The Clearing (13 page)

Later, she watched the ceiling boards develop out of the gloom above the bed one by one and prayed he hadn’t found another war. The bed jittered, as if from a minor, distant earthquake, and then was still. From down at the boiler house came the sound of the furnace doors banging open and the clank of iron rakes as firemen dragged out the ash.

Merville had gone to bed around eleven, and his arthritic bones floated on the mattress like dying coals on a grate. From a pack of muskrat trappers come to town for women and fistfights he’d taken a three-dollar pistol, a claspknife, three sets of brass knuckles, and a slapjack. As usual, he’d tossed the weapons over the top of the tall armoire standing against a corner of his room.

He woke at five, dressed, dripped coffee, fried eggs, and boiled a pot of grits. At six he walked through the damp air to the office on River Street where the walls, the bars of the cell, and even the stove were sweating. Then the door swung open and the tall priest stood there on the step.

The marshal smiled. “You playing hooky from seven o’clock Mass, you?”

The priest sat down and set up a game of checkers on the desk. He made a move, looked up, and said, “Have a seat, please.”

Merville gave the priest a look and did as he was told. He pushed a checker forward and waited.

The priest was frowning at the board as though stumped by a complicated move. “The women who clean the church in the mornings, they’re Sicilian, mostly.” He glanced up. “Very devout.” He nudged a piece over the board.

“Yeah?” Merville moved again.

“Did your phone ring last night? Buzetti, perhaps?”

“No. I pull the wire on the son of a bitchin’ thing when I go to sleep.” He saw sweat beading on top of the priest’s shiny head.

“It didn’t ring when you hooked it up at five?”

“Non.”
He jumped the priest’s lead man.

“Then he’s decided to settle things himself. So.” The priest put his hands in his lap. “I’ve got something to tell you.”

Merville settled back in his chair and looked at the office’s rack of obsolete rifles and shotguns. “Them ladies, they talk a lot, yeah. When they think they alone.”

The priest nodded glumly, his long German face sunk in folds of skin as he stared down at the board. “Oh, yes,” he said, almost in a whisper. “I feel almost like a traitor for what I am about to tell you.”

The old man watched the priest move a checker and leave his finger on it.

When the lumber train rattled back from Poachum with its empties, the mill manager heard the whistle and saw through his office window that the marshal was standing in the locomotive cab, a suitcase next to his leg. The fireman helped him down and carried the valise for him toward the office.

“Hot damn, I don’t know if I can make it,” he said, collapsing on a chair just inside the door, the fireman backing into the hall with a touch to his sooty cap. “Had to drive the town’s car to Poachum.”

Randolph studied the scarred tin trunk. “What did Byron do in town last night? I tried to see him this morning, and his wife said he wasn’t to be wakened.”

“He pulled Buzetti’s bar into the river with your steamboat.”

The mill manager swallowed hard. “Oh my God, he—”

“Buzetti didn’t complain to no lawman about it.” Merville pulled out a nickel-silver watch the size of a biscuit, yet he still squinted. “In a hour and a half the westbound’s coming in to Poachum with four men on it from New Orleans what gonna put your brother in the ground.” He held up his watch for emphasis. “They’s only one thing that’ll run ’em off and keep ’em off.” He looked at the ceiling and thought a moment. “Maybe.”

Randolph stood up. “What?”

“Get a bunch together, colored and white. With guns. Send them down to stand at the station. The chicken-shit bastards on the train will see it’s not just three or four men they up against.”

The mill manager pinched his lips and wondered how one might do such a thing. “Will you go to the station with us?”

He shook his white head. “No. Hell, no. I got to live next door to them slimy bastards. You way out here in the woods where they just about got to paddle a boat to get at you.” He bent over and opened the suitcase, which held six short-barrel Winchester pump shotguns with full-length magazine tubes.

“Trench brooms,” the mill manager exclaimed, for even he recognized what they were, recalling from magazine articles that the only firearm the Germans complained about during the Great War were these same weapons filled with double-ought buckshot.

