The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux Page A

his teeth. Randolph threaded the hooked needle and decided that seven coarse stitches would hold the big wound shut. As he forced the first suture through, the only sound in the room was Jules’s ragged breathing as his teeth ruined the boot. The mill manager took his time, figuring the better job he did, the sooner Jules would be back at work. After bandaging the wound tight, he handed his patient a big soda to drink all the way down, and a half hour later, Jules was sitting up, and the clerk was using handfuls of cotton waste to mop the sides of the counter. Tending the man with the wounded ear, Randolph ran a wad of alcohol-soaked gauze through the hole and told him to go back to the mill and help install a new blade. Meanwhile, Jules’s wife, who had just returned from town on the log train, walked her husband to their house with the help of one of the filers. After doing what he could for the sawyer’s knuckle, Randolph took a long time cleaning blood from under his own fingernails, looking through the window at the mill, then back at his trembling fingers. He decided to walk to his brother’s house.
    Byron was at the saw shed, Ella told him through the screen door. He could smell that she’d been drinking.
    Putting his face close to the screen, he asked, “He hard to live with?”
    She looked past him to the mill. “You ever see a big fine passenger train run downhill without any brakes? It’d be a sad sight if you’d see that, now wouldn’t it?”
    “I’m sorry.”
    She looked at his coat, which his housekeeper pressed each day after supper. “You come down to help him?”
    “Yes.”
    “You better get to it. I can’t do a thing for him.” She raised an arm, and started to say something else, but gave up.
    “He’s a good man,” he said.
    She pushed her sandy hair from her eyes with both hands and held it at the sides of her head. “Let’s just say he’s worth the effort.”
    He found Byron standing on the log carriage, digging with a long pry bar in a slab of cypress, working a round metal shaft out of the wood. He picked up the steel and banged his left palm with it. “Looks like a case-hardened transmission shaft, ground to a point. Someone drove this into the tree and countersunk it so nobody would notice.”
    The mill manager remembered the note left under the firebrick, and told him about it. “When I found the message, I thought it was from the German.”
    “You know who it’s from now, don’t you?”
    Randolph looked over at what was left of the ruined saw blade. The millwrights were already truing up a new one. “Just because of maybe a hundred-dollar take on a Sunday?”
    “It’s not just about money with some people,” his brother said quietly.
    “What, then.”
    Byron smiled a wide, wide smile that was even more frightening than a shattering saw blade. “It’s a little habit a man picks up or is born with. He can’t be told no.”
    “Well, I’m telling him. That damned saloon’s staying closed.”
    “You want to wait around for another accident?”
    The mill manager regarded his fingernails, still faintly outlined with dried blood. “Maybe you’re right. We can’t do to him the things he can do to us.”
    At this, Byron walked off, stopped in the bright doorway, then turned and pointed the shaft at his brother. “You want me to talk to him, at least?”
    “I think you better stay in camp, By, where you’re safe.”
    Byron motioned to the holes in the roof. “Safe?”
    Randolph thought about saw blades, nights in the howling saloon, his brother’s midnight rounds. “But you can’t talk to men like that. Talking won’t do a damned bit of good.”
    “It depends on how you talk.”
    The mill manager looked up at the whitewashed patch on the ceiling. Jules said the boy had been a careful worker who didn’t take chances. “So talk to him, then.”
    After supper Randolph had the housekeeper heat water for the washtub, where he sat and scrubbed his assistant’s