“And Mom?”
“What?”
“You’re not a fish.”
In a moment, the screen door slammed, then slammed again. Charley pulled the curtain and saw the two of them on the swing—Miss Honey in her housedress and slippers, and Micah, snug beside her. In a few minutes, Micah’s hair was loose and Miss Honey was brushing it—long strokes and quick gathering. There was a rhythm to it, and watching, Charley remembered the feel of Miss Honey’s hands in her own hair all those years ago, the smell of Miss Honey’s talcum powder, Cashmere Bouquet, which smelled of wood, and roses and maraschino cherries. She knew exactly how Micah felt. Charley watched awhile longer, then let the curtain fall. She wished she’d caught Micah by the elbow and pulled her close before she left the room. Wished she’d been able to say, I’m sorry. I won’t fail you twice.
Charley’s workshop—two thousand square feet of corrugated steel—sat on a patch of cleared ground just off the road that separated her north and south fields. An old John Deere tractor with a blown-out windshield and weeds twisting though the fender hulked out front. Rust-pocked chemical drums and stacks of cracked tires littered the side yard. The place had a postapocalyptic feel. It was a miracle the shop hadn’t been bulldozed and hauled to the scrap yard. Inside, under brittle fluorescent lights, it was cool, a nice break from the heat, but the air reeked of diesel fuel with bitter undertones of dried grass and the slightly acrid scent of rat droppings.
In the tiny office, Charley sat at a desk piled high with farm bulletins and equipment manuals. She sorted through folders brimming with crumpled receipts and unpaid invoices. How Frasier managed to hold this ship together as long as he did was a mystery, Charley thought, and she guessed his departure was a small blessing. But she didn’t know what half the bills were for, and even if she could identify the purchases, she couldn’t find them in the shop.
“What the hell’s Paraquat?” Charley said out loud. She balled the receipt and tossed it to the floor.
Around eleven o’clock, a sleek sedan with tinted windows and gleaming tires cruised up and parked. Charley heard the ping, ping, ping as the driver’s door opened, and she was just stepping out of the office as a smooth-looking white man in crisp pale clothing rapped on the shop’s metal door.
“Good morning,” Charley said. “Can I help you?”
“Welcome to Saint Josephine, Miss Bordelon.” He flashed a country-club smile and offered his hand, which sported a gold chunk of a class ring, then pulled a business card from his breast pocket. “I’m Jacques Landry.”
“‘Saint Mary’s Sugar Cooperative,’” Charley read. She had driven past Saint Mary’s sugar mill on her way to her farm and seen the original brick smokestacks draped with kudzu and the new, gleaming sugar warehouse. But other than noting that the air around Saint Mary’s always smelled like malt balls, Charley hadn’t paid much attention. She invited him in.
“So, you’re the lucky owner of LeJeune’s plantation,” Landry said. “Congratulations. That’s some fine land you’ve got out there.” Landry was handsome the way a Chris-Craft motorboat was handsome—all good lines and varnished teak.
“Thank you,” Charley said. “It’s very—exciting.”
“You’re the name on everyone’s lips,” Landry said. He looked around the shop with bright-eyed interest, as if paintings, not tools, hung on the pegboard. “Miss Honey’s granddaughter, all the way from Los Angeles to rescue LeJeune’s plantation from ruin.”
Landry was charming. The longer they talked, the more Charley felt like she was at a cocktail party. He laughed, asked her where she’d gone to college, what she’d majored in, when she’d married Davis, and what her mother did for a living. Slowly, it occurred to Charley that he was asking all the questions, and that she, tired of feeling desperate and alone on a sinking ship, was happy to answer him.
“So, how are things going for you, Miss Bordelon?” Landry sat on an arm of the beat-up couch and picked up an invoice, which Charley suddenly wanted to snatch back. “You doing all right? Have everything you need?”
No, she wanted to say. She had nothing. Please help. But she had already said too much: mentioned her student loans, her daughter’s name and age. Landry was grilling her, wasn’t he? And she had missed all the cues. “Why do you ask?”
