The Clearing (40 page)

They continued cutting the tract from the outer edges in toward the factory, and early in 1928 the mill manager studied the maps, saw what was happening, and fired the first two woods gangs. In May he sold the big rafting steamer to a sugar mill, because all the timber that could be rafted had been cut. The steam winches on the pull boats spat and chuffed along, dragging the trees away from the cutting crews and into the canals where they were handled by a new little gasoline tugboat and shoved to the mill. The compound began to fill with herons, egrets, owls, bullbats, marsh hens—any feathered thing that had lost its cypress home. Grackles lined roof ridges and stared off at the remaining trees crowded with crows and chicken hawks. Three Indians were hired to shoot and haul off alligators, just to keep them from under people’s houses where they hid from the noon sun, waiting for house dogs and chickens. Nothing edible could be left out for fear of the starving raccoons, possums, rabbits, and squirrels that were eating the hides off porch chairs, boots left on the steps, magazines in the privies, and the bright contents of flowerpots.

In July more woods crews were laid off as the circle of timber around the mill shrank to a mile wide. The narrow-gauge rails were unspiked and the little locomotive shipped away to another mill on a flatcar, the timber cars stacked and burned, their wheel sets sold for scrap iron. The single men were let go first, Lillian saw to that, and the dormitories, white and black, were sold, winched onto barges by the pull boats and hauled off by an oil-company steamer down the long canal to the main channel. Randolph and Byron stood on the company bulkhead and watched them drift away, their gables dragging moss off the cypresses still standing on the bank. A limb raked a line of slate-gray birds off a roof ridge; they circled the unpromising swamp, and returned to their moving roost. The mill manager turned around and looked over his dwindling compound. “Well,” he began, “Oregon will be quite a change for you.”

“It’s a good mill,” Byron told him. “I read the whole bill of sale last night. One of the better tracts Father’s bought.” He moved two steps over into the shade of a ragged willow. “I can cut and sell more fir than we sold cypress here.”

“You’re moving up in production, all right.”

Byron smiled, knowing the veiled reference to Ella’s pregnancy. “You think I can get out before she delivers?”

Randolph spat into the black canal. “You don’t want it connected with this lovely place?”

“What do you think?”

There was a detonation at the mill, yells, and then half a length of band saw shot through the roof like a steel snake. The men froze, hearing the piercing stop-engine whistle and, a minute later, two short moans from the big whistle, a signal that the line was shut down but no one was hurt. The mill manager shook his head. “We’re wearing out. The main engine needs new bearings and belting.”

“Minos was telling me he’s got so many leaky boiler flues plugged with wooden stobs he’s having trouble keeping up steam.”

“I’m not paying for a flue job this late in the game.” He motioned to the rust-streaked roof of the saw shed. “You better go see what the damage is.” Byron nodded and walked off.

Five minutes later Randolph was in Ella’s kitchen, teaching Walter to drive a nail into a piece of kindling, using the child’s hammer that Byron had bought.

The boy turned up his hands. “Uncle Rando, the nail keeps jumping away.” He picked up a number four finishing nail, tapped it with the red hammer, and it glanced sideways out of his fingers.

Randolph took the tool and studied its head. “Why, your hammer face isn’t broken in yet, Walt. It’s too slick.” He reached over and made a show of scraping the face on the rusted leg of the woodstove. “And you should practice with a nail that has a bigger head on it.” He chose a box nail from the boy’s kit and started it for him in a piece of one-by-four, showing him how to place his fingers. He froze then, in a brief seizure, remembering the touch of Byron’s fingers on his own, the first time he’d ever hammered a nail.

Ella began pulling plates down from a cabinet. “I hope he grows up to be more than a sawmill carpenter,” she said.

Randolph sat down and stared over the boy’s head and into the years he would not see him. “You and Byron have to make sure of that,” he said. “There should be good schools in Oregon in that city. What is it?”

“Portland.”

“School’s the key. And bring him to church.”

“He’s goin’ to Sunday school.” She looked down at him. “Randolph Aldridge, you’re just a boy yourself. You’re grinding ashes into your suit pants.”

