The Clearing (21 page)

The doctor swallowed something and plucked off his napkin. “Why you in such a sweat, Mr. Aldridge?” He picked up his bag from inside the door and stepped out into the sunshine. “You can’t work that woman’s whelp ’til he’s twelve, at least.”

Randolph wanted to imagine that the doctor was just tired because he’d spent the morning sewing up three men who’d been whipped by a broken cable out in the woods. “Come on.” He slipped a hand under the doctor’s elbow and guided him off the little porch.

“You know,” Sydney Rosen complained, holding back, “any woman down in the quarters can jerk this baby.”

“I’m sorry to disturb your meal,” Randolph said, hustling him along the lane, “but come on. Now.”

When they entered the bedroom, the doctor opened his bag and looked at May, who was sprawled on top of the bedspread. “How you feel, gal?”

“Like I’m about to pass a watermelon.” She gave him a look. “You gonna wash your hands?”

The old man stopped short, then turned abruptly for the kitchen.

“Hot water in the kettle,” she called after him.

“I don’t need to be told about hot water, by damn.”

Randolph patted her hand a few quick times. “He’ll make it all right.”

“I hope so. I’m ready to burst open.” She threw her head back, and he could hear her teeth grinding.

The doctor was gentle, at least with his hands, and three hours later came a strong and squalling boy, his eyes already open and wanting to see where he’d got to. Exhausted, his mother held him against her breasts. The doctor and mill manager sat there until supper, and at bedtime Randolph walked May and the boy to her cabin.

The next morning, the doctor came again to tend them. In the new light he took the wriggling, naked baby and held him up to the room’s single window. Turning him like a loaf of bread in several directions, he made the child’s color come and go, finally provoking him into a wailing fit. Then he handed him back to her and said, surprised, “This one’s all cream and no coffee.” He gave the housekeeper a questioning look. “Do you know who the daddy is?”

She smiled down and gave the baby a nipple. “He don’t have a daddy. I made him myself.”

“What you going to name him?”

She gave the doctor a sly look. “I might name him Sydney.”

The old man bent down to close his satchel, then sprang upright. “I’ll be damned if you will. That’s my name. I’d have to move out of the parish.”

“Well, then how about Walter?”

“Now that’s more like,” the doctor said, sliding along toward the door. “With a name like that at least he can sell insurance.”

March 23, 1924
Nimbus Mill
Poachum Station, La.

Dear Father,

The weather has faired off this week and the woods crews are
free of influenza. Our production will rise a thousand or so board
feet per shift. If the men stay healthy and without hangovers, we can
maintain the call from Standard Oil for box board and from
Williams and Co. for shooks. I am on the phone most of the time
with the New Orleans brokers and spend a lot of energy keeping
prices down here, though I have had to raise sawyers’ wages a nickel
an hour to avoid losing them to the Tiger Island mills.

My housekeeper has delivered a boy. I know you don’t approve of
employees having children out of wedlock, but this camp is such a
heap of hell-bent roughnecks that she can hardly cause any lowering
of morals. She is intelligent and her son is healthy and fine, and I
hope to keep her on as long as the timber around here lasts.

Byron is drifting. I’ve tried to get him to go on a holiday with
Lillian and me, but he says he can’t get used to more than one place
at a time. He often drinks too much, which leads him to lose control
and break up furniture. (Note the enclosed invoice for a new cabinet
model Victrola.) I informed him that I told you about his wife, and
he wouldn’t speak to me for a week. I’ve given him your letters and
he has read them, but will not return to Pittsburgh. He says he must
be his own man. I don’t know what he means by that. He is so
injured in his mind that sometimes I tire of trying to help. At his
house the other night, after an hour of listening to his maudlin
records, I challenged him to arm-wrestle as we used to do. When he
beat me easily, as he had always done, he accused me of giving in
and said I was making fun of him, then practically pushed me out
the door.

It’s been a relatively dry spring and the camp is out of the
water. I haven’t stepped on a snake in two days.

Your son,
Randolph

In the evenings, the mill manager held the baby—safely named Walter, unlike any white man in camp—while May cleaned the kitchen. He grumbled whenever she offered the boy but always took him. He often studied the small face when she was out back in the cabin tending to her father, who was now bedridden. During the day, the child stayed in the small rear bedroom that opened into the kitchen, and the baby became used to the sight of him. Walking into the room to retrieve a rain slicker or pair of boots, he would pass by the crib and the boy’s arms would fly up. The first time this happened Randolph was startled with longing and regret, and he backed away, forgetting why he’d walked in to begin with.

Byron would visit whenever he noticed that May was out hanging laundry, and he’d talk about mill business or problems in the camp, but Randolph knew he wanted to steal looks at the boy. When Walter was four months old, Byron came in and saw his brother holding him at the kitchen table, and he sat down and took the baby himself, laying him atop his thighs and gazing at his gray eyes and walnut-brown hair. He felt Walter’s ears between his fingers and looked up at his brother.

“No,” Randolph said. “Not yours. And there’s no telling whose.”

Byron nodded. “Fine looking little tadpole, I’ll admit. Looks like May, pretty much.”

“That’s true,” his brother said, laughing. The baby twisted his head in Byron’s palm to look toward the mill manager, who at once got up to pour a cup of coffee, keeping his back to the table. He dared not look at the child when anyone else was in the room, because he knew what showed on his face.

