heart in him for the better and hope that his war wounds are healing. Though new men come into the camp weekly and fights erupt at the saloon with regularity he hasn’t seriously hurt anyone.
I’ve been forced to hire again from the east Texas mills that have cut out their tracts. These hands are generally single and totally undomesticated, but their arms and backs are like iron. Unfortunately, this quality extends to their heads as well. These are poor people who are as hard as the lives they’ve lived, but, all in all, worth the expense. I’m continuing the policy of paying them in scrip redeemable in goods at our commissary, to keep them in camp. They live well enough, considering that part of their pay is shelter, fuel, water, and electricity. For anyone who cares for those things, it’s better than living in a pasture. I must say that labor is much cheaper and less demanding hereabouts than in our part of the world. The larger, older mills in this region have better men, family men, and they keep them. I could use fewer savages in camp.
I make a point of visiting with Byron every day. We keep waiting for the gangsters to do something, which is like waiting to be struck by lightning. He says he is sorry that you are not feeling well. That is something, at least.
Your loving son,
Randolph
He had rented a suite at the St. Charles in New Orleans until Lillian could find a suitable house to rent. After settling her in, he took a train back to Poachum and arrived at the mill after dark, exhausted, yet still having business to see to in his office. He rode the horse up to the main building and settled in at his desk.
A hard, steady wind kicked up from the south, pushing a tide that crept into the mill yard like pooling blood. He was totaling accounts when from across the compound he heard Galleri’s high, excited voice calling out for Byron. He dropped his pencil and clattered down the steps to where the horse stood tethered to a spigot. The gelding began to walk toward a storm of voices coming from the white side of the saloon and when the pop of a small pistol punctuated the general racket, the animal fell into a trot. In the moonless clearing Randolph caught sight of his brother carrying a shotgun, and he reined the horse up hard, forcing it to stumble away from what it heard.
“By,” he called.
Byron stopped. Down at the saloon, someone was shrieking, “Gott im Himmel.”
“What?”
“Do you need the gun?”
His brother motioned to the saloon. “Listen to them in there.” Another shot popped, followed by a fresh eruption of hollering. The kerosene light spilled through the windows, and the screams were voices in flames.
Randolph dismounted and put his hand on Byron’s shoulder. “Maybe, if you let it run its course, it’ll just work out. These events are, well, they’re natural, and you’re always interfering.”
Byron put the shotgun’s butt plate on the top of his boot and looked down, leaving Randolph no way of seeing what was in his eyes. “I don’t know what to do. You’re telling me to just stand here?”
“I’ve never been in a battle. I don’t know how it is. I don’t understand.” He took back his hand. “I’m just worried about you.”
“You want me to stand here.” Byron looked back at the dark house where they both knew his wife was listening. “Kind of an experiment.” Ten or twelve voices rose up in rage and a table flew out of the saloon’s dim doorway. “You want me to believe in ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Well, I do believe it. But what about those fellows?”
“Let’s go back to your porch and sit down.” He dropped the reins of the horse, which turned completely around and then stood stock still. The men walked back to Byron’s house and sat on the steps. After a minute Galleri appeared in the saloon’s doorway and began screaming like a woman. Four rapid reports from a large-caliber pistol followed, and men began flying out of the door and dropping from windows like hornets escaping a burning hive. The mill manager’s heart sank, and he suddenly felt both frightened and foolish.
The old doctor came hobbling up, his shoes and pants on, his galluses pulled over gray long johns. Since Sydney Rosen had arrived in Nimbus he’d kept his ears open for shouts and gunfire. “I can’t go down there, you know, until someone disarms those sons of bitches.”
Byron turned to his brother. “Now?” The word was barely audible.
Randolph looked away, then stood up, and the three of them walked toward the holes of light down at the end of camp, arriving in front of the saloon as two men dragged someone out onto the front porch—the German chief engineer, who’d been shot several times. He was glossy with blood and gasping out in a pleading voice what sounded like prayer.
The doctor knelt beside him and touched each bullet hole, lifted off the engineer’s short-brimmed cap, stood, and looked back to his own little house, pulling on his white beard. “Maybe ten minutes.”
“There’s nothing you can do?” Randolph asked. “Surely there’s something. My God, he’s our engineer.”
The doctor leaned against a post. “He needed a little preventive medicine,” he said, staring at Byron.