The mill manager got up and dusted his seat. Walter bammed the nail halfway through the board and was trying to pull it out with his fingers. “Here,” Randolph told him, “let me show you what the other side of that hammer head’s for.”

He came out of his front door late one morning and started to walk the edge of the muddy lane toward the mill when something unusual in the air arrested his motion, a new quality he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He looked around at the houses in the white section, at the mill itself, and decided it was the light. The woods around the compound were no more than a windbreak, a scrim of trees a hundred yards thick. When he’d first come to Nimbus he could not imagine what was beyond the great cypress swamp, and now he could see through the trees to the plateau of stumps on the other side. Giant bars of light stood on the eastern camp, and he understood that soon the factory would steam away in an enormous clearing, that Poachum would be visible in the devastated distance. The mill manager now felt under constant scrutiny, and he wondered if all the savagery would still have happened if he’d cut outward from the mill, if the light and a wider view would have stymied the bloodshed.

He walked over to the commissary and went inside to stand by the long counter. Byron was there, and the manager, who was wearing a white shirt and arm garters as he silently counted bars of soap.

“Well,” he sighed.

The commissary manager looked up. “I know why you’re here. I’ve been through cut-out before.”

“I’ve still got to say it. Don’t order anything else. Let everything you have go out at cost. I’m sorry.”

The man nodded and continued to count soap.

Randolph turned to his brother. “You in on the betting?” “I don’t care when they cut Last Tree.”

He looked down at the stained counter. “It might be next week.”

“Does Father know?”

“Of course. He wants me to come up afterward, to help him retire.”

“Well, God knows you both deserve some rest.”

The only remaining saw gang gathered in the mist at daylight at the foot of the Last Tree, a gray giant six feet through the middle at a man’s waist. It was between the mill and the railroad to Poachum, right in the compound, and was the final cypress standing anywhere in sight, a beautiful tree with the red blush showing under the splintery bark and a pool of apple-green foliage at the crown, which was so high up that the egret perched in the topmost branches looked no bigger than a jaybird. The mill manager mounted a stump and made a speech, saying among other things that the mill had fed and clothed everybody for a number of years and that they had to be grateful for what they’d taken out of the swamp. Not many seemed convinced by his words, and he knew that no common mill worker had a bank account, that nearly all of them had only the same belongings they’d owned when they’d signed on. He looked at the barefoot children and the faded overalls of the men as he talked, and he became longwinded, saying things about how industry helped build the country, as if ideas would make them all feel better. He couldn’t imagine what would.

Two black axmen swung in perfect rhythm, notching the tree to make it fall where they wanted it to go, which was directly onto an empty wooden barrel a hundred feet away, part of a bet the saw gang had with the boilermen. For twenty minutes chips spun off the trunk and then the fallers stepped away and rested their double-bit axes on the toes of their soppy boots. Two men poured turpentine on a Disston Cougar felling saw and went against the tree, sawdust boiling out of the cut in long pale ribbons. When the back of the blade was deep inside, a man stepped up and placed four wedges, painted silver for the occasion, into the cut and swung his sledge, opening the incision so the saw could work through the back half of the tree without binding. At a certain point a mystical and inevitable feeling touched the crowd, and everyone gravitated to the safe side of the tree and began looking up its straight trunk. The mill manager did the same, wondering if the clouds were drifting or the tree’s top was beginning to move. Along his shoulders he felt the pressure of Byron’s arm, smelled the soap in his fresh shirt, and the mill manager put out his own arm behind his brother’s back, as if to pose for a photograph, both of them looking skyward. The long saw soughed through the heartwood, the fallers so used to the motion they hardly broke a sweat as they tossed the blade back and forth, letting their ropey arms do the work.

“How are you, By?” Randolph asked, his face still raised to the treetop.

“No better,” he said, “but gladder to be here.” He, too, kept his head up. “You?”

“Selling lumber, is all.”

At the first subtle crack from the trunk, Byron took back his arm. “That’s better than nothing.”

“I’ve heard that.”

