The Clearing: A Novel

by Tim Gautreaux

  After a long time, Merville stuck out an elbow, and Randolph helped him up from the floor, easing the breaking stars of pain in the old man’s knees.

  By noon Lillian was in the kitchen, her jaw set, her hands darting like birds to fire up the cookstove, to pull down pots and skillets, to exorcise the kitchen with activity.

  After a few minutes Ella came in warily, wearing her apron like armor over a loose housedress. She found a potato and began to peel it savagely. After a minute, she asked, “Did you ever think why you weren’t the one he shot?”

  Lillian closed the firebox lid with a stove key. “He knew who he wanted. You heard what Randolph said.”

  “Still, I believe you’d better carry your little pistol in your apron pocket.” She finished the potato and quickly grabbed another, desperate to keep busy.

  “I wouldn’t even know where to shoot a man to knock him down. And do you actually think a killer who had it planned out, some expert who knows how to do these things, couldn’t come in here right now with us both standing with cocked pistols in our hands and not shoot us dead?” She dragged a cast-iron skillet onto a stove lid. “I don’t know the first thing about it.”

  “Still, you might have a chance.”

  Lillian banged down a lid on the skillet. “There’s no chance against people like that. You’re fooling yourself if you think otherwise.” Her shoulders slumped and she looked at the floor for the first time. “Besides, it’s over now. Buzetti’s cousin, or whoever that awful man was, is avenged.”

  Ella began to cut the potatoes into rounds. “So it’s over.”

  As soon as the words were said, Lillian began to picture her husband and his brother, smoking cigars, drinking, talking, pointing to emphasize their facts the way men do, cursing whatever was contrary to them. She thought of the sharp scents on her husband’s body, the sweet, burnt smell of sawdust and woodsmoke and tobacco, the earthy emanations of his damp brogans. “If it was left to me, it would be,” she finally said. “But men, they act like they smell.” She laughed and banged the back of a knife blade on a pot. “Say, could you cut up an onion over those potatoes before you add the cheese?”

  Ella wiped her knife and gave her a questioning glance. “An onion?”

  “It’s what she did,” Lillian said, her hands trembling over a pot that began to raise a ghost of steam. “And it tasted damned good.”

  Nimbus Mill

  May 15, 1925

  Father,

  I received your last and was not happy to read your criticism. I was not trying to do Byron’s job the night the gambler was killed. I was trying to help him, for God’s sake. If you had been in that room with the bullets flying around your head like bees, I doubt that you could have managed as well as I did. There was time only to bend a trigger finger. As for the loss of our housekeeper in retaliation, that has angered me a great deal. There are no witnesses and the local lawmen are unable or unwilling to find any leads whatsoever. Sometimes it seems there is no law down here other than Byron’s shovel.

  I have replaced the housekeeper with an amiable middle-aged Irishwoman from the white quarters who comes early and leaves late.

  The Sicilians have replaced their dealer in the saloon, but he is so poor at cheating I think the loggers will break up his game before too long.

  My physical health is holding up in the heat, but I feel downhearted sometimes. Byron of late has taken more intensely to his phonograph. I have asked him what his plans are and he says that for himself, he has only one, to last until bedtime. One bright spot is that he and his wife have decided to try in earnest to have a child, and in that respect Lillian and I are in a similar circumstance. Something has got to come out of us other than boards.

  The orders are slowing the past week, except for number one siding. I think by now half the summer cottages of New England must be built of our cypress.

  Regards,

  Randolph

  Moonlight streamed over their bed, and after making love, Randolph and his wife lay toweling off sweat and casting about for cool spots on the mattress. All evening long he had prepared himself to launch the question that now hung in his mouth like a gasp. Finally, he swallowed and asked, “What do you think of adopting Walter as our own?”

  In the dark, he imagined her eyes moving toward him, incredulous. “Darling,” she whispered, “that baby is colored.”

