25

Standing under a sky that had yet to break, Charley marveled at how different the air smelled. Mixed in with the usual mildew and damp earth was a carbony sweetness, and Charley knew that from this day forward she would always associate mid-October with the smell of burnt sugar. She took a final swig of coffee, dumped the rest in the bushes, screwed her thermos cap on tight, and crossed Miss Honey’s yard, her breath pluming in a small cloud of white vapor, the frost on the grass crunching under her boots. In the car, she turned on the radio. And the heater. Mornings were cold now, and while the car warmed up, Charley listened to the first few minutes of Morning Edition. Sluggish economic growth, congressional logjams, unrest in the Middle East. Nothing ever changed.

Two minutes later, the car was toasty. Charley honked, then honked again, and was about to get out, when Ralph Angel tripped down the front steps carrying his shoes.

“Sorry,” he said, sheepishly, sliding into the passenger seat. “I was looking for my gloves.”

Charley threw the car into drive. “Let’s just go.”

•   •   •

By the time they reached the drawbridge, night was peeling away from the horizon, amethyst and plum replaced by a rising line of tangerine light. Fog swirled across the asphalt. The bayou was the blue-gray of a Confederate coat.

Ralph Angel rode in silence, which was fine with Charley. He looked out the window and picked at a blister on his hand. But every once in a while, he seemed to hear something on the radio that troubled him and he stared at the dashboard as though the announcer had insulted him personally.

“You’ll be on Romero’s crew,” Charley said, not because she wanted to talk, but because once they got to the fields, there wouldn’t be time to explain.

Ralph Angel looked over at her.

“His men work fast,” Charley continued. “It’ll be hard to keep up.”

“Gotcha.”

“And you’ll want to keep your jacket on all day, even when it gets warmer. Those cane leaves will slice you up if you’re not careful.”

Ralph Angel reached into the well and lifted a book to the window. “The Southern Gardener.” He flipped the pages, bending them slightly at the corners.

Charley cringed. He may as well have been rifling her underwear drawer. “Careful with that,” she said, “it’s not mine,” and practically snatched the book from him.

•   •   •

Even in the near-darkness Charley could tell, by the height of the headlights and the rhythm of their bounce, that the approaching vehicle was a tractor. As they got closer, she saw that it pulled an enormous V-shaped trailer loaded to the top with cane. Stalks jutted through the metal rails and spilled over the sides. Charley slowed. “Will you look at that?” Gazing up at the creaking wagon, Charley couldn’t help but smile. It was the second sign, after the burnt-sugar smell, that grinding season had officially begun.

When the tractor passed, Charley touched the necklace Mr. Guidry gave her, fingering each of the nine tiny knots.

“Where’d you get that?” Ralph Angel asked.

“It’s nothing.”

“Please tell me you don’t believe in all that hoodoo shit.”

Charley pressed the necklace to her throat. “It can’t hurt,” she said, her mind drifting back to the dark woods. Maybe she was imagining things, but she felt different—still anxious about their chances, still nervous about how much The Cane Cutter would sell for, knowing that it was her last hope, still furious with Miss Honey—but there was a quiet calmness too, one that had not been there before, as though a cocoon, loose and silky, had been spun around her.

Ralph Angel rolled his eyes.

“You only break when the cane wagon is empty and goes to reload,” Charley said. And since she was at it, added, “You have an hour for lunch,” and thought of the plate covered in tinfoil—last night’s pork chops—still on the stove where Miss Honey left it for her. She would ask Denton to pick up an extra sandwich if he went into town.

“Aye, aye,” Ralph Angel said and saluted. “No breaks unless the wagon is empty; an hour for lunch; clock out at seven.”

If she weren’t so angry with Ralph Angel, Charley thought, his response just now would be funny. Which is what Ralph Angel must have thought too, because he smiled to himself, and Charley felt a quick softening around the edges of her disgust. From the corner of her eye she watched Ralph Angel slip his hands into his gloves. They were extra large and looked cartoonish on his hands.

“It was the only size left,” Charley said. “One of the guys might trade with you.”

Ralph Angel shook the gloves into his lap, and for the next mile, they rode with just the radio playing, until Charley glanced over and said, “When I told Miss Honey I didn’t want to hire you, you know it wasn’t personal, right?”

Ralph Angel looked at Charley. His expression was cold. “Everything’s personal,” he said, then turned to the window.