A wheezing creak came from the wood and the fallers stopped for a moment to listen, then swung in several quick strokes on one corner of the cut and stepped back, leaving their saw in the tree. Byron and Randolph imagined a drift to the crown, which slowly became real movement, ponderous, giving true meaning to a man’s puny weight, the feathery top beginning to flutter as if the tree were beating its wings to stay aloft. The cracking intensified to the sounds of bridge timbers tearing apart and the tree came down in the muck like a lightning bolt, exploding the barrel to toothpicks. Lillian applauded weakly, glanced around at the somber workers, and crossed her hands behind her back. The mill manager felt as though a giant electric switch had been thrown off, stopping everything in his life. The buckers climbed up on the trunk like ants, bringing their heavier crosscut saws, the toppers went after the limbs, and in a half hour one of the last mules limped up, towing the steel cable from a pull boat’s winch. The cut-up tree was dragged into the pond, where it waited its turn with a hundred others to be made into boards, dried, shipped out to be nailed into churches and whorehouses, hospitals and jails.

Two days later, the Last Tree was sent through the band saw, and after the final skull-ringing gnaw of the blade, the master sawyer pulled the stop whistle, the big steam engine down under the floor slowed, the belts whined lower in pitch, the overhead pulleys and line shafts and idlers rotated slower and slower into a paused quiet that ached in the men’s heads as if a powerful vacuum had been applied to their ears. The saw-shed crews began to wander, stunned by the stillness, then one by one they pulled off their gloves and walked out into the sunlight like mourners leaving a funeral. They went home, where most of them had already taken apart stoves and crated chickens. They washed the mill off of them and got ready for the morning’s train out. A few would hang on to help with the end tasks.

Minos kept pressure up for a week until all the lumber was kiln dried, then he turned the two-foot valve wheel to shut off the main steam lines, pulled a long soulful note out of the mill whistle, threw his gloves into the firebox, and walked with the boiler crew upstairs to the pay window. The mill manager was spelling the accounts keeper when Minos walked up.

“If you need a reference,” Randolph told him, “tell them to call me.” He reached under the grill to shake his engineer’s hand.

“I got on at the Tiger Island power plant. I been studying them diesel books and tested for my license.”

“You give up on steam?”

Minos drew his pay and counted it. “Times is changing, yeah.”

“I doubt they’ll change that fast.”

Minos pulled his watch and glanced at it, then laughed. “Look around. This damn mill turned a whole forest into window frames and water tanks in six years.”

Randolph looked down to the ledger and drew a line through
Minos Thibodeaux
. “You were the best steam engineer I ever hired, I know that much. I’m just sorry you lost your father here the way you did.”

Minos wound his watch tight. “The old priest come to see me and said for me not to worry about his soul. I told him, hell, if he missed out on heaven nobody else in this parish got a chance.” The engineer turned toward the door.

“Take it easy,” the mill manager hollered after him.

“Ain’t no such thing,” he called back.

Two days later, the machinery buyers and scrappers came down in the crew car and walked the mill, drawing yellow chalk lines on every piece of mechanism left in the compound, one man writing his company’s name on a flatcar even as a crew stacked lumber on it. A week later, the mill was coming apart like a wedding cake eaten by ants. A few of the better shotgun houses were winched up onto flatcars and sent to Shirmer; the rest were knocked down, the lumber sold to trappers who took it out in small rafts on towlines behind their skiffs. The steam pipes to the kiln were pulled up, the brick structure itself left behind, where the mill manager imagined it would be found by hunters in a hundred years and puzzled over as if it were a pyramid.

Byron and Randolph did not have to stay around for the end, but they did. Jules was sent to a new Arkansas mill, even though they could’ve kept him on to close Nimbus out. The brothers felt they could not leave until this place where they had fought and killed and created was completely gone. Their wives and Walter had moved to a hotel in New Orleans the week before crews began cutting the better homes into quarters and loading the pieces on flatcars. On the sunny day when the locomotive pulled the dismantled houses out of camp, Randolph looked into his kitchen as it drifted by, open to view, the stove still in place, nailed into the blazing linoleum where May died and where he lay pouring blood.