9

When Charley arrived at her farm on Monday morning, Denton was sipping from a thermos and leaning against his pickup, his shirtsleeves rolled up, a pen tucked behind his ear, an Ag bulletin poking out of his back pocket. The sight of him made the day seem suddenly brighter, and Charley kneed her door open, stepped out into the buzz of a thousand unseen insects and sultry morning air. “Good morning.”

Denton set his thermos on the dashboard and shook her hand. You could tell a lot about a person from their handshake, that’s what her father always said, and Charley could tell from Denton’s solid grip that he was the real deal—a man of integrity and honor, steady and forthright—he would not let her down, and for the first time since Frasier quit, Charley thought she might actually have a shot, not just at making the farm work; she would make Micah proud.

“So, where do we begin?” Charley said.

“Let’s have a look.” Denton headed toward the shop, but not before he whistled and his two dogs, the same ones Charley recognized from his yard, came bounding out of the fields, the larger one flinging slobber in his excitement. Now the picture was complete, Charley thought; it wouldn’t be a farm without dogs.

Charley slid the metal door back and felt along the wall for the light switch. She still breathed through her mouth for the first few minutes after she entered, but Denton didn’t seem to notice anything. In fact, he inhaled deeply, as though he were inhaling the homey aroma of fresh-baked bread. He bent to inspect an air compressor Charley could actually identify because there was one just like it, but smaller, at the gas station near her old house. Denton had barely touched the hose when the nozzle came off in his hand.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Charley said. “I told you it was bad.”

Denton wiped grease off the air compressor with an old rag. “I’ve seen worse, but I’ve seen better.” He moved from one piece of equipment to the next, calling out each machine’s manufacturer, model, and function—all for Charley’s sake—followed by the list of parts he’d need to repair it, while Charley recorded everything on a yellow legal pad. The Baileigh drill press under a veil of cobwebs needed a timing belt, and they’d have to order a new output contactor for the MIG welder. They might as well pick up another workbench, Denton said, and a set of wrenches; and that bin of odd pipes under the window might come in handy. Denton moved methodically about the shop like a chef in his restaurant kitchen. He arranged tools by size. He tested the drill press for vibration and runout, uncrimped and rewound the spool of feeder wire for the welder.

“What’ll it cost to get everything working?” Charley asked. “Just ballpark?”

“Too soon to tell.” Denton had his doubts about the tractor out front; it had been awhile since he’d seen parts for a JD 6400, and he needed to take a closer look at her fields, but when he pried the lid off a metal drum and saw that it was still full, he nodded. “Least we’ve got enough NH Four to get started. Saved four hundred dollars right there.”

By noon, they had taken inventory, and Charley’s list of parts and materials was three pages long. But before they drove into town, they climbed into Charley’s car and headed off down the narrow road that led to the back quadrant, Denton riding shotgun, his dogs in the backseat, panting and thrusting their heads through the windows.

Occasionally, as they rolled down the headland, a rabbit darted across their path, or swallows, like kamikaze pilots, swooped in front of them, while a hot breeze kicked up from the south, romancing the young cane on either side of the road. Theirs turned out to be a comfortable silence, the only sound the crunch and ping of gravel under the tires. And riding along, Charley fought the urge to say again how grateful she was—partly because she kept thinking about Miss Honey’s warning: Don’t come apart like a ball of twine, and partly because Denton’s manner was so calm, so steady, she felt more at ease than she had in months, but also because if she’d kept going like she was going, a few more weeks and she’d have been back in Los Angeles, back in her mother’s travertine castle, listening to Lorna say, I told you so.

And as far as Charley could tell, Denton seemed equally at ease. He pointed out different varieties of cane as they rumbled past the fields: Louisiana 90 with its aqua-colored leaves and creamy stalks; Home Purple, which started off pale as green tea but turned to Bordeaux in the sunlight; and Denton’s favorite, Ribbon Cane, with deep-red-and- bright-green-striped barrels that reminded Charley of an all-day sucker. Each time he called out another variety, 310 or 321, Charley repeated it, hoping that saying the names out loud would help her remember, wondering if she should confess that it all looked like the same leafy green stalks to her.

“For instance,” Denton said, “you got a lot of three eighty-four out there.”

“Three eighty-four,” Charley said. “Is that bad?”

Denton nodded. “It’s what most farmers’ve been planting since ’93. But you ought to think about mixing it up some. Maybe plant some five forty or one twenty-eight. It’s only been out two years, but it’s good. More sugar in it than three eighty-four, and you won’t get as much rust.”

“Rust. Hold on.” Charley asked Denton to hand her the yellow pad.

