The Clearing (34 page)

“It’s a badge,” he told him. “Be down at the locomotive at four in the morning. Wear that and I’ll tell you what to do.”

Hutchins looked at the shiny weapon dangling from Byron’s right hand. “That’s a .401, ain’t it?” He dried his hands and took it reverently, working the action, finding the safety and flicking it on and off. “Where you want me to pin this here badge on, Mr. Byron?”

“You can wear it on your drawers for all I care. Just be on time. We’re going to arrest some fellows, and that’s all you need to know. Don’t tell anyone about this.”

Hutchins handed back the weapon. “I’ll be there, boss. Do like you tell me.” He drew a hand across his bald chest, holding the badge by one of its points, positioning it over his right nipple.

Outside, Randolph trod on a mule dropping and stopped to wipe his foot. “So you’re right. Now there’s four of us.”

“Five,” Merville said. “Minos will do what I tell him.”

“Are you sure of that?”

The marshal gave him a look and the mill manager nodded. “Okay, then. Five,” he agreed.

In the saloon, Norbert, the young fireman for the narrow-gauge dummy engine, was getting a drink. A new man in camp, too smart for his job, Byron figured he was safe enough to ask. They pulled him out into the yard and talked to him a long time before he agreed to be deputized, and it cost the mill manager a five-dollar raise. Byron watched the big man pocket his star and walk off toward his shack, then said, “Six.”

Merville pulled a handkerchief and wiped his neck. “I got to go sit on your porch awhile. I’m done.”

“Go on into the house,” Byron told him. “Make yourself at home. Ella can fix you a drink.”

Randolph bent and looked. Merville’s eyes were staring, red-rimmed. “Rest up, Marshal, and we’ll finish this.”

Byron touched the old man’s shoulder. “Make her play a record for you.”

“My dancing days is over,” he said, giving them a handful of badges and angling away, carefully sidestepping a rut.

Byron looked after him. “Well, we’ll have to drop in on the Negroes.” They struck out across the dummy line track and walked through the mill to avoid the log ramp and its avalanche of bark and mud. The gangs of men catching lumber and sorting it glanced at them but didn’t stop working, because boards were flying through air filled with blinding, cinnamon-colored cypress dust. Threading through the rack yard, they entered the lower camp where brown ducks and fish snakes navigated standing green pools, and everything smelled of wet, burned wood, chicken dung, and Ivory soap. In the Negro barracks they found Clarence Williams’s room bare as a pauper’s coffin. The man across the hall raised up from his cot and told them he was on shift. They walked back to the rack yard and found him finger-tossing two-by-fours to a man high up on an air-dry stack, who waited for each board to stall in the air next to him and then closed his hand on it.

Byron raised a finger and both men looked at him. “Take a break,” he said to the man on the stack.

Williams was running with sweat and stepped back into the shade cast by the pile of lumber. “Mr. Byron.”

“Clarence, we need you to be a deputy for tomorrow, to help us round up some of those Tiger Island bootleggers.” Byron held up a badge and put it in Williams’s long fingers.

The stacker rolled his eyes up. “You ain’t gonna let them use me for no target practice, is you, Mr. Byron?”

“Keep your head down and listen to what I say tomorrow, you won’t get hurt. I want you on the train at four o’clock.”

Williams looked at the needle on the back of the metal. “I ain’t never been on this side of no badge before.”

Byron tossed him the Winchester. “I’ll give you one like this, loaded up. All you do is flick off the safety and pull the trigger.”

“Sure enough? You don’t got to work nothing? It just reload itself?”

Byron looked around for the other man. “Your partner, will he shoot or run?”

Williams laughed, showing a mouth full of crooked teeth. “He so cross-eyed, he shoot and the bullet be goin’ around the rabbit and back again.”

Randolph held up a hand and gave him a serious look. “Can you find us three like yourself we can deputize?”

A bead of sweat ran down Williams’s scar as he turned his head toward the barracks. “I can show you three Negro gennelmens won’t never have to back up to the pay window.”

