The Clearing (33 page)

In the office he found the receiver lying on his desk. “Hello?” he yelled. Below him the band saw was cutting twelve-by-twelves.

“Mr. Aldridge? This is Merville.”

Randolph was annoyed that he’d had to trek across the mill yard, but the old lawman’s voice made him forget that he was sweating. “What can I do for you, Marshal?” He listened a long time without speaking, without feeling the floor vibrate, without hearing the safety valve roar its daily test. After a while he said only, “Yes, of course,” followed by, “Come on the train. It’s safer than the road.” He hung up, fought the door, which had swollen into its frame, and bounced down the steps, heading home to look in on the child. When he came into the room, his wife stood up and gave him a kiss in front of the doctor.

“The swelling’s way down,” she said. “He actually sat up for a moment or two.” He looked at her kinked hair, smelled her blouse in which the starch had soured, and thought he had never admired her more. He walked over to the bed, where Byron’s wife was changing the pillowcase, said the child’s name, and Walter looked up, blinking and exhausted.

“He’s worn out, the little bugger.” He took off his fedora and ran his finger round the sweatband, looking down at the child.

Ella watched him replace the hat. “Going out again?”

“Back to Byron’s. We have some preparations to make.”

“I’ll walk over with you,” she said.

He put his arms around his wife. “I know,” Lillian said. “It’s a relief.”

“Have you moved that accordion?”

She gave him a look. “It’s behind our bed. Why?”

He found it and removed it from its case. It banged against his calf as he and Ella walked over, and on Byron’s porch he put his arms through the straps and walked in. His brother looked up, expressionless with drink.

“Oh,” Ella said, reaching for his shoulder.

Randolph caught her eye. “Can you make us some coffee?” He set the instrument’s stops.

“Sure. Say, can you really play that thing?” She smiled at the accordion, and Randolph struck a pose.

“We’ll see.” He started into “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” missing a few notes. The reeds, like everything in camp, had begun to corrode, and dead bugs were caught under the reed flaps, but the instrument just sounded silly and jolly as it exhaled its mildewed breath into his face. “This is some real music,” he called over the notes. Taking a few steps forward, he stood in front of the Victrola, facing his brother, and squeezed harder, until Byron cautiously began patting his foot. He played “Moonlight Bay” all the way through, ending with a wheezy arpeggio that made Byron laugh, and when he began playing “My Indiana Home” both men started to sing; it was a song their mother had bribed them to learn as children. Ella brought in a pot of coffee and ironware mugs, sugar and fresh cream, and they sat and drank in the heat, and Byron—coming around from wherever he’d been—told Ella a story about their Polish music teacher, an earnest gentleman who drove to their father’s house in a lopsided buggy and taught them to count time by tapping on the backs of their hands with a pair of chopsticks while they played piano. Randolph stood and tried a polka, playing too slowly, with the left hand a flash behind the right, but it was still good enough, he told them, for a sawmill.

After an hour and two pots of coffee, he pulled out of the accordion’s straps and bent over to take his brother’s face in his hands for a second, then told him about Merville’s phone call.

By two o’clock that afternoon, they had made their plans. The mill manager had drawn a map at his brother’s desk, a series of pencil strikes that showed where the Cypress Bend switch left the main line, three miles west of Poachum. Merville would show up with his authority and deputize enough men to carry out the arrests.

Byron examined a railroad timetable and noted that since there were no trains scheduled through Poachum until 9:30, they could take the mill locomotive out on the main line, stop before the curve at Cypress Bend switch, and hike down to get into position before daylight. He stared at the map, trying to focus, rubbing his eyes, then drawing his palms down the stubble on his face. “I don’t know. I remember good cover in there, but it’s a risk.”

Randolph rocked on his heels. “It might work just like the ambush I set up at Poachum station. You can hand out those cannons you bought in Shirmer to the deputies. Buzetti’s men will see the guns and back down. Then we tell them they’re under arrest.”

