The Clearing (18 page)

“Don’t come back,” he whispered, “until garlic smells like roses.”

At dawn, the mill manager, still awake, heard someone walking on his porch, and May rattled his doorknob. “You better get up and see about him,” she said.

He found Byron outside, sitting in a rocker, smoking. Without looking up, he said, “I wish you’d been right.”

Randolph watched a snake sidewinding along the road. The smell of the mud-choked swamp rose up to him, mixed with woodsmoke and privy. “I don’t understand anything, By. I was wrong. From now on, do like you’ve been doing. Just stop it as quickly as you can.” He looked across the mill yard at the breakfast smoke creeping down the roof pitch of every paintless house, and he felt profoundly sad, remembering the drunk German’s last minute, the short string of a song, which he now began to whistle, trying to place it.

“ ‘Lo, How a Rose E’re Blooming,’ ” Byron said.

“A Christmas carol. What was going through his mind?” Byron rocked back and looked up at him. “I wish I knew, brother.”

“Yes.”

“If I’d put a bullet in the German in the right place, maybe he wouldn’t have died. Maybe the stacker wouldn’t have caught the stray shot that ruined him.”

“Just do what has to be done. But try not to kill anyone.”

His brother rocked forward and closed his eyes. “What if Vincente and the engineer had already faced off, and I had to make a choice? Hans was so drunk he wouldn’t have listened to me. What if I had to shoot one or the other?”

“You save the best one, I guess. You’ve done that before.” Randolph studied his brother’s tortured profile as he looked off toward the saloon.

And then Byron’s voice broke. “You have to decide in half a second.”

“I don’t know, maybe you should carry a smaller-caliber pistol.”

Byron shook his head. “I could empty a .38 into a big tree cutter, and if he’s drunk enough it’d be like throwing a handful of gravel at him. That’s one thing I learned policing cowboys in their shit-hole bars.” He put his head back on the rocker and met his brother’s eyes. “What
exactly
do you want me to do?”

“Shoot to wound. If they die anyway, you’ll still have tried to do right.”

“Leave myself open to the last shot?”

A safety valve opened up above the mill, venting an angry feather of steam, and Randolph squinted toward the raspy sound. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

“Just a while ago, I used the new phone line to call the German’s folks in Houston. I had to go through about ten operators, a Kirby commissary manager, and a preacher to reach his wife. Lord, that woman cried and cried. I heard the phone’s earpiece swing and hit the wall and then more noise after that. When I hung up, I opened the window for air and thought I could hear her screams coming all the way from Texas.” Byron put a hand over his eyes.

Randolph bent down and grabbed his arm. “Come inside, By. The housekeeper makes wonderful coffee.”

His brother began to cry. “I asked around. That lumber stacker lying in his blood, his name’s Georgie. He was a good old boy and could make a two-by-four fly and land like a bird.”

“Come on, now,” Randolph said, lifting him up as best he could.

In the kitchen, the housekeeper watched the men settle at the table. “Lord,” she said, astonished. “A crying man.”

That night, when the mill was dead quiet but for the whispery exhale of the boilers, Randolph wandered his house from room to room, brooding about Hans. Back in Pennsylvania, he’d sung the engineer’s song as a hymn during Christmas season, sometimes even in German. On the third trip through his bedroom, he saw, behind a chair, a sparkle of pearline finish. He pulled the accordion against him like a lover, his fingers wandering for the melody, and the way a hand finds a doorknob in a midnight hallway, he found the song, playing his way into it, hoping the missing words would come and ride the notes against the silence. He closed his eyes and remembered snow, and then the words came one by one, like birds landing on a wire at sunset.

Lo, how a Rose e’re blooming
From tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse’s lineage coming
As those of old have sung.

