The Clearing: A Novel

by Tim Gautreaux

  “You know, livin’ out here with the owls, I thought about it a while. Not real serious, you know? But still, a thought like that wouldn’t never popped into my head if I lived in a town.” He rattled the knob. “A thousand dollars is a lot of money.” Galleri laughed. “That’s how you get to thinkin’ when you work in the woods sellin’ booze to the animals.”

  Jules began filling the little voids of an invoice. “I guess.”

  “Is it workin’ out in the woods makes you crazy?” Galleri asked. “What you think?”

  Jules did not look up. “I think you’re glad you didn’t take that money.”

  The mill manager rose to wakefulness the way a Louisiana coffin pushes up out of the mud after a week-long rain. Lillian was there holding his hand, one of her eyes blacked shut, a narrow bruise across the bridge of her nose and fourteen bristling stitches marking her cheek. He tried to speak, but his mouth felt plugged with wax. “No,” she said. “Don’t try anymore.” She told him this as if he’d tried for many days already and had failed, and this frightened him. He saw behind her a figure the size of Byron, and beyond, against the wall, a man holding a book who was perhaps a minister. The room came apart and drifted away, and Randolph prayed for forgiveness for whatever he’d done wrong in his life, and then suddenly, when he felt his brother’s touch and voice, the walls came back together, light again registering in his brain and his eyes seeing as if through broken water. He thought of things he had yet to do, hundreds and hundreds of things, but realized, in his trough of weakness, that he had better think of the two or three most important. He willed his lips into a shape and aimed his one working eye at his wife, who lowered her face to his.

  “Love you,” he whispered. She kissed his cheek and put a finger on his bloodless lips, but he spoke around it. “By,” he said, like a call.

  His wife backed away and Byron stepped closer, his eyes wide on some grief-killing drug the doctor had given him. “Rando,” he whispered. “The man who did it, Mrs. Scott hung up his guns for him. I’m thinking of giving her my badge.”

  The mill manager struggled for a breath. “No.”

  “What is it?”

  “Walter,” he said slowly.

  “He’s safe, brother. And he’ll be safe.”

  It cost him a great effort to form the words, “I lied.”

  Byron’s brows went up, and his eyes were dark moons. “What? What lie?”

  “May told me.” He felt the room warping apart, so he gathered his breath and said, “He’s yours.”

  Byron turned and looked behind him, and Lillian put the heel of her hand on her forehead. She took the minister’s arm and led him through the door into the hall, then came back alone. She looked at her husband, who had closed his eyes and gone under, then at Byron. “I consider myself a loyal wife, but I’m not stupid. It occurred to me that it could have been one of you.” She looked to the window, where a rainy sky darkened toward sunset. “I just tried not to think about it.”

  Byron put his hand on Randolph’s shoulder.

  “Let him sleep.” She pulled him away from the bed.

  He sat down next to the cold radiator. “I’ve got to think straight.” He pointed at the bed with his stump. “Why would he lie to me?”

  “Maybe he figured you had enough troubles.” She looked down at her stomach. “Or he wanted the baby for himself,” she said bitterly.

  “This is some news.”

  Lillian looked at him a long time. “What kind of news, Byron?”

  He raised his face to her, smiling a regular smile. “Tall headlines,” he told her quietly. “Like they used at the end of the war.”

  The mill manager groaned and stirred under the sheets. The rubber tube snaking down into a bloody bottle on the floor quivered with his pounding pulse, and the two of them continued to wait for him to die.

  A week after his brother entered the hospital, Byron returned to Nimbus and found his wife waiting for him on the porch with Walter in her lap. He walked up carrying his grip and stood still in the yard.

  Ella looked down at him and hugged the boy. “It’s a fine thing to hear about over the telephone.”

  He stepped up onto the porch. “I told you what happened, how and why. I can’t do any better, but if you want me to say or do something else to make it right, I’ll do it.”

  Walter squirmed out of Ella’s lap and grabbed Byron’s hand. “Come see,” the boy said, tugging him to the far edge of the porch. “Take me to the train.”

