“I’ll call you as soon as it sells,” Charley said, the thought of the auction once again making her insides churn.
Denton looked at her.
“What?” Charley said.
“You look different. Your skin’s shiny.”
“Shiny?” Charley touched her cheek, wondering whether Denton had picked up Remy’s scent. Until a couple hours ago, a part of her still refused to believe she had spent the night with him. Even this morning, when the sun came up and she looked down into Remy’s yard, where, indeed, bunches of oxblood lilies were erupting beneath the trees—even then she didn’t believe it. Only when Remy walked her to her car and leaned in through the window to kiss her again did Charley know for sure.
Watching from the pew as Denton and Alison stood in line for communion, Charley sensed their anxiety—about the farm, about the future, about nature’s hand in how well they did. They were like her, their fears were her fears, but they didn’t show them. As she sat there, Charley said a prayer for her partners. Lord, if you can hear me, please bless Mr. Denton and Alison, who have already done more for me than I could have ever asked for. Bless them and keep them strong.
• • •
Outside, after the service, Alison lit a cigarette and tossed the match into the little cemetery where the first Acadian pioneers were buried. A fine layer of lichen coated the oldest vaults, which pitched sideways after decades of sinking into the soft ground.
“Well, thank God that’s over,” Alison said, smoke streaming through his nostrils. “I better get back before my grandkids set my neighbor’s house on fire.”
“You might want to take Highway 90 on the way back from New Orleans tomorrow,” Denton said. “It’s prettier than the interstate and it’s not that much longer.”
“I’ll try to remember.” Charley looked at Denton and thought he would be a better priest than that other guy. Even with uncertainty in his eyes, the way he held himself suggested an old battleship pushing through deep water. She dug through her purse until she found her checkbook, then scribbled a check for six thousand dollars. Now she was not only maxed out on her credit, she was officially broke. She folded the check and handed it to Denton. “That should take some of the pressure off. Tell the crews we’ll square up in January after the numbers are in. There’s enough there for you and Alison to pay yourselves, too.”
Denton protested and tried to hand back the check.
“Absolutely not,” Charley insisted. “In your wallet.” She noticed, at the far end of the cemetery, a statue of the Virgin Mary that someone had vandalized. The side of the Virgin’s shapely stone head had been bashed in; part of her face was missing. “I think maybe Alison was right.”
“About what?”
“I thought the Blessing of the Crops would help, but I feel exactly the same.” Maybe worse.
Denton leaned against the wrought-iron fence. “This is a long walk in a dark wood, Miss Bordelon. Don’t psych yourself out just yet.”
• • •
Back at Miss Honey’s, Ralph Angel’s car was parked along the gully. Inside, though, there was no sign of him. Micah and Blue, still in their church clothes, sat at the kitchen table eating large wedges of Micah’s crawfish cake.
“I didn’t win,” Micah said, glumly.
“I’m sorry, sweat pea. I know how hard you worked.” Charley kissed the top of Micah’s head, then, in a moment of sheer zaniness, grabbed Micah’s fork, broke off a chunk of cake, and stuffed it in her mouth, saying, “But now there’s more cake for us.”
Blue and Micah stared at her, then Micah said, “You’re nuts,” and smiled even as she rolled her eyes. And for the next few minutes, Charley sat at the table with the children, listening as they recapped the day’s Sunday school lesson and trying not to think about Remy Newell or the auction.
“Y’all take your cake outside. I need to talk to your mama,” said Miss Honey, stepping from the den into the kitchen. When the children were gone, she pulled out a chair and sat down—something she rarely did in the kitchen unless she was eating. She leaned in conspiratorially. “Ralph Angel is home.” She tilted her head toward the back room.
“I saw his car.”
“He’s in a foul mood.”
Charley thought, but did not say, What else is new? and instead patted Miss Honey’s hand. As much as she wished she could sit longer, she had come home only long enough to change, then she needed to get out to the farm, check on how the crews were doing with planting.
“He’s in a real bad place,” Miss Honey said. “Worse than I’ve seen in a long time.” Before Charley could ask, she added, “The boss let him go.”
“Oh no.” Even without the specifics, Charley knew what this meant: more sulking, more flare-ups, all of them walking on eggshells.
“Something about him being overqualified,” Miss Honey said, rubbing her knuckles distractedly. “You know how that is. Some of these white folks don’t like to see a black man get ahead.” She looked at Charley for confirmation. “I knew something was wrong when he stopped coming home. I’ve been praying every night for the good Lord to keep him safe. You don’t know how hard I’ve been praying.”
Charley took Miss Honey’s hand, which was warm and soft, like it had been marinating in buttermilk. “It’ll all work out. Don’t worry. You’ll see.” But when she started to rise, Miss Honey tightened her grip, and pulled her back down into the chair.
“I want you to give Ralph Angel a job.”
“A what?”
“On your farm.”
Charley dropped her grandmother’s hand. “No. No, no, no, no. Bad idea.”
“There’s got to be something he can do, Charley.” Miss Honey’s tone seemed too controlled, too practiced. “Just to tide him over till he finds something else.”
