The Clearing: A Novel

by Tim Gautreaux

  My housekeeper has delivered a boy. I know you don’t approve of employees having children out of wedlock, but this camp is such a heap of hell-bent roughnecks that she can hardly cause any lowering of morals. She is intelligent and her son is healthy and fine, and I hope to keep her on as long as the timber around here lasts.

  Byron is drifting. I’ve tried to get him to go on a holiday with Lillian and me, but he says he can’t get used to more than one place at a time. He often drinks too much, which leads him to lose control and break up furniture. (Note the enclosed invoice for a new cabinet model Victrola.) I informed him that I told you about his wife, and he wouldn’t speak to me for a week. I’ve given him your letters and he has read them, but will not return to Pittsburgh. He says he must be his own man. I don’t know what he means by that. He is so injured in his mind that sometimes I tire of trying to help. At his house the other night, after an hour of listening to his maudlin records, I challenged him to arm-wrestle as we used to do. When he beat me easily, as he had always done, he accused me of giving in and said I was making fun of him, then practically pushed me out the door.

  It’s been a relatively dry spring and the camp is out of the water. I haven’t stepped on a snake in two days.

  Your son,

  Randolph

  In the evenings, the mill manager held the baby—safely named Walter, unlike any white man in camp—while May cleaned the kitchen. He grumbled whenever she offered the boy but always took him. He often studied the small face when she was out back in the cabin tending to her father, who was now bedridden. During the day, the child stayed in the small rear bedroom that opened into the kitchen, and the baby became used to the sight of him. Walking into the room to retrieve a rain slicker or pair of boots, he would pass by the crib and the boy’s arms would fly up. The first time this happened Randolph was startled with longing and regret, and he backed away, forgetting why he’d walked in to begin with.

  Byron would visit whenever he noticed that May was out hanging laundry, and he’d talk about mill business or problems in the camp, but Randolph knew he wanted to steal looks at the boy. When Walter was four months old, Byron came in and saw his brother holding him at the kitchen table, and he sat down and took the baby himself, laying him atop his thighs and gazing at his gray eyes and walnut-brown hair. He felt Walter’s ears between his fingers and looked up at his brother.

  “No,” Randolph said. “Not yours. And there’s no telling whose.”

  Byron nodded. “Fine looking little tadpole, I’ll admit. Looks like May, pretty much.”

  “That’s true,” his brother said, laughing. The baby twisted his head in Byron’s palm to look toward the mill manager, who at once got up to pour a cup of coffee, keeping his back to the table. He dared not look at the child when anyone else was in the room, because he knew what showed on his face.

  As the heat gathered throughout summer, the saloon fights seemed to generate out of the humid air. Byron had to go into the quarters at night to break up husbands and wives, or husbands and their wives’ boyfriends, answering the wink of straight razors in the dark with the ring of his shovel on bone. During June alone, Randolph was required to throw three stoves into yards. Byron had to pack the broken families out of the mill, run off hoboes, shoot snakes and alligators, knock down, handcuff, and ship trespassers and log rustlers off to Tiger Island for jailing and trial. Vincente had to be watched, warned, and sometimes protected from the men who lost their wages and wanted to kill him with their bare hands. No matter how busy they were, the brothers never forgot Buzetti and remained watchful for some toothpick-sucking presence he’d send slouching through the swamps.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  After lunch, Randolph and his wife stepped out onto the second-floor porch on a hot August Sunday and watched children playing below on the brick street. Lillian had not said much during the meal, and he imagined a certain grimness around the corners of her mouth.

  “Are you feeling all right?”

  She nodded. “Of course. It’s just that it’s time for me to make my monthly announcement that I’m not going to have a baby yet.”

  He slid his wicker chair next to hers and put a hand on the back of her neck, under her short brown hair. “It’ll happen.”

  “Maybe we’re not trying enough. Maybe four times a month isn’t enough.”

  He nodded. “I can take a night train on Wednesdays, then the four o’clock mixed back from Algiers.”

