Queen Sugar: A Novel (23 page)

“Micah! What on earth—?”

“Mom!” Micah tried to cover herself. “Get out!”

“What are you doing?”

“I said get out! Please!”

Close the door
, Charley’s mind said, as she stood there gazing into the dark bathroom, where the mirror reflected the candle’s golden glow and Micah tried to cover herself
. Just close the door. You don’t want to know.
But then her mind cleared and she realized there was no way she could abide Micah’s command.

Charley stepped into the bathroom. She closed the door behind her. “Not until you tell me what’s going on.” She spoke in a measured tone, like a tour guide,
This way, please. Everyone follow me
, even though inside, she was screaming.

And when Micah realized Charley was not leaving, when she saw that her mother had locked them both in, she jumped down from the chair and climbed into the far end of the bathtub. She sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, put her head down, and rocked slowly.

“Micah, please. What’s going on? What were you doing?” The bathroom smelled like cucumbers and melon from the candle Micah had lit.

Micah shook her head, no. She covered her ears.

“Please, talk to me.” Charley sat on the floor with her back against the tub and waited. She would wait as long as it took.

“I was praying,” Micah said at last. “I was asking God—I was asking God to fix my arm.”

The red flame had already spread up Micah’s shirt by the time Charley reached the kitchen and she smelled the burning flesh, saw how the top layer of Micah’s skin had already blistered, how under that top layer of Micah’s arm was the same wet pink as her tongue.

“I was asking Him to make me pretty.”

“Oh, babe—” Charley said. “But you are.”

“I’m not. Not with my arm.”

Charley climbed into the bathtub with an aching heart. “My sweet girl.” She pulled Micah into her lap and felt where Micah’s body was cold from leaning against the side of the tub. She wrapped her arms around her daughter. And that was all Micah needed. She burst into tears. She cried harder than Charley had ever heard her: anguished sobs with long breaths and choking in between, until she was spent and her body was hot and sweaty. And when she finally fell asleep, Charley covered her with a towel, then leaned back against the tub’s sloping back and prayed to be forgiven.

Given Alison’s contempt for the Blue Bowl crowd, most days, they ate lunch at Dina’s out near Belle Island, where the dining room opened onto a view of the salt flats, the air smelled faintly of jasmine and boiled peppers, and five bucks bought a cold beer, a basket of cobbed corn, and all the peel-and-eat shrimp you could handle.

With Alison on board, their productivity had skyrocketed. One brilliant morning last week, they fertilized the back quadrants, and yesterday, under an enamel blue sky, they pulled the cutter through some of the coco grass that kept the cane from suckering.

At the table now, Denton peeled a shrimp and squinted out at the salt flats in a way Charley had come to know. “An idea came to me last night,” Denton said, quietly. “I think we ought to pay eight dollars for common labor come grinding.”

Alison drained his beer and snapped his fingers for the waitress to bring him another. “Going rate’s seven and a quarter. You got money to give away?”

“We offer seven and a quarter,” Denton said, “we’ll be up against every farmer out there. Won’t have nothing to set us apart.”

“Hell, Denton, how much different we need to be? A black chick from California, an old black has-been, and a broken-down white dude? We’re like freaking Barnum and Bailey as it is—
Jesus Christ
.”

Charley winced. It had been a month since Alison signed on, and she still hadn’t gotten used to his frank appraisals and candid observations.

“In a way, that’s what I’m talking about,” Denton said. “It hurts me to say this, Miss Bordelon, but I’ve come to know it’s true. The white man’s ice is always colder.” He paused for a moment. “Say you hire a man for grinding, tell him you’ll pay same as the white man’s paying. You give him an hour for lunch where the white gives him fifteen minutes, works him all day. You tell him all the ways you’ll treat him better and he’ll look you in the eye, shake your hand, and say he’s coming to work for you. But come October first, you look up and he’s gone to work for the white farmer down the road.”

“Shit,” Alison said. “I never knew that.”

“I didn’t either,” Charley said, “but I’m not surprised.”

“Now, we pay eight,” Denton said, “we got a chance. We pay eight, men will come and they’ll stay.”

Alison tossed his cap on the table. “Denton, how’s Miss Bordelon going to pay extra for labor when she barely has enough money for plant cane? LSU’s charging three hundred a ton for the new variety. We’ll be lucky to afford enough for ten acres.”

