The Clearing (31 page)

That night the child’s heartbeat was fast and weak, like a roof leak tapping a pan, the doctor said, and Mrs. Scott, the housekeeper, who normally banged about the kitchen, floated quietly through the house, bringing drink and food to those waiting for Walter to recover. Her quietness frightened Randolph, who was sitting on the porch praying, so scared he couldn’t think of revenge, feel anger, or think of anything but how, if the boy died, it would leave a hole in everything forever. He imagined the child as a fine, educated grown man and understood that someone was trying to take all of that from them. At dawn, Byron came through the screen and found his brother asleep on the porch in a rush rocker, the hair on his arms silvered with dew. He sat down next to him and tapped his shoulder. Randolph slowly opened his eyes. “How’s Walt?”

“Look what a little nip of venom did to me.” He held up a shaking arm. “I’m amazed he’s still alive.”

“You coming around?”

Byron’s face showed several layers of sickness. “If I’d felt good enough last night, I would’ve gone into town and had some spaghetti.”

“You’d have been tried and hung, too.”

“I know it.”

Randolph sensed that his brother was ready to burn out, like a dying star. A soft rain began to drift over the compound, and the smoke from the boiler-house stacks fell straight down and littered the mill yard. “We just have to figure what to do. I don’t want to wake up to any more surprises.” Across the yard, the main whistle blew a giant C chord out to the ends of the parish; the sound washed their minds clean, letting them think.

After ten minutes or so, it was Byron who said, “I don’t know.”

“It’s easy to kill someone if you don’t have any choice.” This sounded like the false cheer of a sickly man.

“It’s never easy,” Byron said. “But when you’re ordered to, taught it’s right, at least you don’t have to think while you’re doing it.”

“It’s rough to sit on a porch and talk about this.” Randolph stood and walked inside.

The old housekeeper looked up at him, her face a moon over the baby where it slept, and she raised her hand from its forehead. “I got some water in the little thing,” she said, “and he finally held that down, at least.” She looked away just to the right of Randolph’s face. “But he won’t open his eyes yet. Sure, you think he’s got the headache that bad? My old man was laid low by a cottonmouth and he said his head was comin’ off his shoulders for three days.”

“He feels about as bad,” Randolph said, “as you can feel.”

She folded her hands in her apron, and he appreciated the motion. “It’s a sin and a shame,” she told him.

“Yes, that it is.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Father Schultz was walking in the garden next to the sta-tue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, reading his breviary. Inside the brick church, the women of the Ladies’ Altar Society performed their weekly cleaning of the rooms behind the altar, ordering the vestments, inventorying the Communion wine and hosts, gossiping among the holy objects. The priest’s main failing was deliberate eavesdropping; he thought gossip the most interesting noise the soul made, not for any truth it contained, but for what it said about the speaker’s character. The day was warm and the stained-glass windows were swung open on their pivot hinges, the bottom canted out, the top in. As Father Schultz made his first pass, the Frenchwomen, Mrs. LeBlanc and Mrs. Dorgenois, were folding altar cloths and talking about Mr. Olson down at the fish dock and how ugly he was acting toward his mother. Fifteen minutes later, two of the Sicilian women came out and sat on the steps with cans of brass polish and four candle-holders, beginning an animated discussion of a neighbor’s illness. They stopped speaking when the priest walked near, and he nodded and loafed past, his head down to his book, silent in his thin black shoes. Around the corner of the church he went with his rolling gait, disappearing behind a tall ligustrum. The women began speaking again—in English, because one of them was young—and it was this young one whose brother was going to pay her back the twenty-five dollars he’d borrowed.

“And how is he going to raise this money?” the older one asked.

“Ah, Buzetti, he’s giving him some work on Sunday morning,” she said. “He’s gonna be unloading boxes from a boat to a train at the shingle factory.”

“These boxes, I wonder what they got inside them,” the old woman teased.