Charley pulled her hand away from Miss Honey’s and stood. “I know you’re worried. And don’t get me wrong—I’d like to—it’s just that—” She backed away from the table.
“Come back here. It’s just what?”
“It’s just.” Charley took a breath and started over. “It’s just, I can’t even pay the men I’ve got. Even if I could pay Ralph Angel, he doesn’t want to work for me. He doesn’t do manual labor. He said so himself.”
“What about a job in the office?”
Charley pictured the shop. The broken-down sofa, the piles of telephone books they hadn’t had time to throw away, the refrigerator that sent a tingling current of electricity through her fingers every time she touched the handle. “There is no office.” The suggestion was so absurd, she laughed before she could catch herself.
Miss Honey gave Charley the look she reserved for people who bumped into her shopping cart without apologizing. “You mean to tell me—you mean to tell me you got all those Mexicans and that crazy white man out there working for you and you can’t find a way to help your own?”
“With what money?”
“You mean to tell me, you got your own flesh and blood right under this roof, and you can’t find a way to lend a hand?”
“Miss Honey, please listen. Alison isn’t working for me, he’s one of my partners. He’s made a huge investment. His time, his equipment.” Charley felt her argument dissipate like smoke. Nothing she said would make sense now.
“Last spring when you called to say you were coming down here, you remember what I told you?”
Tears flooded Charley’s eyes. “You offered to let us stay here. You said it was silly to rent a house when we had family.”
“That’s right. Family. This is about family. Ralph Angel is smart. All he needs is a chance. I know you can find something for him.”
“Miss Honey, please. Things are tight. I’m on the verge of losing the farm.” Charley took her checkbook out of her purse and flipped to the register. “Look. It says thirteen dollars. I just wrote Denton a check for the
last of it. I’m broke.”
Miss Honey drew herself erect. Her eyes bored into Charley. “‘And the Lord said unto Cain, where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not. Am I my brother’s keeper? And he said, what hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.’”
Charley felt something slip inside her. “Maybe once grinding starts, if I need some extra help. That would be better.”
“Charlotte Bordelon, I never thought I’d hear these things coming out of your mouth. That farm isn’t just yours. Yes, Ernest bought it, and yes, he left it to you, but you’re part of this family. Have I charged you rent?” Miss Honey leaned forward in her chair, but Charley could not speak. “When someone in a family needs help, it’s up to everyone to see that he gets what he needs. I know Ralph Angel would do the same for you.”
“Thirteen dollars. You’re not listening. I don’t have any money!”
Miss Honey stood up then. “I’ve heard everything I need to hear, and I’m telling you what you’re going to do. You’re going to find a job for your brother. I don’t care if he digs ditches or scrapes cane kettles. He’s coming to work for you until he gets back on his feet and you’re going to find the money to pay him. And when we get finished with that, we’re going to talk about giving him what is rightly his. If that takes till the end of grinding, if it takes the next ten years, then so be it.”
The room, as far as Charley could tell, had tilted ninety degrees. Everything seemed to be sliding off its surface, crashing to the floor. Cabinet doors swung open, dishes tumbled, and silverware flew from the drawers, and Charley almost reached for the salt and pepper shakers to hold them in place. She swore she couldn’t hear her own voice for all the noise, but when she looked around again, the room was quiet. Just the soft whirring of the ceiling fan, the steady dribble of water from the faucet.
“You can’t force me to do this,” Charley said, still dazed. “And anyway, the trust imposed restrictions on who can own it.”
Miss Honey pointed an indicting finger. “‘And now art thou cursed from the earth,’” she said. “‘When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.’”
The counter was littered with vegetable scraps. Charley stared at Miss Honey’s broad, silent back, listened to the hiss from her skillet. Outside, Micah and Blue screamed as they played hide-and-seek and Charley knew they were still high on all the cake they’d eaten. They would run through the woods for an hour and come back panting and spent and hungry all over again.
Charley threaded her belt through the loops of her jeans. “I’m going to work,” she said. “I won’t be back till late.”
“We’re having pork chops,” Miss Honey said. “I’ll leave yours on the stove.”
Charley recognized the gesture. Food was love. Food was Miss Honey’s weapon, her sword and her shield. Charley knew she could accept the olive branch, and put the whole incident behind her; she could surrender, hire Ralph Angel, and in turn, receive the nourishment she’d come to cherish and crave.
Or she could reject it.
“No, thank you,” Charley said, coolly. “I won’t be hungry.” She wouldn’t eat Miss Honey’s cooking if someone paid her. Not tonight, not for lunch tomorrow, not as leftovers later this week.
Miss Honey flinched, almost imperceptibly. She stirred something in the skillet and the hiss flared into a roar. “Then I guess you’d better go on.”
• • •
Charley was still shaken when she pulled up to Violet’s church, and for a few minutes she just sat staring at the words TRUE VINE BAPTIST CHURCH, which were painted over FRANK’S STICK ’N STEIN. Violet said the place used to be an old pool hall, Charley recalled, and she surveyed the row of dilapidated storefronts. Taped to the door, a piece of poster board meant to function as a marquee read TODAY’S SERMON: DON’T BLOCK YOUR BLESSINGS!
