The house Lillian had rented he thought to be wastefully comfortable, so bright it hurt his eyes with its white plaster medallions and ivory walls, brass light fixtures and beveled-glass doors. The deep porcelain tub, however, was a blessing, and he was glad to stand up after a bath and not have his buttocks stippled by galvanizing and impressed with the number 3.
On Sundays they would walk on a real sidewalk to church, but Randolph would still watch his feet, expecting a water moccasin in any sunny spot. The minister was elegant and bright, as straight in his back as he was in his thinking. To the mill manager he looked like some rare intelligence hired for a large fee, and the stained-glass-washed air around him was fragrant with logic.
Lillian began to fit in with the New Orleans culture, learning to cope with the hot afternoons and palate-tingling food. He was afraid that she would be lonely and homesick, but for once she seemed delighted to be out on her own, away from both her dour family and his father, who lately had railed more or less exclusively about responsibility and money. She no longer complained that Randolph was dull and made clear how proud she was of what he was attempting with Byron. Even her complexion, he thought, had improved in the humidity.
Sunday nights he rode the windy coaches of the westbound mail, rocking back into darkness. The train crossed moonstruck alluvial farms by the river, then a grassy, water-haunted prairie, plunging next into the old-growth swamps where everything slowed to the pace of a hunting reptile and the skirted trees threw back at him the crashing of the coaches’ wheels. Poachum was only seventy miles from streetcars, jazz bands, sane religion, and theaters pearled with hundreds of lightbulbs, but when he stepped off the train at the station whose only illumination was the backwash from the locomotive’s headlight, the settlement seemed to be in the jungles of Brazil.
Sales preparations he previously had completed on Sundays had to be carried over to later in the week. One Monday in early October, an hour earlier than usual, the housekeeper struggled to wake him, her thin fingers set deep in his well-fed biceps.
“What?” He couldn’t even see her.
“You have a tying-up to do.”
He rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands for half a minute. “Oh, Lord.”
“The men are on the porch.”
He sat up, pulled on his clothes and boots, and at the front door she handed him a lantern. Two somber, bearded mill hands and Byron, stiff as cardboard and silent, stepped off with him down to the commissary. Randolph unfolded a big jackknife key and unlocked the store, the bearded men going inside and soon coming back out with a crated cookstove between them that they loaded onto a two-wheeled mule cart. Byron sat on the tailgate, his straw cowboy hat slanting in his eyes. By the time they got to the last cabin in the Negro quarters, a gray light had come up over the treetops. A large black faller wearing new overalls stood between the cabin and the rutted lane, and next to him a woman held herself in a sideways slouch, her head bound in a red turban. The mill hands knocked the crate apart in the yard and assembled the stove, tightening bolts with their fingers. After the lids were on and the lifting keys stuck into them and turned forward, they stepped back and assumed the posture of witnesses.
The mill manager came forward and cleared his throat, trying to remember their names. “Led Williams, do you want this stove to go into this house?”
“Yes sah,” the man said, nodding gravely.
“Nellie Jones, do you also want this stove to go into this house?”
The woman put a hand on her hip and looked the mill manager in the eye. “That’s a fact,” she said, spitting expertly on the stove’s long shadow.
Randolph motioned to the men, who picked up the range and walked it through the front door and into the rear of the house, dropping it under a new crock flue pipe set in the wall. When they emerged, the man and woman stepped up out of the yard through the doorway, turned, and stood in the frame, looking outside.
Randolph felt the urge to raise his hands toward the sky, so he did. Then he was at a loss for what to say, feeling pagan, drawing magic from the clouds. Finally, he told them, “You’re together now. I guess you know what that means.” He brought down his hands. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you, sah,” the man said. The woman nodded once, spat another brown jet into the yard, and turned toward the rear of the cabin.
Byron replaced his hat and motioned to the doorway. “I won’t have any more trouble with him in the saloon. She’ll keep him straight.”
“You think so?”
