The Clearing (29 page)

Randolph moved uncomfortably on the piano bench. “There is no way anyone can tell you or me what he suffered.”

His father thrust out his glass. “Many others have gone to war and come back fine.”

“Maybe they appear so on the surface.”

His father took a long pull of his drink. “You want to come home, I know. But if you can do anything at all for him, to get him to return to us, to help his mental state . . .”

His father stopped, and Randolph saw that he was near tears.

“I’m trying and I’ll keep trying,” he said, nearly angry at the emotion in the room.

“I know, boy,” his father said, straightening in the chair. “You’re a good son.”

“But Byron’s the oldest,” he snapped. “He’s straight-shouldered and handsome, and the one who should take over all the mills someday, is that right?” He was hoping to lead his father toward the realization that Byron had reached a place in his life from which he could never return. He watched him carefully, imagining the words sinking in, waiting for understanding.

The old man let out a long breath and set his drink on the floor. The window was open, and the banshee sound of a Pennsylvania Railroad train whistle drifted in on the cool air. “If only he’d done better in battle,” his father said.

Randolph looked through the window into the darkness and could think of absolutely nothing to say in reply.

They got into Poachum at noon, and the mill locomotive was waiting for them. Rafe Sommers’s pumpkin face hung out the cab window, oily and brick-colored with heat. “You didn’t bring back no cool breeze in your suitcase, did you?” he called as Lillian walked up to the engine.

She stopped and squinted up at him. “No, Mr. Sommers, but I’ve got some extra cinders down my neck courtesy of the L&N, if you need them.” Once they arrived in camp and their suitcases were carted to the manager’s house, Lillian walked down quarters to check on Mrs. Scott, and Randolph went over to get the baby. Ella was in a porch rocker holding Walter on her lap. The child looked at Randolph, smiled, then squirmed down to the decking where he balanced on his rubbery legs, holding on to Ella’s fingertips. Randolph reached over and took him by the middle. “Where’s By?”

“He’s over at the bunkhouse cooling down two millwrights.”

“How’s he been?”

The woman fluffed her skirt, a full, out-of-date housedress. “Not bad.” She looked puzzled, as if she hadn’t thought about Byron before now. “Not bad at all, in fact. There was a big row down at the saloon one night, but he went and handled it bare-handed. Came back with a drunk and chained him to the flywheel for the evening. But no, no real trouble.”

The mill manager hoisted the boy up and watched him put a hand in his mouth. “Did he take to babysitting?”

“He carried Walter around like a watch. Got up with him, even, which plumb amazed me. Not a man type of thing, you know. Matter of fact, he fooled with that young ’un so much he laid off the Victrola a good bit.”

Randolph gave her a look. “Is he out of needles for the thing?”

Ella put a hand against a porch post. She was staring hard at the baby. “No. He played with little Walter some. Did paperwork. You know.”

The boy squirmed and said something in his language. “Well, yes, I do know,” Randolph said. “The Sicilians cause any trouble?”

“One night a new man was dealing. A sure-enough Chicago man. He told Byron he’d cut his throat if he messed with him.”

“What did By do?” He lowered the child onto a dry piece of ground and held on to his hands.

“Came home,” Ella said, looking over at the saloon, seeming freshly surprised. “You know, he just came home.”

Merville was in his waterfront office putting down pans over the warped floor boards while a thunderstorm spun whorls of water against the sweating windows. His arthritis bound him at the hips and knees, and his chest ached as if a mule had kicked him. Sitting at his desk, he signed the last form he had to fill out for that night. He was trapped by the storm, immobilized into thinking, and he closed his eyes, remembering his wife, who had hated lightning, and his father, who’d been the same way. Now and then, in the long nights Merville’s life replayed like a wrongly spliced silent film, an overlong saga that always ended with his sitting in this water-stained office, or sometimes in the empty house two blocks away. He looked up at the flickering bulb on its cloth cord, whose light barely revealed the ceiling’s corners where soot-bagged spider webs held leggy husks dead since the war in Cuba.