  Biting the inside of his cheek, he plunged on. “But when we go back, when the tract is cut out and we go back, nobody up there will know. He’s as white as you are.”

  She rolled over next to him, a cloud of fragrant heat, and laid an arm across his chest. “Byron and his wife know.”

  “Oh, they wouldn’t say anything,” he told her, putting his hand on her arm.

  “They might, someday. Maybe when he’s eighteen and courting a Highsmith or a Vandervoort. It would be a disaster waiting to happen.”

  He waited a moment, trying to focus on the beaded boards of the ceiling, weighing the risk of what he would say next. “But when I pick him up I feel that he’s my own.”

  She sighed and lay back. “I know. He’s smart and well featured for a castoff.”

  He frowned. “So you think there’s not a way?”

  “I didn’t say that. We could take him in as a ward, that’s all. Put him in schools. When the time comes, we could say we don’t know who his parents were. It’s been done.” She moved again, twisting her head on the pillow. “But why do you want to adopt him, give him your name?”

  Suddenly lost in a dark, unfamiliar landscape at the rim of a cliff, he pulled back from the edge and said, “I wasn’t thinking,” and then, “It just would be nice to raise him. Keep him with us.”

  After a long silence, she asked, with a tremble in her voice, “Are you afraid we’ll never conceive?”

  “No, it’s not that.” He patted her shoulder. “It’s just taking us longer than most, is all.”

  “Bringing Walter into our lives is no small thing, Rand. He might grow up thinking he’s white, and that would be fine. But if we told him he was ours and then someday, somehow he found out otherwise, he’d be crushed, turned inside out.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I guess that’s true.”

  “But if he knew his parents were a mystery, even if Byron or Ella would let it slip about his race, well, sure, it would be bad, but it wouldn’t be as if we’d been living a big lie. Does that make any sense?”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling, understanding that the boy would be with him, now.

  They slept for an hour, and then Walter began crying. “I’ll get up,” he said, pulling back on his wife’s shoulder as she rolled out of bed. He found a clean bottle above the cooler, filled it with milk, and banged around the kitchen until he found the box of nipples. The first he tried to stretch over the bottle slipped out of his fingers and jumped behind the stove. As the cries grew more insistent, he dug out another, this time fitting it on. Walter was old enough to take his milk cool, so he gave him the bottle, changed his dirty diaper, which he washed out in the new toilet, and set it in the covered bucket in the corner. Powdered and with a dry bottom, Walter clamped down on the nipple and stretched his arms out. Randolph gathered him up and settled in May’s old rocker. The baby turned loose of the nipple and said, “Wok,” and Randolph rocked, inhaling the powder, feeling the flannel gown and the tender skin beneath it, watching the thin, lavender-tinged eyelids grow heavy as the boy floated away. The baby took a breath and sucked in his sleep, dreaming of the business of taking things in.

  Randolph knew he should feel like a father, albeit a secret one. He should feel some type of late-night peace brought on by the child asleep against his stomach. Instead, he thought that Walter was his mother’s son, with enough of May in his face that Randolph could never forget her and the manner in which she’d been taken out of all their lives. Buzetti had stolen her as casually as he would lift a plum from a fruit peddler’s wagon, and Randolph wondered if he would take again, if not from h
im or his family, from someone else. After the murderer had fled in the skiff, Byron had wanted to catch the train into town that night and kill him, and it had taken Randolph all night to calm him. The mill manager had followed him home and stayed close, asking about his records or how he’d met Ella, pacifying him, keeping him connected to something else, something good. Now, he wondered if he should have left him alone.