“What do you think? It’s Buzetti, after all. Do you think it’s books?” Here the women laughed, their hands flying along the brightening brass. They said other things, and the priest, who was on the other side of the ligustrum, was ashamed for listening but determined to turn a shameful act to the good. When he came around the hedge, the women fell silent again, and he smiled at them.

Merville labored over his report of Ada Bergeron’s death, at the same time worrying about something he couldn’t put his finger on. He laid down his pencil and looked up to a furry web fringing the hole where the phone wires entered his office. Deep in the hole, a black spider the size of a silver dollar waited like bad luck. He wondered where the girl was at the moment, if something bad was happening to her because of the things she’d done when she was alive. If she was in a place of torment, Buzetti helped put her there. The lawman was not given to thinking much about an afterlife, but the idea was somewhere in the back of his head, just as he suspected it was in everyone’s. There was so much punishment in life, the notion it might continue in the next life had to be taken seriously. Merville again remembered Ada, an honest-looking little girl, hefty and tanned from play, and the memory made him walk to the window to look up at the clouds and wonder if there might be something beyond them, but when he lifted the shade he saw only the big priest slowly walking by, his hand already extended for the door.

“What you know?” Merville said.

Father Schultz sat down next to the marshal’s desk and drew two bottles of homemade beer out of a paper sack. “Everything and nothing.”

Merville sat down, opened a bottle, and took a swallow. “You not getting better at making this.”

“The more I drink it, the better it gets.”

“Getting used to bad stuff.”

“Something like,
ja
.”

The marshal rubbed his fingers to draw blood into them, and then opened a narrow drawer in his desk. When he drew out a deck of cards, the priest shook his head. “What?”

“I have something to tell you.” Father Schultz looked at the floor. “And it will probably cause harm.”

Merville slid the swollen cards out of their pack and began to deal solitaire. “You think it’s gonna cause less than it’ll cure?”

“I hope.”

When he finished dealing, he looked up. “Say it if you want to.”

The priest took another swallow and made a face at the truth. “Buzetti is loading three freight-car loads of whiskey at Cypress Bend switch day after tomorrow, in the morning.”

The marshal turned over a ten, played it on a jack. “Loading from what? They ain’t nothing there but a open shed. The shingle mill burnt down a long time ago.” When the priest shrugged and took another swallow, Merville stood up and put his hand on the phone crank, thought better of it, and walked over to a map of the parish tacked to his wall behind the stove. He leaned close to the yellowed paper and ran a thick fingernail along a black line. “Green Bayou’s at the end of that switch,” he said to the map. “I forgot they used to take shingles out by barge, too.” He looked over and saw that the priest’s face was longer than usual, as though weighed down by the news he’d brought. “Three boxcars. Damn.” He reached for the beer and drained half of it. “Take your time here, you. I got to go for a little walk.”

The priest raised a hand as if in absolution, then let it fall on his bottle. “When are you planning to come to church to be with God?”

Merville checked the shells in his revolver, plucked out three empties, and rummaged in a cigar box on the desk. “How you know God’s not in this office?”

“Maybe you had him in jail once?”

The marshal put on his stained hat and went out in the sun, which felt like steam on his shoulders. The motorcar started for once, and he ran it south through the railroad underpass toward something he thought he remembered, a swatch of red wood with railroad symbols painted in blistered paint. On the third street from the main line, backed up to the levee, sat a swayback warehouse covered in green tarpaper, top and sides, a spur track alongside. Set out at the back of the lot were three wooden boxcars, weeds lacing up around their rust-freckled wheels. Merville pursed his lips and rode down Poisson Street until he spotted a tank car next to the seafood-packing plant, then turned around and drove the clattering Ford to the station.

Laney was on shift, and when Merville came through the door the agent shifted his tobacco and spat into a box of sawdust. “Yeah?”

“They’s a tank car blocking the road a little bit.”

Laney looked out the window. “On Bayer Street, with Santa Fe markings?”

“That’s the one. Who’s leasing it?”

