Queen Sugar: A Novel (26 page)

•   •   •

Just after two o’clock, Huey Boy climbed down from the tractor and announced that the hydraulic light had come on. While the crews took a break, he tinkered with the control panel, and it was while she waited that Charley spotted Remy’s pickup coming toward her over the headland. He pulled up in a cloud of dust. With their reflective lenses, his sunglasses gave his otherwise boyish face a menacing steeliness, but it was his dopey legionnaire-style sun hat with its mesh side panels and protective neck drape that made her laugh.

Remy slammed the truck door, took off his sunglasses. “What’s so funny?”

“Nice hat.”

He touched the brim as though he’d forgotten he was wearing it. “I know it makes me look stupid. But it keeps the sun off my ears.”

For a second they stood awkwardly, and Charley didn’t know whether to hug him or shake hands. “I actually need a hat like that,” she said, touching the bill of her baseball cap. “This glare is killing me.”

Remy took off his hat and put it on Charley’s head, put her cap on his. “How’s that?”

“Better.
Much
better.” But when she moved to return it, Remy waved her off.

“Keep it. It looks better on you.”

Two weeks had passed since Remy gave her the shrimp, and in that time, with all the work, Charley had thought of him less frequently. She’d forgotten how tanned he was, how gently weathered his skin, how carefully he watched her when she spoke. She adjusted the hat and caught the faint smell of him—musk and citrus and the faint fragrance of the Gulf coast; it was a clean smell, strong and good.

“How about if I borrow it for a day or two, till I get my own?” Charley said.

“Suit yourself.” He gave a little shrug and put his hands in his pockets. “How’s planting going?”

“Mr. Denton says there may be a hurricane.”

“Yeah, I heard.” The look on Remy’s face made Charley more worried. “In the meantime, I brought you a little something.” He led her around to his tailgate and Charley saw that the bed of his truck was filled with cane stalks.

“What’s all this?”

“Ag station released a new variety this morning,” Remy said, and lifted out a long, husky stalk. “They’re calling it ‘Energy Cane,’ and it’s supposed to be more resistant to rust and borers, plus it’s got a higher sugar content. I thought you might want to try some.”

“Mother stalk is three hundred dollars a ton at least,” Charley said. “How much do I owe you?”

“Consider it a gift. One farmer to another.” And when Charley protested, he offered a compromise. “Give it a try. If it works out, you can buy me a beer.”

“Two beers,” Charley said. “One for the cane and one for the shrimp.”

Remy seemed surprised she remembered. He smiled. “Two beers, then.”

And for a moment, he looked at her so intently, Charley worried that she had something on her face or in her hair. She almost reached up to wipe her cheek and then felt a rush of embarrassment that she would even care. This was crazy, she thought. She barely knew him. “Well, thanks again.”

“You bet,” Remy said, glancing up at the clouds. “And good luck this afternoon.”

“Thanks.” She looked over at Huey Boy, who’d lifted the tractor’s engine panel. “If we can just get the hydraulics on that old clunker to work.”

“Let’s have a look.” Remy climbed up onto the tractor’s wheel. “Can’t fix it,” he said after a minute, “but I can patch it. Should hold till you get back to the shop and Denton can have a go.”

“Make that three beers,” Charley said.

Before Remy climbed down, he surveyed this side of Micah’s Corner. “Looks good, Miss Bordelon.”

“Please, I’ve been trying to get Mr. Denton to call me by my first name since we started working together, but he refuses. I understand why he does it, but it’s so formal. I don’t think I can take hearing it from someone else. Just call me Charley.”

Remy nodded. “Okay.”

“And thanks again. For everything.” Charley shook Remy’s hand. “So. How about you? How’s it going?”

Remy smiled and looked at the ground.

“What? What did I say?” Charley worried that she’d offended him.

“It’s not what you said, it’s how you said it. Your accent. Like you’re on a TV commercial or something. Next thing you’ll be telling me you grew up playing beach volleyball.”

Charley hesitated. The last time she told someone how she spent her summers as a kid, the conversation had ended badly. “Surfing, not volleyball,” she said, cautiously. “If you have anything you need to get off your chest about that, you should say it now and get it over with.” But there was just that long, meditative look again.