“It’s pretty quiet around here,” Landry said, shrugging. “Sort of unusual this time of year. Most farmers are out cultivating their fields but it looks like you’re barely finished laying-by.” He sat with one foot crossed over the opposite knee, like a CEO in a boardroom, and now he wiggled his foot casually. “I noticed you’ve got some water hung up out near the back quadrant. Should probably get that pumped out soon. But listen to me, making suggestions. You probably know that already.”
“You’ve been out in my fields?” Charley said.
“Took a little drive.”
“Yes, well. I’ve had a few setbacks.”
Landry picked up another invoice and scanned it. “Wayne Frasier. Yeah, I heard about that. Tough break.”
“But I’ll be fine,” Charley said. “I’ve got some good leads.”
Landry looked skeptical, but said, “I’m glad to hear it. Good people are hard to find, as I’m sure you know.” He put the invoice down and stood.
“Is there something I can do for you?”
“No. I was just passing by. Saw your car out front, thought I’d stop in, see how you were doing.” He scanned the shop once more, then turned to Charley with a broad grin. “I remember when old man LeJeune was still alive. Talk about a man who was suited to this business. Folks used to say he had cane syrup in his veins. I tell you, he poured his heart into this operation. Shame his kids didn’t take better care of it.”
“You’re right,” Charley said. She walked toward the metal door and slid it open.
“He had this car,” Landry said, like a stand-up comedian about to deliver the punch line. “Great big Lincoln Continental. Had his man wash and wax it every Saturday. But would you believe he hardly drove it? Afternoons, rain or shine, right up till he got sick, he rode out to his fields on the back of a fifteen-hand Tennessee Walker.” Landry sighed, almost dreamily. “I guess some people prefer the old ways.”
His man, Charley thought.
“Thanks for stopping by,” Charley said in what she hoped was a dry tone, and slid the metal door wider.
“Good luck, Miss Bordelon. You’ll need it.” Landry was almost over the threshold when he turned back. “One more thing. You ever think of selling this place?”
“It hadn’t crossed my mind.”
“Well, if it does, give me a call.”
“And why would I want to sell?”
“Who knows?” Landry pointed to the card she held. “I’m just throwing it out there. You seem like a sensible young woman. It’d be a shame to see you get in over your head.”
• • •
NeNee Desonier’s trailer could have been the subject of a Dorothea Lange photograph, with its yellowing newsprint and strips of faded floral wallpaper clinging to the walls. In the places where there was neither newsprint nor wallpaper, gigantic watermarks, like seismographic readouts, stained bare plaster, which, over the years, Charley guessed, had turned from chalky white to burnt sienna. And NeNee herself should have been captured in a gelatin print. Her small dark face, etched with wrinkles, had a sinkhole in the middle where her top four teeth were missing. She was no taller than Micah, Charley thought, and probably ten pounds lighter. A bright green stocking cap swaddled her small head, and her faded housedress was so threadbare, it was a wonder it didn’t disintegrate as she stood there.
But Charley was on a mission. The more she thought about Landry’s intrusive questions, the way he seemed to prophesy her failure, the angrier she got. So when she found NeNee Desonier’s name and address on an old pay stub in the files, she acted without thinking; got in her
car and drove all the way out to Four Corners, the sleepy hamlet on the outskirts of the parish.
Now here she was, in NeNee’s living room. “As I was saying.” Charley smiled. NeNee did not. “I found your name on this piece of paper.” She held out the pay stub.
NeNee glanced at it and nodded politely.
“How long did you work for Mr. LeJeune?”
NeNee held up four fingers, which meant either “four years ago” or “for four years,” Charley couldn’t tell.
“What kind of work did you do?” Charley asked.
NeNee offered another polite smile, but she looked increasingly nervous. Every few minutes she stole a glance at the front door.
Charley knew she should go. But she had driven all this way, was holding tight, like a child on a carousel, to the fantasy that NeNee Desonier was a seasoned manager like Denton, or a young, ambitious field hand on the lookout for an opportunity to run the show. At this point, she would have hired a middle schooler if he or she had worked cane before.