The big German’s eyes grew wide and blind, his lips moving in the old language of death, trying to say the last thing that mattered, and the mill manager got on his knees and put an ear to his lips, surprised to hear, of all things, the thinnest thread of song. A mixed-race gang of tree cutters folded their arms and watched, and a boilerman took off his hat. When the engineer stopped breathing, a tingling panic rose through the
mill manager, and placing his hands down on the engineer’s chest to shake him alive, he felt only the dead, flowing movement of inert flesh. He then sat up and stared for a long time, saying at last, “Someone wake up the carpenters.”
Galleri stepped out onto the porch, his hands wrapped in his dirty apron. He gave Randolph a look of restrained reproach. “You gonna ship this one back to Germany?”
The mill manager’s mouth fell open.
Byron stepped over the corpse and entered the saloon, where the Italian who ran the card game was thumbing shells into the magazine of a Colt pistol. “What happened?”
The dealer kept feeding in the fat cartridges. “He was, what you say, nuts. He said I did the cheating on him.” Putting down the weapon, he pulled off his fedora, reshaped the crown, and then replaced it, looking at no one.
Inside the door lay a black lumber stacker, moaning, his face pressed sideways against a splash of blood, his left boot nosed into a spittoon. Shivering on the floor next to the bar was a mill hand cradling a broken arm. Byron gestured to him. “What did you see?”
“I didn’t see shit,” the man slurred, staring at his boots. “Mister Hans lost his pay is all I know.”
“Was he drunk?”
The mill hand had the lopsided face of a stroke victim. “It’s Saturday, ain’t it?” Half of the face was joking, the other as serious as a dead man’s.
Byron looked at the dealer. “Who shot first?”
He put out an upturned palm and bunched his fingers. “Hey, he pulls out a two-dollar pistol, sticks it here, sticks it there. Everybody gets the red ass. At me, at him. Next thing he sets it off. Two time. Maybe three.” The Italian lit a cigarette and took a long drag. “He sticks it in my face and that’s when I shot.” He flicked an ash toward the door. “The nigger was accidenti.”
“You had to shoot the German four times?”
“Hey, that’s defense of the self.” He crossed his legs and broke the seal on a new deck. “What you worried about?” He gave Byron a sliding smile. “It’s just sauerkraut. I hear you kill more of ’em than me in the war.”
Even the mill hand turned his head, sensing the mistake. “I’ve forgotten your name,” Byron said.
“Vincente. What’s it to you?”
The mill hand began groaning, trying to rise.
Byron said, “Get out of camp now. Tell Buzetti he can send another dealer.”
Vincente smiled out a cloud of smoke. “It’s no gonna work. Buzetti’s my cousin. This is my, how you say, territoria.”
Byron walked over to the table. “Listen,” he began, smiling too widely, but he checked himself when he glimpsed Randolph’s empty face looking in from the porch.
“What?” Vincente asked with his mocking smile.
“Don’t come back,” he whispered, “until garlic smells like roses.”
At dawn, the mill manager, still awake, heard someone walking on his porch, and May rattled his doorknob. “You better get up and see about him,” she said.
He found Byron outside, sitting in a rocker, smoking. Without looking up, he said, “I wish you’d been right.”
Randolph watched a snake sidewinding along the road. The smell of the mud-choked swamp rose up to him, mixed with woodsmoke and privy. “I don’t understand anything, By. I was wrong. From now on, do like you’ve been doing. Just stop it as quickly as you can.” He looked across the mill yard at the breakfast smoke creeping down the roof pitch of every paintless house, and he felt profoundly sad, remembering the drunk German’s last minute, the short string of a song, which he now began to whistle, trying to place it.
“ ‘Lo, How a Rose E’re Blooming,’ ” Byron said.
“A Christmas carol. What was going through his mind?” Byron rocked back and looked up at him. “I wish I knew, brother.”
“Yes.”
“If I’d put a bullet in the German in the right place, maybe he wouldn’t have died. Maybe the stacker wouldn’t have caught the stray shot that ruined him.”
“Just do what has to be done. But try not to kill anyone.”
His brother rocked forward and closed his eyes. “What if Vincente and the engineer had already faced off, and I had to make a choice? Hans was so drunk he wouldn’t have listened to me. What if I had to shoot one or the other?”
“You save the best one, I guess. You’ve done that before.” Randolph studied his brother’s tortured profile as he looked off toward the saloon.
And then Byron’s voice broke. “You have to decide in half a second.”
“I don’t know, maybe you should carry a smaller-caliber pistol.”
Byron shook his head. “I could empty a .38 into a big tree cutter, and if he’s drunk enough it’d be like throwing a handful of gravel at him. That’s one thing I learned policing cowboys in their shit-hole bars.” He put his head back on the rocker and met his brother’s eyes. “What exactly do you want me to do?”
