The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux Read Free Book Online

the shallow water on either side carpeted with apple-green duckweed. In the distance he heard the exhaust of a locomotive, and in twenty minutes the train came wobbling into sight, dragging cars of kiln-dried one-by-twelves, six-by-six timbers, beams fourteen inches square, and racks of weatherboard, all red Louisiana cypress, fine grained and fragrant in the heat. After the engine drew the loads out onto the main line, then shoved them back into an empty siding, the mill manager pulled on the grab irons and mounted the locomotive.
    The engineer studied his suit and shoes. “What?”
    “I’m Randolph Aldridge.”
    “The devil you say.”
    “No, the mill manager. You and your fireman get down and put those trunks on the tender.” He watched as they stepped down and considered his luggage a while before pulling off their oily gloves.
    Randolph ran the locomotive himself through the hundred-foot trees back to Nimbus. The wood slabs the fireman tossed into the firebox were free fuel, and the smoke smelled like efficiency. The reports he’d received about the site had not drawn him a picture, but he hoped for an adequately maintained property that he could fine-tune. However, when the train clattered into a clearing of a hundred stumpy acres, the settlement lay before him like an unpainted model of a town made by a boy with a dull pocketknife. Littered with dead treetops, wandered by three muddy streets, the place seemed not old but waterlogged, weather tortured, weed wracked. He stopped the engine and blew the squalling whistle once, gazing out from the engineer’s seat, his feelings sinking like the crossties under the locomotive’s axles.
    A two-story barracks for the single workers rose against the western tree line, and in front of it, on both sides of a rain-swamped lane, ran two rows of shotgun houses, paintless, screenless, not a shutter on a single one of them. South of this row by a hundred yards he spotted the manager’s house, a square, porched, steep-roofed structure of raw, pink-tinged weatherboard, to the rear of it a cabin and tiny stable, then a short crude fence of cypress bats, and beyond that a wide canal, its surface broken with trunks drifting like reptiles in ambush. Between the house and the mill was the looming commissary with its muddy porches, and a good distance behind it was the low saloon, carelessly built and rangy, sagging back from a wide gallery bearing a dozen scattered hide-bottomed chairs. To the rear of the saloon three cabins and a line of privies perched at odd angles on the berm of the canal. On the other side of the soaring mill was a longer double row of forty shacks without porches or steps—the black section, he supposed—and two more of the featureless, rain-streaked barracks. Not far from Randolph’s position in the locomotive’s cab, he could see a line of low houses with screened windows and balustered porches facing south. In one of the backyards he noted a broken steam-engine flywheel, a set of rusty handcuffs dangling from a spoke.
    In the middle of the clearing roared the mill itself. Out of every metal roof rose jetting exhaust vents or hundred-foot black iron smokestacks streaming flags of woodsmoke. Randolph figured that some five hundred people worked in the mill and in the woods beyond. He stepped down from the engine, felt the unsettled land devour his shoes, and suddenly understood something about this place: two years before, the loudest sound had been the hollow calls of slow-stepping herons.
    Walking around watery gouges rippling with minnows, he made his way to the office upstairs in the mill. In an unpainted room made of glowing beaded board he met his assistant manager, Jules Blake, a rough, hungover-looking fellow, who said he was from Trinity County, Texas. Randolph asked him questions for two hours, watching him nervously build the wad of tobacco in his left cheek as he gave answers.
    He tried to put the man at ease. “Just because ownership