Micah buttoned her pajama top. “Yuck. Why’d you bring that?”
The figure — a black man, naked to the waist — swung a cane knife. He was only eighteen inches tall, but his power took Charley’s breath away. She ran her hand over the Cane Cutter’s broad shoulders, the knots of muscle in his arms, the burnished slabs of his pecs and back flexed with the force of his swing.
The day her father brought it home, he called Charley and Lorna into the living room. Charley got there first and saw the coffee table heaped with Lorna’s silver-framed family photographs, many of them facedown, Lorna’s prized Lalique vase, the one with the naked ladies following each other around the icy glass, resting on its side.
“So?” Her father placed his hand on her shoulder.
Charley heard her mother’s footsteps in the hall behind them; heard her mother’s humming stop as she entered the room. But she saw how excited, how proud her father looked and she did not turn around. She took her time studying the piece. The bronze man looked like he must be sweating. Something about him — his deep-set eyes, wide forehead, and square hands — seemed familiar. He stirred up a feeling she could not name.
“He looks like you,” Charley said.
“I certainly hope not.” Her mother, coiffed and buffed from a day at the salon, was already holding the Lalique vase. “What’s next, Ernest? A painting of the garbage man?”
Charley looked from her mother to her father and saw his expression dim, his mouth move as if he tasted something sour.
“This is the living room,” Lorna said. “Your laborer can go in the den.”
“Move it,” her father said, quietly, not taking his hand from Charley’s shoulder, “and I’ll break every piece of goddamned crystal in this house.”
Now Charley touched a finger to The Cane Cutter. The curve of his back like he could lift ten times his weight, the rough drape of his pants, which she imagined as burlap or canvas; his determined gaze, as though he could cut a thousand acres by himself. He almost breathed.
Years later, after her parents divorced, Charley let herself into her father’s condo. She found him staring at The Cane Cutter.
“Dad? You okay?” He was on his second round of chemo by then. Leiomyosarcoma. Leios from the Greek word for “smooth.” Sarx, Greek for “flesh.” Cancer of the soft connective tissue: bone, cartilage, muscle.
When she sat, he patted her hand and she saw that the treatment had turned his nail beds the color of walnut shells. But she was not going to talk about his nails. She was not going to ask him if he’d slept; he hated that.
“I love the way he stands,” she said, tilting her head. Because it was easier to look at The Cane Cutter with his broad back and tapered waist and biceps all intact than it was to acknowledge how the muscles in her father’s arms and legs had withered away; he’d lost so much weight, the hollows beneath his collarbones were cups of shadow. Because it was easier to appreciate how the track lights brought out the warm tones in the bronze — the rich rusts and golds — than to admit her father’s complexion had turned the color of bile.
“What else?” her father had asked.
She’d reached for the words. “A quiet confidence.” He seemed to approve. She went on. “And a defiance.”
“Yes,” her father said, nodding. “Exactly.”
Now Charley stepped over the butcher paper and bubble wrap heaped on the floor. She slid The Cane Cutter onto the dresser, where she could always see it.
Micah popped a row of bubble wrap. “Did it cost a lot of money?”
“Sort of.” No sense in telling Micah how much.
“Gross,” Micah said, making a face. “It looks like a mud monster. Put it back in the closet.”
Pop, pop. Like a cap gun.
“He’s staying right here.”
Micah draped her dirty T-shirt over The Cane Cutter’s shoulders, pulled it up over his face, went back to her bubble wrap.
“Don’t touch,” Charley said, pulling the T-shirt off. She needed to see him. “I’m not kidding.” And stop that fucking popping.
Four months in the hospital and a year of physical therapy before the doctors said Micah would recover. Charley still put on the blue robe at night. It was her fault Micah wore only long sleeves to school, even when the weather called for flimsy summer clothes. It was her fault Micah didn’t want to swim anymore or go to the beach. Charley cried in the dark, until one day, she came home to the little Spanish bungalow to find The Cane Cutter on her mantle. No sign of her father anywhere, not even a note. But she didn’t need one. The message was clear. He was telling her, Get up. He was telling her, Fight for your life. He was telling her, We are the same, you’ll find your way, I won’t let you fall. She carried the blue robe out to the patio, dropped it on the poured concrete, and doused it with lighter fluid. Then she lit a match.
• • •
Micah dropped the bubble wrap and stepped over the air mattress. At the door, she paused. “Mom? This morning you said we were gonna lose every goddamned—”
“Hey,” Charley said. “listen to me.” She took Micah by the shoulders. “Don’t worry.”
“But you said—”
Charley stole a glance at The Cane Cutter. Years from now, long after her body had turned to dust, the elegantly sculpted chunk of wire and molded metal would still be here; it would pass from Micah to Micah’s children. The sculpture made her aware of what she had to do. That farm would get going again, no matter what stood in its path. For her daughter, for her father. Charley smoothed Micah’s hair. “Forget what I said,” she said. “Your job is to have fun. Let me worry about the rest.”
7
A buckled sandwich board advertised the Blue Bowl’s daily specials: seafood salad, Cajun pasta, shrimp étouffée on top of fried catfish on top of French toast, white-chocolate bread pudding with vanilla ice cream and homemade caramel sauce for dessert. Charley crossed the bridge that spanned the bayou and crunched into the gravel lot filled with monster pickups, pulled alongside a Chevy one-ton with a cracked windshield.
All week, Charley had been consumed with finding a manager. On Monday, she placed an ad in the Louisiana Sugar Bulletin offering a three-thousand-dollar signing bonus. On Tuesday, she posted flyers at the market and plastered them on every telephone pole in town. On Wednesday, she spent so many hours at the Ag station that Gladys, the receptionist, knew how much cream she took in her coffee and had a cup waiting at the front desk when she came back on Thursday.
“Try the Blue Bowl,” Miss Honey had said when Charley said she’d run out of ideas for places to find a manager.
Friday now, and Charley brushed past artificial flowers woven into the lattice by the entrance as she entered, and tried to imagine coming here every morning for coffee. Maybe she would. The place had a certain charm if you didn’t mind the late-seventies Country Kitchen décor: yellow curtains with white eyelet fringe that looked hand sewn, framed pictures of farmers in their fields dating all the way back to the twenties, miniature model tractors that cluttered the shelf running around the room’s perimeter.