“That’s a fact, yeah. The mayor bought these for the city from his brother-in-law. They loaded up with deer shot. Double-ought to start with and two slugs at the end of the row.”

Randolph picked up one of the guns and turned it over. “I can’t put sawmillers out there with these. It could turn into a war.”

Merville stood up. “Tell ’em just to flash these things. Them dagos’ll back off.”

He shook his head. “No.”

The marshal sniffed his mustache, his gray eyes ranging over the mill manager’s rounding shoulders. “Then order your crazy brother’s headstone,” he said, kicking the suitcase closed.

Randolph studied his eyes for a moment, hoping for a way out. “You couldn’t bring deputies to stop them?”

“Who’s gonna volunteer to get they house burnt down?”

“The parish sheriff?”

The old man walked to an open window and spat. “Let’s just say he likes spaghetti. Now, can you spare a colored man to ride me up the track to Poachum on your handcar? I got to get the Ford back to town.”

Walking down the roughcut stairs into the noise and dust of the saw shed, Randolph worried that if he told his brother about the assassins, he’d deal with them himself and get killed. Merville’s plan might short-circuit that threat and demonstrate to Byron that he was far from alone, so he pulled the stop whistle, told the head sawyer to kill work on the line, and began gathering the sweating saw crew, the engineer, assistants and oilers, the trimmers and chip-covered planer crew from the floor below. He told the men to go home and get whatever guns they had, then board the train.

The German engineer stepped up onto the log carriage. “What you expecting us to do?”

“Some of the bunch that spiked the log are coming to give Mr. Byron some trouble,” he said. “I want to show them that we know who they are, and that they can’t get through us.” The men moved uneasily, and no one said anything, sawdust settling like dry snowflakes. The mill manager glowered, momentarily at a loss for what to say, what dollop of self-interest to heap on their plates to convince them to go along. “Of course, maybe you all want to be around when that blade hits the next steel rod,” he told them, pointing to the band saw that was still idling down, trembling like quicksilver.

The head sawyer, a little man, the front of his hat brim pinned back with a box nail, drawled out, “All right, then.” He turned to his crew. “Let’s show the tree-spiking bastards some of our own iron.” The crews broke up without enthusiasm, but in a half hour the flatcars were loaded with nearly seventy workers: the cutoff men, a woods crew, millwrights, stackers, and pond monkeys.

The mill manager was waiting next to the drizzling locomotive when the engineer, a rawboned man named Rafe, hung out of the cab window and spat next to him on the ground. “You sure you can run this show?” the engineer asked.

“It looks like I’ll have to.”

Rafe looked doubtful. “No offense, but you ain’t no lawman, Mr. Aldridge.” He turned to check the water level in the boiler, then leaned back out of the window. “And you ain’t been in the war.”

Randolph didn’t answer for a long time. The locomotive’s air pump thumped six strokes, stopped, and a safety valve began sizzling steam. Everything seemed ready for release. “Mr. Merville told me how to set it up,” he said, feeling weak for saying so.

“Well, that’s something.”

He felt the blood rise in his face. “It’ll have to do, won’t it?”

“If you say so, Mr. Aldridge.” Rafe leaned into the engine to adjust the lubricator.

At Poachum station the frowning agent stood at the west end of the platform holding aloft a willow train-order hoop with a message attached. His arm shook as a westbound locomotive barked down on him, hot and mountainous. The fireman hung off the cab steps, squinting through the steam, and put his left arm through the hoop as the engine coasted five car lengths past the station and stopped with a hiss and a squeal. The engineer read the order and hung his questioning face out of the gangway, scowling back at the agent, who nodded his head and scurried inside.