“What for?”

“I need to write that down.”

“All you need to do is listen,” Denton said, tossing the pad on the dashboard. “This ain’t something you take notes on, Miss Bordelon. You got to live it.”

And so, as they reached the second quadrant, Denton told Charley to pull over. When she did, Denton got out, knelt down at the field’s edge, and palmed a handful of dirt. “This is what I was talking about at lunch last Friday. This here’s good, loamy soil. You can tell by how it holds together.” He pinched a bit of soil between his fingers then put it in his mouth. “Not too much clay,” he said, “but not too sandy. Now you.”

Charley knelt. She pinched a fingerful of dirt and raised it to her mouth, but then she hesitated, thinking of all the creatures that had probably crawled or slithered over that spot.

“Go on, Miss Bordelon. It ain’t gonna kill you. All that scribbling won’t do you any good if you don’t let this get inside you. It’s the only way you’re going to learn.”

Charley guessed this was what Denton meant when he warned that she’d have to do it his way. She looked at him again, expecting his face to have darkened with impatience, but he only gave her an encouraging nod. Charley put the dirt in her mouth and swallowed quickly.

“Well?” Denton said. “What did it tell you?”

“Nothing,” Charley said. “I didn’t taste anything. I don’t know what to look for.”

“Do it over. Take your time.”

Charley raised the dirt to her mouth again. She sniffed: wood smoke, grass, damp like a sidewalk after it rained. She tasted: grit, fine as ground glass, chocolate, and what? Maybe ash? She closed her eyes as soil dissolved over her tongue, and slowly, slowly, almost like a good wine, the soil began to tell its story. She tasted the muck, and the peat, and the years of composted leaves, the branches and vines that had been recently plowed under, and the faint sweetness the cane left behind. She swallowed: a moldy aftertaste she knew would stay on her tongue for the rest of the afternoon. And though she didn’t yet know the terms to describe what she had experienced, she understood a little more clearly what Denton was trying to teach her. When she looked over at Denton again, he nodded approvingly, then, without another word, brushed dirt from his knees and walked back to the car.

•   •   •

Back at the shop, Charley had just discovered another envelope of invoices Frasier apparently hadn’t bothered to pay, when Denton knocked on her office door. He held her yellow pad. “Here’s what I’ve come up with.”

Charley wheeled around from the desk she’d only partially cleared, gesturing for him to take a seat on the tattered sofa.

“Besides the replacement parts for the machinery,” Denton said, “we’ve got to buy more mother stalk.”

“Mother stalk?”

“That’s the cane you plant at the beginning,” Denton said. “You start by cutting a long piece of cane and laying it on its side in the ground. Every piece of cane has knots on it a few inches apart, sort of like eyes on a potato, and out of those knots, a new cane plant will shoot up. That first shoot, when it grows up tall like you see around here, is called your plant crop. That’s what you harvest during grinding. The next year when that cane sends up another shoot, that’s called first-year stubble. Next year after that, the shoot that comes up is second-year stubble, the next year is third-year, and by the fourth year, that original stalk you planted is pretty much worn out, so you dig it up and start again. You usually get four crops from every mother stalk.”

“So mother stalk is like sourdough starter,” Charley said. “I think I get it.”

“Sort of, I guess,” Denton said, looking puzzled. “You got a lot of third-year stubble out there that’ll need to be replaced. We also need to dig those drains I showed you and fill those ruts in the front quadrant. It’ll cost us, but we can probably find some local labor if we ask around.”

“Local labor?”

Denton looked at Charley over the top of his bifocals. “Black folks.” He flipped the page. “Now, I think I can save the John Deere out front, but you’re gonna need a combine, a chisel plow, and at least two three-row choppers.” He did some final figuring. “We’re looking at one fifty-six.”

“Excuse me?”

“One hundred fifty-six thousand. Give or take.”

Give or take what? Charley wanted to say. My kid? My life? My soul? She felt her knees buckle even though she was sitting down.

“One fifty-fix should do it,” Denton mused, tapping the pad with his pen. “That’ll get us to October. Once grinding starts, we’ll need at least four cane wagons, that’s another twelve, but I saw one out in the yard, so we’ll worry about that later.”

Charley leaned forward, put her head between her legs. And now the ball of twine had not only hit the floor, it was coming apart fast, with little bits of fiber poking out everywhere. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

“Miss Bordelon?”

“Mr. Denton, I don’t have one hundred fifty-six thousand dollars.”

“How much do you have?”