“I can’t figure you out,” Remy said, finally. He shook his head. “First it’s farming, then it’s surfing.” He laughed. “Are they all like you out in California?”

They?
Charley’s heart sank. What did he mean,
they
? Did he mean all left-handed people? All women? All African-Americans? But when she looked at Remy, whose eyes, she thought now, were actually on the small side, and whose sideburns were grayer than she’d noticed before, she didn’t detect an ounce of malice or irony in his question, nor cynicism in his tone. “No, not all.”

Behind her, the crew was crumpling up sandwich wrappers, beginning to reassemble, slipping on hats and gloves. Charley consulted her watch. “I’d better get back to it. Thanks again for the hat—and the Energy Cane.” She shook his hand, which didn’t feel like enough.

Remy climbed into his truck and started the engine. Then he paused. “Hey, California.”

Yes, California, Charley thought, that was who she was; that far-off place her father, still a boy then, dreamed of as he lugged those water buckets; the address he made up—6608 Sunset Drive—and practiced writing in the corner of his homework papers until he was seventeen and old enough to escape. California. The place her dad had asked to buried, in a plot facing the Pacific, rather than the red clay of his youth. She was all those things. Always would be. Charley turned to look at Remy, who sat in his truck with one arm on the open window.

“I know it’s planting and all,” Remy said, “but you can’t work every minute of every day.”

“Is that so?”

“Those beers you owe me.” And here he hesitated ever so slightly, a look of doubt, as though it was occurring to him that he was being hasty, too forward, swept quickly across his face, but then it passed. “There’s this zydeco place. They book some decent bands.”

“Keep talking.”

“You like to dance?”

“Will it help me lose my accent?”

“Maybe, maybe not. You’d have to give it a try.”

“Sounds tempting.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Remy smiled. “Couple of beers, some good zydeco, you’ll be talking like a Louisiana girl in no time.” He turned the key.

Charley caught the last bars of the
All Things Considered
theme song before the local news began. “NPR?”

“What?” Remy said, smiling. “Cane farmers can’t listen to public radio?”

•   •   •

On the fourth day of planting, the hurricane moved into the Gulf of Mexico, and though it wouldn’t make landfall for two days, the outer rainbank would reach Saint Josephine in twenty-four hours. Charley and her team had planted seventy-five acres, but they still had one hundred twenty-five to go. She’d given the crews the option of evacuating, but Romero and the others insisted on working until the last minute. In the morning, they managed to plant fifteen acres, but by noon, Charley was nervous. The weather was disturbingly good; the clouds white as chalk, the sky blue as a gas flame.

“Time to pack it in,” Denton ordered over the walkie-talkie. There was no mistaking the concern in his tone.

Once they were all back at the shop, Charley, Denton, and Alison gathered around the old Zenith TV in her office. The forecasters downgraded the hurricane from a category four to a category three, which meant evacuation was optional. Still, there was no way of knowing where the storm might hit, whether it would swerve up the eastern seaboard or hover in the Gulf, gaining force; and in the meantime, they had to decide what to do with Romero and his men.

“I’m not sure that house out there will hold,” Denton said. “We ought to think about letting them head up to Arkansas. They can stay at the apple farmer’s place till this thing blows over. We might lose a couple days on the back end, but I think it’s worth it. At least they’d be safe.”

“Yeah, but who’s going to pay to get them up there?” Alison said. “Even if we could afford their tickets, every Greyhound headed north is sold out.”

“We could rent a van,” Charley suggested.

“Can’t afford the liability,” Denton said.

“Look, Romero’s offering to stay,” Alison said. “He swears they all know the risk. I say, let ’em stay. They want plywood, food, lanterns, and they’ll ride it out; we can do that. Hurricane passes, they’ll be here, ready to work.”

Eventually, they reached a compromise: If the hurricane rating stayed at three, Charley would loan them her car and they would drive to Arkansas; if it was downgraded to a two, they would stay.

For the rest of the afternoon, they went about strapping down equipment and securing the shop’s doors and windows. Denton went out for plywood while Charley boxed up bills and receipts, mourning all the work she’d put into organizing her file cabinets. Alison brought over his portable generator. “It ain’t fancy,” he said, “but it’ll run a fridge, a couple of lights, and a TV.”

