The Clearing (20 page)

“It might be mine.”

He took back his hand. “Good Lord, By, I—”

“I know, I know.” He put up his palms.

“No, I mean, how do you know?” He looked toward the window. “Maybe she’s been with others.”

“It was back in June, I think. Ella went into New Orleans, and I tied one on. Sat on the porch, got drunk, and sang my records. Ella’d told May to bring over some supper, I guess, and I was capsized in bed when I heard her leave it in the kitchen and come into the bedroom.” He looked up sheepishly. “She just got on board.”

Randolph looked away again, out at the mill. “Was it just that one time?”

“Yeah. It was kind of a lovely ambush.” Suddenly, he straightened in his chair and looked at his brother. “But I was drunk as a noodle, and she knew it.”

“Well,” Randolph said, getting up, “the odds are it isn’t yours. I mean, think of it. Who could be that unlucky?”

“I guess we’ll be able to tell soon enough.”

Randolph stiffened, his hand on the doorknob. “There’s other white men in this camp.”

Byron looked up. “Do you, well, do you know if she’s seeing anybody? She used to talk to Jules in the commissary, and that toothless clerk.”

“She spends the day in Tiger Island once every two weeks, to get medicine for her father. I don’t know what else she does there.”

“I’m worried sick about it. If Ella left me, I don’t know what would happen.” He leaned back from the stove and clasped his hands under his armpits.

Randolph started across the compound, so distracted he forgot the horse, the animal following his footsteps like a dog. In his own backyard, the woman was carrying stove wood. He intercepted her between his house and the cabin.

“Mr. Aldridge?”

He barely opened his lips. “How many white oaks have you been climbing around here?”

Her eyes went down. “You starting to talk colored.”

“How many?”

She put the firewood on the ground between them. “You found out the third one, I guess.” She folded her arms and waited.

He turned and looked at the shingles on his roof as though searching out the source of a leak. “Are you sure that baby’s not his?”

“Between him and you the red river flowed.”

“What?”

“I had my monthly.”

He let out a breath. “I’ll have to tell him, I suppose. He’s worried about it.”

She studied his face, looking in one eye and then the other. “You glad it’s not his?”

He jammed his hands deep into his pockets. “I don’t know what to be glad of.” He wanted to walk away but felt rooted to the spot.

She tilted her head. “You look kind of glad around the eyes.”

He glanced over to the cabin door, which her bent father had opened. “It’s chilly,” he said. “You better make use of this wood.” A white mill hand walking past slowed at the fence to watch them, and Randolph stepped quickly into his own house.

For Christmas, he and Lillian had planned on returning to Pittsburgh, but in mid-December, influenza grabbed her in a hot fist, and they abandoned the trip. At Nimbus it rained every day, and the woods crews suffered like cattle left out in the storm. Randolph played gin each night at Byron’s house, talking to excess, forcing out memories of their Pennsylvania hunting adventures, horseback trips, swimming matches, and singing parties with neighborhood girls. Byron would nod, but sometimes his eyes grew hard and dark, as if to ask why he should be interested in someone he used to be.

One February dawn, Randolph sat in his office staring out the window, thinking of how to begin a letter to his father. He watched Byron come out for his first rounds and disappear in the mill steam and drizzle. The standard-gauge shay locomotive headed north for Poachum, and the narrow-gauge dummy bobbled south into the swamp. The rafting steamer—loaded down with men dressed in dark, sagging coats—broke a skim of fog on its way down the canal, the leaking steamboat forming its own cloud that retreated over the black water. Crews fired up donkey boilers and pull boats, and the sooty air was so cold and wet that all the steam exhaust roosted on the mill yard and buildings, brooding and still. The mill manager thought about the twelve boxes the carpenters had to build because of the influenza. Only one other had been built because of the saloon, the weather dampening the drunken meanness in most of the men inclined to kill. He hoped that even in this temporary truce his brother’s nerves might relax like the diffusing tuft of steam floating up past his window. As he continued to watch, it occurred to him that Byron’s life was a motionless thing. Most people drifted and reshaped like clouds throughout their lives, pushed along by poverty or wealth, disaster or luck. Byron was a self-contained vessel of sorrow that needed to be broken open. Randolph had thought his attention could do it. Byron himself had married Ella with the hope that she could change him out of his haunted self. Neither had done any good.

The mill manager looked down at a new pack of cards Jules had brought from town. He would play gin with his brother that night, even though he knew Byron would not glance at the score.

On a fog-bound morning later that month, he was riding around the back of the millpond when he heard a rifle shot. The horse stopped and rotated its ears. At the second concussion, the animal turned its head and the mill manager spurred it into a meandering amble past tall stacks of two-by-sixes. Riding into the clear, he saw Ella standing on the front porch of their house in an apron, her hands over her ears. A string of shots erupted on the far side, and Randolph rode toward the racket. He found his brother standing in the side yard firing a lever-action Winchester into his Victrola. A window sash was completely broken out where he’d heaved the machine through it. Randolph dismounted near the corner of the porch as Byron began to reload.

A reddened face that had nothing to do with the bitter-cold day flared at him and shouted, “Stay away from me.” Again, the rifle bucked and the turntable flew out of the mahogany box and spun along the ground. The next shot ricocheted and gonged against the tender of the locomotive. Not a worker was visible, but the feeling of being watched was palpable in the leaden air. Randolph’s horse backed around the porch out of sight as if it had read Byron’s mind.

Helplessly, the mill manager looked up at Ella. “What?”

She pulled one hand from an ear and winced as another shot went off. “He was playing a new record when the mainspring broke in the middle of the song.” She struggled with the words and began to cry. “He’s gone crazy.”