But Denton had already taken his pen from his bib pocket and folded his napkin over. “Here’s how.” In his shaking hand, he drew a line from one end of the napkin to the other. “We tell ’em up front: you don’t miss work, you get eight. You don’t quit halfway through, you get eight. You get sick or need to go to a funeral, you get eight. Long as you stay to the end of December, you get eight dollars an hour.” He looked up to make sure they were following. “Now, when grinding starts, we pay them seven and a quarter, every two weeks, just like everyone else. Come January we pay the seventy-five cents extra. The ones who keep their word can collect.”

Alison leaned back scratching his head full of straw. “Damned, if that ain’t the best idea I’ve heard in months. Where’d you get that from?”

“I come up with it last night,” Denton said, modestly, “lying in my bed.”

“Brilliant,” Charley said. It was one of the things she admired most about him—his ability to puzzle through a problem and come up with not just
any
solution, but the
right
solution, to make all the other pieces fall into place. With Denton’s plan, Charley realized, she could hire good workers and still afford fertilizer and plant cane.

Alison squeezed Denton’s shoulder tenderly. “Man, Denton. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were a freaking genius.”

Charley looked at her two partners seated across the table, and rested her chin in her hands as a swell of gratitude and affection washed over her. Alison was right. The three of them were a sideshow, but she wouldn’t trade their company for anything. As far as she could tell, they were beating the odds, if only just by a nose. In less than four weeks, they had whipped most of her fields into shape, almost eight hundred acres. They’d dug more ditches, cleaned more drains, had more arguments, and eaten more five-dollar lunches together than she could count. But come October, God willing, her cane would be ready for grinding.

And then it was time for Alison’s daily lecture. To look at his uncombed hair and dirty fingernails, Charley would never have guessed he had a PhD in agriculture and an MBA from LSU. But Denton swore it was true. Today’s class was a history lesson: Louisiana Sugarcane’s Founding Fathers.

“Did you know,” Alison began, “that in the 1790s, when Louisiana still belonged to Spain, farmers grew maize, rice, tobacco, and cotton? There wasn’t a single stalk of sugarcane anywhere in the region. Their main staple was indigo.”

“Indigo?” Charley set her beer on the table and imagined barefoot Bengalis straddling boiling vats, Gullah women in the South Carolina low country up to their elbows in blue dye.

But Alison said, “Yes, indigo, until 1794, when worms and damp weather destroyed their crops and drove most farmers out of business. The next year, on a plantation that is now Audubon Park in New Orleans, Étienne de Boré, planter, entrepreneur, and visionary, gambled his fortune on sugarcane. He figured out how to turn sugarcane syrup to crystal on a commercial scale.”

And somehow, hearing that men and probably a few women had struggled with sugarcane for centuries and that the crop’s history reached across the Atlantic to Cuba, Santo Domingo, the West Indies, and Brazil, Charley felt as though she were part of something larger, a worldwide movement. People had fought over sugarcane and died for it. They had married for it, prayed over it, and cursed its existence.

And then lunch was over. Denton and Alison wiped their mouths and balled up their napkins, while Charley cleared their baskets. And when she returned to the table, she saw that, for once, they both looked relaxed, their faces not etched with the permanent frowns that came with being cane farmers.

“You guys are the best,” Charley said, overcome again. Because, for once, it had been a good day, and at least for a few hours there was nothing she wanted more than to be a cane farmer, and there was nothing more satisfying than sitting down with her partners over baskets full of peel-and-eat shrimp and washing it all down with a cold beer.

Every day around four fifteen, cicadas fell mute in the stifling heat, the cane grew eerily still, the sky, almost colorless all afternoon, turned to slate, the clouds from white to battleship gray. Thunder rumbled. A rush of wind. And within minutes rain fell in opaque sheets, the half-dollar-size drops exploding against the shop’s tin roof so loudly Charley could barely hear the radio. Whatever fieldwork remained would have to wait.

It had rained for twenty minutes when Charley, sifting through a stack of new invoices, heard a truck pull up. Denton’s dogs, which he’d left behind to keep her company, started barking. It couldn’t be Alison, who left at three to retrieve his grandsons from day care, but it might be Denton, back from Lafayette, where he’d driven for an order of discs.

But Denton’s dogs kept barking, and soon Charley heard a man’s voice calling, “Mr. D.? Anybody here?”

Charley went to the office door. It was Denton’s friend from the auction, the one who’d helped load their winnings onto the gooseneck trailer. “Come in, come in.”

