The Clearing (9 page)

Randolph poured another shot into Merville’s glass. “He’s been out here eight months. How much have you heard about him?”

The marshal tilted his head. “We’ve had dealings. But I don’t much talk about people behind they back.”

“Neither will anyone here at the mill.”

“What’d
he
tell you?”

“Nothing.”

The old man sniffed. “I ain’t surprised, no. I just finished talking to him and he said he didn’t remember killing nobody. Oh, I talked to him maybe five minutes, and then he walked off singing a song like he’s
beaucoup fou,
yeah.”

The mill manager let out a long breath. “I don’t speak French.”

“Plenty crazy. No offense.”

“I can’t find out exactly what he’s been doing.”

The marshal looked around at the invoice-littered tables, the black typewriter, then back at the mill manager, his face showing that he felt sorry for him. “In Tiger Island we got a little two-room hospital. One night one of your white pull-boat operators come in with a slug through his leg and his thighbone broke. He’d been beatin’ on his old lady when Mr. Byron paid him a visit. Then back in cold weather they brought two poor bastards that work for Buzetti into town in the baggage car, one with a broke jaw and the other with a bullet in his gut. Before that it was Buzetti’s poker dealer with his foot half shot off. We got other business like that from your brother. Now, me, I don’t know who been hauled out on the train in the other direction, or who holes up back in here to get well.” When he peered at his empty glass, the mill manager poured him another inch. “Tell your brother, when his head’s a little more clearer, he can pound the shit out of whatever bastard needs it. He’s a good man.” He swallowed a spoonful of brandy. “But whoever gets the smokin’ end of his

.45 got to deserve it. And no more better come out in a box. The parish sheriff in Franklin is startin’ to pay attention to this place.”

“Are they paying attention to you?”

He sucked brandy from the bottom of his white mustache and then laughed. “Minos told me you was watching that from the boat. Me and them rousters. Mister, I let a fight like that get the better of me one time. I went down there in the pitch dark and tried to talk to the crazy
fils de putains
and shot one in the leg with a little pissant Smith & Wesson I used to carry because it can’t do no damage.” Merville sniffed and shook his head. “They threw my ass in the river. Those big rousters started in on each other with the razors, two crews’ worth. By the time I swum to a ramp and crawled up on the bank, Malcolm Brown’s steamboat was on fire, three men was bone-cut and ruint for life, and another two was dying and calling for their mammas.” His gray eyes grew small and bright with the telling. “You know, I got a friend who’s a priest. He says it’s a sin to kill. I got no problem with that, but what if I don’t kill one, and that one kills two or three? Did I kill that two or three? I can’t figure that out, me.” He stood up and left a hand on the desk, as though struggling with the effect of the brandy. “I learned early on how men have to do. I didn’t want to learn that, but I did.”

The mill manager held up both palms. “You know your business,” he said. “I’m not from here, and I’m not used to what people like you have to do.”

Merville seemed to consider this, then swayed a little like a man who’d just stepped into a skiff. “You no different from me. But where you come from’s different, yeah.”

The door opened and the housekeeper came in with a plate of food under a cloth. Randolph looked at the old man. “You’re finished here?”

The marshal put a hand on his chin for a moment. “No. Joe Buzetti stopped me when I was getting on the train. He said he heard your brother told Galleri he couldn’t sell liquor on Sunday.”

“That’s right.”

Merville shook his head. “He don’t like it.”

“I don’t care what he likes or doesn’t like.”

“The saloon is their territory, yeah. Galleri might run it, but it’s theirs. They control it from they little waterfront whorehouse in Tiger Island.” He pointed through the window into the mill yard. “This is your territory, and you don’t want ’em comin’ around. They feel the same way about the saloon. Your brother, he already leaned on them hard, and they don’t like that.”

Now the mill manager laughed. “Do you really think we have to worry about Chicago gangsters out in Nimbus?”

The marshal watched the housekeeper leave. “They all connected, the Sicilians, and if you mess with one down in Tiger Island, his cousin in New York hears. Maybe not right now, but later on. They already got it in for your brother,” he said, looking again at the door. “That a white girl?”