Byron stared at the map and pinched his bottom lip with his fingers. “Maybe.”

Randolph ran a hand over his hair. “Well, what do you think will happen?” He tried not to imagine the event itself.

“The town boys’ll probably run like hell. And Buzetti, once he figures the odds, might decide to let his lawyer do the fighting.”

Randolph placed a finger on the map. “And if not?”

“If we do it right,” Byron said, “they won’t fight a big group. They’re not crazy, and they won’t be expecting us. They’ll be there to load liquor, not to fight deputies.”

Randolph began rubbing his hands together. “The little details, you’ve got to set them up. You and the old marshal.” He wanted to think that the arrest was not in revenge for Walter, but it was difficult not to wish that the one-eyed man would be there and would draw a pistol on a sawyer standing over him with a semiautomatic rifle. “I just don’t want anybody to get hurt,” he said quickly.

Byron looked at his brother. “Did Merville say that one-eyed bastard was along on this one? What’s his name, Crouch?”

“The marshal told me everyone was called in. There’s something like a thousand cases to be loaded.”

Byron walked over to the Victrola and lifted a round tray of discarded needles out of the cabinet. “The kid station agent told me he’d testify that old one-eye walked by the station a few hours before Walter was bitten.”

“Did he see him walk the track toward the mill?”

Byron shook his head. “Nope. Saw him carrying a sack, though. Got out of a car with it, walked in front of the headlights, and the car left.”

“A sack? What kind of sack?”

“Burlap,” Byron told him, pouring a waterfall of needles into a wastebasket by the door. “And something in it was moving.”

At five o’clock they were waiting at the yellow station in Poachum. The mill manager looked beyond the steep iron roof of a trapper’s house into a soaring cypress forest, not his tract, and passed the time by estimating board feet.

Byron followed his gaze. “You want every tree that walks?”

“That’s a lot of money standing there.”

“A forest is good for more things than shutters and weatherboard.”

The mill manager regarded him blankly. “Like what?”

“Why, just to look at, maybe.”

Randolph turned back to the trees and frowned. “Look at them for what?”

But before Byron could say anything, a locomotive whistle shrieked in the west, and their heads turned down the tracks.

Merville sidestepped down from the wooden coach and shuffled across the platform to meet them, his skin dusty pale. He rolled his shoulders inside his wilted coat and glanced at the waiting room. “Let’s step away over there by your engine. I don’t want no kind of son of a bitch seein’ me here.” They walked along the platform and down the steps onto the spur track toward Nimbus. Out of his rumpled jacket he took the high sheriff’s document and one of the stars.

Byron nodded. “You’ve got the authority, sure enough.”

They had trouble getting Merville up the steps into the cab of the engine, and Randolph wished he had dragged the crew car along.

Byron looked worried. “You’re stiffening up on us.”

Merville touched his throat at his open collar. “I feel like chewed tobacco. I’ll be glad when we get through with this, yeah.”

When the mill manager released the brakes and cracked the throttle, the engine sneezed and drifted backwards toward Nimbus through a tunnel of weeds and willow saplings exploding out of the clear-cut lowland. “I hope your sheriff can hold onto them longer than that other fellow we let him have.”

Merville stepped out of the way as Byron threw a slab into the firebox. “You know, since the lines been going all over, I been using that telephone more and more. I got a direct call into New Orleans right to the office of the federal prosecutor, yeah. I didn’t know you could do that. Nowadays it’s like you think of a man, maybe somebody you ain’t seen in ten years, and you just ring him up. The wire finds him.” He looked out as the engine backed through a dark grove of cypress. Next to the roadbed, blue herons were stabbing crawfish, ignoring the progress of the locomotive. “Everything’s tied to that wire.”

Byron threw in more wood and then took off his gloves, tossing them in the boilerhead tray. “And what did this federal man say?”