As the heat gathered throughout summer, the saloon fights seemed to generate out of the humid air. Byron had to go into the quarters at night to break up husbands and wives, or husbands and their wives’ boyfriends, answering the wink of straight razors in the dark with the ring of his shovel on bone. During June alone, Randolph was required to throw three stoves into yards. Byron had to pack the broken families out of the mill, run off hoboes, shoot snakes and alligators, knock down, handcuff, and ship trespassers and log rustlers off to Tiger Island for jailing and trial. Vincente had to be watched, warned, and sometimes protected from the men who lost their wages and wanted to kill him with their bare hands. No matter how busy they were, the brothers never forgot Buzetti and remained watchful for some toothpick-sucking presence he’d send slouching through the swamps.

CHAPTER TWELVE

After lunch, Randolph and his wife stepped out onto the second-floor porch on a hot August Sunday and watched children playing below on the brick street. Lillian had not said much during the meal, and he imagined a certain grimness around the corners of her mouth.

“Are you feeling all right?”

She nodded. “Of course. It’s just that it’s time for me to make my monthly announcement that I’m not going to have a baby yet.”

He slid his wicker chair next to hers and put a hand on the back of her neck, under her short brown hair. “It’ll happen.”

“Maybe we’re not trying enough. Maybe four times a month isn’t enough.”

He nodded. “I can take a night train on Wednesdays, then the four o’clock mixed back from Algiers.”

“No,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about this. I love New Orleans and my friends in church, but I’m not
doing
anything here.” She swung around to him, her dress whistling against the wicker. “I want to come live with you at Nimbus.”

He took his arm back. “It’s not healthy. It’s a slough full of the worst types of men. I only have a privy.”

She cocked her head at him. “You know, you squeeze a nickel until the buffalo pees.”

He slumped back in his chair. “What’s that mean?”

“Build me a bathroom, Rand. Feed it with a cypress cistern. Run the drain to the swamp or the privy hole. And how much would it cost to add a front parlor where I could read and sew and have a little office of my own? The price of nails?”

“You
want
to be down there?” He imagined her in the mornings, the feel of her smooth neck against his lips.

“I can help you. With the mill, even.”

He shook his head. “It’s just unhealthy.”

She raised her chin and glanced at something across the street, then sideways, at him. “Wouldn’t it be harder for the Sicilians to bother me in Nimbus than here?”

He stood up and walked to the end of the porch. “Maybe we should move back North.”

“So you’ve stopped worrying about your brother? You’d rather go back to a little hardwood mill where your salary would be considerably less than what it is now? And do you honestly think that pistol you left here for me can protect me more than you and Byron?” She came up beside him, leaned over the rail, and picked a magnolia blossom out of a welter of dark waxy leaves.

“What would you do?”

“I could help your doctor. I could give you advice.”

He laughed. “About lumber?”

“About your degenerate mill town. Why don’t you hire more men who’d bring their families?”

He looked at her sharply. “It’s more expensive. Families need larger cabins.”

“More expensive than all the work lost to the savagery?”

“You think the place can be gentled down some, I suppose?”

“It can.”

He surveyed the street. “It’s no tea party out there,” he muttered.

She took his arm and coaxed him around. “Last week there was a man down on the corner standing there looking up at me. He was wearing an eye patch and was smoking one cigarette after another.”

He glanced quickly to the sidewalk, then back to his wife. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want you to worry.”

“Was it the right eye?”

She tapped a finger on her lips, thinking. “Yes.”

He slid his arms around her then, drew her close, and put his face into her hair, thinking not of what he was doing but of a man standing on the platform at Poachum and deciding who to kill first. “When do you want to come?”

“How soon can you have carpenters and millwrights do the work? I want a tub in the bathroom.” She gave him a peck on the cheek. “How wide is the house in Nimbus?”

“Maybe forty feet.” He turned his head to look down at the corner.

“That’s enough. I want a front room with windows, and a screened porch about thirty feet long and at least eight feet deep. Put an outside door in the left side of the screened area and leave the one that leads directly into the kitchen from the front. It’ll look odd, but we’re not going to live there forever.”

He looked up and pursed his lips. “Why, I could have the bathroom in by Sunday. I’ll have to pull off ten or so workers, but that’s all right.”

She slipped an arm up high on his back and kissed his chin. “I can take the train back with you next weekend.”

He realized that he would have to have a long talk with May and be exquisitely careful around Walter. The thought of Lillian in camp was worrisome but, at the same time, wonderful. He felt foolish for thinking she’d be safe in New Orleans, and now hoped he would be at least a lucky fool.

That same day, Byron was sitting at the desk in his front room, sweating and breaking pencil points as he wrote out an arrest report for the parish sheriff. The sunlight coming through the screen door dimmed, and when Bryon raised his head, he saw Buzetti smiling in at him, the screen imparting a scaly texture to his face.

“What do you want?” Byron said, stepping out onto the porch.

Buzetti’s smile widened around the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. “Ey, how’s the phonograph? I hear they got you a bulletproof one.”

Byron glanced toward the railroad. “How did you get in here?”

“What, you never hear of a motorboat?” He pointed over his shoulder to where a wooden launch idled at the end of the log canal, two men in slouch caps sitting on the bow, watching. “I’m looking for the head man, your brother. Nobody can tell me where he’s at.”

“He’s not to be found.”

Buzetti cocked his head. “Aw, yeah. I know about not-to-be-found.” He laughed and someone seeing him from a distance would have taken him for a salesman, a politician. “Well, just so’s my trip out here ain’t wasted, I’ll talk to you.”

“About what?”

Buzetti looked over his shoulder. “Can we go inside?”