The Clearing (24 page)

Randolph stepped into his brother’s line of sight. “No one got killed.”

“A miracle,” the doctor announced. “If they’d strung up that gal, you’d have had a race riot. They’d have burned the mill and slaughtered each other. I’ve never seen such a crazy bunch of juiced-up fools.” He dumped a load of bloody instruments into a porcelain bin. “You should’ve kept them closed down on Sundays.”

Jules stuck his head through the door, water running off his hat brim. He nodded at Randolph. “I got the list.”

“Get a shotgun and take Minos with you.”

“You sure about this? It’ll cost us a few thousand feet a day until we can rehire.”

Randolph made a face at the floor, thinking about the money. Finally, he said, “I want you to fire every last son of a bitch who was making trouble last night.”

Jules shrugged. “Well, if that’s what you want.”

“If one of them gets on his knees to beg, just walk on to the next man. They’re all gone.”

“It’s pretty cold to put men out.”

“I hear it is.”

“You the boss,” Jules said, backing out into the wind.

The mill manager called after him. “Tell Rafe to get the shay hot and haul them out to Poachum. I don’t want them on the property.” He looked over to where two wounded men and the woman lay on pallets at the back of the room, floating on a lake of pain. “Even them. As soon as they can walk, I want them gone.”

Byron did not make rounds for three days. Each of those afternoons he visited his brother’s house where the baby would sit in his idle lap as May cooked and Lillian wrote letters, sewed, or read her husband’s business magazines. Randolph saw him there when he came in for coffee at three, and again for supper-time when Ella would finally walk over and nudge him home. One afternoon, the mill manager came home, looked through the screen, and was startled to see his brother lying on the floor, facedown. At first he was paralyzed with fright, but then he heard the baby noises Byron was making. From the next room, just out of sight, Walter threw a cypress block at Byron’s head.

Randolph pulled the screen open carefully. “By, you all right?”

“Rando. This little bugger’s going to be a baseball player, I believe.”

He came into the house and picked up the boy, brushing back his curls. “No, he’ll go into business for sure.” Randolph looked into the small sharp eyes. Walter grabbed his nose and the mill manager gave the baby’s hand a kiss, then bent down with him next to his brother, who sat up. The men each gave the baby a finger and watched him grab on and try to stand.

May breezed in from the yard holding a freshly plucked chicken and set to work at the stove, and the mill manager wondered what she made of grown men playing with her baby on the floor, of what might really be happening there.

Randolph touched his brother’s bandage. “You coming along all right?”

“It was just a tiny little bullet.”

They both laughed and the baby looked up at the noise, his face questioning one man and then the other.

Randolph stood and brushed at his knees. “I never did figure why you let him open up on Sunday.”

Byron pulled himself standing and brought Walter with him. “I’m so optimistic about human nature, I just couldn’t help myself.”

“Maybe you feel sorry for Buzetti. A little.”

“You’ve been drinking Sydney’s medicine.” Byron put Walter down, and the boy cupped the constable’s thumbs in his palms and stood, trying for balance. “But he was in France a long time. I heard he lost three brothers in one day.” He looked away from Walter’s bright face. “All bayoneted. They say he watched each one die.”

Ella appeared on the porch and pushed open the screen, glancing at Randolph. “Would you tell him he doesn’t live in your kitchen?”

“Well, since he’s already here, why don’t you both stay for dinner?”

“No, I’ve already fixed something.” She touched a finger to the baby’s nose. “That child is a weed.”

Walter took a handful of Byron’s pants and a handful of Randolph’s, wobbling, looking up.

By one or two at a time, troublemakers, drunkards, stomp-and-gouge fighters, whore beaters, or dull-eyed gamblers with only lint left in their pockets, were fired and replaced. But still, late at night, down in the kerosene eyes of the saloon, the howls that sprang from insults or sexual deception or sixty hours of work blown away by the turn of a card rose into the mossy limbs ghosting above the iron roof. Every night twenty or so men drank on either side of the wall, but on Saturdays the sprawling building held over a hundred. There were no real women to gentle the place down, no music or dancing, just boozy hollering between addled men who imagined they were telling stories.