“No, it’s my housekeeper. She lives out back.”

The old man sniffed. “You better keep her inside your fence. These bucks out here mus’ get a hard-on just looking at her shadow.”

The marshal walked out, and Randolph toasted the closed door with his shot glass. Pulling an ironed napkin off the serving tray, he lifted a cover from a fine chicken stew sprinkled with chopped shallots and edged on one side with a sprig of parsley, suggesting a flower.

CHAPTER SIX

Merville climbed into the lumber train’s empty crew car, a windowed box painted the color of dried blood. As soon as it lurched into motion his vision slid sideways, the car turned like a log in an eddy, and he sagged onto a wooden seat, regretting the brandy at once. “If this is it, I’m sorry,” he said toward the ceiling. By the time the car rattled out of the trees at Poachum, he was able to totter into the hot station to wait for the westbound local. His revolver pulled at his waist like an anvil, and he slid the belted holster around to the left side, where he seemed not to feel it at all. Suddenly very dizzy, he lay lengthwise on the slatted waiting-room bench and closed his eyes. The agent glanced at him once but went back to his clacking telegraph, and Merville knew that the boy could do nothing for him anyway. The train would come at its own speed to bring him to Tiger Island and the nearest doctor.

His weapon prodded him in the back, and he thought of how there was no law but what his pistol made—and at once the empty, vagrant eyes of Byron Aldridge came to his own closed sight. He’d been deep in the big war, Merville had heard, the war that the men who returned to Tiger Island refused to talk about. He himself had never done any soldiering, but the thought of it broke loose images that eddied fast and dizzying, and he became truly frightened, for what was it people said, that when a man is dying, when his body slows down, the mind speeds up and everything comes back like a flipped-through album of regretted pictures? He remembered living in a war, the one with the blue devils and the butternut devils riding back and forth through his father’s sugar cane fields on Bayou Lafourche. He closed his eyes more tightly against a gathering vertigo and saw himself as a boy but could remember almost nothing about that open-mouth simpleton dressed in homespun. Then a taste formed like a ghost on the back of his tongue, and there it was, cream cheese made by his mother, big sausages, smoked pork, and something else—a sound, the waspy drone of fiddles and dancing on Saturdays, dancing in the yard when it was dry enough, all the neighbors come out for a
bal de maison
.

A window opened wide in his memory and Merville was afraid he might indeed be peering through it into death, but still he would not open his eyes. He waited for the evil things to come back to him, but with a pang he realized that until he was ten years old, already trusted with planting seed cane, there were no evil things, and he could remember no blade used against anything but plant or pig, no gunshot but that which brought a rabbit flopping toward a
sauce picante
. His heart skipped once, twice, and a vision formed of a face sunken around a pipe, his grandfather, old Nercisse, who’d told the hearth one night—a north wind leaning on the mud-and-moss house like God’s own foot—that he remembered the 1700s when there were still Indians about, and how they did not understand the Acadians’ yards, how they must not go into yards, must not take one thing and leave another thing in its place without asking. He’d told in his whispery French how the red men thought the Acadians should be Indians as well, and not take apart trees and put the little pieces in a rectangle and say, “Inside this is not yours. You have to go around.” The grandfather told that one night an ambush was prepared and a group of Acadians shot one of the red men, who later died. The whole race of Indians on that upper part of the bayou told each other in one day of that one death, and some struck their heads and some of the bravest cried like whipped children. Within the month they were
all
gone from the region,
toute
ensemble,
down one hundred miles to the marshy lower bayou where there was not a fence to be seen nor a tree out of which one could be made. In those days, in that place, that was the worth of one life.

