The Clearing (39 page)

His father, delayed by his own ill health, arrived by train and went straight to the hospital, doddering down the hall peering at numbers. He came up behind Byron, who was outside the room leaning against the wall, and grabbed him by the arm, turning him gently around. “Son, it’s good to see you.”

What surprised Byron most was how unsurprised he was, as though he’d always expected to be touched and turned in this manner, to be found. When his father embraced him, he let his arm dangle toward the floor as he smelled the train ride on the old man’s clothes, all the soot and lounge-car smoke between Pittsburgh and New Orleans giving him an idea of how hard the journey had been. His father looked weaker, older. For this he gave the old man one pat on the back, then pulled away. “It’s been a while,” he said.

His father opened his mouth, then closed it. Finally he said, “I don’t know what to say. I don’t want it to be anything that will run you away.”

“Don’t worry. I’m already away.”

The old man nodded. Straightening his back, he looked toward the door. “How is Randolph?”

“Out of danger, but he’s seen a lot of damage.” Byron put his hand on the knob and they went in.

After giving a pale Randolph brief greetings and reassurances, the old man spotted Walter, who was on his knees in a shaft of window light and drawing in a buff-colored tablet. “Byron,” he cried out, walking around the bed, “why didn’t you or your wife write me about him?” He looked at the child closely and smiled a claim on him, placing a hand on his head. “Why, he looks exactly like you. I’d have known him anywhere on earth.”

The mill manager witnessed this exchange from his bed and felt that he’d been shot once more. Over the past weeks he’d slowly come to realize that he was going to live, and had begun wondering if it were possible to tell Byron the truth and retrieve his son. But now, with his father’s recognizing cry, he felt that Walter’s identity, his place in the family, was sealed. His father would never visit Nimbus and find out otherwise, and once the trees were cut out and the mill broken down, the place itself—Walter’s source—would no longer exist.

His father picked up the boy and brought him close to the bed. “You rascal,” he said to Randolph. “You should have written something to me in your letters.”

Walter swung a hand out, and Randolph seized it. “Yes,” he said, closing his eyes. “I should have told.”

“I’ve got a grandson,” the old man blurted, bouncing the boy who studied him blandly, trying to place him, looking around to Byron for some clue as to how to take this new face.

Randolph watched the trio gathered against the window, the boy’s thumb up the grandfather’s nose, his brother’s old grin come back.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

In early October 1925, when the black swamp water was bleeding south and the cypress tops were burning into their coppery change, the mill manager returned to Nimbus. In a rocker on his front porch he listened to his wife tell him what she had been doing with the church and the school and how she’d been helping Byron hire good people. Since the saloon had burned, there had been nothing much for a constable to do, though Big Norbert, his shoulder wound healed, had taken a badge and was making rounds at night. Byron had been called in by Jules to help with the office tasks, duties he’d dreaded all his life. After a week on the job he’d made a mistake and shipped three carloads of lath to a customer in Missouri who’d wanted shutter material. When he got the phone call telling of his mistake, he picked up a Remington typewriter with his one hand and hurled it through the window sash. He turned over his desk, and pencils, order books, and ledgers exploded across the floor. Jules opened the office door for him like a porter as he rushed down into the mill yard and stood for a moment, staring at the mill manager’s house and the potted flowers Lillian had placed out front. He looked over to his own place, at two pair of little trousers flying in the breeze out back, and seeing that, he turned back, taking the stairs two at a time to the office where he and Jules uprighted the big desk. He shuffled around on his knees gathering pages and books, paper clips and rubber stamps while Jules went down into the yard and retrieved the typewriter; together they dug mud from between its keys with their pocket knives.

“Type a nasty letter to someone owes the mill money,” Jules said, “and that’ll shake the rest of the dirt out of it.”

