The Clearing: A Novel

by Tim Gautreaux

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Lillian moved into the logging camp and learned to deal with the captured heat of the place, mosquitoes always floating in her vision, stinkbugs haunting her collar, love bugs flying drunk and sticking to her dress like crawling black snowflakes. She learned the necessity of keeping a shovel on the front porch, which she used to cut the heads off snakes sunning on the steps in the afternoons. The housekeeper she treated as she had always dealt with maids and kitchen women, though she was somewhat at a loss in accounting for Walter. A woman from over in the white quarters had told her the child was probably the son of a millwright who’d quit and moved to Texas back in March. Lillian noted the housekeeper’s cleanliness, intelligence, and devotion to her frail father, and made no alteration in her duties aside from teaching her how to bake and boil a few dishes instead of frying or stewing everything. At her urging Randolph hired five married men who brought their families along, displacing rough-neck drunks Byron had escorted to Poachum in handcuffs; she met each new family as they got off the crew car and urged the men, in front of their wives, to keep clear of the saloon.

  The mill manager worried that his wife might last only a few days, but Lillian surprised him, and her activity gained momentum through September. On the last day of the month, when he came home riding the old horse, she met him outside with a list of figures. He was still in the saddle when she handed it up with a slender arm.

  “What’s this?” he said, his eyebrows rising. “What will cost six hundred dollars?”

  “A one-room schoolhouse. The parish will let us have a teacher and some old books if we supply the building. And a privy, of course. There’s a colored woman down in the quarter who can teach reading and figures to the little black ones at night.”

  “You’ve been busy.” He looked down at her. “But most of these kids will wind up sawing timber like their fathers. That doesn’t require any schooling.” He dismounted and began walking the horse around back.

  “How much timber will be left when these children are old enough to cut it?” She followed him to the gate of the tiny stall and crossed her arms. “Times are changing up ahead.”

  He turned to her and sucked a tooth. “You’ve been reading my Lumber World.”

  “Enough to know that most of the virgin timber will be stumps in fifteen years or so.”

  He looked at the sun in her hair, the mosquito whelps on her neck. “Where do you want it?”

  “Between here and Byron’s is a little less swampy.”

  He looked at the heavy tree line surrounding the site. Nimbus was being cut, unlike most tracts, from the perimeter toward the center, since this would diminish lumbering costs over the life of the operation, requiring less railway maintenance, less cable and fuel for the pull boats and rafting steamer. From where he stood, the timber seemed to go on forever. Turning away from the woods, he imagined a twenty-four-by-forty-foot schoolhouse, open windows, cypress shingles, all number two stuff, of course. In his mind, the benches were lined with shoeless offspring of boiler firemen and loggers, preparing for a life after trees.

  He pulled the saddle from the horse, and the animal let out a relieved breath and leaned sideways against the stall boards. “School,” he said. “Next thing, you’ll want me to build a church.”

  “I’m one ahead of you,” she told him, putting an arm through his and leading him through a cloud of Dominick chickens toward the back porch. “The Methodist missionary who comes to Poachum can conduct services in the schoolhouse.”

  May, who was broadcasting chicken feed out of her apron, looked up at her as they passed. “There going to be any religion for the colored?” she asked.

  Lillian stopped and looked at her, surprised. “Why, May, I sometimes forget you are colored.” She reached out and squeezed her forearm. “If you ask around in the quarters and find enough interest, maybe Mr. Aldridge can provide materials for a chapel. Until then, if you can find a preacher, you can use the commissary porch Sunday mornings.”

  “Shouldn’t you ask me first?” When his wife looked at him, Randolph pulled off his hat. “Oh, nobody’ll come. You don’t know these people. White or colored, they left their religion behind in Texas or Arkansas.”

  Lillian gave out a scoffing laugh. “Every mill town has a school and church, Rand. It’s time you think about providing some civilization.”

  He looked again toward where she wanted the schoolhouse built and thought of his red-eyed, headache-haunted employees. “I don’t know.”