A shadow passed over the marshal’s eyelids, as though someone was walking past him in the dusty waiting room, but he did not open his eyes, because inside his mind men in dirty blue wool who stank worse than any Indian were knocking flat a year’s work in the cane fields to build a three-days’ camp, kicking down the fence for firewood and taking shrieking piglets on their bayonets. He and his mother and sisters were hiding under the beds with the chamber pots, silently praying
Notre Pere qui es aux cieux,
and watching the filthy boots punish the brick-scrubbed floors as the soldiers cursed the family for having so little. A corporal grabbed the house’s shiny new rifle, and Merville watched as it winked out of the doorway and was gone. His father stood in the yard and shook his fist until knocked down and kicked, left talking blood, his body ruined for two planting seasons, at least. The next day at noon, a hundred and fifty horsemen, some in gray uniforms, most in homespun broadcloth and carrying shotguns, rode over the flat fields from the east, breaking down tall cane in a panic, their animals bleeding at the bits. They had ridden by accident into a large Union force at Donaldsonville and thought those federals were chasing them, though they were not.

After the cavalry men came the supply wagons, cannon and limbers, then foot soldiers, their eyes rolling white, panicking through October’s dry cane until three hundred yards beyond the house they retreated headlong into the ignorant bluecoat camp. The Yankees saw the foaming horses and thought they were under attack themselves; they tried to retreat, but were overrun by the velocity of the rebels’ fear and so began firing everywhere, a smoky and confused melee erupting almost at once. From the house the shooting sounded like an egg broken into hot grease. Merville ran toward the noise and stink of powder, hid in the broad cross-ditch and saw his first death, a man in checkered pants catching a fat rifle slug in the throat, a neck bone coming out with it, his head tumbling sideways like a flower on a broken stem before he hit the ground and died kicking dust. After somebody unlimbered a cannon, a thunderbolt flamed out of the cane, and a horse exploded under a cavalryman whose right leg pin-wheeled across the field like a blue ax, and then Merville had seen enough and began running down the ditch toward the bayou, away from the hollering and the thump of rifle fire. When he got to the bank he ran north back to the house under the lisp of bullets flying overhead and thwacking the willows across the stream, and his water soaked down his legs when he thought of what the men were doing to each other in the cane. There should have been a law to stop what was happening. He remembered thinking this.

That day, his family woke up in one life and went to sleep in another. Over the next few weeks, soldiers from both sides gradually stole everything they had, and for years there was no such thing as lawmen, and after the war there was still no law, just roving gangs of thieves, or Negro-killers, or sick, saddle-wild murderers doing what wrong they could because there was no one to stop them. Merville saw his father’s face shift forever when the old man understood he couldn’t sell a crop because the sugar mill had been broken into gravel by the blue army. He saw his older brother, who had come back from war with two white scars under his ribs and empty holes for eyes, sitting on the porch smoking and cursing and staring out at the brambles that rose like wiry smoke where fields used to be. At one time this brother had played the fiddle, but the only sound Merville remembered him to make was a brittle refrain of how he wanted to kill this son of a bitch and burn out that son of a bitch. Merville recalled sun on his back each day for eight years as he beat the dead farm like a lazy mule, but the old man had to borrow money from planters who had turned into bankers the way lizards change color. The gentry lost their slaves and got replacements by loaning money at interest against the next crop; and when his father failed to pay it off, they took his land, and loaned him against the next crop, which came short, and they rolled the debt over into the next year until they owned him and his sons like cattle and he realized he could never clear a cent if he lived a hundred years. Before the war, his father had a dream of a big farm for all his children, but Merville witnessed the last day of a nightmare when the old man dropped dead behind a mortgaged plow, falling tangled in the reins, dragged by the spooked mule to the edge of the field, even in death working to the end of the row.

A far-off train whistle shrieked in the woods and he put an arm over his eyes. He saw the rainstormy day he left his brother muttering on the porch and took his mother to Tiger Island, where she hated town life so much that she died within a month. He became a lawman there in 1895, his job to deal with the leftovers of the great killing, gaunt men who bore in them the poisons of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Gaines’ Mill and Chancellorsville, places where the air itself had sung with gunfire like the ripping of cottonade and thousands of men had jerked backwards into either quick death or the slower mortality of hate, which they would pass on to their children and grandchildren like crooked teeth and club feet.