Byron stayed in the office nine hours a day, and when he got home he sat on the floor with Walter or took him on his lap in the Morris chair to read to him. Most of the time he was too tired to listen to the Victrola. Work exorcised the sad music and much of the maudlin streak from his life, and when he did play the machine, he found its voice hoarse and wavering, for the humidity of the camp had corroded the nickeled mechanism and turned its internal grease to varnish. He cut back on his drinking because he didn’t want to perform the morning’s desk work with a head swaying on his shoulders like an anvil, but mostly because with the saloon gone, liquor of any sort was a commodity hard to find. In truth, he was too busy to drink.

Five weeks into the job, he rode to Tiger Island on the local and was fitted for two suits. He traveled into Mississippi and gave a presentation to officials of the Vicksburg, Shreveport and Pacific Railroad. During that trip he became reacquainted with the world outside of Nimbus. The day he rode through New Orleans, he felt like a monkey set free from its cage. On the train, the dining-car steward seated him among strangers, and when the man across from him asked what line of business he was in, for a long moment he didn’t know how to answer. He was Randolph Aldridge’s brother, doing his brother’s job until he got well or died, he started to say, but then thought better of it, and shook the man’s hand too hard over the sugar bowl, saying, “I’m in cypress, the wood eternal.” In Vicksburg he could tell that the railroad men thought him odd with his pinned-up coat sleeve. He knew he was abrupt with them but couldn’t imagine what to say other than what he was there for. What finally mattered was that his calculations squeezed the price of a crosstie down to a cent better than his competitors. On the train back, with the signed contract for 200,000 ties in his jacket, an army officer in full dress sat in the aisle seat next to him and tried to make conversation, but Byron wanted none of it and looked away from the man’s uniform only to see it reflected in the darkening coach window. He closed his eyes and saw two men killed next to him, a single Mauser bullet passing through one heart into the next, and suddenly he was fighting the urge to force up the sash and plunge into the speeding, cinder-strewn darkness when the officer said, “Excuse me, but were you wounded in the war?”

Byron turned on the man rudely. “Yes.”

“Chateau Thierry, I bet.”

Byron looked into the young man’s eyes and saw he’d never been in combat. “Nimbus Wood,” he told him.

“Ah, yes.” The officer’s smile was jolly, thoroughly absurd.

Byron looked back out the window, where stumps littered a dark pool of cut-over swamp.

At the middle of October the mill manager was still frail, able to get up the office steps only twice a week, and then only with Lillian pushing him. Jules and Byron ran the mill together, and Randolph found himself with time on his hands, dropping in at Byron’s house once each day to see Walter. He would teach him a new word or read to him with whatever expressiveness he could muster. The boy would sit still for one story but otherwise wanted to move down into the weedy yard to play. Randolph wasn’t up to chasing him, so Ella would have to keep an eye on them both, which made him feel like a child himself.

A cool spell breezed through the swamp late that month, and after lunch he and Lillian sat on the front porch, looking around at the dry air as if they could see it. Months earlier, she had detailed men to haul off some of the brush and dress down the stumps in the mill yard. A tough, long-legged grass came up in the sections of the compound not crushed to mud by wheels or hooves, and the clearing began to look civilized and green. The playground behind the church and school had been covered with masonry sand she’d ordered from Tiger Island, brought in by rail.

She laid a hand on his arm. “I saw you over there with Walter.”

“He’s spinning out whole sentences. Pretty good ones, too.”

She drew back her hand to wave away a mosquito, and he could tell she was trying to figure how to ask something. After a long while, she said, “When you were in the hospital, why did you tell Byron about the boy? Did you think I wouldn’t have taken care of him?”

He turned in his chair toward her, alarmed. “No, not that. I’m not sure exactly what I was thinking, but not that.”

“I’d have taken him as a ward. As I told you I would.”

“Of course.” Wincing, he reached out to her the stiff hand she’d shot a bullet through. “You’d have done a fine job.”