Two whole stanzas returned to him, and he recalled a Christmas play in which he’d sung them with his baby voice. He worried that the song was as sentimental as one of Byron’s dollar records, another palliative to mask the true hurt of living, but as the instrument’s reeds thrummed, he thought of Hans trying to sing it and wondered why, of all the sounds of a lifetime to cling to, he chose this one. Adding another finger to the melody, Randolph sang, with the feeling of a child:

Wahr’ Mensch und wahrer Gott,
Hilft uns aus allen Leiden,
Rettet von Sund’ und Tod.

He played out all the German in his memory and sang it next in English, opening the accordion’s stops and polishing the rhythm until the straps pulled down his shoulders. Then the door to his bedroom swung open, the housekeeper standing there in a flannel nightgown.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

Near tears and surprised, he began to stutter. “I—I was singing a tribute to Hans.”

May sniffed. “Tribute, is it? Mr. Randolph, you and Mr. Byron have to stop looking at everything on this green earth like it’s a moving picture.”

“He was a fine engineer,” he said defensively.

She put a hand on her hip. “Mr. Hans could make those engines run like a chicken on Sunday morning, all right, but he was a nasty drunk and smelled like a lost dishrag.”

Embarrassed, he turned away, the accordion bulging from his stomach. “I guess I was trying to find something redemptive in his death.”

She made a face. “You were with him when he died, I heard.”

“I was.”

“Tell truth. You see anything beautiful about it? Or was it just another sawmill man shot up in a poker game?” She came over and put a hand on his shoulder. “You all have got to deal with what is. Now take this whiny box off and get some rest. I heard this thing from out in the cabin and it scared me half to death.”

He unshouldered the instrument and placed it on the floor. As May was going though the doorway, he called after her, “How’ve you been feeling?”

Over her shoulder she said, “Kind of heavy,” and was gone.

Randolph shoved the accordion into a corner with his foot and watched it take a final breath.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Within a week, Lillian found a large galleried house to lease in the Garden District, and Randolph was glad to have her even further away from the mill because May would soon begin to show. He and the housekeeper had agreed on a story in which she’d been taken advantage of by a white man in Tiger Island. Once such a thing was said in the South, she’d told him, no other questions would be asked.

He began to take the Saturday-evening mail train into New Orleans, and within a few weeks he and Lillian had established a routine. At ten o’clock he would arrive at the house on Prytania Street, where she would have a hot bath ready for him, and afterward, they would have drinks and make love. Each journey was a return to civilization, and he was shocked to get off the train and see people who didn’t stink excessively, were not spattered with mud and dung, who didn’t walk around with silver-toothed crosscut saws bouncing over their shoulders.

The house Lillian had rented he thought to be wastefully comfortable, so bright it hurt his eyes with its white plaster medallions and ivory walls, brass light fixtures and beveled-glass doors. The deep porcelain tub, however, was a blessing, and he was glad to stand up after a bath and not have his buttocks stippled by galvanizing and impressed with the number 3.

On Sundays they would walk on a real sidewalk to church, but Randolph would still watch his feet, expecting a water moccasin in any sunny spot. The minister was elegant and bright, as straight in his back as he was in his thinking. To the mill manager he looked like some rare intelligence hired for a large fee, and the stained-glass-washed air around him was fragrant with logic.

Lillian began to fit in with the New Orleans culture, learning to cope with the hot afternoons and palate-tingling food. He was afraid that she would be lonely and homesick, but for once she seemed delighted to be out on her own, away from both her dour family and his father, who lately had railed more or less exclusively about responsibility and money. She no longer complained that Randolph was dull and made clear how proud she was of what he was attempting with Byron. Even her complexion, he thought, had improved in the humidity.

Sunday nights he rode the windy coaches of the westbound mail, rocking back into darkness. The train crossed moonstruck alluvial farms by the river, then a grassy, water-haunted prairie, plunging next into the old-growth swamps where everything slowed to the pace of a hunting reptile and the skirted trees threw back at him the crashing of the coaches’ wheels. Poachum was only seventy miles from streetcars, jazz bands, sane religion, and theaters pearled with hundreds of lightbulbs, but when he stepped off the train at the station whose only illumination was the backwash from the locomotive’s headlight, the settlement seemed to be in the jungles of Brazil.