•   •   •

At the shop, Denton and Alison had built fires in two empty oil drums and the crews huddled around them, warming their hands as the flames licked their fingers. Charley saw half a dozen new faces, men Denton recruited back in July, in addition to Romero and his crew. She introduced herself, asked the new men’s names, what towns they were from, and welcomed them to her farm.

“You ready?” Denton zipped his jacket. He stopped, puzzled, when he saw Ralph Angel.

“I’ll explain later,” Charley said, though she still hadn’t decided what she’d say.

“Hey, Denton,” Alison called, the first cigarette of the day bobbing from his lips. “Why’re we standing around?”

“Take it easy.”

“I can’t help it. First day of grinding always gets me fired up. Feel like a damned jitterbug.”

Denton called for everyone to gather ’round and mapped out the day. Romero’s men would keep planting while he, Alison, and Charley drove the tractors and the combines through the fields that were ready for harvesting. The new guys would replenish the planting wagons and haul the cut cane to the mill.

“Bayonne is taking four hundred tons a day,” Denton announced. “We got eight cane wagons, but we really need ten. That means we got no time to waste. Longer that cane sits once it’s cut, more likely it goes sour. Got to keep things moving. It’s all got to flow.” He reached into an old duffel bag, doled out walkie-talkies, and told the men to check in on the hour. “Questions? Anyone got anything they want to say?”

“Yeah.” Alison raised his hand and stepped forward. “As some of you know, I ain’t too high on organized religion.” He glanced at Charley and Denton. “The Lord hasn’t exactly been good to me these last few years, but that’s beside the point. I think we should say a prayer, just to be safe. I’ll lead it if you want.”

All heads bowed.

“Gracious Lord,” Alison began. “You know if there’s ever been a sadder group of folks just trying to do what’s right, it’s this group of misfits right here. Why Miss Bordelon came down here and teamed up with us two old goats continues to be a mystery. But if you want my opinion, I think we done a pretty freaking good job pulling her farm together. The way I see it, we got a chance of bringing in a decent crop. So Lord, I’m asking you to cut us a break. You don’t have to perform any miracles or nothing, though that’d be nice. All I’m asking is that you let us do what we do best, what each of us was born to do. Let us be the best damn cane farmers we can be. Help us get to the end of this grinding season, and maybe even live to do it all again this time next year. Oh, and stick close to Miss Bordelon when she goes to New Orleans tomorrow. Amen.”

Amen.

•   •   •

The sun had risen in earnest, the fog lifting off the fields to reveal a carpet of solid green so thick Charley couldn’t see between the rows. In the combine, she fingered the knots on her necklace and waited for the signal. Another minute, and the walkie-talkie on the dashboard crackled—Jose to Missus. One-two-three. Through the window, she gave Jose the thumbs-up, turned the ignition, and the combine lurched forward, the massive scrolls on its front end slowly turning. Down on the ground, cane stalks trembled. The machine moved forward, chewing through the rows. She made sure to stay a few feet ahead of Jose’s tractor so that the combine was in line with the cane wagon he pulled as they moved along the row. Choppers inside the combine stripped leaves from stalks and cut the cane into billets, carrot-size pieces that traveled up the conveyor belt into a chute that spat them into the cane wagon. As Charley drove, shredded leaves and dirt fell around her like rain.

In an hour, the first two cane wagons were full. Jose pulled the tractor onto the headlands and waited for a driver to unhitch him. In the combine, Charley’s walkie-talkie sputtered, then Denton’s voice came in clear. He was sending Huey Boy out to relieve her.

“But I’m fine. I’ve got a rhythm going out here.”

“Okay, but I thought you’d want to be the one to haul the first load to the mill.”

•   •   •

Set back from the road, the Bayonne Sugar Mill was a jumble of geometric shapes—triangular warehouse roofs, cylindrical smokestacks, boxy square buildings housing the boilers and evaporation tanks, parallel rows of bulging cane wagons waiting in the yard to be unloaded. In Pittsburgh or Milwaukee, a mill like Bayonne Sugar would have closed years ago, dismantled and shipped piece by piece to Cuba or Santo Domingo, or converted into a sprawling indoor shopping mall with a food court and a metroplex. But this was Louisiana, and Bayonne Sugar was the largest, most powerful sugar mill of them all. Take that, Landry and Baron! Smoke and steam billowed from the stacks while the windows in the main building glowed orange as bagasse, the shredded cane pulp, burned. The air vibrated with the muffled roar of furnaces and the drone of gears turning. Twenty-four hours a day, from now through the end of the year, Bayonne Sugar would roar and growl and hiss until it pulverized, ground, and boiled every stalk of cane to crystal.