  “No,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about this. I love New Orleans and my friends in church, but I’m not doing anything here.” She swung around to him, her dress whistling against the wicker. “I want to come live with you at Nimbus.”

  He took his arm back. “It’s not healthy. It’s a slough full of the worst types of men. I only have a privy.”

  She cocked her head at him. “You know, you squeeze a nickel until the buffalo pees.”

  He slumped back in his chair. “What’s that mean?”

  “Build me a bathroom, Rand. Feed it with a cypress cistern. Run the drain to the swamp or the privy hole. And how much would it cost to add a front parlor where I could read and sew and have a little office of my own? The price of nails?”

  “You want to be down there?” He imagined her in the mornings, the feel of her smooth neck against his lips.

  “I can help you. With the mill, even.”

  He shook his head. “It’s just unhealthy.”

  She raised her chin and glanced at something across the street, then sideways, at him. “Wouldn’t it be harder for the Sicilians to bother me in Nimbus than here?”

  He stood up and walked to the end of the porch. “Maybe we should move back North.”

  “So you’ve stopped worrying about your brother? You’d rather go back to a little hardwood mill where your salary would be considerably less than what it is now? And do you honestly think that pistol you left here for me can protect me more than you and Byron?” She came up beside him, leaned over the rail, and picked a magnolia blossom out of a welter of dark waxy leaves.

  “What would you do?”

  “I could help your doctor. I could give you advice.”

  He laughed. “About lumber?”

  “About your degenerate mill town. Why don’t you hire more men who’d bring their families?”

  He looked at her sharply. “It’s more expensive. Families need larger cabins.”

  “More expensive than all the work lost to the savagery?”

  “You think the place can be gentled down some, I suppose?”

  “It can.”

  He surveyed the street. “It’s no tea party out there,” he muttered.

  She took his arm and coaxed him around. “Last week there was a man down on the corner standing there looking up at me. He was wearing an eye patch and was smoking one cigarette after another.”

  He glanced quickly to the sidewalk, then back to his wife. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t want you to worry.”

  “Was it the right eye?”

  She tapped a finger on her lips, thinking. “Yes.”

  He slid his arms around her then, drew her close, and put his face into her hair, thinking not of what he was doing but of a man standing on the platform at Poachum and deciding who to kill first. “When do you want to come?”

  “How soon can you have carpenters and millwrights do the work? I want a tub in the bathroom.” She gave him a peck on the cheek. “How wide is the house in Nimbus?”

  “Maybe forty feet.” He turned his head to look down at the corner.

  “That’s enough. I want a front room with windows, and a screened porch about thirty feet long and at least eight feet deep. Put an outside door in the left side of the screened area and leave the one that leads directly into the kitchen from the front. It’ll look odd, but we’re not going to live there forever.”

  He looked up and pursed his lips. “Why, I could have the bathroom in by Sunday. I’ll have to pull off te
n or so workers, but that’s all right.”

  She slipped an arm up high on his back and kissed his chin. “I can take the train back with you next weekend.”

  He realized that he would have to have a long talk with May and be exquisitely careful around Walter. The thought of Lillian in camp was worrisome but, at the same time, wonderful. He felt foolish for thinking she’d be safe in New Orleans, and now hoped he would be at least a lucky fool.

  That same day, Byron was sitting at the desk in his front room, sweating and breaking pencil points as he wrote out an arrest report for the parish sheriff. The sunlight coming through the screen door dimmed, and when Bryon raised his head, he saw Buzetti smiling in at him, the screen imparting a scaly texture to his face.

  “What do you want?” Byron said, stepping out onto the porch.

  Buzetti’s smile widened around the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. “Ey, how’s the phonograph? I hear they got you a bulletproof one.”

  Byron glanced toward the railroad. “How did you get in here?”

  “What, you never hear of a motorboat?” He pointed over his shoulder to where a wooden launch idled at the end of the log canal, two men in slouch caps sitting on the bow, watching. “I’m looking for the head man, your brother. Nobody can tell me where he’s at.”