“Ma petite-fille,” NeNee said.
“What’s that?”
NeNee pointed to the yard. The next second, a woman in her mid-forties, dressed in pink medical scrubs and sneakers, pushed through the front door. She saw Charley and stopped short. “Who are you?”
Charley introduced herself, offered her hand, but the woman regarded it suspiciously, then turned to NeNee and said something in what sounded like French, but wasn’t quite. And suddenly, NeNee came to life. She chattered on, gesturing and occasionally pointing to Charley. The younger woman nodded, frowned, then glared at Charley over her shoulder. Finally, she turned.
“What do you want with my grandmother?”
“I thought—”
“Thought what?”
“I just thought, maybe she’d like to work for me.” Charley started to explain about her farm, thought of explaining about Denton’s refusal, but said only, “I own some acreage off the Old Spanish Trail—” when the woman cut her off.
“My grandmother is seventy-seven years old.”
NeNee hobbled over to the rocker and sat down. She looked from Charley to her granddaughter, who, Charley realized, still hadn’t said her name.
“I can see your grandmother is quite frail,” Charley said. “I didn’t realize until I got here. I was in the office, I mean, the shop, sorting through stacks of papers and I found this.” She held out the pay stub.
The woman glanced at the stub, then appraised Charley with a steely gaze. “You ain’t from around here.”
“I’m from California.”
“California,” the woman said, as though California were a hostile nation.
“But I live here now, with my grandmother. Not too far, as a matter of fact.”
“Excuse me, but have you ever worked cane?”
“No.” Charley sighed. “I haven’t.”
The woman drew herself up. “Well, I have. And let me tell you, cane work is the hardest, dirtiest, most backbreakin’, thankless, low-paying work there is. My family’s worked cane for six generations, and after all that, we ain’t got nothin’ to show for it. Just look at my grandmama’s house.” She made a sweeping gesture. “She worked cane since she was nine years old, and this is all she’s got. Has she got any money saved? Has she got a pension? Health care? Does she own anything but this trailer and the little speck of sorry-ass ground it sits on?” Drops of sweat spangled her hairline. “Those big cane farmers cut corners with her every chance they got.”
Charley wanted to say that she was different, that she would offer medical benefits, a retirement plan, even a small life insurance policy. She wanted to look straight at the woman and ask, How about you—can I hire you? But she had the overwhelming sense that she’d be digging a hole for herself.
“If it wasn’t for social security,” the woman fumed, “and the little bit us grandkids scrape together each month, my grandmother would be out on the road.” The more she spoke, the thicker her accent grew. “And here you come, pecking around like a spring chicken. Talking like someone on the TV. Asking if she’ll work for you?”
“I should go.”
“I bet you’d be even worse to work for than a white man.”
Charley grabbed her backpack and stuffed the pay stub in the front pocket, let herself out, and hurried down the steps. At the bottom, she paused. All she wanted was to find workers and get down to business. Jacques Landry was one thing—she should have expected that. But her own people? Who did they think she was? She looked back at the woman barring the doorway. “Sorry if I offended you or your grandmother.”
“I bet.” And with that, the woman slammed the door.
5
Four hundred miles to go. They were almost home. East of San Antonio, Ralph Angel saw a sign for Corpus Christi and got an idea. He merged off the interstate onto Highway 37. In the passenger seat, Blue continued his low, rumbling dialogue with Zach the Power Ranger, who was still imprisoned in the glove box. “’Cause we might get arrested,” Ralph Angel heard him say. “So you have to stay inside and be very, very quiet.”
Blue looked up and asked, “Are we there yet?”
“What did I say about that? Just wait. I have a surprise.”
Eventually, the woods yielded to marshland, the two-lane road cutting a straight line through an expanse of gray water peppered with reeds and tufts of low, wiry grass. Egrets, white as porcelain, took flight from their rookeries, while in the distance a house balanced on stilts, lording over its watery homestead, and seeing all this, Ralph Angel felt something within him begin to shift. Like a page being turned.
