“Look at that,” he’d yelled, so loudly that the baby sat down with a spank.
Randolph received in the mail a manila envelope bearing a newspaper page with an account of Vincente’s funeral bordered in pencil. The article gave a tally of flowers, Masses said, hymns sung. He’d been embalmed and sent up to Chicago in an Illinois Central baggage car. Randolph felt a connection with the man as he read the list of relatives and noted the isolated, euphemistic comment that he had worked in the entertainment industry. Again, he felt the pistol leap in his hand, saw the spray of thoughts on the wall. Merville had told him that Vincente was a thug’s thug, a man who recruited whores and then beat them up, who won a worker’s paycheck in a crooked game and loaned it back to him at daily interest, who sold lead-laced moonshine more likely to blind than intoxicate. Randolph wanted to believe that he’d done the world a favor, but his conscience would have none of it. His only solace was to consider what would have happened had he not pulled the trigger, and to hope that the living men would come to justify his decision. After dark, he thought too much and sometimes drank, and one quiet evening when he heard from across the yard Byron wake howling out of another dreamed bloodletting, he saw that his one killing did not stack up against the ranks of German Kinder his brother had packed off to darkness. While this thought didn’t comfort him, it gave him perspective on the deep well of foreboding into which his brother sank each time he opened his eyes on a sunrise.
The second week of March came in like a waterfall. Many snakes coiled on the house steps, and Lillian kept a Winchester .22 rifle loaded with shorts behind the kitchen door. Looming over the reptiles, she’d rivet them to the wood with precise head shots. May picked them up with a stick and threw them over the back fence. Before long, the steps both front and back were tattooed with bullet holes. One afternoon Lillian killed a cottonmouth in the middle of the backyard, and May came with a broom handle without asking what had drawn fire. Lillian pumped the empty shell out and set the hammer in the safety notch.
“I don’t know why I bother. There’s no end to them.”
“Women just don’t like ’em,” May told her, slipping the handle under the coiling, four-foot body. “They give me the chills.”
“That one’s dangerous.”
May smiled and raised the handle. “Aw, Missus, there’s snakes that cause more trouble than this one.” She gave the reptile a heave and it propellered over the fence.
“What do you mean?” Lillian asked. When she saw the smirk on May’s face, she blushed. Later, when the housekeeper came into the kitchen to wipe off the broom, Lillian watched her carefully, the way she moved, the way the light played on her face when she looked out of the window toward where the men worked.
“Something I can do for you, Missus?”
Lillian handed her a pot off the stove. “I heard that you lost your husband.”
“Yes, ma’am, that’s right.”
“Have you ever thought of marrying again? There’s no lack of men around.”
May lowered the pot into a pan of suds. “I don’t think about it, but it might happen. I’d like to move up North and start over with Walter.”
Lillian raised her chin. “I see. When the timber’s cut out?”
“Yes, ma’am.” She reached out for the cornbread skillet and their hands overlapped on the handle. Lillian looked at May’s fingers a moment, then pulled her own away.
“I think that might work out for you very well,” she said, picking up the kettle.
Each step off the clamshell-covered lanes was a boot-sucking ordeal. One day a steady wind came up out of the south and blew for twelve hours until there was a foot of water everywhere and the camp became a broad, muddy pool where the houses were boxy boats and marooned children stood on the porches watching the tide shift under their filthy toes. That flooded night, when Galleri turned off the lamps in the saloon and shoved the last reeling, tapped-out mill hand off the porch into the end-of-the-world blackness that was the mill yard, it wasn’t thirty seconds before he heard the man shrieking like someone in flames. Galleri lit a buggy lantern and jumped off the porch with it, splashing through the sulfurous water. He stopped when he saw the man floating on his back, his arms flailing, the lamplight showing twin ridges breaking the water’s surface and the gold dollars of an alligator’s eyeballs. The man’s screams drowned as the animal towed him under and backed toward the canal. Galleri moved toward his porch but remembered he didn’t have a gun in the saloon. Changing direction, he ran toward Byron’s place, his feet detonating on the water until he stepped into a rut and fell facedown. His lamp out, he ran on anyway, arriving breathless at the porch, slopping up the steps to bang on the door.