  “He’s not to be found.”

  Buzetti cocked his head. “Aw, yeah. I know about not-to-be-found.” He laughed and someone seeing him from a distance would have taken him for a salesman, a politician. “Well, just so’s my trip out here ain’t wasted, I’ll talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  Buzetti looked over his shoulder. “Can we go inside?”

  “No.”

  He shrugged. “You and your brother must think I smell bad. But hey, no matter. Look, I come to ask if you can let Galleri open up on Sunday.”

  Byron narrowed his eyes. “How fast does that boat of yours run?”

  Buzetti’s face rippled like a shallow pool in the swamp where a dark millimeter of water rides over a cage of fangs. “I figured we could help each other out. I can use the Sunday business and Mrs. Aldridge, she could use a little protection on the 2900 block of Prytania Street.”

  “The saloon stays closed,” Byron said, but there was a tentative note in his voice that seemed to catch Buzetti’s ear.

  “Look, I don’t want something for nothing. I figure we maybe shoulda took it easier on some of your woodchoppers. So let’s say I pay you a fine.”

  “A fine?”

  Buzetti drew a small paper bag out of his coat and spread open its top. Disbelievingly, Byron looked inside, as if he were being offered a sack of candy. He saw a roll of bills bound with rubber bands, and laughed. “You’re trying to buy me?”

  “Aw, naw. It’s a fine. Do what you want with it, give it to nigger orphans in New Orleans for all I care.”

  Byron looked through the screen into his empty front room, then turned back to Buzetti and stared over his head at his brother’s house across the compound. “No sale.”

  “C’mon. It’s a lot of money.” Buzetti held out a palm. “You could buy yourself enough records to tile your fuckin’ roof.”

  Byron grabbed him by the shirt front and shoved him against a porch post. “I don’t like the smell of your money, either.”

  Buzetti’s face began to show its blood. “Go ahead, you idiot,” he said, “smash my head open in front of witnesses. Then even your brother can’t keep you out of the pen.”

  Byron relaxed his fingers and took a deep, slow breath. “Sunday’s out of the question.”

  “Why?” He held out the bag. “You can sit in there and look all you want. With the five hundred in this bag you can hire another constable to watch Vincente’s hands. But he won’t see nothing. These chuckleheads you got out here are so dumb he don’t need to cheat.”

  Byron looked at the paper bag. “You think I can do only one thing,” he said. “But I can do another.” His eyes, lifted up from the money, were two dark disks of tin, but he saw that Buzetti understood his words, and yet was not afraid.

  “You can’t do shit but what I let you do. I know a million guys like you. You studied the Bible and then went off and killed, what, a hundred, two hundred schnapps-drinking kids, so your brains, they got in a wringer, right? And now your tight Pennsylvania ass is down here trying to save the fuckin’ swamp from Joe Buzetti. You want to stop some damage?” Here Buzetti put a forefinger against his own temple. “Well, the damage is already done, you dumb fuck.”

  “Get off of the property.”

  Buzetti took a mocking step back. He smiled a genuine smile, but it was for himself alone. “I apologize to come all the way out here and bother you. You all set up out here with Miss Ella. She don’t never come to town. Just now and then, ey? She likes this nice little life you got.” He surveyed the mill yard and his face showed what he thought of a nice little life in a place such as this. “And Mrs. Aldridge all by herself down on Prytania, she’s okay too?”

  Byron stared at Buzetti’s bag. “You don’t scare me, you pimp.”

  “Hey, I ain’t trying to scare you, Jack. Nobody can scare a crazy man what pulls a gentleman’s place of business apart with a fucking steamboat.” Buzetti scratched his forehead with the little finger of his right hand. “But your brother and the ladies, one of them could maybe wake up with a big reptile in their bed and decide mill life ain’t for them, you know? Maybe they’d move out and leave you with the mosquitoes.”