Between her savings and what was left of the operating fund she had ninety-one thousand dollars—a lot of money if you owned a bakery or a bicycle repair shop, but a pittance, Charley realized now, if you were trying to run an eight-hundred-acre sugarcane farm. “Ninety-one.”

“Ninety-one?”

“Ninety-one,” Charley said again, but it may as well have been ninety-one thousand gum balls.

Denton stared at her a moment longer, then pushed his hat back on his forehead and squeezed his brows together. “What about a line of credit?”

Charley shook her head, no.

“What about cash reserves?”

“These are my reserves.”

“Ninety-one thousand,” Denton said, like she’d just handed him a stack of Monopoly money. “I told you this was no game.”

Charley could practically hear Denton cursing himself for coming out of retirement, kicking himself for buying in. She was on the verge of apologizing, but stopped herself, sensing that if she uttered another word, a single syllable, she’d tip the scales and Denton would walk.

“You can hardly find a decent used combine for ninety-one thousand,” Denton said. He sighed the heaviest sigh Charley had ever heard, and set the yellow pad on the floor.

On the other side of the window, a dragonfly bobbed along the glass.

“I understand if you don’t want to work with me,” Charley said. She pulled a crumpled Ag bulletin off the stack, folded the first page over, and stared at the columns of print, not reading any of it, because it was easier, less agonizing than watching the disappointment register across Denton’s face.

Denton slid forward on the threadbare couch. He rested his elbows on his knees and let his head hang. He didn’t say anything for a very long time. “Well,” he said, finally, looking up, the skin around his eyes seeming to sag. “Put your thinking cap on, Miss Bordelon, and roll up your sleeves, because we’re about to get real creative.”

•   •   •

By five thirty, the air was heavy with the promise of rain, and every muscle in Charley’s back ached as she slid the shop door closed. She had spent the afternoon cleaning out boxes of yellowed files, scraping crud from the windows, hauling hoses, and lifting crates of old parts. She’d swept the floors and dragged impossibly heavy barrels of solvent out into the yard. Oil blackened the knees of her jeans. Her shirt was streaked with soot. It would take the rest of the week to clean up everything, Charley decided, and she might as well burn her clothes.

“I’ll stop by the dealer tomorrow to see if they can order that distributor cap,” Denton said, standing aside as she looped the chain through the handle, secured the lock.

Charley nodded. She was more grateful than she could say that Denton had decided to stick with her, that he hadn’t bailed out when he’d had the chance. She was even happy they’d accomplished so much on their first day. It felt good to be productive, to push herself to the point of exhaustion. But privately, Charley nursed the growing suspicion that it was all for naught because no matter how hard they worked, how much they schemed, she didn’t have the money Denton said they needed. I’ll stop by the dealer tomorrow, Denton had said. Two weeks ago, she would have considered the word tomorrow to be the loveliest she could utter, filled with possibility, and opportunity, and promise. But as far as she could tell, tomorrow only meant she’d had another chance to disappoint him.

“Have a good evening, Mr. Denton,” Charley said, sliding in behind the wheel. “And thank you.” She followed Denton’s truck along the headland, past the fronts of untended third-year stubble until they reached the junction, then tapped her horn twice to wish Denton a good night before turning left and bumping over the drawbridge. Up ahead, the sky was the color of gunmetal, the clouds heavy with rain. Lightning slashed through them and their lining glowed white. Nine miles down the road, the sky opened up, soaking the road until it was black. By the time Charley pulled up at Miss Honey’s, the Volvo’s hood glistened like it had just been waxed, and steam rose from it in misty sheets.

•   •   •

Miss Honey was chopping like a prep cook at a roadside diner, scraps of bell pepper, garlic, and onion scattered across the counter, when Charley walked in.

“Where’s Micah?” Charley asked.

Miss Honey gestured toward the window, and when Charley looked out, she saw Micah in jean cutoffs she must have made herself that morning, digging a long, rectangular plot in the grass.

“I convinced her to come in when it rained, but otherwise, she’s been out there all day,” Miss Honey said, and alongside the swell of pride Charley felt at Micah’s industriousness, she felt a pinch of guilt. Since the reunion, Micah hadn’t played with a single kid even though Charley promised, swore, she’d help her find some.

“How was your first day?” Miss Honey asked.

Charley turned away from the window. She took a Coke from the refrigerator. “Things keep getting better and better,” she said darkly. “Denton says I need another sixty-five thousand dollars. Shit!” In Miss Honey’s kitchen, Charley felt the full weight of what she was up against. Sixty-five thousand dollars more, and that would only get them to October. Where would she get that kind of money?

