The Clearing (2 page)

The bound man, a big sawyer in overalls, bent his knees and sat on the ground. “Mr. Byron, these Eyetalians is tryin’ to drown my ass.”

“Aw, naw,” the fat man said. “We just gonna watch him blow bubbles, then we gonna fish him out. That right, Angelo?”

His partner was slim, with a face full of splayed teeth; his response was to tighten his grip on the sawyer’s denim collar.

“Cut him loose.”

“I don’t think so,” the fat one told him, and in a single motion the constable reached under his vest, pulled out a big Colt pistol, and swung it like a hatchet down onto the man’s head, putting his shoulder and back into it. Jules stepped closer to the commissary wall, even at this distance seeing the brassy jet pulsing through the dark pants as the man fell sideways and rolled like an oil drum down the levee. The skinny fellow stepped away from the sawyer, showing his empty palms.

Above Jules, on the commissary porch, a clerk began sweeping boot clods to the ground. He glanced over toward the pond. “Well,” he said, as though he’d spotted a small, unexpected rain cloud.

“A little trouble.”

The broom did not break its rhythm. “He ought to know better than to hammer them dagos,” he said, turning and working the front edge of the gallery.

Jules put a hand to his chin and watched the sawyer stand up and offer his bindings to the constable’s knife. He was thinking of letters he’d exchanged over the years with a man he’d never seen, the absentee owner of his now defunct Texas mill. “What’s that lawman’s last name?”

“Who wants to know?”

“The man who decides whether this mill gets bought.”

The broom ceased its whispery talk. “You the evaluation man they said was coming? Well, you can look around and see the timber, but these fellows running things can’t sell it. They poke around sending telegraphs all over but they couldn’t sell harp strings in heaven.”

Jules looked directly at the clerk, a pale man with skeletal arms. “Tell me his last name.”

The clerk plucked a wad of chewing gum from his broom bristles. “Aldridge.”

Jules glanced back at the millpond, where the smaller man, Angelo, was crouched next to his partner, slapping his bloody jowls. “You think your manager’s in his office about now?”

“That’s the only place he can be. Fell off his horse and broke his foot last week.” The clerk made a final pass with his broom and stepped inside the commissary’s syrupy darkness while Jules walked off toward the grinding thunder that was the mill.

At dusk, after examining the sales accounts, maps, invoices, payroll, pending orders, and the living mill itself, Jules put on his hat and walked toward the constable’s house, glad he’d worn his old scuffed riding boots. A late-afternoon thunder-shower had turned the mill yard into a muddy reflecting pond where the images of herons and crows skated at cross-purposes. The mill was losing money, but only because it was operated by an Alabama drunkard; it was a financial plum, heavy and ready to be picked.

The site itself, called Nimbus, though that word was not apparent anywhere, was composed of brush-lined lanes twisting among stumps as wide as water tanks. The various foremen and the constable lived in a row of large unpainted houses not far from the railroad. Jules raised his head toward an inconsequential guitar music tinkling down a lane and sounding like raindrops striking a trash pile of tin cans. He recognized the watered-down noise of a Victrola coming through the screen door of the constable’s house, the man himself sitting on the porch in a hide-bottom chair, a flushed and waning sun behind him, his eyes squeezed shut under his stained hat. Jules walked up and listened to a whiny lyric about a sweet old cabin in the pines where a mammy waits with open arms. The constable’s eyeballs moved under his lids like nether creatures, not in time with the music; Jules was at pains to reconcile the saccharine song with the afternoon’s violence. He coughed.

“I know you’re there,” the man said, not opening his eyes.

Jules took off his Stetson. “That’s some music.”

“I’m trying to go back to how it was,” the constable said quietly.

“Pardon?”

“This song. It used to be one way. Now it’s another.” Inside the house the music died and the record clicked off.

Jules settled his sweaty hat higher on his brow and looked up over the sun-gilded porch boards. He’d seen a picture once of a younger man, but this was the one they’d been hunting for years. “Things change when that old clock goes ’round,” he said.