A convoy of trucks and tractors hauling cane stretched a quarter mile down the road, and Charley, strapped into the passenger seat of the bull-nose semi, smelled burning sugar even through the closed windows. She rolled hers down and inhaled deeply, not caring that she drew some of the white ash falling like fine snow into her lungs. She had dreamed of this day, this moment. For the first time she saw the true connection, saw the chainlike links of iron between herself, her father, and grandmother, and their fathers’ fathers before that. She was bound to this place, this small patch of earth; it was she and she was it. She thought of Ernest, who must have died praying—believing, crazily—that his daughter could do this. She thought of Micah, at school, where the scent of burning sugar must be seeping into every classroom. She even thought of Norbert Rillieux, son of a white plantation owner and free woman of color, who turned sugar processing on its head when he invented the muliple-effect evaporation system. Charley turned to the driver, a middle-aged black man whose nickname was Mule. His dark face was a map of scars and pockmarks. He hadn’t said more than two sentences for the entire ride—out of respect, Charley guessed; after all, she was the boss. Charley didn’t care. As he shifted gears and the truck inched forward, she put her hand right on top of his.

Mule looked startled.

“It’s okay,” Charley said. “I just wanted to say thank you.”

“We got trouble.”

Charley’s boots had barely touched the ground. “What happened?” she asked, but thought she knew.

“Your brother. The men won’t work with him.” Denton pulled her aside. “He got angry. Thought the men were making fun of him; thought they were working fast on purpose, stepping up the pace to embarrass him.”

“I told him Romero’s team works fast.”

“I’m not done. He didn’t like that the men spoke Spanish. Thought they were talking behind his back. Or, I guess you could say, way out in front of him.”

“Where is he?”

“Hold on. Somehow, he found out what everyone’s making; that he’s making less.”

“Well, of course he’s making less!” Charley shouted. And just like that, she was back in Miss Honey’s kitchen, standing there like a stooge while Miss Honey shoved Ralph Angel down her throat. If she could, she would call Miss Honey right now and scream, You’re killing my farm! “Damnit. I knew this was going to—This is exactly what I—”

“Easy there, killer,” Denton said, raising his hands. “Calm down.”

“I am calm. But I can’t fire his ass without my grandmother throwing me out.”

“I broke up a couple of fights while you were gone. I was going to suggest you talk to him, but maybe I should be the one.”

If only getting rid of her brother were as easy as handing him off to Denton. “That’s all right. I’ll handle it.”

•   •   •

To Charley’s relief, Romero and his men were hard at work across the field, pulling cane from a freshly loaded wagon. Charley scanned the field for Ralph Angel and saw him camped out in a small patch of weeds and low shrubs. His sweat jacket was off, draped between the branches to form a crude shelter.

“What’s the problem?” Charley stood over him, her shadow canted out to one side.

Ralph Angel squinted up at her. “Where do I start?”

“I need you to do your job, Ralph Angel. That’s all I ask.”

“Job? Don’t you mean slave labor?”

“I’m on a deadline here.”

“You pay them twice as much as me.” Ralph Angel broke a cane stalk in half, then turned his gaze out toward the fields. Romero’s men were approaching the end of a nearby row. He cupped his hands and yelled, “Speak English! Comprende?”

Thank God the tractor was so loud his voice didn’t carry. “I pay for experience,” Charley said. “You’ve got two hours of it counting the fights you started. They’ve got years.”

“Yeah, but I’m an—”

“Engineering major. I know.”

Ralph Angel looked at up Charley and she was surprised to see a wounded expression soften his face. He glanced down at his hands and stared. “Come on, sis. It might not seem like it, but I’m trying. This isn’t easy for me, you know? I’m not young like those other guys. I’m struggling just to keep up.” He cleared his throat. “If I can’t do this—” Then he looked away, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “I’m dying out there.”