The platform was empty, and when the conductor put down the step stool, four men slouched off with their hands in their pockets, looking as if they’d just bought Poachum for a great deal of money and didn’t think much of it. They wore new suits and white shirts, their pants shoved down into sleek black boots. The hats were right out of the box, round, felt, with a deep chop in the middle that seemed to go into their skulls. As they walked toward the waiting room, the mill manager stepped out, Merville’s borrowed revolver stuck behind his buckle. “Do you have business around here?” he asked.

The men stopped, rolled back their shoulders. One of them wore a patch over his right eye, and he held out a hand, the fingers bunched and pointed up. “Yeah,” he said. “We got the business.”

“If you work for Buzetti,” the mill manager said, his hands at his side, “you have no business out here. You’d better keep on riding.”

Another man unbuttoned his coat. “We tired of riding.”

There was a shuffle of boots as five white workers and the largest black faller in the mill filed out of the station holding the Winchester pump guns, the hammers pulled back on each, sunlight sparking on the cyanide-blue frames. The men in suits looked at one another, then back at the lumbermen, licking their lips as they thought out the math. When Randolph saw this counting in their eyes, he knew they hadn’t seen enough and probably were very good killers, former Chicago men maybe, and a thrill of fear spread through him. He’d thought running them off would be easy, but now, in a sudden spell of dizziness, he suspected he might be wrong. The train orders that the agent had handed to the engineer, Randolph had written himself. The crew was not to pull out after the passengers disembarked, and they were to do one other thing. He looked west, raised his hand, and the fireman gave a jerk on the bell cord. From the other side of the station’s roof came a rumble of hob-nail soles, and forty men appeared on the peak carrying .22 rifles, rabbit-eared double-barrel shotguns, lever-action Marlins, rusty Bisley revolvers, break-action Smiths with half their nickel plating eaten off. From around the east and west sides of the station came big overalled men carrying more long guns, a few holding axes and adzes overhead like Vikings. A man off the train turned his head slowly to the one wearing the patch. “Hey,” he said.

“Shut up,” the other said calmly.

“Get back on the train,” the mill manager told them. “Don’t let us see you around here again.”

Passengers in the seats next to the station began to slide below the windows. The conductor stepped back down out of the vestibule and replaced the step stool without a sound. He stared west at nothing and said very gently, as if a yell would fracture the sugar-shell calm that encased the station, “All aboard.”

The big locomotive hissed like a fuse, and the four men in the new hats slid their eyes along the roofline as though still figuring odds. Randolph worried about all the cocked guns behind him; if just one accidentally went off, what hailstorm of lead would envelop him? After a moment, the man wearing the eye patch extended a forefinger and thumb and made a brief pointing gesture toward the mill manager, then turned to board the coach.

The workers were told to knock off until three o’clock. After eating the tender fried chicken the housekeeper had left on his desk, the mill manager walked over to see his brother, who was sitting in his boxy front room reading the labels on phonograph records.

“You should have seen them, By,” he reported. “The worst kind of men, down from Chicago, I’m sure, backing onto the train like they thought we were about to blow the coach to pieces.”

His brother took a drink of coffee, spilling a little on his pants leg. “A nice little party. Who told you how to set it up?”

Randolph fell into a chair. “The marshal. Merville.”

He nodded and said, “You could’ve been killed.”

Randolph frowned. “I don’t think so.”

“Then think again.”

“Well, what would you have done? Derailed the whole damned train?” He got up again, put his hands in his back pockets, and walked to the window, gazing out.

Byron held up four trembling fingers. “He sent this many men,” he said quietly, waiting for his brother to look back at him. “So you showed your strength, and they took off. And you think you’ve won?”

“That’s just it,” Randolph said, settling back in a chair. “When they saw we had the guns, the jig was up.” As he said this, he felt like a character in a dime novel, and looking at his hands, he saw that they were pale.

“Well, that’s something,” Byron said in a mocking voice. “It could have been like that in 1914. The Frenchies could have said to the Germans, ‘Boys, look at our guns,’ and everybody would have been home in time for dinner.” He threw his head to the side and closed his eyes.