His arms throbbed and he looked over at the double-barreled shotgun, which had become too heavy for him to carry on rounds. Even his regular revolver made his gut hurt; its shells had turned green in its cylinder, so he had gone through the office’s drawers and found a short-barreled Colt lightning revolver in .41 caliber, small, but good enough to knock down a drunk.

Maybe it was the rain causing him to tremble. Merville was aware that most men didn’t last as long as he had, and he wondered why whoever was above the clouds was keeping him around. Old age was making him look, at last, for the purpose of things, and he figured there was a job left undone, maybe.

Sometimes he wondered how he would die and when, and if there would be some realization right before death when he could understand how well or poorly he’d done, because he honestly didn’t know for sure. He knew that he loved his sons, though he’d never said that. Minos could make a steam engine run slick as a rabbit’s heart, and though the other children didn’t talk to him much, he knew they weren’t off doing anything bad. Had he seen them all last year—Ralph, Aubrey, Etienne, and Maude? He put a spotted hand on his forehead. His children had passed through him as if he were a doorway, and they did not look back.

The crank phone began to rattle—a long, a short, a long—and he hoped that it would stop and Mrs. Aucoin would pick up. But then another long ring drawled from the wall. He got up and walked around a streaming leak.

“Hallo?”

“Merville, this is Jimmy. Something bad done happened, yeah.”

“Quoi?”

“Mais, Ralph LeBoeuf was walking down to his camp boat and found Ada Bergeron on the levee. You better come.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“She been killed.”

“Where at?”

“Downriver from Buzetti’s new place.”

Merville pulled out his watch and checked the time. “That’s little Ada what turned whore?”

“Oh, Lord, I guess so.”

“I’m coming.” He hung up, returned his pistol, pulled a slicker off a nail, and put it on. He hated the floppy rubber hat, but without it the rain would soak down his back. He tried his flashlight and found it dead. The parish wouldn’t send him any batteries until next month, so he lit a large barn lantern and adjusted the wick. Across the street, where the river flowed by under a mat of hyacinth, a steam whistle gargled up a slug of condensate and began to blow a series of hoots. He could tell from the sound that the pilot was trying to raise a policeman. Merville sat in a chair and pulled on rubber knee boots. The roof bell began to clang on a rafting steamer. “All right, all right,” he shouted, then grabbed a hemp sack that hung from a hook by the door.

He stepped off the sidewalk into a foot of water and slogged over to the wharf, hearing the shouts of a big brawl competing with the rain. When he got close enough to see, he held up the lantern. On a big plank dock between steamboats, two crews grunted and punched and cursed. The old man looked down the river toward Buzetti’s and then back to the fight. He drew his Colt and let a round off in the air, causing three or four men to pull up and stagger out of the melee, but the rest were growling like pit bulls, the lamplight showing winks of bared teeth, swinging pipes, eyes torn to red flags. Merville saw that everyone was black except for one overweight white man. He squinted, then shot him in the thigh.

“The hell you say,” the man shouted. He started to come at the old man, but the slug had cracked his thighbone and he went down like a tree. The fight came apart at the seams then, and men began to back away, looking at the white deckhand where he lay holding his leg and hollering. A swaying drunk, his shirt torn off of his ebony hide, pulled a jackknife, and Merville fired a shot six inches over his head, the slug taking a baluster off the second deck of the
Cecil N. Bean
.

The lawman threw his hemp sack down on the wharf, and held up the lantern. “I’m gonna say this one time. Put every piece of iron you got in the bag, and the first son of a bitch that holds back a weapon gets shot in the nutsack.” He pointed the pistol around at each man in turn, and the bag was soon weighed down by two short lengths of pipe with tape-wrapped handles, a set of brass knuckles, five jackknives, a straight razor, two slapjacks, and a corkscrew. The pilot came down a gangplank holding an umbrella and stopped short.