The last one they visited was Minos. At six o’clock they found him in the boiler house disconnecting an injector from a steam line, his shirt off, thick leather gloves dribbling sweat when he reached up to turn a valve. He waved the men off, unable to talk above the roar of the fireboxes and a steam leak from a faulty valve stem. They backed out of the gangway into the slanting sunshine and waited. A few minutes later, he came out buttoning a wet denim shirt, and Byron told him what his father had planned.

Minos pulled a handkerchief and wiped his face hard. “I talked to Daddy two days ago and he was mad.”

“He says you’ll go with us.”

“Then I guess that’s what I’ll do.”

Randolph clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re the last man. We’re all set.”

“Who’s the others?”

The mill manager gave the list. A pipe banged in the boiler room, and Minos looked suspiciously toward the noise. “I don’t know if the old man can take it.”

“He’s got to go. All our authority comes from him.”

Minos shook his head and looked at his asbestos-covered boots. “Shit, he’s almost seventy-five years old.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Merville sat in a rocker on Byron’s porch and watched the mill yard suddenly fold in half like a newspaper and fall inward on itself, the smokestacks tumbling horizontal, workers and mules walking in and out of a seam in the earth. His ears whistled, his eyes went dead and then came back to life. He saw the mill come to rights, but twisted, as if everything had begun to melt. He felt noise and a little breath at his ear, and his head drifted around to a woman who was saying something kind. Was it his own wife? He opened his mouth, feeling he could never again make words, and was amazed to hear himself ask for aspirin and water.

“Surely,” Ella said. Her skirt stirred the air, and at once she was next to him again. After he washed down the pills, he saw her looking at him closely and then felt her hands on him. “You come in where it’s a little cooler.” The next thing he knew she’d sat him in Byron’s chair and turned an electric fan toward him. He shuddered as his eyesight squeezed down again, turning the room warped and jaundiced, as if he were viewing it through a film of varnish. Before him was a mahogany thing he did not recognize, bent and angled like a wooden tabernacle, and the woman said she would play some music for him. Merville blacked out and began to dream about the men on horseback who fired his father’s barn because he wouldn’t tell them where he’d buried his coins. He watched the deserters hang his brother by one foot from a live oak, claiming they would cut him down when the father relented. Little Etienne was not even crying; he was so thin the rope barely cut his ankles, and he swung patiently like a chicken who didn’t understand what was coming. His father told them there were no coins and a deserter drew from his muddy blouse an old single-shot pistol. His father went down on his knees and said if they wanted to hurt him, they should shoot his mule instead. So the deserters, having murdered so many men that they considered the death of a good mule a greater tragedy, did as he asked. Merville decided then that if he lived to be two hundred years old he would never be like these stinking outlaws, would never allow a kinked desire for blood to rise in him the way it did in these robbers’ eyes before their weapons bucked and his father’s fly-bled mule went down in its patched traces.

Merville’s ears vibrated with a sound like the moans of a dying man haunted by nightmare. He opened his right eye to the abrasion of a fiddle and words about lovelight and twilight and silver-haired lovebirds riding the train to dreamland and the kiss of gentle years. At this groaning music, his mind snapped open like a windowshade unblinding a sunrise, and he saw his friend the priest, waiting in the dark confessional for truth from the sweet-faced man who told of his stealing, from the woman who wanted her doctor’s hands on her, from the wife who dreamed her husband dead, and then he saw himself kneeling before Father Schultz and felt at once gilded like a morning-bright pane because he could not think of one thing to confess. The image faded as the music rose around him like the whir of a saw, the nasal moaning so cloying and false that the marshal struggled to his feet and stretched out his hands toward the dark wood to put an end to the sung lies of the glossy machine.

Ella found him facedown next to the Victrola holding half of the record in each liver-spotted hand and ran out yelling for Byron and the doctor. A group of men came clomping into the house, one of them Minos, his face sweating and unreadable.