  Byron looked over to where Rafe was setting the packing nuts on the locomotive’s cylinders. “Sure. We’ll go in just a minute.”

  “This might take more than just a minute to fix,” Ella said. She was biting a thumb, looking away.

  “I’m sorry. It was that one time, and I told you how she came on to me.”

  Out of the side of her mouth, she said, “Kind of like an ambush, was it?”

  He took this hurt and squeezed Walter’s hand. “I guess so.” He moved closer to her and looked at her freckled skin, her sandy hair curled above her shoulders. “Can you forgive me?”

  He could tell that she was trying not to cry, and she didn’t answer him. He was afraid of what she might say, the longer she would not say it. She was studying the child.

  “Ella?”

  “It sure would be hard to let you off the hook if we were in one of our hometowns.” She looked around the mill yard, then raised an arm. “But here, well, where the hell are we, anyway?” She stood up, putting a hand on Walter’s head. “I guess someday we might have one that’s mine too. They say one like this can cause another to come on.”

  Byron looked over to the flat blanket of ash that was the saloon. “I wonder why he never told me the truth.”

  “You don’t have to ask that, do you?”

  He stepped off the porch and let Walter pull him toward the tracks. “I guess not.”

  Randolph Aldridge did not die. For two months a fluid pressed around his heart like a spongy fist. The bullet had passed through the center of his chest, and all the tissue around its path had been shocked black. No one expected him to recover, and after thirty days a young Spanish doctor began to experiment, holding back his injections of fluids, and slowly, like a boat bailed by a thimble, Randolph began to come up.

  His father, delayed by his own ill health, arrived by train and went straight to the hospital, doddering down the hall peering at numbers. He came up behind Byron, who was outside the room leaning against the wall, and grabbed him by the arm, turning him gently around. “Son, it’s good to see you.”

  What surprised Byron most was how unsurprised he was, as though he’d always expected to be touched and turned in this manner, to be found. When his father embraced him, he let his arm dangle toward the floor as he smelled the train ride on the old man’s clothes, all the soot and lounge-car smoke between Pittsburgh and New Orleans giving him an idea of how hard the journey had been. His father looked weaker, older. For this he gave the old man one pat on the back, then pulled away. “It’s been a while,” he said.

  His father opened his mouth, then closed it. Finally he said, “I don’t know what to say. I don’t want it to be anything that will run you away.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m already away.”

  The old man nodded. Straightening his back, he looked toward the door. “How is Randolph?”

  “Out of danger, but he’s seen a lot of damage.” Byron put his hand on the knob and they went in.

  After giving a pale Randolph brief greetings and reassurances, the old man spotted Walter, who was on his knees in a shaft of window light and drawing in a buff-colored tablet. “Byron,” he cried out, walking around the bed, “why didn’t you or your wife write me about him?” He looked at the child closely and smiled a claim on him, placing a hand on his head. “Why, he looks exactly like you. I’d have known him anywhere on earth.”

  The mill manager witnessed this exchange from his bed and felt that he’d been shot once more. Over
the past weeks he’d slowly come to realize that he was going to live, and had begun wondering if it were possible to tell Byron the truth and retrieve his son. But now, with his father’s recognizing cry, he felt that Walter’s identity, his place in the family, was sealed. His father would never visit Nimbus and find out otherwise, and once the trees were cut out and the mill broken down, the place itself—Walter’s source—would no longer exist.

  His father picked up the boy and brought him close to the bed. “You rascal,” he said to Randolph. “You should have written something to me in your letters.”

  Walter swung a hand out, and Randolph seized it. “Yes,” he said, closing his eyes. “I should have told.”

  “I’ve got a grandson,” the old man blurted, bouncing the boy who studied him blandly, trying to place him, looking around to Byron for some clue as to how to take this new face.