Randolph and Lillian were sitting in the new room at the front of the house. He was reading and she was repairing the binding on ragged arithmetic books the state had sent down for the school, and with the windows open, they could hear the saloon’s racket. At ten o’clock, he stood up and buttoned his vest.

“Be careful,” Lillian said.

“The ten o’clock pass isn’t all that bad. I told Byron I’d take it.”

She placed a book on top of a stack next to her chair. “The more he stays out of that place, the better.”

He walked over and entered the colored side, where a whole woods crew had just come in smelling of mules, hand-rolled cigarettes, woodsmoke, and sap. Vincente’s first cousin sat behind a board table that had been hand-sawed round and painted felt green, dealing to a group hunkered under a hanging gasoline lamp. In the corner, a mill hand was playing a cracked F hole guitar, sliding a broken bottle neck over the strings, choking out bluesy rises as the men at the table risked their week’s pay. Vincente’s cousin was a dark man with a narrow face, carelessly shaven, and he kept a Luger on the table next to him. On the white side of the building, Vincente had also begun openly carrying a Luger to work, but to his was attached a snail-drum clip holding thirty-two rounds.

Sitting to the Italian’s right was a faller the woods gangs called Judgment, a man made huge by twelve-hour shifts of swinging a crosscut saw. In the east Texas woods, he’d used only an ax, and his stovepipe arms suggested that he’d cut his way to Nimbus. His skin was the hot, satin black of a locomotive, and his eyes were crimson with both liquor and a steaming suspicion that he was being cheated. Vincente’s cousin dealt a hand of seven-card stud, and Judgment bet heavily from the first card, the pot rising with clumps of ones, twos, and fives. Randolph walked up and stood behind Pink, the man Byron had saved from a razor fight months before. Pink was a school-trained millwright, a master at regulating and sharpening the planing machines, and the mill manager was sorry to see him at the table.

It came time to deal the last card, down, and the Italian hesitated. Even the mill manager noticed the break in rhythm. Then he dealt himself a card from the bottom of the deck, a shadowed, subtle movement with the little finger, but not subtle enough. Randolph felt the atmosphere of the saloon turn to molasses, and it occurred to him how a man could walk through a world of logical movement and be distracted by none of it, but when that one motion that did not ring true impressed itself on the eye, it was like a train roaring past. Judgment reached out with an octopus of a hand and grabbed the dealer’s neck as the Luger went off with a skull-cracking pop. The little .30 caliber jacketed slug whizzed through the top of the black man’s shoulder, but he didn’t blink. The dealer’s mouth gasped open and his pistol wavered between Pink and a fireman at the table. Shouting “No,” Randolph snaked an arm around Pink’s chest and pulled him down just as the pistol cracked again and the fireman went over the back of his chair. Judgment tightened his grip, his fingers like black sausages on the dealer’s neck, and the Luger bounced to the floor. Randolph ducked under the table past the kicking fireman and seized the gun as the gamblers scrambled away like roaches. He came up on his knees and found the dealer wilting like a crushed flower in the huge black hand.

“Let him go.”

Judgment’s flaming eyes swung to face him. “He never gonna let me go.”

“I’ll run him off. Let him go, damnit.” Randolph put an elbow on the table, and at that moment Vincente rushed in from the other room, throwing up his Luger. Judgment ducked, and Vincente fired twice and missed, putting two gouges in the green table next to the mill manager’s head.

“Drop it,” Randolph screamed, pointing the cousin’s Luger toward the roof.

When Vincente shot Judgment in the back, he leapt like a hooked fish and crashed down onto a chair, spindles flying through the room. “You gonna have to hire some more niggers when I get finished,” Vincente called, spraying the room with dust-raising concussions. Pink yelled and flashed a bloody hand as he rolled toward the door on fire with pain. And then, without thinking whether or not he should pull the trigger, Randolph felt the gun in his own hand jump. Vincente hit the floor all at once like a sack of coal.