Byron’s face appeared behind the screen like an angry smoke. “What?” the face said.
“Sloan got took off by a ’gator,” he gasped.
“Where?”
“They’re headin’ to the canal, now.” He screamed a falsetto now.
Byron reached behind the door for a rifle and stepped into a loose pair of rubber boots, coming out onto the porch in his long underwear and carrying two nickel-plated flashlights, handing one to Galleri. They moved as fast as they could through the water, past the saloon, stumbling through a patch of floating blocks bobbing on the tide like headless fowl. The beams from their flashlights cut across the glossy flow that slid and stank like crude oil. Byron told Galleri to be still, and they listened, but all they could hear was the wind pushing at the cypress trees behind the saloon, and then the sound of a horse splashing through the water, Randolph coming up behind them on the bare back of the blind horse. “What’s going on? I heard someone yelling.”
Byron and Galleri waded toward the canal. “A man been pulled down by an alligator,” the saloon keeper said, his voice rising. “Just this minute.”
“Give me a flashlight,” Randolph said. “Maybe I can see him from up here.” Galleri tossed him his, and the mill manager urged the horse to step off the hundred yards to the canal, where he called out and swung the light and finally dismounted. The three men wandered for a long time, mid-calf in the bitter water, swinging their flashlights until the bulbs shrank to mean, coppery eyes. Galleri ran back to the saloon for another lantern, but when he returned and held it high, the light blinded them and they could see nothing but themselves, dirty and half-dressed, impotent against the great teeming swamp.
At dawn the wind died down and Randolph sent out skiffs to look for the lost man. The mill manager stood on the bank and listened to the oarlocks rattling over in the main pond and around the bend in the black canal, but by afternoon, no one had seen any trace of Sloan, a forty-year-old bucker who had lived in the bunkhouse. The mill manager walked to the man’s room to look for the name of a relative or an address, but all he found were four changes of work clothes, a saw file, a pair of dress shoes with one of the heels gone, a bottle of Milk of Magnesia, one work glove, and, under the thin mattress, an autographed four-by-five picture of a naked New Orleans whore.
The camp drained, leaving behind mud-coated snakes and cantaloupe-sized bullfrogs that destroyed everyone’s sleep with their bellowing. Gasping choupique lay in shrinking rounds of water, mouthing air for days, trying to swim through the baking sunlight.
On Sunday, the preacher prayed for the lost mill hand inside the packed little church and even preached to the windows, below which a hundred people stood reverently on a fibrous black mudflat as though they thought themselves lucky and blessed to be where they were. The mill manager fidgeted in the second pew, trying to think of his blessings, remembering only that the man who had been eaten was not very important to the mill’s operations. Feeling guilty about that thought, he wondered if he should give all the buckers a fivecents-a-day raise. While in church, Randolph understood that he had a small soul, but he also knew that it had been bred and taught into him by his father and by teachers who stressed that every chip of wood was currency and every minute was salary paid out, and that a manager who sav
ed a penny a man per day could live an easy old age, at least as far as money was concerned. When the preacher shouted out that death came like a thief in the night, the mill manager closed his eyes and thought of the cardsharp and the devoured bucker, men who’d met their ends on his watch. He sang the final hymn as best he could, unable to find the tune, but he’d be damned if he wouldn’t try.
Not many days later, Randolph was in bed collapsing into a circle of welcoming, dreamless sleep when suddenly, painfully, as though a rope had been drawn around his neck, he was pulled back toward the troubled sounds of the world. He opened his eyes to the dim bedroom, and Lillian’s hands were shaking his arms.
“My God,” she said. “You’re harder to wake than a statue.”
“What?” He blinked at the silhouette of her head.
“Listen,” she cried. “What does it mean?”