“One thing I don’t allow in my house is foul language,” Miss Honey said without missing a beat in her chopping. “That and taking the Lord’s name in vain.”

Her mother was right. She was a dreamer; had always been. But where had it gotten her? “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” Charley said. The kitchen was quiet except for the whir of the ceiling fan. “I know I sound ungrateful, and I don’t mean to, but I wish Dad hadn’t left me this farm. I was doing a good job fucking up on my own. Now I have eight hundred acres to remind me I’m a failure. I’m just making a fool of myself.”

Miss Honey scowled and Charley realized she’d sworn again.

“You remember that first day when we drove out to your farm?” Miss Honey said. “That day Frasier quit?”

Charley nodded. Of course. How could she forget?

Miss Honey stopped chopping, wiped her hands on a dish towel. “Well, your daddy worked out there one summer when he was a boy.”

“Out where?”

“Those fields you own. That same land. I didn’t recognize it at first, it’s been years since I was out that way. The trees are much bigger.”

“Dad never told me about working cane,” Charley said. She knew a lot about her father. For instance, she knew how much he hated the South. So eager to escape, he skipped his high school graduation dance and the parties, packed his clothes in a cardboard suitcase, and caught a ride to California with a woman from town who needed someone to share the driving and the cost of gas. He had sixty-three dollars in his pocket. He was seventeen. Years later, when she was a girl and her father brought her back to Saint Josephine for summer visits, he couldn’t last more than a week before his mood curdled. He grew antsy, short-tempered. Small things—the sound of a train whistle, the sight of an old black man pedaling his bicycle down the road, weeds sprouting through cracks in the sidewalk—annoyed him. But cutting sugarcane? Even when they sat in his living room and looked at The Cane Cutter, he never said a word.

“Can’t say I’m surprised he didn’t tell you,” Miss Honey said. “But soon as you said he bought the place from LeJeune, I put it together.” She pulled a chair out from the table and leaned heavily against it. Charley had lived with Miss Honey for almost a month. She had watched Miss Honey with Micah and knew she could be gentle; had seen Miss Honey explode at Violet, then turn around in the next moment and allow Violet to help her up the steps; but she had never seen Miss Honey look so troubled as she did now, as though her inner fire, the feistiness, her Miss Honey–ness, had drained away.

“Those were tough times,” Miss Honey said. She looked through the window. “I was taking in as much extra laundry as I could, cleaning for Miss Barbara on weekends. Pappaw was working extra shifts at the mill. All that, and we were barely getting by. Ernest was thirteen that year. He told me he wanted to work cane, but I told him no. I’d worked cane when I was a girl, and I knew how hard it was. ‘Go ask Mr. Henry down at the gas station if he has work for you,’ I told him. But Ernest didn’t listen. He got up before dawn and walked four miles to where they rang the big black bell. Got himself hired onto one of the crews making a dollar a day.”

Miss Honey fell silent, and for the first time, Charley thought she looked every one of her seventy-nine years, her skin thin as parchment, her shoulders slumping, her ankles swollen as popovers above her orthopedic sandals. “All that dirt is like an oven the way the heat rises up. You feel like passing out from thirst. ’Round ten, the supervisor set a water bucket at the edge of the field. Didn’t seem to be any order to it. Seemed like, you got thirsty, you drank from the bucket. But not that day. When it came time to break, Ernest was first in line. Reached for the ladle when something caught him upside his face. Said it felt like a hunk of metal. Andre LeJeune, making his daily rounds. He’d hit Ernest with a shovel. Let the white drink first. Couldn’t stand seeing a black boy drink ahead of him.”

Her father had been thirteen, Charley thought. Just two years older than Micah.

When Miss Honey spoke again her voice brimmed with regret. “My son kept that job till school started because he knew how bad we needed the money, but he didn’t tell me what happened till a month before he left for California.” She asked Charley to get her a Coke from the fridge, then tore open a packet of Stanback. “I used to wonder what that did to him, but after that day we were out there with Frasier, I knew.” Miss Honey took a deep breath, and Charley saw her mouth tremble. “It’s an awful thing when a mother can’t protect her own child.”

“I know,” Charley said. She would do anything to take back that day Micah burned herself. She would do anything, give anything, to have those hours back. Through the window, she heard the faint echo of Micah’s shovel as it sliced through the layer of grass, cut into the soil beneath. Miss Honey was right. It was an awful thing, the worst. The very, very worst thing of all.

“Ernest bought that land and never said a word,” Miss Honey said, looking small and frail sitting there with her hands in her lap. “Now he’s gone, and I can’t tell him how proud I am.” She stood and moved to the sink, but not before Charley saw her wipe her eyes.