Charley stepped out of her car and leaned against the hood. Soon, the door swung open, piano music wafted out to the street, and a handful of people streamed onto the sidewalk trailed by Violet, stunning in her bright yellow dress and hat like a Victorian lampshade.
“Oh, my Lord, would you look who’s here.” Violet strode over to Charley and seized her hand. “What’s going on? I can tell by your face this isn’t a social call.”
Charley leaned forward and buried her face in her hands. She told Violet about deciding to auction off The Cane Cutter, about writing Denton her last check, about her blow-up with Miss Honey.
“I can’t work with him,” Charley said. “I know he’s my brother, but he’s—”
“Combative? Erratic? Manipulative? Has an inflated sense of his own worth?”
“I’ll take door D, Monty, all of the above,” said Charley. “She wants me to give him a share of the farm, but she doesn’t understand I’m not allowed to. Either it’s mine or it goes to charity. Some legal thing.”
“So you get to support Ralph Angel while he works. Or, more likely, doesn’t.”
Charley’s eyes filled. “Yes. And Miss Honey is angry. She quoted a lot of scripture. I think she put a hex on the farm.”
“Girl, Mother always quotes scripture. She’d quote scripture in front of the Supreme Court if she thought it would help her win her case.”
“Yeah, but she quoted that passage about being your brother’s keeper. That last part about being a vagabond on the land was creepy.”
“Hmmm.” Violet went quiet for a moment, and Charley could practically see her scanning the biblical reference book she had in her head—it was the same edition Ralph Angel owned. Her lips moved as though she were reading to herself, her soft mumbling growing steadily louder. “‘A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth,’” Violet said. “Oh. I see what you mean. Most people leave out that last part.” She nodded, reverentially. “Mother’s good.”
“So I’m cursed?”
“Who can say for sure? This is Louisiana.”
“Violet, you’re not helping.”
“I’m sorry, darling, but this one has me stumped. I have to say, I don’t envy you.” Violet gave her arm an encouraging pat. “Don’t worry. You’ve managed to get this far, you’ll figure something out. I have faith in you.”
Just before Charley pulled away, she had a thought and rolled down her window. “How come you don’t have a Blessing of the Crops service here?” she said. “Because if you did, I promise I’d come.” She gazed again at Violet’s church with its hand-painted sign and poster board taped to the door. Violet looked up and down the street and sighed. “’Cause none of our members own any crops to bless, I suppose.”
• • •
Mr. Guidry’s tiny shack was tucked far back in the woods, back beyond the dam where the local high school kids smoked pot and blasted the Black Crows from their car stereos, past the POSTED sign and the little lake covered with a thick quilt of algae, and standing on Mr. Guidry’s creaky porch where every other cypress board was missing, Charley thought only a fool would venture this far back in the woods by herself with no invitation and no idea what to expect. How she’d found Mr. Guidry’s still confounded her, but she had, just where Violet said it would be. “This is going to sound crazy,” Violet had called to say, not long after Charley got home from her church, “but, there’s an old man, a traiteur.”
“What do you mean, a traiteur?”
“A healer.”
“As in voodoo?” Charley had held the phone away from her ear. “You’re right. You do sound crazy. I’m desperate, Violet, but I’m not that desperate.”
“Now, hold on. Just hear me out before you say no. It’s not voodoo. Traiteurs do good things like heal snakebites and get rid of warts and cure colicky babies, but they do other things too. Mother used to go to Mr. Guidry. Swore by him. I don’t even know if he’s still alive, but it’s wor
th a try.”
Now Charley knocked on Mr. Guidry’s door—just one knock—and when he answered, she stood facing a blackberry-colored, rheumy-eyed man no taller than Micah, and older, it seemed, than time. Charley almost turned and ran. But Mr. Guidry invited her in as though he’d been expecting her, and before she knew it, she found herself sitting on an old wooden stool in a corner of his one-room cabin.
“You’re a Bordelon,” Mr. Guidry said. “I remember your daddy.” He was soft-spoken and frail, but moved about the cabin with relative ease. Charley watched as he pulled herbs and feathers, dried chicken feet and scraps of leather from dusty bottles on the shelf beneath his window.
“You knew my dad?”
Mr. Guidry nodded. “Long time ago.”
He laid all the objects on the table, then rubbed each of them while he muttered an incantation, and when he finished, he touched his hand to Charley’s forehead. What she felt was something between falling and flying. She wasn’t sure when he removed his fingers, but when she opened her eyes, he presented her with a necklace—just a piece of string, really, with nine equally spaced knots—which she let him tie around her neck. Violet said he’d refuse to take any money and would even consider a thank-you unnecessary, so Charley shook his hand and offered him the fig cake she’d baked. She was already through the woods when she realized he’d never asked her why she’d come—he seemed to know—and that she’d forgotten to ask what he’d done for her father.
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.
Queen Sugar: A Novel Page 34