Queen Sugar: A Novel (27 page)

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh, cut the shit, John. I know y’all told Charley about my last visit. Told her I broke ’Da’s arm. You and Violet and Brother, all running your mouths. I should kick your ass right now.”

John took a step forward. “That’s up to you, cousin. I’ll play this thing any way you want.”

“John, please.” Charley pulled on John’s arm. “Let’s get this wood up before it gets dark.”

•   •   •

The first sheet of plywood was screwed against the window and they were moving to the second when John said, “Lucky for him Daddy made me promise to stay calm, otherwise I
would
kick his ass. I don’t care if he is my cousin.”

The wind had picked up and every few seconds, Charley felt a smattering of rain against her face. She told John about the day Ralph Angel recited the Bible verses and negotiated Micah and Blue’s bickering over the Polaroids, how he’d admired
The Cane Cutter
, how he treated Blue so tenderly. “It’s like he’s two different people,” she said, and looked at the big sheet of plywood nailed against the window. She’d wanted so much to like Ralph Angel. She’d actually sort of resented Violet for not giving him a chance, thought, privately, that Violet was being judgmental, maybe even a little self-righteous. But she’d been the fool, not Violet. And after she and Ralph Angel argued, she called Uncle Brother to say he’d been right when he warned her. She called Violet, too, and apologized for ever doubting her.

John put his arm around Charley’s shoulder and she felt how solid he was. “Be careful, cuz. That’s the first thing they teach us in training. The charming ones are the ones you have to watch. They’ll play you every time.”

At seven o’clock the next morning, the forecasters downgraded the hurricane to a category two. Good news, but they still had to be cautious. In Miss Honey’s den, Micah and Blue broke into the games Charley had purchased when she shopped for groceries, spreading Monopoly money and Uno cards over the floor.

“I’m going out,” Ralph Angel announced, appearing in the doorway.

“But it’s still too dangerous,” Miss Honey said.

Ralph Angel looked past her to Blue. “Mind your grandmother.” And when Blue asked where he was going, whether he could go too, Ralph Angel refused without explanation, which was something Charley had never heard him do. The front door slammed and she could just hear the Impala’s engine below the wind.

By afternoon, the sky was a gray slab filled with a confusion of churning clouds. Wind flurries worried the trees, tossing leaves and small branches across the yard. The outer rainband dumped showers on Saint Josephine in twenty-minute bursts, and when Charley couldn’t stand to watch one more newscast with its high-definition graphics and endless loops of storm footage, she retreated to her dark bedroom, where every few seconds the wind rattled the plywood she and John had nailed over the windows. She lay on the bed, listening to the wind. It really did whistle, she marveled, trying not to imagine how much havoc the hurricane was wreaking in her fields.

The storm made landfall in the dead of night. And though it was much weaker than first predicted, there was no doubting its power to destroy. For eight hours, it tore trees up by their roots, peeled roofs off stores and churches, shredded trailers like tissue boxes, and flooded the streets downtown with dark gray water. Out in the country, sediment churned in the rising tide, and hundred-mile-an-hour winds battered the cane fields until the proud stocks lay flat in submission.

At Miss Honey’s, while she listened to the wind’s high whine as it sliced across the yard, and a downpour that sounded like a thousand coins spilling on the roof, Charley said a prayer.
Please God, protect my family. Leave something behind on the farm so I’m not completely ruined. Let me have one chance to see what I can do before you take it all away.
As she whispered the words, Charley felt a sense of peace settle over the room.

By morning, the winds had died. The rains had ceased. Sun broke through the clouds in bold rays. Charley unbolted the front door and stepped out onto Miss Honey’s porch to survey the damage

It was as if someone had plucked all the leaves from the trees, then systematically plastered them across the lawn and pasted them to the side of Miss Honey’s house. Branches thicker than a grown man’s arm hung perilously or lay cracked and twisted every few feet, from the woods all the way out to the street. In Micah’s garden, all the plants had been ripped up by their roots. It was an awesome sight, proof of nature’s ferocity and indifference, and standing in the yard, Charley knew she would remember this day for as long as she lived. The wind had torn the metal flashing off one side of Miss Honey’s house and sections of the sunroom were flooded. All in all, though, they came through the hurricane intact. Or so Charley thought until the phone rang and Miss Honey shouted for her that Denton was on the line.

“Are you at the farm?” Charley mashed the phone to her ear and closed her eyes. “How’d we do?”

Silence. Then Denton sighed. “How quick can you get out here?”