  “You’ll see,” his wife said.

  By mid-October the school was finished—built of raw, ruddy cypress—and six white children showed up at its door. The teacher the parish sent was an inexperienced stick of a woman, but she knew how to read and write, and after a week, the enrollment had risen to seventeen. Randolph lost a large bet with Jules concerning the attendance at the first church service. He walked out onto his porch at eleven o’clock, sure he would be able to look through the open windows of the little building and see only three or four washed-out hillbilly women. To his amazement, he counted many heads, and as he walked up he saw that the rough benches were filled with women, and their men were standing along the walls. Outside, Negro workers and their women gathered under the windows to hear the spilled-over preaching. The minister was conventional in his sermon, but loud, the homily carrying out the open doors and above the Sunday-quiet mill. A gang of young bucks was sitting in the commissary yard on upright bolts of cypress, watching sullenly. Three white sawyers sat behind them on the commissary porch, quietly chewing and whittling, their ears turned toward the overflowing schoolhouse. The boiler gang lounged about the double doors to the steam plant, far out of earshot, but watching, nevertheless. Above the roofs of both the white and black quarters fewer stovepipes smoked, dinner already cooked and waiting for the service to be over at noon. Maybe less than a quarter of the mill’s population was at the service, yet everything turned toward it, Randolph noticed, from the derision of lounging, wild-eyed buckers to the curiosity of single men wandering the barracks yard in their long johns, commenting and scratching. He looked over at the saloon, saw something, and went inside for his field glasses, then brought into focus a man sitting on a nail keg out front—Vincente, flipping cards into his upturned hat. He swung the glasses to the boiler room door, angry that the gang wasn’t cleaning the fire and blowing down the mud rings on the boilers, but then remembered that Lillian, now seated on one of the benches, had instructed Minos to postpone that noisy task until the services had let out.

  Scanning the yard again he understood that the school and church had become in one day the hub of the rude wheel that was Nimbus. The sermon ended with a ragged “Amen,” and a slow gospel song started up like a balky tugboat engine. He focused his field glasses on one side of Byron’s porch and there he found his brother, a glass of brown liquid in his hand, working his mouth slowly around the words of the hymn.

  Father Schultz liked to play Casino for points, so he and Merville met every Sunday at two o’clock. If someone were locked up in the rusty cell, the priest would offer to visit the prisoner, but on this day they had the mildewed office to themselves.

  Father Schultz pulled on his long nose and dealt a hand carefully, squinting at the cards. “You know that you’re always welcome to come to Mass.”

  Merville spread open his hand. “Like you, I work on Sunday.”

  Casting down a card, the priest shook his head. “You can’t arrest me for trying.”

  “I wouldn’t do that, me. You’d sit in the cell and sing to me in that Latin all day long.”

  “One of these days you’ll come back to mother church.”

  “Maybe so. But it ain’t one of these days yet.”

  The men played four games, splitting the wins. The priest usually talked of his family back in Germany and how everyone was suffering in his country, but today he was quiet, dropping cards without thinking or after thinking too hard.

  Merville studied him.
“Father, you worried, you?” “Perhaps.” He lay down big casino and when Merville picked it up by slamming down his own ten, the priest’s expression didn’t change.

  “Quoi?”

  “You know about those women, don’t you?”

  The marshal shook his head. “Nothing I can do about it.”

  “I understand.”

  “The sheriff told me if I brought in a Buzetti prostitute, he’d throw out the charges.”

  “Of course. I know how things are. But the local girls.” The priest threw down his last card and Merville picked it up.

  “That’s how Buzetti works it. Bring in a professional from up North, and she finds the poor girls, orphans and hop heads.” He waved the deck at the priest. “Mais, you want to go again?”

  “Of course.” He pulled his hands off the desk. “Ada Bergeron has become one of them.”

  Merville shuffled the cards. Out in the river, the ferry whistle shrilled for the landing. “Well, her father’s dead,” he said sleepily, almost to no one. “He was my cousin, I think.” He bit the inside of his cheek and dealt. “We didn’t fool with that part of the family much.”