Charley felt an ache of guilt deep in her chest as she looked down at her brother, who seemed older than she’d ever noticed before. Another place, another time, she could afford to handle the situation differently. But when she looked across the field, she saw that the tractor had made the turn and was starting down a new row. The clock was ticking. The cane would not wait. She turned back to Ralph Angel. “I’m sorry. And I hear you. But right now, the only thing that counts is how fast you plant.”

Ralph Angel leaned back stiffly. “Well, listen to you, Miss ACLU, Miss Equal Opportunity.”

“Are you going to work or are you going home? You call it, Ralph Angel.”

Ralph Angel glared at Charley, and she thought he’d say he was quitting. Instead he rose and crammed his arms through his jacket sleeves, hobbled off toward Romero’s crew.

But Charley took Ralph Angel off the planting crew just to be safe. She radioed Alison—a bad idea, she knew, but she couldn’t think of anywhere else to put him—and pulled Denton’s truck up to Alison’s combine in the middle of the field. Unlike the combine Charley drove, Alison operated an old-fashioned soldier harvester, which looked like a garbage can on rollers. No metal scrolls or vacuum chutes to suck, cut up, and spit out neat billets. Instead, the soldier harvester moved through the field like a pair of cutting shears, clipping stalks at ground level and laying them side by side across the row.

Charley handed Ralph Angel a cane knife. “All you have to do is follow behind the harvester and cut the cane he misses.” Scrapping cane was the most menial, most mind-numbing of all jobs; it required no skill. In the old days, it was the job reserved for women and children.

“Jesus, Charley. A man has his pride.”

“Take it or leave it.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Ralph Angel said darkly, and slammed the truck door.

But pairing Alison and Ralph Angel was like throwing water on a grease fire. In less than an hour, Charley’s walkie-talkie crackled again.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Alison’s voice was a lightning strike, and by the time Charley made it to the front where she’d dropped off Ralph Angel, Alison had called her twice more.

“Sorry, Miss Bordelon, but I can’t work like this,” Alison said, stomping over freshly cut cane. “He’s impossible. I told him to swing the cane knife closer to the ground, but he won’t listen.”

“Me?” said Ralph Angel. “All I was trying to say was that maybe if you adjusted the blade, you’d cut more cane to begin with.”

“All right, that’s enough!” Charley yelled. “Ralph Angel, you’re out of line.” They started up again and she stepped between them. “Hey!” she shouted. “Cut it out. Alison, please, go to lunch.” She dragged Ralph Angel away from the combine. “Are you trying to cause trouble? Is that your plan?”

“It wasn’t me,” Ralph Angel said. “That guy’s a whack job.”

“Because I’m warning you. This is strike four by my count.”

“It wasn’t my—”

Charley raised her hand. “After lunch, you’re going back to the office. You’ll sweep the floors or shovel dog shit for all I care. I swear to God, Ralph Angel, this is your last chance.”

•   •   •

Six thirty p.m. now, and night crept forward along the sky’s hem. A mother-of-pearl crescent moon hovered above the tree line, and out on the road, the steady flicker of headlights confirmed tractors were still hauling cane to the mills. In her combine, Charley touched the knots on her necklace. Thank you, Lord. She had survived the first day of grinding.

Ralph Angel had, miraculously, swept the floor and stacked Denton’s tools along the ledge when Charley returned to the shop. He looked up when she entered, seeming to search her face for approval.

“The others are on their way back,” Charley said, tossing her gloves down. “You should clock out. Denton and I need to go over tomorrow’s schedule, then we’ll head home.”

Ralph Angel nodded, but was quiet otherwise, and Charley figured maybe the time alone had done him some good.

From out in the yard came the sound of truck tires rolling to a stop and, over its idling engine, the faint echo of zydeco music. A man’s voice, then Ralph Angel’s saying, “Straight through that door.” Charley poked her head out of her office. That weathered face; those eyes that looked at her as though she were the only woman in town. “Remy.” She would never get tired of saying it.

“Hey there, California.” Remy took off his baseball cap then leaned forward to kiss her. He ran his hand down her arm, lightly squeezing her biceps, and said, “Those pretty arms,” then took her hand. He smelled of motor oil and grass and sweat, and underneath, citrus. “Thought I’d swing by, see how you did today.”

“A few setbacks,” Charley said, “but overall, good. And even better now.”

Remy was about to kiss her again, but over his shoulder Charley saw Ralph Angel hovering just inside the shop door. The thought of him witnessing so private a moment made her pull away. She motioned, reluctantly, for Ralph Angel to come over. She introduced him to Remy. “This is my brother.”

