“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, l
istening 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.
He smiled. “Keep talking. I’m hanging on every word.”
“I’ve talked enough. Tell me about your farm.”
“You don’t want to know about that. It’s nothing special.”
But Charley insisted that she did.
“I lease three fronts,” Remy said. “Colette, over in Saint Abbey, is six hundred and fifty acres, and Emilie, out near the bay, is four hundred. The biggest, Genevieve, out near Four Corners, is almost a thousand, with the rest in bits and pieces sprinkled around the parish. All in all, it’s about twenty-one hundred acres.”
“Twenty-one hundred acres. That’s enormous.”
Remy smiled modestly. “It’s respectable. Just wish I owned it.”
Charley had grown accustomed to Alison, who yelled, and to Denton, who, while her partner, also projected a quiet authority that required a certain respect. But Remy’s manner put her at ease. He talked to her farmer-to-farmer, in a way she found she liked.
“Colette, Emilie, Genevieve,” Charley said. “Sounds like you’re talking about your children.”
“Not mine,” said Remy. “Back in the eighteen hundreds, farmers always named their fields after their daughters.”
And right then, Charley decided to name her biggest parcel Micah’s Corner.
Where did the time go? Six thirty, and the sky was a sultry cobalt with clouds like wisps of orange sherbet. Everything tinted to gold—the shop’s tin roof, the tangle of wildflowers that clung to fence posts, even the dirt.
“I can’t thank you enough,” Charley said as she walked Remy to his truck. “I mean it.” She was thinking that Remy wasn’t quite like anyone else she’d met. Not just his voice (though she could listen to it all night), or that he was thoughtful enough to bring them a whole truckload of shrimp. He had an up-from-the-bootstraps scrappiness she found interesting. And there was something else. Remy seemed to have come up through the land, seemed connected to it in a way other farmers weren’t. Like when he described how the land changed with each phase of the growing season: “In January, there’s just dirt,” he said, “then by April, the new cane sprouts, and by July, you’re surrounded by green fields. Come December, all the cane is cut again and, suddenly, you can see for miles. It’s always changing,” he said, “a new view every four months,” and she wondered who else paid such close attention. “I would rather be out there in my fields than anywhere else,” he said.
Remy started his engine. “Tell Mr. D. I’ll catch him next time.” He squared his baseball cap.
“He’ll be sorry he missed you.” In twenty years, Charley thought, he’d look like all the old farmers who gathered every morning around the back tables at the Blue Bowl, swapping stories and solving the world’s problems. She waved as he pulled away, then stood in the middle of the road. He was probably married with a house full of kids, Charley thought. And besides, she had too much to do on the farm.
• • •
“Well, well,” Violet said, when Charley called her that evening. “The plot thickens.”
“It was only a sack of shrimp,” Charley said. “And he didn’t just bring one for me. Besides, he really came to see Mr. Denton.”
“I bet,” Violet said. “Let me fill you in on a Southern man. There are only three things he’ll sit still for: football, duck hunting, and a woman who’s caught his eye. Remy Newell may have stopped by to see Mr. Denton but he stuck around to talk to you. So, are you going to ask him out?”
“Violet!”
“What?”
“What kind of woman do you think I am?”
“Girl, you’ve got to loosen up. This isn’t the 1850s. Women ask men out on dates all the time. It doesn’t even have to be a date. You could meet him for lunch or a cup of coffee.”
“Since when did you start working as a matchmaker?” Charley asked.
“Since when did you become such a stick in the mud?”
18
On Thursday morning, Miss Honey asked Ralph Angel to put gas in her car. “I have a prayer meeting tonight and I won’t have time to stop,” she said, handing him forty dollars. And since he had nothing better to do, Ralph Angel obliged. Rather than drive straight home after filling up (thirty in the tank, ten in his pocket), though, Ralph Angel drove in the opposite direction, followed the Old Spanish Trail all the way out to where he believed the turnoff led to Charley’s farm. He didn’t set out to do it. He just wanted to take a drive, get out of the house for a while, which he’d been reluctant to do in his own car since the trooper pulled him over. But out on the open road, curiosity tugged at him, the need to see with his own eyes what he’d been missing, what he’d been cut out of, like a cupped hand nudging him forward. He didn’t know exactly what to look for, and had guessed, by piecing together little bits of conversation he’d overheard, where Charley’s farm might be. He was about to give up when he spotted her car.
Ralph Angel parked. Far enough down the road that Charley wouldn’t notice Miss Honey’s old blue sedan if she happened to look up, but close enough that he could watch as she and two men in overalls stood talking, a large sheet of paper the size of a road map held between them. Ralph Angel watched as Charley studied the paper, then pointed across the road to the wall of sugarcane; watched, a few minutes later, as a biplane dropped out of the sky and swooped low over the fields, gray mist streaming out from beneath its wings; and twenty minutes after that, he rolled down the window to let a little air in and watched, with a growing sense of indignation, as the black man, probably Denton, worked a raggedy tractor, while Charley and the other man—who could that be?—schlepped ba
ck and forth between the yard and the shop, loading boxes into the back of a pickup. Ralph Angel watched and thought, Fuck her. Fuck Charley and her talk of needing time to figure out how best to bring him in, she couldn’t afford him, there wasn’t enough work for another man. It certainly looked like she had enough work. Ralph Angel peeled off his sweat jacket, leaned back. He didn’t know how, but he’d show her he was good for something—he was practically an engineer, after all—and when he figured out a plan, his sister would realize what she had missed out on and come begging. Ralph Angel watched for a long time. And when Charley and the two men finally disappeared inside the corrugated metal building, he went back down the road the way he came.
On his way back to Miss Honey’s, Ralph Angel drove through Jeanerette, past LeBlanc’s bakery, where the red light signaling that fresh French bread was ready for sale glowed like a flare. He turned down the short gravel driveway that ran alongside the brick building. Folks used to say that Jeanerette had everything you could want, you never needed to leave town, and thinking back, Ralph Angel supposed that was true. As a boy, when he came to Jeanerette with Miss Honey, he bought candy from the two Sicilian sisters who owned Machioni’s Fruit Stand. Vee’s five-and-dime sold everything from school supplies to china to aquarium fish, and at Gomez’s Army Surplus, clerks scaled tall wooden ladders to reach merchandise stacked to the ceiling. There’d been three movie theaters once, though he could remember the name of only one; the National Mercantile Company, where, when he visited, his dad always took him to buy blue jeans; Grisiaffi’s Grocery, a little mom-and-pop operation where you could buy a slushy for thirty cents; Rose Culotta’s liquor store across the street; and down on the corner, the Fitch Family Hotel and Restaurant, where you picked up to-go orders at the side window. All that was in the past, though. These days, Jeanerette was closer to a ghost town than a boom town, the bakery practically the only business still open on Main Street.
Queen Sugar: A Novel Page 23