  “Obviously.” Father Schultz leaned back and opened his hand against his stomach. “Still, if there’s something you can do for a fallen-away Catholic girl that’s got your own blood, it would look good on your record, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’d be crazy to bother Buzetti about his lady business.”

  “Could he get you fired or something?”

  “Something,” Merville said, chuckling. “He would something me.” He drew out his little Colt lightning revolver and wiggled it in the air above his silver head.

  The priest placed his cards on the table and frowned at their red backs. “What could bring Buzetti down?”

  “Not arresting him for whores, excuse me.” Merville tipped an imaginary hat and then dropped a ten.

  The priest flipped over his top card without looking at it. It was big casino. “You see? Everybody’s luck changes. One day this Buzetti will be caught with so many cases of liquor, that they can’t ignore what he’s doing.”

  Merville shrugged. “Maybe them feds would get interested if the load was big enough. And he brings it in by the ton, yeah.” He plucked a card from his hand, then replaced it. “I don’t know how.”

  “It’s a funny thing,” the priest said, “that if you caught him with a large amount of liquor, everybody—the newspaper, the government—would consider it so important. But if you saved a young woman’s soul forever, no one would think much of that.”

  “Why you so interested in this girl?”

  “Ach, I gave her instruction as a child. I gave her her first communion. She’s good at heart, but headstrong and desperate.”

  “Father, a religious man ought not worry so much about cat-house women.”

  “There’s precedent for it,” the priest said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  The telephone bells sounded the jailhouse ring, and Merville struggled to his feet. After a moment, he hung up and turned to the priest. “They want you at Murphy Dugas’s house. He’s sick to death, they say.”

  Father Schultz stood up and put on his four-pleated hat. “He’s dying and mentally ill both. He got hit with both barrels, as you’d say.”

  Merville sat heavily into a swaying steamer chair by the door. “Crazy’s a kind of dead. You can’t hardly come back from it, either.”

  Father Schultz, his hand on the porcelain doorknob, seemed to think of something. “How’s your friend out at the sawmill? The constable.”

  “Pas très bon. He’s a good man. Just got ruint in France.”

  “Ach. It really was a world war.” He pulled the door open and walked out into a bitter wind flowing up from the ferry landing, where drovers were cursing a large herd of mules onto the wharf. On the other side of the river, a storm cloud rose ragged and swirling like smoke from a wildfire.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  In late December the mill yard froze into a grotesque, ridged pudding, and the housekeeper’s father died while staring out his cabin’s frost-foxed window. He was buried in the colored section of the graveyard and the mill manager ordered the mason to build a brick slab over the grave so the coffin wouldn’t push out of the ground during high water. He and his wife attended the little ceremony, at which there were more whites than blacks. The old man had no friends in camp, and the people from his real life would never know where he was laid.

  Randolph and Lillian returned to Pennsylvania for Christmas, understanding with a mild shock that they were no longer fond of snow and bland food. His father wanted him to consider having Byron committed, and as always, he listened carefully to the old man and then ignored what he said. For a week they endured his complaints and offers of positions in New England mills, then traveled back South to ignorance and good food, poverty and independence, and Nimbus—that place tethered to all of civilization only by a few miles of buckled railroad.

  In February, a fistfight started in the saloon after midnight on a Sunday, and Byron was rousted out, tired and half drunk himself, to deal with it. He stood in the sleet before the dark building, holding his short-handled shovel in one hand and a .38 revolver in the other, not remembering the walk from his house. Yells broke out the saloon door like flying glass, and he digested enough of the agonized shouts to understand that a white sawyer had cut a black whore and she’d shot him in the face with a .22 revolver. A gang of white men came lurching onto the porch, cursing a length of plow line tangled in their boots, bent on hanging the woman from a porch beam while the blacks from the other side of the saloon scrambled out to fight them. The lanterns had been knocked out in the scuffle, and Byron waded into a dark sea of men waving cheap pistols, showing their teeth and screaming, ducking under straight razors that dipped and flashed like bats flying under lightning.