•   •   •

On her drive out to the farm, Charley began to grasp the full extent of the destruction and appreciated, for the first time, why storms were named after the Carib god of evil, Hurican
.
Folks had already started piling their waterlogged possessions—splintered furniture and mattresses, sheets of soggy drywall and chunks of ravaged insulation, dead washing machines, sopping curtains, and parts of swing sets—in heaps along the roadside. To hear some people talk, Charley thought, you’d think only black folks lived in the buckled trailers and shotgun shacks with abandoned cars askew in the front yards, but no; as many poor whites scraped by on the back roads as poor blacks. Maybe that was the hidden blessing: the hurricane was the great equalizer; its wrath indiscriminate. In the end, the blessing, if there were one, was that for a short time, everyone would come together in order to survive.

Less than six hours since the storm passed, and Charley was amazed to see all the animal carcasses—raccoons, possums, and armadillos run over by last-minute evacuees, no doubt—that littered the roads. In the black bayous, fish were bloated into silvery balloons that reflected the morning’s light. The air reeked of death, even with her window rolled up.

•   •   •

Heart punching, Charley turned onto what was once the dirt road leading to her shop but was now an obstacle course of branches and twisted metal scraps, and finally pulled up in front to find Denton and Alison waiting.

“Your houses?” Charley asked, looking from one tired face to the other as she slid out of her car. “Your families? Please tell me no one was hurt.”

Alison stubbed out his cigarette. “A tree branch took out our bedroom window,” he said, “which really burns me up because I was going to prune it this weekend. But the boys are fine.”

Charley looked at Denton.

Ever the stoic, Denton wiped his glasses on his shirttail. “Nothing broke I can’t repair.” He opened his pickup door. “Get in. Let’s take a drive.”

Neither man had much to say as they rolled past fields where the cane lay flat as a bad comb-over against the ground, but Charley gasped at the sight, shook her head in disbelief, saying, over and over, into her palm, “Oh my God. This can’t be happening.” Two days ago, she couldn’t see the trees across her fields, the cane was so high, but now she had a clear view. For the first time since that day Frasier quit and she’d looked out over the expanse of earth, she was struck by how much land she actually owned.

“I know it looks bad,” Denton said, soberly. “But as long as the wind hasn’t dislodged the stalks from their root boxes, we can get the combine through. All it needs to stand up again is a week’s worth of sun. But we won’t know for a day or two how bad it’s bent.”

“Bent or straight, what difference does it make?” Charley said, still grappling with the notion of six hundred trampled acres.

“Makes a huge difference,” Denton said. “We’re using some of this as plant cane over in Micah’s Corner. Crooked stalks are harder to plant. How’re you gonna plant a crooked stalk in a straight row?”

Alison scribbled on the back of an envelope to illustrate Denton’s point. “Even if you can get most of each stalk in the row,” he said, thrusting the envelope at her, “the ends stick up, which means the eyes on ’em won’t sprout.” Charley looked at his drawing: two parallel lines with squiggles jutting out from both sides. “Which means we’ve got to cut more cane to compensate, which means our diesel and labor costs are higher. Plus, any cane that’s not covered with dirt dies soon as it gets cold, and that affects next year’s yield.”

Charley handed the envelope back and listened to Denton and Alison estimate what it would cost to repair the fields, the figure jumping by the thousands. “So, you’re saying we’re screwed,” she said, and reached for Alison’s cigarette. God knew what she would do with the damn thing since she’d never smoked before, but it felt good to hold something in her hand. She was down to twenty thousand dollars, which she needed to cover payroll and buy fertilizer, and every day more invoices arrived with the afternoon mail.

“Let’s hope Micah’s Corner didn’t get the worst of it,” Denton said. “If there’s water hung up out there—” His voice trailed off.

“Just say it.” Charley sucked on the cigarette, coughed and choked.

Denton shook his head. “Let’s wait and see.”

“Hell, I’ll say it,” Alison said. “Close as that quadrant is to the bay, it’s bound to have some water on it. You heard about the tidal surge, didn’t you? Everything south of Patterson is underwater. And don’t get me started about the damage out at the Point.”

Denton punched Alison’s shoulder. “Shut up, Alison.”

“Why you barking at me, Denton? Hell, I didn’t do it. I’m just telling her what she’s in for.” Alison turned to Charley. “Brace yourself.”

But there was no bracing herself for the way the tidal surge, the great wall of rushing water blown in from the Gulf, had had its way with Micah’s Corner. Half the quadrant was under hip-deep water. Where it had receded, a thick layer of sludge and grit coated the fields, as though someone had dredged the Mississippi and smeared its sediment across her land. For a long time, the three of them could only stare.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Alison said, a match trembling in his hand. “I thought this was a category two.”