  “You try that and you won’t believe what turns up in your bed.”

  Buzetti pushed his fedora far back on his head. “Let’s get something straight here. This ain’t about you. I know I can’t do nothing to make you think twice about nothing. You a fucking nutzo or something, I don’t know what.”

  “What’s it about, then?”

  “Money. Vincente, my cousin, who wants Sunday.” He looked past Byron into the house. “With five hundred dollars you could double the size of this shack. Miss Ella, she’d like that.”

  Byron reached out and took the bag, hefting it.

  The sallow face watched him. “What?”

  “How many Germans did you kill?”

  “Austrians,” Buzetti corrected, his voice less harsh. “It was Austrians.”

  Byron looked down into the bag. “Why did we do it?”

  Buzetti cocked his head. “Because somebody gave the permission. That’s a great thing, permission. After the war, I learned to give it to myself, you know?”

  Byron thought about this and nodded. “Tell Galleri he can open on Sunday. Just leave my brother and the women alone.”

  Buzetti looked back at his men who were watching but not watching, their eyes aimed to the side of the house. He turned to Byron. “Now you thinking straight.”

  He stepped inside and latched the screen, leaving Buzetti hovering on the porch like a noisome insect. “No, I’m not,” he said, backing away from the door.

  Byron got off the train in Shirmer and headed to the rambling store owned by the Spencer Brothers Plantation. The commissary smelled of molasses, coffee, kerosene, and dirt, its rafters hung with harness, cane knives, and axes frosted with dust. Shelves rose to the smoked ceiling packed with everything except what Byron wanted. The clerk, a short, bald man wearing thick glasses, took a long time to walk up from the back and he addressed him in French.

  “I’m the company law down in Nimbus,” Byron said. “What do you have in the way of rifles?”

  The clerk put his hands flat on his counter and leaned over them. “Depends on what you need to kill. I got some .22 pumps.”

  Byron shook his head. “No. I need large caliber.”

  “Oh, you goin’ deer huntin’ in the bushes, yeah?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I got some old ’73 Winchesters upstairs in 38-40. Nobody buys that no more. I can let you have ’em right.”

  “That might do.”

  The clerk looked long into Byron’s face.
“Mais, if you want something that’ll put a twelve-point down on his ass, I got the one.” He walked to a vertical glass case, opened it with a little key, and pulled out a semiautomatic carbine, a mean-looking rifle with a satin-walnut stock and a short, night-blue barrel.

  Byron took the weapon and sighted it. “I’ve read about these.”

  The clerk put a finger on the gun’s receiver. “Shoots fast as you pull the trigger, yeah. Six times. It fires a soft-point slug that’ll knock a black bear’s brains out in one shot.” He handed Byron a .401 caliber cartridge shaped like a little sausage.

  “How many will five hundred dollars buy?”

  The clerk glanced at Byron’s badge, then flattened out a paper bag on the counter and added up figures, hiding his arithmetic with a broad hand. “I can bring in eight on the train day after tomorrow, with two boxes of shells each.”

  Byron worked the glassy action on the rifle, studied the fearsome cartridge. He remembered his brother’s amateurish standoff at the Poachum station, how Buzetti’s men had seen the Winchester trench brooms and had left without drawing a weapon. “Order them,” he said.

  By Wednesday evening the rifles were locked in his armoire in Nimbus, loaded and rubbed down with Outer’s gun oil. His wife watched him wash his hands in the kitchen, then walked into the next room to put a record on the Victrola. As Bessie Smith’s “Downhearted Blues” began to fill the house, she came back and poured herself a tall glass of blackberry wine.

  “That record you ordered is too sad,” he said, squeezing his fingers in the dish towel.

  She looked at him, flat and steady. “Somebody’s sad is another somebody’s happy, I reckon.”

  He looked through the kitchen window into the dark. “You ought not to drink. It’s a habit that gets worse.”

  She pursed her lips and leaned against a door frame. “Is it the habit that gets worse, or what causes it?”