Randolph crept around the corner of the porch and could see that the Victrola was halfway to kindling. The gun banged and another ricochet smacked into the coal house next to the locomotive. He turned back to her. “What was the title?”

“What?”

“The record. What was it?”

“ ‘Are You Tired of Me, My Darling.’ ”

It was their father’s favorite song, and Randolph remembered the day when he’d played it on the Baldwin upright at home. Byron and his beautiful girlfriend sang, one on each side of the cherry piano, while the old man sat in the parlor across the hall, trying to hide the fact that he was enjoying himself. Now, he looked behind him into the mill yard, where a worker was hiding behind a pile of lath, and then stepped clear of the house. Byron crammed the last shell from a box of Winchester 44-40 ammunition into the rifle’s magazine, put a slug through a cabinet leg, and then his fingers froze on the trigger as he heard the improbable sound of his brother’s singing.

Are you tired of me, my darling?
Did you mean those words you said
That have made me yours forever
Since the day that we were wed.

Byron closed his eyes for a moment, then lowered the rifle and set the butt plate on his brogan. Randolph walked up and put an arm on his shoulder, took the Winchester, and handed it back to Ella, who’d gamely followed him out.

“Help me, Rando.”

“What’s the next verse?” he asked, turning his brother toward the porch, where the doctor and Jules had walked up out of the mist.

Byron began to sing weakly, and Randolph sang harmony, their voices rising in strength after the first line.

Tell me, could you live life over,
Would you make it otherwise?
Are you tired of me, my darling?
Answer only with your eyes.

During the next stanza, several emerging workers stood and watched, amazed. When the song was over, Randolph walked his brother to the edge of the porch, where he lay back and put a forearm over his eyes.

The mill manager looked at Jules and shrugged. “The mainspring broke in his talking machine.”

The assistant spat a dart of tobacco and nodded. “I’ll call the furniture place in Tiger Island and tell that skinflint to load his best Victor on the next train that’ll stop for a flag.”

The doctor, still standing back watchfully, motioned for Ella to step over. “I’m going to the office to get him something. Give him three drops in a glass of water.”

She walked back to the edge of the porch, laid a hand on her husband’s head, and looked around at Jules. “He’s not some kid you can buy things for and make feel better.” She turned her gaze on the doctor, who glanced away. “You can’t oil him like some machine that’s about to blow up, either.”

Randolph levered the Winchester’s magazine empty and picked up the blunt cartridges from the ground, wondering if the last one would have gone into his brother’s head. “We can’t sit around and do nothing.” Suddenly, rain began washing down the fog, and Randolph stepped up onto the porch. Everyone except Byron watched as the tree line melted behind the wild, gray spray, and the blind horse stood steaming like a hot rock, all four legs planted like fence posts and its ears pricked forward. With a pang, Randolph saw that it was waiting for the next shot.

In early March, Minos came into the office to give the mill manager an evaluation of the steam plant. He still wore the vest and short-billed cap of a steamboat man, and unlike most of the mill workers he was straight in the back and had all of his fingers. When he stood up to leave, he paused for a moment. “You know, I got to thank you for hiring me.”

“Just keep up your good work.”

Minos nodded. “They ain’t many northerners who treat people like you, no. None that I met, anyhow.”

“I appreciate that.”

The engineer coughed, and Randolph looked back up at him.

“Your brother’s having a rough time of it,” he said. “He was in the war, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. For a long time, too.”

“All that killing—I don’t know. Some don’t never come out of it.”

Randolph knew that the workers had been talking about the Victrola episode and were making of it a camp legend, the kind of thing that foreshadows a terrible event, though none of them could guess what that might be. “You try to help, and wonder if you can ever fix it.”

Minos put his hands halfway into his pockets. “My daddy, he lived through a lot of it in the war between the states. That and the wildness that went on after. Mr. Aldridge, I don’t mind telling you, getting raised by that old man was holy hell. All when I was a kid he woke the house up screaming in French. He was hard as iron to me and my brothers, and some of ’em still won’t waste a penny postcard on him.” He pointed at the door. “I seen him be just like your brother, crying and breaking furniture.” He looked out the window. “I seen him kill a man, a man that needed killing, but it’s hard for a boy to watch his daddy do something like that, yeah. And when he killed him, it was like he was used to it. Like it was a business.”

Under the floor, a call whistle shrieked twice. The engineer pulled his pocket watch and began moving toward the door. “I don’t want to bother in your business none, but I wanted to say that my mother and me, well, we kind of straightened the old man out. After she passed, I give him one of my children to keep a day at a time. He spent so much time chasin’ and fussin’ that he wore a lot of the meanness out of himself. I sent the priest around to mess with him, too.” A second call whistle rose up, and he pulled the door open. “I just wanted to say, you know, you don’t have to write Mr. Byron off.”

The mill manager put his hands palms up on his desk. “I don’t know what to do that’ll help him.”

Minos seemed to think about this. “That’s the sad part, ain’t it?”

On a warm spring afternoon, the housekeeper gathered her strength and heaved a pan of pearl-gray dishwater into the yard, scattering the chickens with the soapy splash. Suddenly, a warm rush of fluid cascaded along the inside of her legs. She saw that Randolph had just come in for his lunch, so she turned round on the porch, opened the screen door, and looked in at him.

“Why,” he asked, “are your shoes wet?”

“ ’Cause this baby’s comin’ to town,” she gasped, her dark eyes wider than nighttime.

A tidal swell of panic rolled over him, and he led May into the small back bedroom and sat her on the mattress. The next thing he remembered, he was running in his vest and shirtsleeves across the mill yard to get the doctor, his legs lifting with each bound as though filled with helium. The old man came to his cabin door with a napkin tucked under his furry chin.

“The housekeeper,” Randolph gasped. “Her baby’s coming.”