Farther south, the road ended abruptly at the Intracoastal Waterway, the narrow channel stretching from the mouth of the Mississippi to the Rio Grande. A short wood dock jutted out into the water. Ralph Angel could see where the road picked up on the other side—not even sixty feet; they could almost swim across.
“What now?” Blue said.
“We wait.”
It wasn’t long before a ferry cruised up the channel. Cracked black buoys dangled from its rusted bow, paint curled away from the wheelhouse, but otherwise, nothing had changed; it was the same ferry as when he was a kid, and Ralph Angel, suddenly breathless with an old excitement, thought back to the day his daddy brought him to this very spot. A summer trip to the beach, just the two of them; a vacation he waited months to take, his father having called from California that September to say they would go someplace special when school got out. Ralph Angel had marked the days off the calendar, slogged through the long months until June finally arrived and his father, dashing in slacks and loafers, knocked on the front door. And while his father steered the Buick LeSabre with one hand, the other arm propped in the open window, he sang along to the cassette tape—Al Green’s version of “People Get Ready”—as they cruised over the blacktop road. Ralph Angel bathed in the radiance of his dad’s presence, so happy he thought he would burst.
And now, belching smoke, the same ferry rumbled up to the dock and idled. Ralph Angel smelled creosote and diesel fuel.
Blue grinned. “Can we ride on that boat?”
“You, me, and Zach.”
Ralph Angel paid the one-dollar fare and steered the Impala onto the dock, then onto the ferry. For the few minutes it took to cross the channel, he and Blue stood on the creaky deck, Ralph Angel holding Blue’s waist as he leaned over the side and spat in the water.
“It’s a good boat, Pop,” Blue said. He held Zach over the side, making sound effects as he pretended Zach could fly.
“Okay, that’s enough,” Ralph Angel said, but really, he didn’t mind at all.
• • •
More miles of black road. A lone oil well seesawing. Then the marsh ended in a wavering wall of sea oats, and beyond it, a flat stretch of bone-colored sand, a sky the color of bleached driftwood washing out the
horizon.
“Is this the surprise?”
Ralph Angel nodded as he killed the engine. “I came here with my daddy when I was a little boy,” he said, and watched a seabird, squat as a crab apple, its beak thin as a sewing needle, skitter across the sand. How odd it felt to be back here after so many years, almost a lifetime, and yet here he was. He had a vague sense of his boyhood self separating from him now, standing beside him like a specter, so that he saw the landscape through two sets of eyes; felt the pull of old memories as if someone were tugging on his sleeve. He put a hand on Blue’s shoulder. “You can get your feet wet if you want,” which was exactly what his father had said to him.
A briny wind sprayed sand as Ralph Angel, kneeling, rolled Blue’s pants up his spindly calves. “Not too far.” He sat on the Impala’s warm hood as Blue romped and galloped out to the pale brown surf, leaving a trail of flat-footed prints in the sand. The limp tide. A fringe of broken shells, froth, and plastic bottles left by the receding waves.
What he remembered most clearly was that they stayed at the beach all afternoon, that his father had set out a picnic with all his favorite things—salami between fluffy white slices of Evangeline Maid bread, Zapps potato chips, a can of Barq’s root beer for each of them, a package of Big 60 cookies with lemon crème filling bought special from Winn-Dixie—and that the wind worried the blanket so much they finally took off their shoes and used them to anchor the corners. While they ate, his father told him about California: how in a single day you could drive from the beach where the sand was as fine as cornmeal out to the desert where cacti and bright orange poppies with petals thin as tissue paper blanketed the ground; how, at the lighthouse just south of the airport, you could watch whales spout plumes of spray as they migrated through the channel, their enormous backs glistening like sea monsters as they rolled through the swells; and how, on a clear September weekend, you could drive down to the pier and order a whole boiled crab, then sit with a brown bag on your lap, pick meat from the crab’s body, and toss empty claws to the hovering gulls.
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