“Better than I can,” he said, climbing back onto the cart.
Randolph returned to his house and ate breakfast, glancing repeatedly at May. “That’s the fourth hitching-up I’ve done. How do I handle a divorce?”
She poured him more coffee with one hand and gave him a dollop of cream with the other. “Get somebody to throw the stove in the yard. Send the man back to the barracks, and give the woman train fare to her mamma. Buy tickets for her little chaps, too.”
“That’s it?”
She thought a moment, her lovely gold-flecked eyes floating between him and the window. “What else could happen?”
He broke open a feathery biscuit. “How long were you married?”
She pursed her lips and looked at him directly. “Can I sit down?”
He looked behind him through the screen.
“Nobody’s studying you,” she said ruefully, pulling out a chair and easing into it. “I married a nice, smart boy from Shirmer, a kind, light-skinned boy named James. We came here to work and he spent two dollars to get us married by a preacher. Had to go into town and sign papers because he wanted everything right. About three months later, they had him on the log train and he fell down between two cars and got his foot pinched off above the ankle.” She worked her hands in her apron as though trying to scour something off her fingers. “I tried to care for him, but he wouldn’t stop bleeding. Mr. Byron, he came over and tried some things they taught him in the war, but it didn’t do any good. After two days he got fever, and I wanted somebody to take him to Tiger Island.” She glanced out the kitchen window. “I found out the doctor there wouldn’t work on colored. Mr. Jules finally got it set up so that the railroad would carry him in the baggage car to New Orleans. But the morning we were going to load him, he passed.”
Randolph pushed his coffee cup away and made a face. “I’m sorry.”
She looked at him then. “I learned something, though.” She reached over, took his empty plate, and placed it in her lap. “I know who I am, and I’m not too proud to be colored. But I know what I look like. I understand that the main reason people know I’m colored is my old daddy out there. But when he’s gone, I can take what I’ve got set aside and head out.” She stood and threw the plate into the dishpan. “I’m not going to be somebody a doctor won’t touch. No, I’m not.”
He rose and went over to her, studying her face. “You can pass, and when you can get away from here, I’ll get you employment elsewhere.” She was tearing up, so he took her fingers and pressed a thumb on the back of her hand.
“Mr. Jules gave me the idea last year,” she said. “He says up North some of the quality folks are Jews, Spaniards, and all kinds I can be taken for.”
“You’ve been speaking to Jules?”
She nodded, looked at her hand in his, and straightened up. “Some days before you got here, I went with him. But Mr. Jules felt guilty, and he was scared his wife would find out, so we just went the one time.”
“You slept with Jules?” He remembered how the big assistant manager would sometimes scream at the saw teams, calling them “rafts of worthless niggers.”
She shrugged. “That sap was from good white oak.”
At that moment, he sensed how infinitely trapped she must feel, but before he could say anything, he heard the scuff of shoes on the back steps and she pulled her hand away.
A man wearing a pointed hat wrapped with a red silk hatband walked up out of the yard to the screen
door and began gesturing with his hands. “Ey. I don’t want to in’errupt, but I’m lookin’ for the manager.” His eyes were dark and hard and bounced back and forth between the two of them in the kitchen. “Can I come in?”
“I’m Aldridge. What do you want?”
“Joe Buzetti.” He straightened up and put his fingers through the handle.
The mill manager pushed the door open in his face and walked out onto the porch. “How’d you get here?”
Buzetti looked at him, glanced inside at the housekeeper, then shrugged. “I got a motorboat can come from Tiger Island in about ninety minutes.”
Randolph looked over at the canal, where he saw a long skiff and two men in it tending a gleaming three-cylinder inboard engine. “What brings you out here?”
“I got a little business to talk.” He looked over his shoulder across the sun-stricken mill yard toward the saloon. “Normally I’d send somebody, you know. But an important man like yourself, I thought I should come myself.” He spread his hands out before his waist, as though offering himself as a present.
“What business?”