He went to his father and lay a hand on his white hair, then rolled him on his back and shook him as if he were an engine that could be coaxed back to motion. He sat down on the floor and closed Merville’s eyes, then changed his mind, pushing them open and looking hard and close. “Well,” Minos said, lowering the lids again, “he had a good long run.”

The doctor came in and knelt to put two fingers on the marshal’s neck. He looked up at Minos.

Ella put a hand over her mouth and started crying. “He was here one minute and gone the next.”

“That’s how it happens,” the doctor said, getting up awkwardly and going back outside.

She leaned against Byron’s chest and began to sob. “I was playing a love song for him on the phonograph.”

Minos leaned over and read the title off the smashed record. “That would do it,” he said.

Randolph and Minos straightened Merville’s body and crossed his hands over his chest. The light was failing, and the men gradually spilled out onto the porch, Minos staying inside with the body. No one said anything for several minutes, until Randolph announced bitterly, “It’s all off.”

Minos came through the screen door, slumped into a rocker, and looked up at him. “What you mean?”

Randolph nodded respectfully toward the front room. “Without your father, we’ve got no written authority to go after Buzetti.”

Byron folded his arms and spat into the yard. “Tomorrow, when they back that switch engine down that track, I’ll show them some authority.”

His brother shook his head. “It’s an arrest we were planning, not a damned ambush.”

“I’ll arrest him, then.”

“You mean you’ll arrest his motion with a .401 slug. By, I’m not about to let you throw yourself away over this.”

“I’m doing,” he shouted, “what we said we’d do.”

Randolph pointed through the screen into the house. “You have no jurisdiction anymore.”

Byron looked across the yard for a long moment. “If the old man is our power,” he said softly, “we can bring him with us.”

“What?” Randolph looked down at Minos, who pulled off his nautical cap and hung it on a knee, squinting at it.

Byron spread his arms. “Just put him on the train and bring him along. Nobody can say exactly when he passed away. We can tell LaBat he died after the arrests were made.”

“By, that’s crazy.”

His brother’s eyes turned hard. “Someone shoots May in the brain, then puts a snake in her baby’s bed, and
you
call
me
crazy?”

Byron took a step forward, but Minos got up and stood between them. He jerked his head toward the front room. “You know what? He’d like the idea, yeah. Going for the last ride. Sort of like working overtime. He was made for that.” He pulled his watch. “We gonna leave in less than ten hours.” And with that announcement, all that could have been said about the heat and decay was done away with.

“You want to bring him along?” Randolph was incredulous.

Byron turned around and smacked one fist into another. “We’ll lay him on a stretcher in the back of the crew car, with his face uncovered. I’ll tell the men he’s sick and not to bother him.”

Minos nodded. “You’d better. If some of them think he’s passed, they won’t get on that car.”

Randolph peered inside through the screen. “I’m sorry about this.”

Minos put his face alongside the mill manager’s, looking into the room as well. “All my life I was the horse and he was the spur, and I don’t know if that’s how it’s supposed to be, but it’s sure how it was.”

Randolph could smell the sweet pipe-joint compound on him, tobacco, sweat, and woodsmoke. He smelled of work. “After it’s over,” he said, “we can tell people he died on the job.”

Minos nodded. “Won’t nobody not believe that.”

Rafe, the locomotive engineer, got up at two o’clock to raise steam, and by ten to four Randolph could hear the machine’s safety valves sizzling. The engine was turned on the wye so it could run backwards, pushing the crew coach out to the main line at Poachum. The stars slid behind a mudflat of clouds, and the mill yard was empty of light. One by one the men assembled, and as the mill manager walked up, he wondered if any of them had been able to sleep at all. After he’d gone home and watched Walt sit up drunkenly and point to his still-swollen foot, he’d tried to keep Buzetti out of his thoughts. The child’s pinched face brought out May’s features, and again he could see her, the soul of his house. In bed he rolled around like a log, and then, along toward the end of the time he’d allotted for sleep, he’d dropped off briefly, the way an automobile wheel rolls off the edge of a paved road, and he saw the hard, just face of Merville fixed on him, his eyes asking for law.