“It wasn’t the wind,” Denton said. “It was the water. Storms are getting wetter every year.”

Neither man, normally strong-willed and confident in his own way, had the courage to look at Charley. And standing between her two partners, a peculiar coolness settled over her, a sensation similar to the calm she figured most people experienced just before they died. “I don’t see any point in kidding myself,” Charley said. She looked out over her fields and thought how her mother always accused her of being a dreamer. Well, she wasn’t a dreamer anymore. “It’s over. I’m ruined.”

•   •   •

Yet, back at the shop, Denton insisted it
wasn’t
over. While Charley wondered how she’d tell the crews she couldn’t afford to keep them on, Denton retreated to her office.

“An extra twenty-eight thousand,” Denton announced an hour later, tossing the yellow pad on the desk. They’d need pumps to drain the water, money for extra diesel and overtime, and a petty cash fund for spare parts since they’d be running equipment twice as hard. “We’ll have to cut more premium cane to replant Micah’s Corner, so that’s less we’ll have to sell come grinding. You’ll have to include those lost dollars in your costs.”

Charley looked at him blankly. “You know I don’t have that kind of money.”

“Got anything you can sell?”

For one criminal instant, Charley saw
The Cane Cutter
’s broad back and steady gaze. If she sold him, she’d be selling her father’s memory; she’d have sold everything he cared about. “I’ve got nothing,” she said. “I’m telling you, it’s over.” Denton pushed the yellow pad toward her. Without looking at it, Charley tore off the top sheet where he’d made his calculations and jammed it in her back pocket, saying, “I’ll take care of it.” She waited till Denton left the office, then she walked calmly behind the shop where no one could see, planted her hand on the side of the building, and vomited on her boots.

Tapped out. Finished. Done. That was what Charley thought as she slid into the Volvo and drove away from her farm without another word to Denton or Alison. In minutes, she was out on the road still littered with branches and debris. But for the devastation, it was a beautiful day with the blue sky wide open, the big yolky sun overhead, the dark trees lengthening along on the horizon. Charley increased her speed and felt the wind’s moist breath on her face. She could drive out to San Francisco or New York, assume a new identity and start over. But what about Micah? How would she explain that they were leaving
again
, and not just leaving but running away? How could she look Micah in the eye and tell her she’d given up because cane farming was too hard; because she was exhausted and afraid and out of ideas; because the life she’d dreamed of wasn’t turning out as she expected?

•   •   •

The gently rolling hills and golden pastures dotted with hay bales and the wide dry riverbeds of the East Felicianas looked nothing like the south Louisiana Charley had come to know, and as she crossed into the parish, northeast of Saint Josephine and an hour’s drive from Baton Rouge, her eyes drank up the scenery. She followed the country road through Slaughter, where the ragtime legend Buddy Bolden lived before he moved to New Orleans and lost his mind, and less than an hour from the Mississippi state line, she stopped at the gas station in Clinton and bought a Coke, then sat in her car for a long time, watching people come and go from the courthouse in the tidy town square. The courthouse, made in the Greek Revival style and painted a crisp, gleaming white, matched the row of lawyers’ offices across the street, their columns looking like matchsticks, the way they lined up so perfectly. The whole town looked like a picture postcard, Charley thought, so serene and unblemished, having never been touched by the storm; nothing at all like the wreckage she’d left behind in Saint Josephine. Why was it that some places had escaped nature’s wrath while her small corner of the world seemed constantly tormented by misfortune? It didn’t seem fair.

When Charley finished her Coke, she checked her watch—almost three o’clock, which meant it was almost one o’clock in Los Angeles. She took out her cell phone and dialed her mother’s number.

Lorna answered on the first ring. “Charlotte?”

Charley heard glasses clinking in the background, silverware tapping delicately against bone china plates, the echoey voice of a woman speaking into a microphone followed by applause, and guessed that her mother was at a fund-raising luncheon for one of her charities. Until that moment, Charley had decided, stubbornly, not to call, reminding herself every time she was tempted that her mother had mocked her decision to move to the South. But Lorna’s voice was like warm milk, and hearing it now, all of Charley’s defenses and justifications fell away and all the rawness she’d worked so hard to ignore came right to the surface. Her eyes filled immediately with tears, her chest tingled with a silvery tightness, and just like that, she was five years old again, aching to be held and comforted.