Free The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux Page A

some way to reach him. He looked over at the assistant manager’s spittoon and asked, offhandedly, “By, tell me about France.”
    His brother flipped his hat on askew. “You read about it in the papers, didn’t you?”
    Below them in the mill, the big saw cut into the day’s first log, and the building trembled, the office windowpanes buzzing in the sashwork.
    The weather turned markedly hotter, giving the woods the motionless heat of an oven, and extra boys had to be hired to lug fresh water out to the crews. The camp was overrun with water moccasins, and a box of cheap pistols was sent out to the woods foremen.
    Randolph, recovering from an ambush of diarrhea, decided to get away from the mill yard, riding the narrow-gauge steam dummy a mile south to watch a team of cutters take down trees near the canal. At the end of the line he watched two Negroes in sopping shirts smear kerosene on their thin felling saw and swing it against the base of a notched cypress five feet in diameter, working the blade into the trunk until the metal jammed as if welded. They drove wedges into the cut with blunt-backed axes until the blade was free again. A boy gave them several dippers of water each, and they finished the cut, their eyes on the tree, listening for the first deep cracking sound. They backed off as the wood groaned and the body fell away, smacking the swamp like a tugboat dropped out of the sky.
    The men looked as though they’d been sprayed with fire hoses, and the mill manager saw mosquitoes riding their sweat. One man pulled a rock of salt from his pocket and put it under his tongue like a lozenge. Two shorter men carrying a wide saw, glossy as a gun barrel and stippled with silver-tipped teeth, topped the tree and bucked it into sections, stopping to blow and drink between cuts, their felt hats sagging to their eyes. Randolph watched a filer wade up through calf-deep water to sit on the stump and sharpen the felling saw, polishing each cutting tooth with a small file and swaging the rakers with a little hammer, his care telling that unless the teeth were like razors, leaving woody ribbons on the ground instead of sawdust, the fallers would work themselves dead on but a few trees.
    Randolph felt feverish and slumped against a trunk as his mind juggled and flashed. It was a good thing, it occurred to him, that his brother hadn’t killed a saw filer. Immediately his face flushed with the mean truth of the thought, and he slogged back to the wheezing locomotive, instructing the engineer to return to the mill. “I need a drink of cold water,” he explained as he climbed into the cab.
    “Be sure to check it for wigglies,” the old man said, pulling the Johnson bar against his thigh and cracking open the throttle. The locomotive bunched up its train of four loads and lurched backwards. The engineer left his throttle and bent down to toss several wood slabs into the firebox. “When you going to send me another fireman?”
    Randolph drew out a yellowed handkerchief and wiped his face. “What happened to the man you had?”
    The engineer didn’t turn from his fire. “Your brother kilt him.”
    For days after the shooting, the mill manager spent a great deal of time looking out the high window of his office into the trees. His dead worker had been shipped off like a faulty machine returned to the manufacturer, and no one seemed to question what had happened. He expected that eventually somebody would come to interrogate him—no worker could be that powerless, that unloved—so he was not entirely surprised one day when he finally saw, after the lumber train had whistled its return from Poachum, a short man with wild white hair shambling through the mill yard toward the Negro quarters. When the noon whistle shook the windowpanes, he heard a knock at the door and Merville, the town marshal from Tiger Island, walked in, his elbows turned out a bit from his sides, imparting a locomotive-like oscillation to his corky arms. He