The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux

bleeding. “You’ve got one bad penetration and a few small places. Is anything hurting on your backside?”
    “Naw. Just my chest.”
    Randolph looked around at the crew. “Anybody else hurt?” The carriage operator, a short man wearing a bandanna, held up a streaming hand. “I lost the top of a knuckle is all. But I sure nuff ought to be dead.”
    Someone down the carriage track hollered that he’d taken a saw tooth through an ear. “What kin I do about it,” he squalled, holding a handkerchief against his cheek.
    “Aw, get yourself a earring,” the carriage man told him as he slung blood off his fingers.
    Workers began to stand up and to crawl from under the walkways, and the mill manager saw that things could have been much worse. Two dozen shafts of light fell from the tin roof where pieces of band saw had knifed through. When he bent down and ripped open the front of Jules’s shirt, he saw several shallow cuts, and nested in the middle of them was a blue hole over an inch long. Spreading the wound with his fingers, he could make out the pebbled butt of a shard of blade steel.
    He and two edgers carried him to the commissary and laid him on a counter between the cheese cutter and the accounts ledger. Randolph scissored off the bloody shirt and poured whisky into the hole.
    “Son of a bitch,” Jules hollered.
    “Yell all you want to.” Randall called for a light and the commissary clerk brought over a gooseneck desk lamp. “I think it’s just in the meat of you. Now, we can do this here, or you can go into Tiger Island in the next baggage car that goes by.”
    Jules draped a forearm over his eyes. “Aw, God,” he said. “There’s more goes in to that place than comes back out.” He dropped his arm and looked at the manager. “You like this doctor stuff, don’t you?”
    “Maybe I’m in the wrong business.” He wiped the chest down with medicinal alcohol the clerk had found for him. “But my father wanted a lumberman.”
    “What in hell did the saw hit?”
    “We’ll find out.” Randolph walked over to an oak display case filled with bright tools and chose a pair of needle-nose pliers.
    Jules’s glossy eyes followed him. “Can I cuss you?”
    The mill manager clicked the pliers once in the air and studied the fit of the jaws. “If it helps.”
    The small pieces came out while Jules bunched and hollered under him. A mill hand came over with a second lamp, holding it high above the wound, as the clerk mopped the counter to keep blood from running under the cheese. When Randolph found a purchase on the large fragment and pulled, Jules called him things that made the toothless clerk laugh. But the hook of Disston saw steel would not come out straight, and the assistant manager began to pant and flail and curse. Randolph motioned for two filers to come over and hold down his arms.
    “Maybe I ought to go into Tiger Island after all,” Jules gasped.
    “Well, we’ve started in on it now. If it takes several hours to find a doctor over there I’m afraid you’ll get an infection. Hang on.” The mill manager pushed the blue steel pliers deep into the welling blood, grabbing and then twisting the sap-stained tooth out of the muscles. Jules crossed his eyes, arched his back above the counter, and screamed out like a mill whistle, all of which gave more urgent strength to Randolph’s hands. When at last he tugged a bright, corkscrewed shaft out of a rill of blood, two black firemen behind him laughed out loud.
    “Turn him on his side and let him bleed a while,” the carriage operator suggested, cupping his ruined knuckle, and Randolph watched the wound wash itself out. The clerk fetched gauze, patches, and a little war-surplus suture kit while the mill manager washed his hands in alcohol.
    “This sewing is going to sting some,” Randolph told him.
    Jules was still panting. “How much is some?” he croaked. And when the clerk showed him the soft top of a woman’s boot, he gripped it between