“Shoot to wound. If they die anyway, you’ll still have tried to do right.”
“Leave myself open to the last shot?”
A safety valve opened up above the mill, venting an angry feather of steam, and Randolph squinted toward the raspy sound. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“Just a while ago, I used the new phone line to call the German’s folks in Houston. I had to go through about ten operators, a Kirby commissary manager, and a preacher to reach his wife. Lord, that woman cried and cried. I heard the phone’s earpiece swing and hit the wall and then more noise after that. When I hung up, I opened the window for air and thought I could hear her screams coming all the way from Texas.” Byron put a hand over his eyes.
Randolph bent down and grabbed his arm. “Come inside, By. The housekeeper makes wonderful coffee.”
His brother began to cry. “I asked around. That lumber stacker lying in his blood, his name’s Georgie. He was a good old boy and could make a two-by-four fly and land like a bird.”
“Come on, now,” Randolph said, lifting him up as best he could.
In the kitchen, the housekeeper watched the men settle at the table. “Lord,” she said, astonished. “A crying man.”
That night, when the mill was dead quiet but for the whispery exhale of the boilers, Randolph wandered his house from room to room, brooding about Hans. Back in Pennsylvania, he’d sung the engineer’s song as a hymn during Christmas season, sometimes even in German. On the third trip through his bedroom, he saw, behind a chair, a sparkle of pearline finish. He pulled the accordion against him like a lover, his fingers wandering for the melody, and the way a hand finds a doorknob in a midnight hallway, he found the song, playing his way into it, hoping the missing words would come and ride the notes against the silence. He closed his eyes and remembered snow, and then the words came one by one, like birds landing on a wire at sunset.
Lo, how a Rose e’re blooming
From tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse’s lineage coming
As those of old have sung.
Two whole stanzas returned to him, and he recalled a Christmas play in which he’d sung them with his baby voice. He worried that the song was as sentimental as one of Byron’s dollar records, another palliative to mask the true hurt of living, but as the instrument’s reeds thrummed, he thought of Hans trying to sing it and wondered why, of all the sounds of a lifetime to cling to, he chose this one. Adding another finger to the melody, Randolph sang, with the feeling of a child:
Wahr’ Mensch und wahrer Gott,
Hilft uns aus allen Leiden,
Rettet von Sund’ und Tod.
He played out all the German in his memory and sang it next in English, opening the accordion’s stops and polishing the rhythm until the straps pulled down his shoulders. Then the door to his bedroom swung open, the housekeeper standing there in a flannel nightgown.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
Near tears and surprised, he began to stutter. “I—I was singing a tribute to Hans.”
&nbs
p; May sniffed. “Tribute, is it? Mr. Randolph, you and Mr. Byron have to stop looking at everything on this green earth like it’s a moving picture.”
“He was a fine engineer,” he said defensively.
She put a hand on her hip. “Mr. Hans could make those engines run like a chicken on Sunday morning, all right, but he was a nasty drunk and smelled like a lost dishrag.”
Embarrassed, he turned away, the accordion bulging from his stomach. “I guess I was trying to find something redemptive in his death.”
She made a face. “You were with him when he died, I heard.”
“I was.”
“Tell truth. You see anything beautiful about it? Or was it just another sawmill man shot up in a poker game?” She came over and put a hand on his shoulder. “You all have got to deal with what is. Now take this whiny box off and get some rest. I heard this thing from out in the cabin and it scared me half to death.”
He unshouldered the instrument and placed it on the floor. As May was going though the doorway, he called after her, “How’ve you been feeling?”
Over her shoulder she said, “Kind of heavy,” and was gone.
Randolph shoved the accordion into a corner with his foot and watched it take a final breath.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Within a week, Lillian found a large galleried house to lease in the Garden District, and Randolph was glad to have her even further away from the mill because May would soon begin to show. He and the housekeeper had agreed on a story in which she’d been taken advantage of by a white man in Tiger Island. Once such a thing was said in the South, she’d told him, no other questions would be asked.
He began to take the Saturday-evening mail train into New Orleans, and within a few weeks he and Lillian had established a routine. At ten o’clock he would arrive at the house on Prytania Street, where she would have a hot bath ready for him, and afterward, they would have drinks and make love. Each journey was a return to civilization, and he was shocked to get off the train and see people who didn’t stink excessively, were not spattered with mud and dung, who didn’t walk around with silver-toothed crosscut saws bouncing over their shoulders.
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