“My cousin, Vincente, he tells me your constable don’t want him dealing in the saloon no more.”
The mill manager nodded. “He killed my chief engineer, for God’s sake.”
Buzetti put up his palms. “Ey. It’s a habit. He was in the war, you know? He kill five or six of them Dutchmen before breakfast.” He laughed.
“He’s killed his last Dutchman around here,” Randolph said.
Buzetti raised a thumb and forefinger and brought them together slowly, in front of the mill manager’s face. “Vincente. He and me we kind of close, you know?” He lowered his hand and bobbed his head to the right. “If I replace him out here it might be with somebody worse. My cousin, he been out here pretty long, and this the first time you got cause to complain.” He made a motion, a little starburst of fingers. “He’s sorry about the guy. He told me he had to do it, and tried to hit him where it wouldn’t be, you know, fatal.”
Randolph put a hand up and leaned against a porch support. “He shot him four times with a .45.”
“Hey, you let Vincente come back I’ll tell him to carry a Luger. In the war, I seen a kraut dump three or four Luger rounds in a big farmboy and it didn’t even slow him down.”
Randolph looked at the man’s hat as though it offered some clue to the inexplicable reasoning of the brain beneath it. Growing serious, Buzetti turned sideways and looked down. “Ey, your brother pushed Vincente around some already. He coulda done your brother anytime. He held back, you know. He’s just interested in the family and the poker game, not no sad sack constable. The next guy I put in could be some young New Jersey guy who don’t give a shit. Who knows?”
The mill manager looked at the man’s slippery smile and wanted to plant a fist in the middle of it. He glanced over at the thugs, now standing on the canal bank. “You know what I’m thinking, don’t you?”
Buzetti shrugged. “Scuzi?”
He leaned back against the wall. “I could call up some sawyers to feed your ass to the alligators in the millpond.”
Buzetti laughed again, a hacking noise. “Yeah, that’s right. You got lotsa people do what you say.”
When he heard this laugh, Randolph understood that Buzetti lived in a world where a house could be burned for ten dollars, a tree spiked for twenty, a man sleeping next to his wife shot dead for a wad of five-dollar bills.
Buzetti sniffed, seemingly disappointed. “I thought you had good sense, you know? I thought you was worried about your brother’s welfare.”
“You could talk to him yourself.”
Buzetti blinked. “Last time we talked, my place of business fell in the river.”
Randolph looked again at the hat, its foreign angles and too-bright hatband. There were things he did not understand, so he decided to be cautious. “I’ll talk to him,” he said, turning inside.
“Fine. That’s fine,” Buzetti called after him.
Randolph watched him swagger over to where his men waited in the shade of a discarded boiler, and they all laughed and started toward the saloon.
Coming up from behind, May cleared her throat and said, “Throw him to the alligators, huh?”
“What?”
“Your talk is changing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look out,” she said, hefting a pan full of gray water and heading through the door. When she flung it off the little back porch, her father, sitting in the shade of his cabin, looked up but seemed not to see her. A hot wind began to push down the weeds along the fence. “I mean this place is changing you.”
“Nonsense.” He followed her out into the chicken-scoured yard, pretending to examine the smoke rising from the mill’s stacks. He knew she was waiting for him to look at her, and when he did his eyes fell to her billowing apron, where her hands blended into the cloth.
Randolph convinced his brother that Vincente should continue as the dealer. In return Buzetti told his cousin not to carry his big Colt, that if he felt threatened, he should deal with his back to the corner of the room. But the first night of renewed gambling, Galleri took Byron aside and told him there was a Luger in a cigar box under the dealer’s chair. When he heard this, he laughed and asked Galleri to fix him a tall drink.