  He looked through the kitchen door and pictured May standing at the stove. He felt a taste of his brother’s anger, but after that moment passed he sensed only frustration at the fact that he was surrounded by hundreds who did his bidding, yet nowhere in that crowd was a man who could touch Buzetti with impunity. The baby sighed, lifted an eyelid, and the mill manager rocked him again, smiling down like someone who’d lost control of his own face. He began to hum a melody from one of his brother’s insane records.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  At the beginning of June 1925 a telegram arrived, telling that Lillian’s father had died. As she and Randolph were packing for the trip home, the housekeeper, Mrs. Scott, a large, hale woman with hamlike arms, fell ill with influenza, so they decided to leave Walter in Byron and Ella’s care. When Randolph walked over and handed the child to his brother, he noticed in Byron’s eyes a flicker of something he hadn’t seen for years, the old prewar lightness of glance. The men stood on the porch without talking, and Ella came out and tried to take the boy.

  “Hold on a minute, gal, I just got him,” Byron complained. He put his lips against the baby’s cheek and made a noise.

  Randolph coughed. “I hope we can get back inside of ten days. Whatever you need, go over to the main house and get it.”

  “We’ll make out fine,” Byron said. “Stay all year if you want. And tell the old man to go to blazes for me.”

  “He moves around pretty quick, now. Don’t let him tumble off this porch.”

  Byron sat in a rocker and the boy reached out and grabbed hold of his ear. “Not a chance.”

  The mill manager and his wife boarded an early train, a ratty mix of passenger coaches and boxcars full of cattle. They crossed the train ferry into New Orleans and took the Southern Railroad to Atlanta, changing trains and lines, and after two days’ travel got off in Pittsburgh. Arriving late at her family’s house, they rushed to get ready for the funeral. Her father had been dead three days, and the mourners who’d gathered in a stone church thirty miles to the south seemed anxious for the sense of release that burial brings. During the service, Randolph watched his wife carefully, but there was little need for his worry; she was not grief-stricken. Her father had been an official for the Pennsylvania Railroad, a man all numbers and economics who had spent little time with any of his children. Lillian once said that she never cared to understand a thing about what her father did, since whatever it was had cut him off from the family. Randolph had always thought him dull and uncommunicative, and he knew that his Lillian, as she sat next to the aisle in the dark little church, was listening to the minister’s comments for some clue as to who her father really was. Toward the end of the service, she reached out a black-gloved hand and almost touched the varnished coffin.

  The next day they visited with his father in another town outside of Pittsburgh. His father was not a distant or particularly hard man; he liked a tall glass of rye and water after dinner, but his sole topic of conversation was sawmills. He rode his son down with questions for an hour and a half, until Randolph excused himself when he saw his wife strolling in the yard. He caught up with her and they walked downhill to a rose arbor and sat together on the enameled bench wedged under the latticed arch.

  Lillian looked toward a line of dark hills. Even this far from the city, a thin brown haze floated above them. “It feels good to be outside without fear of breaking a sweat.” She laughed and leaned against him. “Or stepping on a snake.”

  “We’ll come back before too long,” he said absently. “I don’t want to build a place on a hilltop anymore, though.”

  “No,” she agreed. “South of a ridge is the place. Out of the wind.”

  “Maybe we can find a lake. I’ve grown used to the water, I guess.”

  “The Lemmon tract.”

  He made a little sideways motion with his head. “That’s a bit large.”

  “If Byron came back he could have the eastern half. You two used to ride and camp there.” She closed her eyes and settled her head against his shoulder.

  He was quiet. Looking from hill to hill, then back to the green copper gutters of his father’s house, he suddenly felt idle, that everything he belonged to was somewhere else. In Pennsylvania, he had never run a mill completely by himself, had not gone out in the dark to look for a man taken off by a reptile, had not shot a man dead, and no one here had ever carried his child. “Oh, my,” he said aloud.

  His wife did not open her eyes. “Yes, the air is so dry, isn’t it?”