“He said if we live to do it, we can bring whoever we arrest straight to New Orleans and put ’em in his custody in parish prison. When we round up those boys tomorrow we’ll take ’em out on the eastbound. LaBat can kiss my ass.” He began to cough and settled back in the fireman’s seatbox. “That telephone,” he said after a while. “I didn’t have to get on a train to go see nobody. Just crank the phone and tell the operator to find whatever fool I want.”

Randolph looked out the cab window at the single new line running along the tracks on peeled poles. The man who put in the wire had told him that in five years nearly everyone in the country would have a telephone, and he thought about what that might mean. Anyone who witnesses wrongdoing could call for a policeman or a newspaperman. People would know everything, because the phones weren’t just ears and voices but eyes as well. He looked again at the copper wire. Like a vein, it would soon run head to foot through the body of the world.

Later in the mill office, Byron decided to use no more than ten men. Jules sat on his desk and listened to the plan, his big cowboy hat cocked to one side on his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I done left Texas to get away from the shooting kind of folks. I won’t do my wife no good all crippled up with pistol slugs.” He kept his eyes low as he spoke, and it was clear to Randolph that he was an employee, not someone bound to this problem by money and blood. An employee didn’t take chances for the company after the knock-off whistle blew. The mill manager said nothing and stared at the floor, surprised for a moment, but then realizing that neither the yard foreman nor chief millwright nor saw boss would allow himself to be deputized. Those of higher rank had plenty to lose. They went into Tiger Island, and some had local family. But he had to be sure. He told Merville and Byron to come with him, and together they walked down to the railroad engineer’s house in the white section of camp. When they stepped up onto his little porch, he came out, pulling his galluses onto his shoulders. He’d finished his shift but hadn’t yet cleaned the locomotive’s oil and soot off of him. He looked around, blinking at his company.

The mill manager stepped close, shook his hand, and said, “Rafe, we need to deputize you.”

The engineer looked back at his wife, who stood behind the screen door as Randolph explained the deputizing process. “They want me to help get that dago what paid to get the log spiked,” Rafe told her.

The woman was rubbing flour off her hands with her apron. “Is there gonna be guns?”

“Yes,” the mill manager told her.

“If he gets kilt, you going to feed me and our babies for the rest of our lives? He goes to town and gets stuck, you going to sew up the hole and keep sending his pay till he mends?” Her voice was an experienced weapon, and the engineer turned toward the men on his porch to view its effect.

Randolph stepped back. “I don’t want to put any burden on you, Rafe. Just give me an answer and we’ll move on.”

The engineer motioned with his chin. “Aw, if they was coming in the mill yard up to some mischief, I’d be with you. But this liquor stuff ain’t really the mill’s business, is it?”

Randolph heard Merville and Byron step off the porch behind him. He tipped his hat to Rafe’s wife and followed them out into the rutted street.

“I’ll run y’all down there with the engine,” Rafe called. “But I ain’t packing no gun.”

Byron pulled off his straw hat, looked up at the sun, and replaced it. “It’s not exactly like raising an army, is it? The only people who’ll go along are the ones who owe us, and the ones with no families.”

“And the crazy ones,” Merville said. “You got any crazy ones can shoot straight?” He pointed at the Winchester automatic rifle Byron was holding. “Show them that bear-killer and they’ll think it’s a party they going to.”

A crop-eared yellow dog came up close, and Byron held out his boot for it to sniff. “You can’t just ask, for God’s sake. We’ve got to go in and tell them what they’ve got to do for us.”

“You handle the next one, then. Where’s Clovis Hutchins, the drunk that promised he’d turn preacher if I kept him on?” He pulled his watch. “He’s on the first boiler gang, so he’s off now.”

They walked over to the barracks where the single men lived, a long, two-story box punctuated at intervals with single-pane windows propped open with ax handles. Turning into the bottom hall they walked through the smells of tobacco, liniment, sweat, and unemptied chamber pots until they found Hutchins washing up in a corner of his little room.

Byron pitched a star to him and Hutchins caught it in his towel. “What you giving me a medal for?”