“At the time I thought it wasn’t a good thing, telling him like you did. I mean, he’s not well enough to raise a child. But when I see Ella walking with him down to the commissary, and certainly when I see Byron come home and ride him on his shoulders around the house, well—”

“Look.” Randolph pointed across the way as Walter ran naked out onto the porch, Ella right behind him with a billowing bath towel. They watched the chase, heard Ella’s entreaties and the boy’s squealing laughter.

Lillian put a hand over her mouth. “Just look at that little fool,” she said. “I almost wish he
was
yours.”

Randolph bit the inside of his cheek until he could taste blood under an eyetooth. He kept watching until Walter was pinned against a post and Ella swept him up in the huge towel and carried him inside with her face down in the squirming bundle. He watched the door they entered for a long time, even after Lillian got up, regarded him closely, and then dragged a finger over the back of his scarred hand.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

By January of 1926 the mill manager was riding the blind horse on daily inspections, handling a few sales calls on the phone and helping Lillian with what she called personnel. It was the low-water time, and on a Saturday morning he rode the animal through the clacking palmettos to Cypress Bend, walking it up and down the area of the shoot-out, trying to remember who had killed whom, staring at the rails rusting off into the dead weeds. The horse was tired and got its hoof caught between two angled crossties, and Randolph knelt there for half an hour, talking to it, finally working the animal free with a pocketknife. At noon, the mill’s whistle sounded over the brush like a chord played on a giant faraway organ, and he sat down under the overhang of the vine-wracked shingle mill, pressing with his fingers the place under his sternum that still ached when he took a deep breath or started to laugh. For a long time he stared at the spot where he’d killed Buzetti and wondered if he would be punished by God for the deaths he caused or if the killing itself was the punishment.

The thought occurred to him that it was no longer necessary to stay in Nimbus, that he wasn’t doing much and could move back to Pennsylvania, but he’d be just as idle there, and Lillian had not suggested that they move. He felt there was still unfinished business with his brother. The horse nudged his back, as if he’d read his thoughts and judged them unworthy, so Randolph mounted up, reigning through the trash-wood saplings rising from the wrecked land.

In 1927 the rains came and never left. The mill was awash for months, and when the main levees broke on the Mississippi, Nimbus was submerged for sixty days. Randolph watched the water rise, boiling in from the north through the railway’s culverts. The Negro section went under first, the water coming up slow, an inch or two a day. At the flood’s crest only the mill manager’s place was dry, though he could hear the water popping against the bottom of the house. At night he and Lillian listened to the backs of turtles bumping against the floorboards or the blind thud of garfish caught between the joists.

The water was two feet deep in Byron’s house, and the Victrola’s veneers delaminated and peeled like dark sheets of skin, leaving the machine workable but twisted and decomposed. When the floodwaters doused the fires under the boilers, everything was shut down. Workers moved to tents along the tracks in Poachum, to the second floors of the dormitories, in attics and crew cars. The tracks were still open, so some families gave up and headed to New Orleans. To Randolph’s surprise, Byron’s was one of these. Five cases of typhoid had sprung up in camp, so he took Walter and Ella to a hotel on Canal Street, where they ate in restaurants each night, walked along the swollen river, and felt as though they were in Paris. The mill manager admired the logic of their escape, even as he and Jules stayed in the mud-haunted, swirling nightmare to direct the movement of livestock and the roundup of lumber floating out of the rack yard. He was thankful for the extra work, because it kept him tired and sent him spiraling to sleep at night like a thrown shingle, too exhausted even to dream back the faces of the men he’d killed. At times, when he was taking a rest, leaning against a wall or climbing up on the horse just to be someplace dry, he would watch the egg-smelling water leaching around him and think of Buzetti’s cousin, knocked dead at once in the saloon, or of Buzetti himself folding up into a resentful oblivion.

As soon as the water receded enough for Minos to raise steam, they began to cut trees and fill orders, running longer shifts, even nighttime shifts, with stackers working in the boot-sucking yard wearing headlamps, some carrying pistols and scanning the borders of light for the luminescent eyeballs of alligators.