•   •   •

Out beyond the town limit, the Missouri Pacific’s whistle announced midnight’s arrival, while in the pitch black of the front bedroom, Charley thought about Miss Honey’s story, imagined her father, just a boy, working the long rows of cane as the sun beat down, racing to the water bucket like any child would do. Charley rolled onto her side. She had to find the extra sixty-five thousand dollars. She had to get to October, then through to grinding. She slipped out of bed and walked down the hall to the kitchen, where the stove light threw off a soft glow. She flipped the light switch.

“Oh.”

Ralph Angel sat at the table confronting a heaping bowl of Frosted Flakes. He wore a T-shirt and boxers, and Charley, in only shorts and a tank top, folded her arms across her chest, thinking this was far too intimate for a brother and sister who hadn’t seen each other in twenty years. “Excuse me. I didn’t know anyone was in here,” she said, and was about to head back to her room when Ralph Angel spoke.

“Couldn’t sleep either, huh?”

Charley hadn’t seen much of Ralph Angel since he teased Hollywood the night of the reunion. But looking at her brother now, she thought he looked smaller without the warm-up jacket, almost harmless sitting there with the big box of kid’s cereal. “The heat at night,” Charley said. “It’s the one thing I haven’t gotten used to.”

Ralph Angel poured more cereal into his bowl then pushed the box across the table. “Help yourself,” he said standing up, going to the sink, holding his bowl under the tap.

Charley stared.

“What?”

“Nothing, I guess,” Charley said. “It’s just that I’ve never seen anyone eat cereal with water before.”

“I been thinking.” Ralph Angel turned off the tap and sat down again. “We sort of got off on the wrong foot the other night.”

“Sort of, yes,” Charley said, warily.

Ralph Angel dipped his spoon into his cereal and stirred slowly, but he looked as though he’d lost his appetite. “I mean, it’s just a room, right? And like ’Da said, you got down here first.” He seemed to be talking to himself, and for a second Charley thought he’d forgotten she was in the room, but then he looked up. “The room’s yours fair and square.”

As troubling as Violet’s story was, as much as she disliked how Ralph Angel had treated Hollywood, people deserved a second chance. Because it was easy to make mistakes. “Thank you.”

Ralph Angel nudged the box of Frosted Flakes. “Sure you don’t want any?”

“I’m fine.”

“At least you want to sit down?” He pushed a chair from under the table.

“For a couple minutes.”

The kitchen was quiet, the stillness soothing. Charley wondered how long Ralph Angel had been sitting there, how many nights he spent sitting alone in the dark.

“It must feel pretty wild,” Ralph Angel said, “you being down here, riding around on tractors all day, getting your hands dirty.”

Charley shrugged. “I don’t mind.” Just this morning, under Denton’s careful tutelage, she’d donned thick gloves and safety goggles and he’d shown her how to use the blowtorch. “It’s interesting.”

“Come on, sis. You can level with me. I mean, Saint Josephine isn’t exactly Vail, Colorado, or some other fancy place. Even this—” And here, Ralph Angel gestured to indicate Miss Honey’s kitchen. “I mean, it’s not exactly the Beverly Wilshire. It’s gotta be an adjustment, seeing how you were a debutante and all.”

“I was never a debutante,” Charley said. “It just looked like a fairy tale.”

“Well, kudos to you for coming down here. I’m not sure I’d have done the same.” Ralph Angel looked down at his own hands, turned them over to stare at his palms. “So, I was thinking. I’m going be down here for a little while. I’ve got some free time on my hands, maybe I could help you out on the farm.”

Charlie blinked. “What do you know about sugarcane?”

“Well, nothing. But I was thinking I could manage the office or something.”

“I already have a manager,” Charley said.

“Yeah, I know. Prosper what’s-his-name. Micah told me. But I was thinking about something administrative. I’m good with numbers. I was an engineering major in school.”

“There’s not really much to administer,” Charley said.

“There’s gotta be something I can do.”

Charley looked around the kitchen still crammed with paper goods and cases of soda from the reunion. “I appreciate your interest. And if you knew something about sugarcane, I’d say yes, absolutely. But since you don’t, it would sort of be ‘the blind leading the blind,’ know what I mean? And besides, I can’t afford to pay you.”

“I know we could work something out. I could build up some equity or something. Come on, sis. There’s gotta be something. At least say you’ll think about it.”

Charley sighed. “I’ll think about it. But I have to see how things go these next couple weeks.”

Ralph Angel smiled. He picked up the cereal box and poured another bowl. “Take all the time you need. I’m not going anywhere.”