“Well, shit, Marshal, why’d you shoot my white man?”

Merville spat next to the pilot’s boot. “The doctor won’t work on niggers. Get your stretcher and bring him over to the clinic.” He picked up the sack and dragged it across the street to his office, slinging it muddy and sopping inside the door.

It was a half-mile walk to Buzetti’s riverside saloon. He thought about the Model T the parish let him use, but it would never start in the rain. Merville understood that the high sheriff didn’t want him to be much of a lawman because somebody with too much ability to inflict justice could cause problems for local government. Crossing the tracks at the railroad station, he continued downriver along the low levee toward the wiggle of a flashlight. The rain slacked off and he came up on the scene and raised his lamp. The man who’d called him motioned to the grass, and Merville bent down.

“You took your own damned time,” the man said, taking an extinguished cigar from his mouth.

Merville looked at Ada Bergeron, at the broad cut across her throat, remembering her as a young girl of average looks who had lived with her family in a camp boat north of town. A few years after her father had drowned, she began working as a barmaid on River Street, and after Buzetti set up business she went to work for him. He reached out and rolled her eyelids shut and, before withdrawing his hand, pinched the slick material of her tight dress as if he meant to hurt it. What was under the cloth shifted like meat in a package, and he took back his hand. “Anybody know anything?”

LeBoeuf, the man who’d found her, stepped back out of the circle of light. “Let’s put something over her, at least,” he said.

“What you know?”

“Nothing. I was walking home, and there she was.”

Merville looked around at the other men. “Anybody hear anything about this in Buzetti’s?”

No one responded. Out in the river a small rafting steamer screeched for the railroad bridge to open. Merville knew that the man who had found her spoke French and the others did not, so he began questioning him in Cajun. “Come on, you know she was Buzetti’s whore. You’re in there two or three times a week.”

The man’s head turned toward the north. “I was in there yesterday and he was telling her to go with his cousin for free. She was a little bit drunk and told him she didn’t want to do it. She didn’t tell him very nice.”

“And?”

The man shrugged. “That’s all I heard. He took her by the arm and brought her into his little . . .” He searched for a French word in his head and, finding none, said the English, “office.”

“Did you see her later?”

“Oh, yeah. She was working some muskrat trapper from Sugarhouse Bend.”

The old man looked closely at the wound. It was a single cut, and the knife had been sharp. Ada Bergeron could have been anything she could have afforded to be, if her father hadn’t died and left her and her mother with six younger children. He knew that poverty wasn’t the only reason a woman became a whore. If it were, most of the women in town would work on their backs. He took the corpse’s hands and turned the palms up to the lamplight. They were soft and the nails were unpainted. The old man recalled that his mother’s father was a Bergeron, and squinting an eye shut, he began to sort through cousins until he found Ada’s father. Ah, yes, that boy he’d rolled bales with on Giror’s steamboat after the war. He looked up and opened both eyes. “This one was Sydney’s daughter?” he said in surprise.

LeBoeuf said, “Sydney from Pierre Part.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. I forgot who that was, me.”

“Sydney was your people,” the man said. “You spend all your life in that police office, you forget too damned much.”

Merville turned his head toward a spurt of garbled laughter rolling down the levee and his eyes brought Buzetti’s saloon into focus, a board and batten place painted flat red and built on the repaired foundation of the old business. When he let go of the girl’s hands, they stayed up in a gesture of supplication.

“You want me to get the undertaker?”

The marshal stood up slowly, reached down, and rubbed a knee. “Yeah. Get that priest, too.”

He then walked over the band of stinking shells at the door of Buzetti’s place and went inside. The bouncer put a hand on Merville’s open slicker, next to his badge, a pewter-colored star dangling on a few strands of cloth. “You can’t come in here.”

Merville batted the hand away. “If you make me kill you, I’ll be out of shells for the night.”