The mill manager continued to ride off to New Orleans on weekends feeling as if that were the strange world, the big city, unreal in its pleasures, in the whiteness of his wife’s house, in the pale and giving body that enveloped him like a glowing cloud on Saturday nights and sometimes on Sunday mornings when the deep steamship whistles floated up the river and the vegetable man sang out of cabbages and beets, bananas and plums, muskmelons and grapes, the harness of his wagon jingling down the brick streets. But sometimes when he heard the vegetable man’s voice rising pure, two blocks away, Randolph thought of the German and his dying song, and again he would try to figure out whose fault it was the engineer was dead: Vincente, or himself, or Buzetti—or a war that had taught so many how to kill.
Randolph began to give the agent at Poachum twenty dollars a month to alert him at once if any suspicious men came into the station, men not dressed for the woods, men with big mustaches, striped suits, flashy hats. When Jules rode into Tiger Island for supplies he brought back the news that Buzetti had repaired his barroom, brought down a new raft of cousins and soldiers. A Chicago madam, yet another cousin, had set up a new whorehouse.
One afternoon the phone rang in the office and it was Merville.
“Mr. Aldridge, you there?”
“I’m here, marshal.” Randolph smiled at the old man’s voice. “What can I do for you?”
“I got a bill from the city for twenty-three dollars. The burial plot for that engineer what got killed out at your place. Will you pay that?”
Randolph closed his eyes, wondering how long such reminders would show up in his life. “Yes. Send the invoice and I’ll take care of it.”
“All right.” Then Merville’s voice brightened. “This new line is something. The mail woulda took ten days. I remember the time I’d have to lug a city bill that needed some face-to-face explaining out to Shirmer on horseback, and it would take me two days on the road. Hell, a car trip would take me a whole day. Now it’s over in a minute.”
The mill manager thought about this. “That’s right.”
“While I got you, can you tell me if Galleri got him a big storage shed out there?”
“Why, no. I think he’s got a little attic space, that’s all.”
“I heard Buzetti was bringing in cases of stuff from Cuba. I was kind of wondering where he was storing that. I can’t even figure how he’s bringing it in.”
“Why’re you asking? You people don’t seem too worried about alcohol.”
“I just like to keep my finger on things,” Merville told him. “It’s the stupid finger what gets burnt.”
Even in November the swamps steamed, but overnight the weather c
ame down cold and hard as a hammer on the fingers, a blue wind blowing the long flags of Spanish moss to the south all day as the men worked on in their light clothes. At quitting time, a skim of ice was forming in the shallowest puddles. Two days later, fever swept through the camp, and new men had to be hired. One morning, Jules came into Randolph’s office with a large Negro following behind him.
“Mr. Aldridge, this buck wants work in the rack yard.” He jerked a thumb sideways. “Says he knows you.”
The mill manager looked over at a very dark man in shirtsleeves, barefoot, a hemp cord for a belt. He was about to ask Jules when he’d started recruiting hoboes when the office bulb ignited a black streak of lightning running down the man’s face. “So you made it,” Randolph said.
“Yas suh. I healed up and stayed on the Newman.” He turned his head to let the scar catch more light. “You patched me up good.” His features didn’t move when he spoke. His was a face prepared to show nothing.
“Why’d you quit the river?”
“Boat hit the lock wall at Plaquemine and broke half in two.” He looked at the floor. “You hire me and I be grateful, boss. I got a good back and no rupture no place.”
The scar ran thick as yarn. Randolph nodded toward Jules. “Put him on and see how he does.”
“All right,” Jules said. “What’s your name?”
“Clarence Williams. I from ’round Vicksburg.”
Randolph thought of something. “Did your engineer live through the sinking?”
“Mr. Minos?”
“Yes.”
“He on the bank cussin’ right now.”
“Jules, go find him and hire him on. He’s that old policeman’s son.”
Jules stood in the door and reached into a coat pocket for his plug. “He any better than the German?”
Randolph looked again at Clarence William’s face, at the wholeness of it. “Yes, I’m sure he is.”
“I do you proud, suh.”
“Go by the commissary and draw a pair of boots against your wages. By the way, what happened to the waiter on that boat?”
The Clearing: A Novel Page 14