  He raised his gun and hollered, but his words were carried away on a boiling flood of voices, so he shot a white man in the side, and then a black man in the thigh, holstering his pistol when they went down and raising the shovel, banging anyone in reach as if batting away hornets. A gun popped and a slug burned into the back of his shoulder. He made a roundhouse swing and felt the shovel toll against a skull, and then two men siezed him, the three of them falling onto the floor of the white section. He smelled the mud and ash, and someone with big stony knuckles began punching him in the face. When he tried to get up, a hobnail boot crashed into his ribs, loosing a shower of sparks in his brain and igniting the thought that this might be the end of it all, and there was a wink of sad comfort in the thought. But then he heard the metallic flutter of a steel wing, and one of the men holding him down let out a yowl. Soon someone else was hollering under the shovel, followed by a general stumbling in the room, and a lantern dangled over Byron, lighting the face of Clovis Hutchins, the man he’d handcuffed to the flywheel in his yard. Behind him, holding the shovel, was a scarface Negro worker.

  “Mr. Byron,” Clarence Williams said, “come on get up and help this gal out on the porch.”

  They rocked the constable to his feet, pulling on his hands, and the hole in his shoulder felt as though someone had filled it with a lit cigarette. Out on the porch, the whore was roped but not yet swinging, and several black workers pounded on the two drunken mill hands who were trying in tandem to hoist her up. Someone brought another lantern and Byron drew his pistol into the light to show them all that every trace of fear had been burned out of him. He remembered that he had four loads left in the gun. The men holding the rope, big men, swaying, bovine with rum, glared at him and his weapon. They tightened the rope.

  Byron pointed the Colt at them. “I’ve got some lead tickets. Who wants to go?”

  The taller of the two men took an extra turn of the plow line around his wrist and the black woman went up on tiptoe, her hands at her neck. “This nigger bitch shot a white man.”

  Byron drew back the hammer of the pistol, placed the muzzl
e in the speaker’s ear, and then the men eased the rope and dropped it. The whore threw off the noose, jumped to the mud, and ran for the side of the building, calling over her shoulder, “You all a barrel of motherfuckers.” Galleri began shoving men out of the saloon, holding a broomstick sideways to their backs, and when he’d cleared the rooms, he slammed the entrances on the dark energy still simmering in the drunken blood. The men outside heard the heavy bolts knock the night down on all of them, and then a voice rose from across the mill yard, angry as a buzz saw. “Damn it to hell,” the doctor called out. “Is it safe to come over and patch the stupid bastards up?”

  Within the hour, Byron was lying facedown on a narrow wooden table in Sydney Rosen’s office. “Reach under and grab your wrists,” the doctor told him. “This is going to sting a mite.” He picked up a forceps shaped like a marsh hen’s beak and probed a hole high on Byron’s back. The room was quiet except for the slow creaking of the narrow table. “All right, all right,” the doctor said, turning the forceps. “Don’t piss on yourself, here it comes.” He drew out a .25 caliber slug, glossy as a berry, and set it on a dinner plate. After bathing and bandaging the wound, he taped up Byron’s ribs, and stood back, looking over his glasses at three other patients slumped against the back wall like prisoners waiting to be shot. “Put on your shirt and help me with these other fools.” The two of them picked up a groaning black logger and laid him out on the table.

  “Oh, hep me Jesus,” the man prayed.

  The doctor peered close at the wound in the man’s left side. “Here, constable, hold this mask over his nose while I pour the ether. Mind, hold your breath.” A gasp under the mask seemed to draw the light from the room, and Byron staggered back a step. The doctor gave him an electric light to hold and then cut open the man’s belly, running his hands down among his bowels the way a housewife might rummage in dishwater.

  Byron sat against a low porcelain table covered with bandages and swabs. “How bad is he?”