•   •   •

It was almost five when Charley got back to Miss Honey’s, and the wind had just begun to disturb the trees behind the house. Micah’s garden was in full flower, and before she went inside, Charley walked through it, inspecting the cucumbers and green beans almost ready for the taking, okra and tomatoes baking in the unwaving heat; the sunflowers with faces broad as a baby’s nodding along the fence. Micah had even planted pumpkins, not bulbous yet, just long, groping vines beneath hooding leaves, and as Charley walked the last row then climbed the porch steps, her arms loaded with groceries they’d need whether they evacuated or not, her heart broke for her daughter. It would be a shame if Micah lost everything she’d worked so hard to plant.

The sky was still gloriously blue half an hour later. Charley was struggling to tie the porch swing to the railing when, to her great surprise, cousin John eased the Bronco along the gulley.

“What are you doing here?” Charley asked. John had called to check in on her a couple times since the reunion, but she hadn’t actually set eyes on him, which meant she’d never seen him in his prison guard uniform. Now Charley hugged him, and smelled something institutional—Lysol, maybe—rising off his starched gray shirt.

“I brought y’all some plywood,” John said. “Thought you could use some help putting it up.” He held out a cordless screwdriver and a box of screws.

“Oh, John. With this traffic?” But Charley was grateful. With so much of her attention devoted to getting Romero and his men settled and securing the farm, she’d imagined how she, Miss Honey, and the kids would spend the long hours waiting for the storm to pass but hadn’t considered the physical damage the hurricane might do to Miss Honey’s house. Now here was John, thoughtful as always, coming to her rescue. And for the first time in a very long time, Charley was aware of what it meant not to have a man around the house. For all the time she spent with Denton and Alison, there was a limit to what she could expect from them. They were her partners, and yes, even her friends, but they weren’t her family, they weren’t her husband.

“As long as I’m back before they start the contra flow I’m okay,” John said.

Just then, the screen door creaked, and when Charley looked up she saw Ralph Angel standing on the porch. He paused for a moment with his hands in his sweat suit pockets, then planted himself in the middle of the top step, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “Well, if it isn’t Little John.”

“Hello, Ralph Angel,” John said.

Ralph Angel frowned. “Since when did you start calling me by my given name, boy? Show some respect.”

Hot as it was, Charley shivered. She hadn’t seen much of Ralph Angel since they’d argued over the farm, and to be honest, since then she had avoided him. It hadn’t been difficult. Most mornings, she left before dawn, returning home in just enough time to talk to Micah while she worked in the garden before eating whatever dinner Miss Honey left out for her and retiring to her room, where she promptly fell into a deep and much-needed sleep. As best she could tell, Ralph Angel spent his time barricaded in the back room, doing what, exactly, she could only guess; that, or watching old war movies with Miss Honey.

“All right,” John said and sighed. “Hello, cousin. How are you?”

Ralph Angel took a toothpick from his pocket and slid it into his mouth. “You’ve got the nerve to look like a real officer. What kind of uniform is that?”

“Texas Department of Criminal Justice.”

“No shit. A real-life prison guard. Bet you can kick some ass when you feel like it, can’t you, boy?”

“Only when I have to.”

Ralph Angel motioned to Charley. “What do you think, sis? Think John here can kick my ass?”

“I’m not having this conversation,” Charley said.

“Want to try?” Ralph Angel said. His body seemed to inflate inside his sweat suit.

“No, sir,” John said. “I don’t.”

“Is that a real gun? Let me see it.”

“No, sir. I can’t do that.”

Charley looked at Ralph Angel and thought she could track the anger coursing through him.

“Ah, shit, boy. I’ve held a gun before. Let me see it. I’m not going to fire it.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I’m not giving you my gun.”

“Well, fight me, then.” Ralph Angel stood up.

“I didn’t come here to fight.” John pulled himself up to his full height, and Charley thought,
this
was the man the prisoners at Huntsville saw.
This
was the correctional officer. His voice remained steady and calm. “I just came to help Cousin Charley cover the windows. Make sure y’all are boarded up and ready for the storm.”

“Yeah, right,” Ralph Angel said. “You came around to make sure I’m not causing trouble. Did I pass the test? ’Cause I know you’ve been spreading rumors about me, talking about me behind my back.”