When Byron Aldridge opened his eyes, they were like those of a great horse strangling in a dollar’s worth of fence wire. “Can I last ’til things change back?”

CHAPTER TWO

When the telegram arrived at the Pittsburgh office, Randolph Aldridge read it and looked out the window as if he could see the thousand miles of bird-limed copper wire that carried this information from New Orleans. Telegraphy interested him because of the way it compacted the world, destroying its mysteries, good as well as bad.

Jules Blake, an employee, had located his brother. Randolph told his father, Noah, and when they examined subsequent messages arriving later that day, they decided to buy the Nimbus tract, brother and all. The following week, at the father’s large house just beyond the sootfall of the city’s smokestacks, they went into a drawing room and spread open a map.

“You can stay for three or four months,” his father told him. “Just to straighten things out and convince your brother to come back.”

“It’ll be hard on Lillian,” he said.

“Bringing Byron home will outweigh that.” Noah bent closer to the map. “A good wife will understand.”

“What about City Mill?” Randolph thought of the gleaming plant his father had placed in his charge, a small but modern hardwood mill with paved lanes, in fact a company village stippled with white cottages, electric engines, boilers fueled with clean-burning anthracite, where the title of mill manager held a weight similar to that of mayor or judge.

“You’ve done such a good job there, the place can run itself for a while.” His father looked up as if to check him for doubt. “Suffering down South will make you appreciate what we have here.”

Randolph had heard a great deal about suffering but had experienced none of it and discounted even his father’s tales of his own hard youth; it was his grandfather who had built the company, starting with a third-hand steam engine after the Civil War and cutting crossties for government contracts. Randolph bent down to the broad mahogany table and set his brandy glass on a corner of the map. Below this Louisiana mill was a spongy green area, a cypress swamp that had been explored mostly by snakes, and below that a thin picket of marsh above the pale blue waters of the Gulf. Twenty-five miles to the west of Nimbus, the map showed a town they’d inquired about, a hard-drinking place called Tiger Island, a port on the Chieftan River and a small railroad hub. Some twenty miles to the east of the mill tract was Shirmer and the sugar cane plantations of the Terrebonne region. Directly north by five miles was a particle on the Southern Pacific main line named Poachum, and north of that was seventy miles of uninhabited land visited only by survey crews planning its destruction, for it was pregnant with oil, timber, natural gas, sulfur, and fur-bearing animals.

He had read Jules’s much-misspelled but lengthy report and knew that this country was packed with soaring tidewater cypress, bug-proof, rot-proof shafts of butter-smooth grain, trees nine feet thick at the base, waiting to be made into boards that would outlast by three hundred years the bankers and lawyers sitting on their lake-cottage porches and smelling the sweet, peppery wood taken off the earth to furnish their leisure. Randolph put a forefinger down below Poachum but could not picture this teeming sponge of land, nor could he imagine his brother in such a place, serving law and making enemies at the edge of the world. He picked up his glass and took a drink. “This is two birds with one stone. A good mill and Byron both.”

His father straightened up and pinched off his glasses. “I’ve given instructions that the purchase not be noised about that camp until you arrive.”

“Think he’ll bolt?”

“He will if he hears about it before you step up on his porch.” His father touched him briefly on the shoulder the way a waiter might. “You’re the one who can bring him back to us. You’ve got to remember that.”

“My wife—”

“You’re the one,” the old man repeated, turning and leaving the room.