  Randolph watched the trio gathered against the window, the boy’s thumb up the grandfather’s nose, his brother’s old grin come back.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  In early October 1925, when the black swamp water was bleeding south and the cypress tops were burning into their coppery change, the mill manager returned to Nimbus. In a rocker on his front porch he listened to his wife tell him what she had been doing with the church and the school and how she’d been helping Byron hire good people. Since the saloon had burned, there had been nothing much for a constable to do, though Big Norbert, his shoulder wound healed, had taken a badge and was making rounds at night. Byron had been called in by Jules to help with the office tasks, duties he’d dreaded all his life. After a week on the job he’d made a mistake and shipped three carloads of lath to a customer in Missouri who’d wanted shutter material. When he got the phone call telling of his mistake, he picked up a Remington typewriter with his one hand and hurled it through the window sash. He turned over his desk, and pencils, order books, and ledgers exploded across the floor. Jules opened the office door for him like a porter as he rushed down into the mill yard and stood for a moment, staring at the mill manager’s house and the potted flowers Lillian had placed out front. He looked over to his own place, at two pair of little trousers flying in the breeze out back, and seeing that, he turned back, taking the stairs two at a time to the office where he and Jules uprighted the big desk. He shuffled around on his knees gathering pages and books, paper clips and rubber stamps while Jules went down into the yard and retrieved the typewriter; together they dug mud from between its keys with their pocket knives.

  “Type a nasty letter to someone owes the mill money,” Jules said, “and that’ll shake the rest of the dirt out of it.”

  Byron stayed in the office nine hours a day, and when he got home he sat on the floor with Walter or took him on his lap in the Morris chair to read to him. Most of the time he was too tired to listen to the Victrola. Work exorcised the sad music and much of the maudlin streak from his life, and when he did play the machine, he found its voice hoarse and wavering, for the humidity of the camp had corroded the nickeled mechanism and turned its internal grease to varnish. He cut back on his drinking because he didn’t want to perform the morning’s desk work with a head swaying on his shoulders like an anvil, but mostly because with the saloon gone, liquor of any sort was a commodity hard to find. In truth, he was too busy to drink.

  Five weeks into the job, he rode to Tiger Island on the local and was fitted for two suits. He traveled into Mississippi and gave a presentation to officials of the Vicksburg, Shreveport and Pacific Railroad. During that trip he became reacquainted with the world outside of Nimbus. The day he rode through New Orleans, he felt like a monkey set free from its cage. On the train, the dining-car steward seated him among strangers, and when the man across from him asked what line of business he was in, for a long moment he didn’t know how to answer. He was Randolph Aldridge’s brother, doing his brother’s job until he got well or died, he started to say, but then thought better of it, and shook the man’s hand too hard over the sugar bowl, saying, “I’m in cypress, the wood eternal.” In Vicksburg he could tell that the railroad men thought him odd with his pinned-up coat sleeve. He knew he was abrupt with them but couldn’t imagine what to say other than what he was there for. What finally mattered was that his calculations squeezed the price of a crosstie down to a cent better than his competitors. On the train back, with the signed contract for 200,000 ties in his jacket, an army officer in full dress sat in the aisle seat next to him and tried to make conversation, but Byron wanted none of it and looked away from the man’s uniform only to see it reflected in the darkening coach window. He closed his eyes and saw two men killed next to him, a single Mauser bullet passing through one heart into the next, and suddenly he was fighting the urge to force up the sash and plunge into the speeding, cinder-strewn darkness when the officer said, “Excuse me, but were you wounded in the war?”

  Byron turned on the man rudely. “Yes.”

  “Chateau Thierry, I bet.”

  Byron looked into the young man’s eyes and saw he’d never been in combat. “Nimbus Wood,” he told him.

  “Ah, yes.” The officer’s smile was jolly, thoroughly absurd.

  Byron looked back out the window, where stumps littered a dark pool of cut-over swamp.