Sales preparations he previously had completed on Sundays had to be carried over to later in the week. One Monday in early October, an hour earlier than usual, the housekeeper struggled to wake him, her thin fingers set deep in his well-fed biceps.

“What?” He couldn’t even see her.

“You have a tying-up to do.”

He rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands for half a minute. “Oh, Lord.”

“The men are on the porch.”

He sat up, pulled on his clothes and boots, and at the front door she handed him a lantern. Two somber, bearded mill hands and Byron, stiff as cardboard and silent, stepped off with him down to the commissary. Randolph unfolded a big jackknife key and unlocked the store, the bearded men going inside and soon coming back out with a crated cookstove between them that they loaded onto a two-wheeled mule cart. Byron sat on the tailgate, his straw cowboy hat slanting in his eyes. By the time they got to the last cabin in the Negro quarters, a gray light had come up over the treetops. A large black faller wearing new overalls stood between the cabin and the rutted lane, and next to him a woman held herself in a sideways slouch, her head bound in a red turban. The mill hands knocked the crate apart in the yard and assembled the stove, tightening bolts with their fingers. After the lids were on and the lifting keys stuck into them and turned forward, they stepped back and assumed the posture of witnesses.

The mill manager came forward and cleared his throat, trying to remember their names. “Led Williams, do you want this stove to go into this house?”

“Yes sah,” the man said, nodding gravely.

“Nellie Jones, do you also want this stove to go into this house?”

The woman put a hand on her hip and looked the mill manager in the eye. “That’s a fact,” she said, spitting expertly on the stove’s long shadow.

Randolph motioned to the men, who picked up the range and walked it through the front door and into the rear of the house, dropping it under a new crock flue pipe set in the wall. When they emerged, the man and woman stepped up out of the yard through the doorway, turned, and stood in the frame, looking outside.

Randolph felt the urge to raise his hands toward the sky, so he did. Then he was at a loss for what to say, feeling pagan, drawing magic from the clouds. Finally, he told them, “You’re together now. I guess you know what that means.” He brought down his hands. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you, sah,” the man said. The woman nodded once, spat another brown jet into the yard, and turned toward the rear of the cabin.

Byron replaced his hat and motioned to the doorway. “I won’t have any more trouble with him in the saloon.
She’ll
keep him straight.”

“You think so?”

“Better than I can,” he said, climbing back onto the cart.

Randolph returned to his house and ate breakfast, glancing repeatedly at May. “That’s the fourth hitching-up I’ve done. How do I handle a divorce?”

She poured him more coffee with one hand and gave him a dollop of cream with the other. “Get somebody to throw the stove in the yard. Send the man back to the barracks, and give the woman train fare to her mamma. Buy tickets for her little chaps, too.”

“That’s it?”

She thought a moment, her lovely gold-flecked eyes floating between him and the window. “What else could happen?”

He broke open a feathery biscuit. “How long were you married?”

She pursed her lips and looked at him directly. “Can I sit down?”

He looked behind him through the screen.

“Nobody’s studying you,” she said ruefully, pulling out a chair and easing into it. “I married a nice, smart boy from Shirmer, a kind, light-skinned boy named James. We came here to work and he spent two dollars to get us married by a preacher. Had to go into town and sign papers because he wanted everything right. About three months later, they had him on the log train and he fell down between two cars and got his foot pinched off above the ankle.” She worked her hands in her apron as though trying to scour something off her fingers. “I tried to care for him, but he wouldn’t stop bleeding. Mr. Byron, he came over and tried some things they taught him in the war, but it didn’t do any good. After two days he got fever, and I wanted somebody to take him to Tiger Island.” She glanced out the kitchen window. “I found out the doctor there wouldn’t work on colored. Mr. Jules finally got it set up so that the railroad would carry him in the baggage car to New Orleans. But the morning we were going to load him, he passed.”