The Clearing.
By Tim Gautreaux. Knopf, 2003. 320 pages. $24.00 cloth.

In The Clearing by former University of Mississippi writer in residence Tim Gautreaux, Randolph Aldridge, the second son of a Pennsylvania has been sent to the swamps of Louisiana to find his older brother, Byron, just back from World War I France, and return him to the timber empire that is his to inherit. Instead, haunted by war and death, and filled with emotions seesawing between rage and weepy melancholia, Byron has fled his home and family and traveled about the countryside itinerantly sheriffing his way from town to town until eventually settling down in Louisiana.

Early on, Randolph and Byron are reunited in the godforsaken sawmill town of Nimbus, a filthy, snake-infested, and violent place sequestered deep within a labyrinth of bayous. Randolph’s initial impressions of Nimbus set the tone of the place well: “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.”
Upon Byron’s refusal to return home with his brother, Randolph vows to wait him out, the former continuing as the town sheriff with a propensity for violence, the latter taking over as the new mill manager and overseeing the harvest of the cypress stands.

Complicating the situation is the Sicilian mafia that’s running the town’s one saloon—a place where a man can lose a week’s pay in a single rigged hand of seven-card stud or, just as likely, take a bullet in the back. In an attempt to create at least a little peace on the Sabbath, the Aldridge brothers shut down the saloon Sunday nights. As everyone knows, the mafia, even in mosquito-infested swamps, does not like to be pushed around. Violence leads to violence in return, and soon the blood begins to flow like the rain that refuses to relent, the tension building until the inevitably brutal climax.

The Clearing is a d,arkly lyrical story of wrestling with the conscience nearly to the point of madness, the fine line between good and evil, the bond between family, the effect violence has on otherwise decent and benevolent people, and the struggle to escape the past. It is a plot-driven narrative that keeps the reader in its grip until the very last page. After only a few chapters the reader will find himself swatting at phantom mosquitoes, thanking the ghost of Willis Haviland Carrier for inventing air conditioning, and imagining water moccasins, coiled and ready to strike, around every corner.

One is not likely to put this book down and just move on to the next. Tim Gautreaux is one of the most talented writers to come out of the South in recent years, and the characters and nearly surreal atmospheric setting of The Clearing are guaranteed to revisit readers in their dreams.

Jimmy Thomas