“Hey, man. How you doing?” Remy said, warmly, extending his hand.

Ralph Angel responded with a halfhearted shake. He looked Remy over, openly sizing him up. “So, how do you know my sister?”

“We met at an auction,” Charley said. “Remy’s a farmer.”

“Oh yeah? No kidding. How many acres?” Ralph Angel said.

“Twenty-two hundred, give or take,” Remy said. “Mostly over in Saint Abbey.”

“Twenty-two hundred. I’m impressed.”

“Plenty of farmers a lot bigger than me.” Remy smiled and gave a modest shrug. “So, you’re Charley’s brother.” He sounded relieved to be asking the questions now. “You driving a combine or something?”

Ralph Angel slid his hands in his pockets. “Actually, my sister’s got me scrapping cane.”

Remy laughed. “Get out of here.”

“Why would I joke?” Ralph Angel said.

Charley winced. His tone had darkened, reminding her of the way he sounded the day John brought the plywood for the windows.

Remy looked from Ralph Angel, who stood by with a sour but satisfied look on his face, to Charley, and Charley was tempted to offer an explanation. She hated that Remy was looking at her with a confused expression, as though he were wondering who she was, really, way deep down; wondering if she might be some kind of monster to make her brother do such lowly work.

“Mr. Denton should be pulling up any minute,” Charley said. “We can wait out front.”

“That’s okay,” Remy said. The confused expression vanished. “You’re the one I came to see. I thought maybe we’d have a drink to celebrate. A quick one, since we both need to be up early.”

Nine o’clock at Paul’s Café. Just one drink. Charley would drop Ralph Angel off at home first.

In the car, Charley was about to turn on the radio when Ralph Angel reached for the book she’d wedged between the seats. This time, he practically tore the pages as he turned them. “This belongs to that guy you introduced me to back there?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

Ralph Angel closed the book. “Sort of sleeping with the enemy, don’t you think?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know, fucking a white guy. A Southern white guy at that.”

“It’s none of your business.” Charley’s heart was racing.

“I mean, there must be at least one black man down here who’s good enough for you. There must be a doctor or a lawyer in one of these towns who meets your high standards.”

“You’ll be plugging drains tomorrow,” Charley said.

“Just tell me this: what makes Mr. Twenty-two hundred acres so special?”

“There’s a five-acre stretch over in Micah’s Corner that had some water on it. Mr. Denton will show you what to do. Don’t forget your gloves.”

“I mean, what makes you think he sees anything in you but a piece of black ass? That’s the way they do it down here, you know? They always have a little dish of chocolate on the side.”

Charley’s whole body went rigid. “You should plan on driving yourself from now on.”

“You humiliated me out there today. I have my pride.”

“We don’t have time for pride. You brought this on yourself.”

“Making me walk behind that cracker’s harvester was bad enough, but then to make me pick up dog shit around the shop?”

“It was the only job left. If you don’t like it, talk to Miss Honey since she forced me to hire you.”

“And then to be fucking a white boy? I wonder what Micah will say when she finds out what white men in Louisiana have done to black women for centuries. Hell, why limit it to Louisiana? All over the South. I mean, what kind of role model are you?”

It was as though Ralph Angel had dipped a long stick into the dark pit of her private concerns and stirred up all the muck. And now, all the questions Charley had asked herself about how she and Remy could ever possibly work given the South’s complicated history; given her worries about what people would say—white people but also black people—considering both sides’ sensitivities and prejudices; what her own father would say given all he’d suffered—all of those anxieties rose to the top. This wasn’t the 1950s. She was free to love whomever she wanted. Still, Charley felt as though she was breaking some cardinal rule. She knew Ralph Angel understood her fears, the obligation and the burden she felt. She knew her brother was hurting, that he was desperate, and would likely apologize later, but she hated Ralph Angel for saying what he said just to get back at her. Charley pulled the car over to the shoulder. “Get out.”

“You could have put me in the office from the start. Let me file papers or something.”

“I said get out.”

Ralph Angel stared at Charley for a long moment, then opened his door. “Tell ’Da I missed my ride.”

“Tell her yourself.”

Ralph Angel stepped back from the car, but he didn’t close the door. “See you at work tomorrow, sis.”

“I don’t think so,” Charley said, leaning over to pull the door closed. “You’re fired.”