It was the mill whistle, a big Lunkenheimer triple-chime, droning deep, harmonizing tones. “There’s no signal like that,” he said. “This is nonsense.”
The sound seeped into the wood of the house, into his bones. As he got up and dressed in the dark, he accidentally kicked the bedpost and cursed. The whistle grew louder, rising slightly in pitch as it warmed up, setting the windowpanes buzzing like huge insects. Out on the porch he looked toward the mill, but the moon was down and he couldn’t make out a thing. The ground everywhere was slop, so he went out back and bridled the horse, throwing on a saddle without a blanket and climbing up, giving the animal its head.
The whistle cable was above the main catwalk in the boiler room. Randolph rode up to the door of the boiler house and just inside found the watchman unconscious next to his lantern, facedown in the sawdust. When he rolled him over, one of his eyes opened but began roaming as if in search of the thundering whistle. Byron came in, along with Minos and a fireman, all of them shirtless.
“What’s wrong with the whistle?” Byron shouted.
Randolph cupped his hands toward Minos. “Do something.”
The engineer yelled to the fireman, a young man with blond hair, and he bounded off toward a ladder leading up to the main catwalk. In a few moments, the whistle stopped with a yodel and the fireman came back holding up a twenty-four-inch Stilson wrench for the engineer’s inspection. “This here wrench was hung on the cable, Mr. Minos.” He held it high for the men to look at like a mystery.
“It’s a joke,” Minos said. “A son-of-a-bitchin’ joke.”
Byron bent down and jiggled the watchman’s face, trying to bring him around. “A jokester doesn’t coldcock a watchman.”
“Oh, my God,” Randolph said. He and his brother looked at each other and the connecting glance was electric.
Byron drew his pistol and raced toward his place. His brother ran for the horse, which was confused and began to stutter-step until a pistol shot ripped across the dark mill yard, and the animal, now that it had something to aim for, began trotting toward Randolph’s house, where a woman’s scream rose more frightening than the unbidden whistle. The horse picked up its pace without being spurred, and Randolph was afraid it would run into the side of the house and kill both of them. When he splattered into the yard, he reined up hard and jumped off.
Lillian ran off the porch in her nightgown, screeching, her hands clamped around her temples. Bounding past her into the kitchen, her husband saw the yellow tongue of flame in a lamp on the counter and, below it, the housekeeper sprawled on her back.
He cried out and knelt next to her, his heart falling like a dove shot out of the sky. Her eyes were closed, her lips barely parted, and in the center of her clear forehead was a small bullet hole. He picked up her arm to feel for a pulse, then put his fingers on her neck, but she was inert, empty, no longer there. Looking up, he caught his brother’s eye as he came in. “She’s dead, By.” He could barely say the words.
Byron’s unshaven face was the color of lead. “We should’ve known,” he said slowly.
Randolph’s head lifted. “Where’s Lillian?”
“Ella’s got her now.”
In the canal a rackety engine fired up, and Byron flew through the back door and across the yard, leaping the fence. He saw the boat cutting toward the main channel. It was a fast skiff, and Byron realized at once there was nothing at the mill that could catch it. The deckhand on the rafting steamer turned on the big carbon arc light and swung it across the water, missing the skiff but giving Byron enough backlight to see that a single man was running the boat. He flicked off the safety on his .45 and tried a shot, then another, but the boat was a hundred yards away. The first slug banged a barrel on the steamer, the second raised a geyser next to the skiff, and Byron emptied the clip, hoping at least to save some future victim, but the engine didn’t waver, and in a few seconds the boat rounded a bend out of sight, its two-cylinder engine rattling into the timber.
Randolph didn’t look up when he heard his brother shooting. He knew nothing about the woman on the floor, yet he had taken root in her, and she had made a son for him. He felt this now, fully, a feeling that had come at last simply because she was dead. He’d always thought of the child as hers alone, so responsibility had not blossomed in him. But now, as Walter began to cry out from the back bedroom, he knew he was the one to go to the boy, take his arms, and pull him onto his shoulder. Walter rubbed his face on Randolph’s neck, then turned his head away, his arms going slack and trailing down his father’s chest.