  At the middle of October the mill manager was still frail, able to get up the office steps only twice a week, and then only with Lillian pushing him. Jules and Byron ran the mill together, and Randolph found himself with time on his hands, dropping in at Byron’s house once each day to see Walter. He would teach him a new word or read to him with whatever expressiveness he could muster. The boy would sit still for one story but otherwise wanted to move down into the weedy yard to play. Randolph wasn’t up to chasing him, so Ella would have to keep an eye on them both, which made him feel like a child himself.

  A cool spell breezed through the swamp late that month, and after lunch he and Lillian sat on the front porch, looking around at the dry air as if they could see it. Months earlier, she had detailed men to haul off some of the brush and dress down the stumps in the mill yard. A tough, long-legged grass came up in the sections of the compound not crushed to mud by wheels or hooves, and the clearing began to look civilized and green. The playground behind the church and school had been covered with masonry sand she’d ordered from Tiger Island, brought in by rail.

  She laid a hand on his arm. “I saw you over there with Walter.”

  “He’s spinning out whole sentences. Pretty good ones, too.”

  She drew back her hand to wave away a mosquito, and he could tell she was trying to figure how to ask something. After a long while, she said, “When you were in the hospital, why did you tell Byron about the boy? Did you think I wouldn’t have taken care of him?”

  He turned in his chair toward her, alarmed. “No, not that. I’m not sure exactly what I was thinking, but not that.”

  “I’d have taken him as a ward. As I told you I would.”

  “Of course.” Wincing, he reached out to her the stiff hand she’d shot a bullet through. “You’d have done a fine job.”

  “At the time I thought it wasn’t a good thing, telling him like you did. I mean, he’s not well enough to raise a child. But when I see Ella walking with him down to the commissary, and certainly when I see Byron come home and ride him on his shoulders around the house, well—”

  “Look.” Randolph pointed across the way as Walter ran naked out onto the porch, Ella right behind him with a billowing bath towel. They watched the chase, heard Ella’s entreaties and the boy’s squealing laughter.

  Lillian put a hand over her mouth. “Just look at that little fool,” she said. “I almost wish he was yours.”

  Randolph bit the inside of his cheek until he could taste blood under an eyetooth. He kept watching until Walter was pinned against a post and Ella swept him up in the huge towel and carried him inside with her face down in the squirming bundle. He watched the door they entered for a long time, even after Lillian got up, regard
ed him closely, and then dragged a finger over the back of his scarred hand.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  By January of 1926 the mill manager was riding the blind horse on daily inspections, handling a few sales calls on the phone and helping Lillian with what she called personnel. It was the low-water time, and on a Saturday morning he rode the animal through the clacking palmettos to Cypress Bend, walking it up and down the area of the shoot-out, trying to remember who had killed whom, staring at the rails rusting off into the dead weeds. The horse was tired and got its hoof caught between two angled crossties, and Randolph knelt there for half an hour, talking to it, finally working the animal free with a pocketknife. At noon, the mill’s whistle sounded over the brush like a chord played on a giant faraway organ, and he sat down under the overhang of the vine-wracked shingle mill, pressing with his fingers the place under his sternum that still ached when he took a deep breath or started to laugh. For a long time he stared at the spot where he’d killed Buzetti and wondered if he would be punished by God for the deaths he caused or if the killing itself was the punishment.

  The thought occurred to him that it was no longer necessary to stay in Nimbus, that he wasn’t doing much and could move back to Pennsylvania, but he’d be just as idle there, and Lillian had not suggested that they move. He felt there was still unfinished business with his brother. The horse nudged his back, as if he’d read his thoughts and judged them unworthy, so Randolph mounted up, reigning through the trash-wood saplings rising from the wrecked land.

  In 1927 the rains came and never left. The mill was awash for months, and when the main levees broke on the Mississippi, Nimbus was submerged for sixty days. Randolph watched the water rise, boiling in from the north through the railway’s culverts. The Negro section went under first, the water coming up slow, an inch or two a day. At the flood’s crest only the mill manager’s place was dry, though he could hear the water popping against the bottom of the house. At night he and Lillian listened to the backs of turtles bumping against the floorboards or the blind thud of garfish caught between the joists.