Randolph walked over to the piano and pressed down a C chord. His older brother was well educated, big, and handsome, and in spite of a disposition oscillating between manic elation and mannequin somberness, he’d been destined to take over management of the family’s mills and timber. Then he’d gone off to the war, coming back neither elated nor somber but with the haunted expression of a poisoned dog, unable to touch anyone or speak for more than a few seconds without turning slowly to look over his shoulder. Randolph saw on the mantel the sepia photograph of a young man with dark hair laid over to the side, a sharp-eyed fellow who looked as though he had a politician’s gift for talking to strangers and putting them at ease. After France, Byron spoke to people with his eyes wide, sometimes vibrating with panic, as if he expected them suddenly to burst into flames. Late in 1918 he had joined the police force in Pittsburgh, his father angry and ashamed that his eldest son would rather wrestle with the city’s thugs and factory trash than come to work in the business he’d been born to.

After six weeks Byron disappeared, and Randolph was given the task of finding him, but none of the investigators he hired turned up a trace.

When letters began arriving in 1919 from Gary, Indiana, his father sent a detective to find him, but without success. Two months later, a postcard appeared from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, then a one-sentence note from Heber Springs, Arkansas. After that came a long silence when the family could speak of him only in the polite evening language of holidays and Sunday dinners. In 1921 a paragraph from a little town in Kansas told of police work and jail tending, followed by a penciled note from farther west in Kansas, and a month later one from a New Mexico town that didn’t appear on any map. Then, for a year now, they’d received not a word, as though Byron had at last found a place in which he was the only citizen, and somehow had gone beyond even that in his solitude.

In his brother’s absence, Randolph began to understand that most of what he knew about music, women, or the business, he’d learned from Byron. He and the old man brought out detailed timberman’s maps, running their fingers down canyons, across state lines, out of forests and into the white space of deserts, guessing at where he was. Now they knew, and their spirits lifted.

Leaving Pittsburgh, Randolph kept his face at the window of his sleeping car as it rolled down through the ordered farms whose crops covered the low hills like squares in a quilt, through modern towns and their scrubbed and turreted brick stations, their electric streetcar lines, their corn-rows of automobiles parked in front of stores burgeoning with anything an American could want. His efficient eye noted the just-built macadam roads, and he imagined a view of the region from an aeroplane, the new avenues spidering out to highways and turnpikes, webs of pavement binding tight the prospering soil.

He changed trains in Richmond, boarding an older coach furnished with plush seats and varnished wood worn to a satin finish, and then watched the night country fly by as the station buildings became smaller and more decrepit, the roads behind them now made of graded gravel. The next day further south he changed trains again and saw gaunt men standing in the fields as if sunstruck, their clothes a sagging second skin of denim and copper rivets, their tobacco crops bug-bitten and jaundiced in the heat. Here were no stone houses at all, no paved thoroughfares, and only a few factory smokestacks divided the horizon. Randolph wondered if the sun-blistered barns of Georgia could offer some clue to his brother’s wanderings. Why
this
direction, he kept asking himself. Away from money, and from people like him? He stared out at this strange country, the South, at the dark heat, and the used-up, coppery soil scratched over by mules.

At dinner a steward seated him with a woman wearing a stylish drop-waist dress, whose young daughter fidgeted at her side. Randolph envied the energy and quickness of children, and for six years had tried with his wife to produce a baby. He ordered, then fixed the child with a flat look. “Tell me a joke,” he said.

The girl looked at her mother, who shrugged politely. “Don’t know one, mister.”

He was stuck by her accent, backwoods, whiny. “Sure you do. Smart girls like you can remember all sorts of jokes. Think of one your grandpa told.”

The girl rolled her eyes under her bangs and said nothing. The waiter brought salads balanced up his arms and refilled the water glasses with long streams that took on the sideways jostle of the coach. The mother said little, only that they were going to a funeral, and Randolph worried that neither of them was very bright.

After the lettuce and the pork chops, the apple pie and coffee, the mill manager looked at his check and stretched a foot out into the carpeted aisle.

“A lady asked a farmer,” the girl blurted out.

“What?” He was in the act of hoisting himself out of the chair. The mother turned her face to the dark window, and her reflection was not amused.

“She asked him how deep was his pond.” The girl’s pink hand flipped through her blond hair like a butterfly, then dropped into her lap.