Byron came into the room and snatched a blanket off the bed to cover May’s body, and when he’d finished he stood next to his brother, whose eyes were wet.
“Why her?” Randolph asked. “Why not me or you, or Lillian?”
Byron looked down. “You know why.”
He shook his head and put a hand on the child’s neck. “I don’t.”
“She’s colored, and they won’t chase him hard for that,” he said, like a fact. “You or me, or the women, Father would send down money and lawyers to force the sheriff to act.” He rested a hand lightly on the child’s back. “Put him down, Rando. He’s out like a light.”
Once the child was in his bed, Randolph began to search for reasons, and when he remembered the day Buzetti had stood on the back porch of the kitchen and looked through the screen at them, a new type of anger swelled under his breastbone like a flaw in his heart. She was dead because Buzetti had seen her hand slide from his grasp, that odd motion that always catches the eye, like Vincente’s cousin dealing from the bottom of the deck. He turned to his brother. “He wanted to hurt me deep and close to home.”
Byron nodded his head, once. “It’s how they work.”
They went out and comforted the women, and much later walked toward the mill office to make the call to the sheriff. Halfway there, they realized that the women and child were alone, and Byron turned back, reloading his pistol as he walked.
Merville showed up after daybreak, his white hair tufted up in crazy angles, his mustache drooped over his mouth. As he stepped out of the splintered skiff, its wood not painted but stained dark green with copper sulfate, he squinted up at Randolph. “How’d you know to come out and meet me?”
“A watchman spotted you coming up the canal and phoned the house.”
He pulled a white flag of a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. “Phones,” he said. “They gonna change every damn thing.”
“Where’s LaBat?”
“He commissioned me to handle it.”
“He doesn’t come out for Negro deaths, is what you mean.”
Merville drew a pipe out of his vest and lit it as they walked to the house. “I don’t have to see nothin’. What you told on the phone last night was plenty.”
“You can’t find the man with the patch?”
The marshal frowned into the bowl of his pipe. “Did you see him?”
Randolph looked back toward the canal.
“You don’t know nothin’, do you? Except who did it and who paid him.”
Randolph raised his arms and let them slam against his sid
es. “Is there no law around here at all?”
Merville sniffed. “Yep. We all guilty, and everybody got a death sentence.” He went through the porch into the kitchen, bent to the floor, his knees cracking like kindling, and picked up the blanket. “She got any people?”
“She told me no.”
“Get a man to make her box, then. Get somebody to clean up the blood off the linoleum and make the women come in and cook a meal.” He turned his head and looked into May’s face. “If the women don’t do it right now, right this minute, they’ll never come in here no more. The place will haunt up in their minds.” The old man sat down in a kitchen chair and stared at the blanket. “Lord, but she was something pretty.”
Randolph glared at him. “I want to get the bastard.”
The marshal pinched a hand on his eyes. “You know, some bastards can’t be got.”
“I’ll pay whatever it takes.”
Merville took down his hand and put it on a knee. “Money can’t do it. Law neither.”
“You want me to wait for him to die of old age?” He got up and pinged the back of his middle finger against the marshal’s star. “Do you want to die, with him still running loose and killing?”
The old man gave Randolph a long, offended look. “You know, they’s a lot of dead people what never finished their jobs.” He looked to the floor.
“I’m sorry.”
Merville stood up carefully. “Let me see what I can find out for us in town,” he said. Hobbling over to the corpse he again folded back the edge of the blanket until only the wound showed. “Small bullet,” he said. “It’s what they use, nowadays, the ones they pay to do things like this.” The two men looked down and, had they spoken of it, would have admitted to being haunted by the future, by everything taken out of it because of May’s death. She’d believed she could escape. Randolph suspected she was trapped for life, but now there was no hope of seeing what she might have done, and that was the saddest part. He’d wanted, all along, to be wrong.
The Clearing: A Novel Page 20