He stepped into the office, stamped his feet. “Man, I tell you,” he said, brushing rain off his baseball cap, “it’s coming down sideways.” He wore the farmer uniform—T-shirt, dusty jeans, and boots—all of it darkened with rain.

Charley struggled for his name. “It’s Ramon, right?” She’d been so embarrassed the day of the auction, she hadn’t said much more than “thank you.”

“Close enough. Name’s Remy.” His hand was damp and warm. “Remy Newell.”

“Remy. Right. I’m Charley—”

“Bordelon,” Remy said. His voice had an internal luster, as deep and rich as cherrywood. “I remember.”

Charley waited for Remy to make a crack about the auction: how foolish she’d acted going up against the rainmaker; how silly she looked crying when Denton surprised her with the equipment, but he didn’t. He just stood there. Dripping. She fetched a roll of paper towels from the bathroom. “Thanks again for loaning us your trailer. And for delivering all our new toys.”

Remy dried his face and arms, which were pale under his T-shirt where his farmer’s tan ended, then stooped to wipe the puddle on the floor. “Y’all cleaned up. That tractor you snagged only has eight thousand hours on it.”

To her surprise, Charley could grapple with sugarcane math. Eight hours a day, one thousand days. Grinding season lasted three months, which was roughly one hundred days. If her calculation was correct, the tractor had been running for eight years. Not bad as tractors went.

She gestured toward the papers on the desk. “I couldn’t do any of this without Mr. Denton.”

“I’ve known Mr. D. since I was sixteen,” Remy said, nodding. “I used to work cane every summer. Dug ditches and filled ruts till I worked my way up to driving a combine. Still don’t know why he did it, but Mr. D. always looked out for me. Made sure I didn’t lose a hand in the scrolls. Some of the old-timers don’t want to admit it, but Mr. D.’s one of the smartest men around.” He paused. “If I know half as much about cane when I’m his age, I’ll have done all right.”

“His mind is quick,” Charley said. “I’m blown away by the ideas he comes up with. The other day our partner, Alison, said he was a genius. I think that’s true.”

“And he’s got a good heart.” Remy’s voice went quiet. He looked at Charley as though there was a story he wanted to tell her. “I owe him a lot.”

Outside, the storm had passed. For a few minutes they sat quietly, listening to the rain on the metal roof downshift into the softer syncopation of water dripping off the eaves.

“So—”

Remy snapped his fingers. “Almost forgot. I brought y’all a surprise.” He invited Charley to his truck.

It had been a scorcher of a day with temperatures in the low hundreds, humidity close to 90 percent, but now that it had rained, the temperature had dropped, at least for a bit, and the air was breathable again. Insects resumed their chatter. The ground fizzed audibly where moisture evaporated, and the cane leaves were glossy and dazzling in the late-afternoon sun.

“Buddy of mine caught these earlier,” Remy said, “but it’s way more than I can eat.” He opened the passenger door, and Charley saw that other than a cracked windshield, the cab was neat, with an empty ashtray and a gleaming cup holder. Three large sacks of shrimp sat on the front seat. “One for each of you.”

Charley wished she had something to give Remy in return. “Thank you.” She had seen the Vietnamese and Cambodian fishing boats docked at Dago’s fish market near the Point. “I don’t think I could get shrimp any fresher.”

“I know you city folks think nothing happens in a place like this, but I tell you, it’s a pretty good life.”

Remy heaved the sacks over his shoulder, refusing Charley’s offer to help, insisting the briny water dribbling from the corners would stain in her clothes. Then he lingered, though whether to wait for Denton or to talk to her, she couldn’t tell.

Charley listened for Denton’s truck but heard only the fizz of the ground drying.

“So, you getting the hang of this cane farming?” Remy cleared a place on the couch.

“It took awhile, but I finally learned to keep the tractor in the row,” Charley said. She told him how they were slowly transforming the back quadrant, about the twenty-two-pound possum they trapped last week, and how Alison insisted on carrying a rifle in his tractor so he could shoot rabbits and other wild animals that ran out of the cane. Then suddenly, Charley paused. Remy was just being polite, she thought, making small talk and listening patiently until Denton arrived. “This is way more than you wanted to hear, I’m sure.”

But when she glanced at him over the stack of receipts and catalogs, she saw Remy looking back at her with open, unfiltered interest.