  Late that night, Randolph and his father went into the front parlor for a nightcap. The old man was slim, and his dark, vested suit hung wrinkled from the long day’s wearing. His white hair was short, brushed off to the side above slate-blue eyes. He was not a bad or shallow man, his son thought, but he enjoyed above all else the complexities of turning trees into figures in a bank ledger. His father believed it was American to make money, a patriotic duty to prosper. In truth, Randolph was most shaped by him, though it was in his older brother that Mr. Aldridge stubbornly continued to invest his hope. This was how things were; Randolph accepted it, and even shared this view. He took what little love his father allotted him and made do with it.

  The old man leaned back in an armchair and rephrased the same old question, “How bad is Byron’s condition? Is there any change?”

  Randolph sat on a piano bench and stared at the keys. “There are days he’s worse than others. At times I’ll be with him and something simple will happen, I don’t know, a whistle will sound or a steam line will pop, and then he’s not there.”

  “Not there?”

  “He’s standing there, but his mind’s thousands of miles away.”

  “In a trench.” The old man scowled. “He should be over all that.”

  Randolph moved uncomfortably on the piano bench. “There is no way anyone can tell you or me what he suffered.”

  His father thrust out his glass. “Many others have gone to war and come back fine.”

  “Maybe they appear so on the surface.”

  His father took a long pull of his drink. “You want to come home, I know. But if you can do anything at all for him, to get him to return to us, to help his mental state . . .”

  His father stopped, and Randolph saw that he was near tears.

  “I’m trying and I’ll keep trying,” he said, nearly angry at the emotion in the room.

  “I know, boy,” his father said, straightening in the chair. “You’re a good son.”

  “But Byron’s the oldest,” he snapped. “He’s straight-shouldered and handsome, and the one who should take over all the mills someday, is that right?” He was hoping to lead his father toward the realization that Byron had reached a place in his life from which he could never return. He watched him carefully, imagining the words sinking in, waiting for understanding.

  The old man let out a long breath and set his drink on the floor. The window was open, and the banshee sound of a Pennsylvania Railroad train whistle drifted in on the cool air. “If only he’d done better in battle,” his father said.

  Randolph looked through the window into the darkness and could think of absolutely nothing to say in reply.

  They got into Poachum at noon, and the mill locomotive was waiting for them. Rafe Sommers’s pumpkin face hung out the cab window, oily and brick-colored with heat. “You didn’t bring back no cool breeze in your suitcase, did you?” he called as Lillian walked up to the engine.

  She stopped and squinted up at him. “No, Mr. Sommers, but I’ve got some extra cinders down my neck courtesy of the L&N, if you need them.” Once they arrived i
n camp and their suitcases were carted to the manager’s house, Lillian walked down quarters to check on Mrs. Scott, and Randolph went over to get the baby. Ella was in a porch rocker holding Walter on her lap. The child looked at Randolph, smiled, then squirmed down to the decking where he balanced on his rubbery legs, holding on to Ella’s fingertips. Randolph reached over and took him by the middle. “Where’s By?”

  “He’s over at the bunkhouse cooling down two millwrights.”

  “How’s he been?”

  The woman fluffed her skirt, a full, out-of-date housedress. “Not bad.” She looked puzzled, as if she hadn’t thought about Byron before now. “Not bad at all, in fact. There was a big row down at the saloon one night, but he went and handled it bare-handed. Came back with a drunk and chained him to the flywheel for the evening. But no, no real trouble.”

  The mill manager hoisted the boy up and watched him put a hand in his mouth. “Did he take to babysitting?”

  “He carried Walter around like a watch. Got up with him, even, which plumb amazed me. Not a man type of thing, you know. Matter of fact, he fooled with that young ’un so much he laid off the Victrola a good bit.”

  Randolph gave her a look. “Is he out of needles for the thing?”

  Ella put a hand against a porch post. She was staring hard at the baby. “No. He played with little Walter some. Did paperwork. You know.”

  The boy squirmed and said something in his language. “Well, yes, I do know,” Randolph said. “The Sicilians cause any trouble?”

  “One night a new man was dealing. A sure-enough Chicago man. He told Byron he’d cut his throat if he messed with him.”