The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux Read Free Book Online Page B

he wondered how many people even knew Nimbus existed, this dot at the heart of a great forest-green blur on his father’s map. He got up and found an old pair of high leather boots in a locker and walked down a rutted lane to his house, trying to ignore a man sitting wall-eyed on a stump next to the road and a noisy group playing cards in the shade of a shack, their commissary tokens glittering on scrap planks thrown across sawhorses.
    There was not a speck of paint on or in his house. Walking through the rooms touching the naked wood, he felt like a beetle inside a tree. In the backyard an old mulatto man drowsed on the porch of a cabin while next to him a young light-skinned woman washed clothes in a galvanized tub.
    “Are you the housekeeper?” he called, looking around the bald yard.
    “Yes,” she said. “This is my daddy.” She nodded to the man with a respectful motion.
    “I’m the new mill manager. Can you find me something to eat?”
    She dried her hands in her apron and walked past him into the big house, glancing across her shoulder at his face.
    Randolph found a nearly blind horse in the small stable behind the yard, its eyes the color of a sun-clouded beer bottle; he saddled him, and set out to ride the whole mud-swamped site, aiming to find his brother, and also wanting the men to see him moving among them, laying claim. The horse was slow but the mill manager sensed it had memorized the place, so he dropped the reins and allowed it to take him on a logical circuit. In a half hour he had not seen his brother, so he retook the reins and turned back to the houses near the railroad, riding to the one Jules had pointed out earlier and tying the horse to a porch post. He was surprised to hear a phonograph keening inside, John McCormack, the Irish tenor, singing “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” in an impossibly high voice. When he knocked, a sandy-haired woman in her early twenties came out as soon as his fist touched wood.
    She wore a patterned housedress and her hair was pinned up in back. Looking at his clothes, at the way he carried himself, she began wringing her hands. “He’s resting up,” she said. “He just came in.”
    Randolph smiled, thinking the woman a rascally surprise Byron had kept from them all. “I’m his brother, the new manager. And you?”
    Her mouth dropped open and she glanced behind her, then gave him a shy look. “Well, I reckon you’ll find out soon enough,” she said. “I went and married him.” She had the direct gaze and chapped hands of a farmwoman. “My name’s Ella.”
    “I’m happy to meet you,” he said, at a loss. “This is, well, it’s nice to . . .”
    “He’s right inside.”
    She stepped back and then disappeared into the rear of the house, so he entered the front room where his brother was seated in a Morris chair, his eyes closed, a large Victrola quaking before him. His brother’s upheld fingers trembled in the air along with the exaggerated wavering in McCormack’s throat. He was, at thirty-six, already graying, the scoring along his eyes and mouth showing all the bad weather of France and Kansas. His hair was close-cropped, as though the woman had cut it with a big pair of shears. Randolph felt a lightness in his chest, just as he had as a young child when his brother came home from horseback riding or hunting.
    When the record finished, the automatic cutoff clicked and the turntable stopped with a whistle. “Byron?”
    He did not turn, but finally said, “I wondered how long it would take for him to send someone.”
    “It’s Randolph, By.”
    And then the lawman, showing his big teeth, stood and grabbed his brother’s hand, squeezing it too hard, not shaking but vibrating it like a man being electrocuted. Randolph stepped forward and gave him a hug, taking in the scent of him.
    “My own little board-measuring brother,” Byron said, backing away. “The best of a good lot has come to lay eyes on me at last. Well, gaze upon this