Violence begets a masterful tale

Reading Tim Gautreaux’s marvelous second novel, “The Clearing,” is like immersing yourself in a film during daylight hours, losing complete track of time. When you emerge from the theater, blinking and stunned by the sunshine, you’re unwilling and unready to resume your normal life. You don’t want the story to end.

From the openings pages, Gautreaux (who also wrote “The Next Step in the Dance” and the story collection “Welding With Children”) gracefully transports readers from the contemporary into the unfamiliar, bringing to life a 1920s Louisiana swamp-bound sawmill and the two brothers who run the place. With a razor-sharp use of metaphor, Gautreaux interlays well-researched details on lumbering with masterful storytelling, capturing the reader’s full attention and holding us utterly transfixed.

The novel focuses on a ragtag cypress lumbering operation hidden in the bayou, a place called Nimbus, mired in the heat and mosquito-laden air and populated by snakes, alligators and hard-working, unruly men who drink too much and fight too hard when quitting time rolls around.

Byron Aldridge is the lawman keeping order in Nimbus. He had served in France during the Great War, we’re told, and returned an altered man, dazed by the carnage he’d encountered. Once home, Byron had inched away from his well-known Pennsylvania family and their highly successful timber empire until he disappeared from their sights altogether, rumored to be somewhere out West. When an evaluator from the family company comes to Nimbus to inspect the mill with an eye to buying it, he comes across the long-lost heir and reports back to headquarters. Byron’s younger, more subdued brother, Randolph, is sent to run the newly acquired mill and to lure Byron back into the family fold.

“[W]hen 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,” Gautreaux writes of Randolph’s first view of Nimbus. “Littered with dead treetops, wandered by three muddy streets, the place seemed not old but waterlogged, weather tortured, weed wracked.”

What follows is a tale that resonates on many levels, much of it told from Randolph’s perspective. His brother is a mess, unable to escape the war images that haunt him. As the camp’s lawman, Byron is effective, if much too violent at times. He listens to maudlin music on a hand-cranked phonograph, drinks hard and indulges his grief. Randolph, who’s never encountered the depravity Byron has seen, tries to shake him from this web of sadness, to restore the older brother he’d once idolized. “He’s a good man,” the local marshal describes Byron. “Just got ruint in France.” Eventually, Randolph finds himself entering the swamps of human barbarity alongside his brother, as hard as he strives to remain unsullied.

Step away from the insulating comforts of civilization, the story reminds us, and nature, with its coexisting beauty and savagery, takes over.

In many ways, the book is a meditation on violence and the way it begets more of the same. There’s human-against-human brutality, as in war, which has long-term effects on Byron and other veterans. In civilian life, violence also rears its head when Byron breaks up saloon fights using his emotional hardness as a tool against further injury. (At one point, Randolph stops Byron from interfering with a barroom brawl, afraid that his brother’s actions are making the fights worse. What results is more carnage and suffering than would have occurred had Byron stepped in.)

Human violence against the natural world is also explored, as the logging operation decimates the resplendent yet menacing cypress swamplands. “It’ll grow back,” Randolph assures Byron as they prepare to leave Nimbus once the area’s been completely logged. “Sure,” Byron replies. “In fifteen hundred years it’ll be just as we found it.”

To his credit, Gautreaux depicts a complex reality in clear terms: violence is sometimes necessary, the cost paid for progress, for the staunching of further violence, for the building of railroads and houses and window frames. “ ‘If someone had shot the Kaiser, would there have been a war?’ ” Byron asks his brother at one point. “ ‘Think about it, Rando. There’d be millions of fat and sane fellows working away in this old world right now.’ ” The perceived necessity for violence, though, doesn’t take away from the harm done, and Gautreaux artfully balances the two.

Woven into this dark subject matter are wry humor and impressive plot tension, adding up to a story that is thoroughly satisfying, not only as you turn the pages, but afterward, when the sun-blinded feeling recedes and scenes from the book continue to play.