The cousin sat up, holding his throat, glancing back and forth between Vincente and the mill manager. “Ah,” he cried. “Thisa no good.” Then, he looked over at the door.

Randolph turned and saw Byron holding a cocked .45 automatic. Behind him was the silver mane of the doctor. “Who is it this time?” Sydney asked quietly.

Byron’s eyes seemed misshapen and sorrow-filled as he looked at the growing pool of blood under Vincente’s head, at his brother, still down on one knee next to the table.

Randolph got to his feet and handed him the Luger, dumbly, barrel first. His pulse spasmed like a runaway mill engine, and he felt that everything in his past history was suddenly of no consequence. Judgment sat up, looked at Vincente, and despite the blood streaming down his back from two holes, laughed aloud. The fireman was dead and Pink was sitting near the front wall, bent over double. “I’m all right,” he said, his voice tight as a fist. “It went through my palm is all.”

Randolph turned to his brother, his hands out, pleading. “Let me tell you what happened.”

Byron took a quick glance around. “I know what happened.” He nudged Vincente’s body with his boot. “Just call the carpenters. We’ll send this one up to Poachum with the next load of boards.”

The mill manager seemed desperate to explain. “He was trying to kill everyone in the room,” he said, his voice high and broken.

“I’ll see if I can phone the sheriff.” Byron motioned to Vincente’s cousin. “Get out of camp.”

The man stood and straightened his collar, which popped off in his hand. “Buzetti no gonna like.”

Randolph was feeling washed out, but when he heard this, he grabbed the dealer by the lapels of his coat, whirled him through the door, and threw him off the porch into a waterfilled hole. “Tell Buzetti I didn’t want to shoot his cousin. It’s the last thing I wanted to do. But let him know that if he gives me more trouble I’ll make damned sure he never eats another meatball.”

The doctor looked up from the dead fireman and called out the door, “Good God, don’t tell him things like that.”

The dealer stood and slung the mud from his coat sleeves and walked toward the railroad track.

“I’ve seen this before.” Byron’s voice was dry and small.

Randolph spun on him. “What does that mean?”

“It’s how it all starts,” he said. “With posturing. With one shot.”

“I didn’t want to do it, By.”

“You don’t have to tell
me
that.”

They walked to the edge of the porch, looking after Vincente’s cousin.

“Who knows how much trouble this will cause?” the doctor said, as he examined Judgment, who was standing up in the doorway and flexing his back, an annoyed expression on his broad face.

Byron shook his head. “What starts small gets bigger.”

Suddenly, they heard a scream rise above the Negro quarters, a high-pitched wail soaring into the night sky as the fireman’s woman got the news.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Lillian was waiting for him in the kitchen, dressed as though she did not intend to go back to bed. “I know it was bad.” She sat down at the empty table and placed a hand over her mouth.

“It was worse than bad.”

“Sit here with me,” she said.

He watched her in the yellow light of the lamp and held back the news, knowing that after he told her, everything would be different between them. “I think I’ll stand a while and look at you.”

“Look at me! What’s wrong, Rand? You don’t seem at all well.” Then a shadow passed over her face.

He imagined that there was no good way to say what had to be said. “I killed a man.” He did not like the sound of it himself.

Lillian’s head snapped back. “I don’t believe it.”

“One of Buzetti’s dealers. The one named Vincente.”

She stood up and put a chair between them, her hands clenched on its back. Finally, she said, “You came here to straighten Byron out. Instead you’re doing the same—” She bit off what she was about to say. “How could you?”

“It was to save a worker,” he said, not sure exactly whose life it was he’d saved, knowing only that Vincente had twenty shells left in his magazine when his head bounced against the floor.

“You killed somebody,” she said, crying it aloud.

He held out his arms to her, but she looked to the lamp on the table. Then she turned down the wick, and he felt his real self disappearing, turning to a brown smudge in the background of her life, a monochrome outline of who he used to be.