“It’s sitting at the damn fish plant, who you think’s leasing it?”

The marshal put his hands on the agent’s counter, one atop the other. “If I write them up, I got to make sure. If the car’s in somebody else’s name, I can’t get no order to move it.”

Laney closed the ledger on his desk, stood up, and jerked another off the shelf. “Here.” He came back to the counter and turned the book around. “Oscar Molaison’s got it. I told them to pull the son of a bitch into their lot with their truck. Their siding’s so bad the switch engine can’t go no closer.”

Merville opened the book and peered inside. “Caffery Mill’s leased fifteen flatcars?” And while Laney cursed and explained the rotten situation at Caffery Mill, the marshal turned the page and scanned the names of lessors, spotting three Southern Pacific boxcars on open lease to J. Buzetti. An open lease meant Buzetti could’ve been using them for months, right under everyone’s nose. He turned the ledger around and walked out while the agent continued to complain. Merville crossed the street toward his car and climbed out of the mud, kicking clods off his brogans on the edge of the banquette planks, then stepped under the drugstore awning and looked down the tracks. Day after tomorrow morning would be Sunday. He closed his eyes and inventoried train movement. Three passenger runs in each direction, the first coming in at ten-fifteen from New Orleans. No mixed or local passenger trains on Sunday, but four scheduled through-freights each way, running between noon and midnight. The only local freight was Thirty-Six, a peddler train picking up Saturday production from the mills to be taken along by a New Orleans–bound express Monday morning. Thirty-Six gathered stray cars all the way out to Rick, which was only five miles from Cypress Bend. It would be nothing for the switching crew to make an unscheduled jog out the main line to the Cypress Bend spur with Buzetti’s boxcars, where they could be filled with whiskey brought up Green Bayou by luggers or a small barge.

Thirty-Six had the same crew every Sunday, he remembered. George Robinson, a gambling wife-beater he’d arrested more than once, was the engineer. Andy Ledge, the fireman, was as dumb as a box of nails and thought Robinson was the greatest man who’d ever lived. The switchman and conductor, Aldus and Mumphrey LeBlanc, were cousins who dressed like twins, and Merville had known them their entire lives. He couldn’t imagine them taking money for unscheduled railroading, but they were meek and could be easily threatened by the red-faced Robinson. He guessed they’d be left in the caboose at Rick, doing their paperwork, while the loading was going on down the line.

The marshal drove back to his office and found that the priest had not waited. In the middle of his scarred desk Father Schultz had left behind a holy card of Saint Stephen, Martyr. He picked it up and studied the tortured expression on the saint’s face. “What you whinin’ about,” he told the card. “What you expect?”

The feelings in the bedroom were as brittle as dry rot. The boy had stopped breathing again, this time for fifteen seconds, and Byron reached into the crib and shook him. Walter made a noise like a bird, took a long draught of air, held it, then let it loose slowly. Randolph’s head fell when he heard the breath come out with a soft finality of spirit, but then his brother lowered his face over the crib and said, “He took another one.” And the boy had. When he let that one out, he took another, and the brothers watched and counted as though each breath were a lifetime and worth as much as all they had lived. They were as frightened as they’d ever been. The doctor had iced the foot and applied salt meat to the wound to draw the poison. All they could do was wait, he’d told them, and depend on the strength of the child’s heart.

Lillian washed Walter’s face every half hour and tried to get him to take water. Now and then he would swallow a spoonful, but then gag and throw it up on his pillow, arching his back like a dying animal in a spasm. Once, she’d asked through her tears, “Who could do this to a baby? What kind of soul would you have to have?”

Byron folded his hands where he sat by the bed and put his darkened face on the spire of his fingers. “I know,” he said softly. “I’ve seen them.”

She squeezed her hands together hard. “Where have you seen such people? In the war?”

Byron slipped a finger into Walter’s hand, and the unconscious child sensed it and closed on it. “I’ve seen them in the hardware store,” he said. “I’ve seen them standing on the steps of a church.”