There wasn’t room for a car to stop on the high bridge, but since it was still early and no cars were coming, Ralph Angel stopped anyway. He stood at the guardrail and looked out over the cane fields, stretched out like a soft green carpet in the morning light, and the bayou sliding beneath him. It was a long way down. He thought again about how that man on the bike must have felt, falling through the air, then hitting the water. Was he surprised to discover he was alive or had he always known he would survive? Ralph Angel thought back to that terrible moment when Blue fell into the barge slip. He’d thought he would die and he’d felt — he’d felt relief that it would all finally be over. Almost wished it could be so. But then he’d thought of Blue, all alone in the world, and it had been enough to make him keep going. He had to keep going. Somehow.
Ralph Angel pulled his tie from around his neck, took off his shirt. For a long time, he stood there on the bridge in his undershirt, feeling the morning air against his skin. He held his new clothes over the rail until the breeze came up from underneath and then he stood there watching as they drifted down to the bayou.
AUGUST
19
August now, 5:30 a.m., and the temperature was already in the high seventies with 86 percent humidity. This late in the summer, anyone with money had escaped the asphyxiating heat and fled to coastal Florida — but not cane farmers. Because planting season had begun. There was no time to rest. And so, under a dawn sky aglow with misty pinks and purples, Charley, Denton, and Alison hitched planter wagons to tractors for the first day of planting, while crews of laborers — black locals and Mexican migrants up from Guanajuato — gathered around Denton’s pickup, waiting for instructions.
“Do we really need all these men?” Charley asked. “Isn’t there some machine we can rent that plants cane? Because my labor costs are going to shoot through the roof.”
“There’s no cane planting machine that I know of,” Denton said. “And if there was, we couldn’t afford it. You gotta trust me. Planting by hand is the way to go. Has been for the last two hundred years.”
Since cane grew from cuttings rather than seed, they had to cut some of Charley’s premium cane in the second quadrant that would ordinarily have been harvested—“mother stalk” Denton called it — and replant it in the freshly cultivated fields.
Yesterday, they had cut the mother stalk and loaded it into the cane wagons. Now, as soon as Denton gave the signal, each tractor would pull a wagon through the fields slowly enough for the crews following behind to yank the mother stalks off the back and lay them in the open rows. Later, another tractor would come along and cover each row with dirt.
Between now and early September, Charley needed to clear and cultivate 25 percent of her land — rid it of the oldest cane stalks, which were no longer producing, and replant the same ground with mother stalk. In a few weeks, delicate shoots known as first-year stubble would sprout from knobs along the recently buried stalks, and twelve months from now, if all went well, she’d have a decent stand of new cane to harvest for the next four years. That’s how it went: 25 percent new cane, 75 percent existing. It was a constant cycle, one made even more unforgiving by the brutal August heat. Planting season was fleeting; and between the thunderstorms and the equipment breakdowns, Charley couldn’t stop for a minute if she wanted next year’s crop in the ground on schedule.
• • •
By six o’clock, it was light enough to start. The last tractor was hitched, the crews assigned. They were about to head toward the back section, now known as Micah’s Corner, when Romero, the most experienced of the Mexican laborers, told Charley one of his men was sick.
“Sick how?” Charley said, eyeing the thermometer she’d nailed to the shop door so she could warn the men when it got too hot to work. Last week she rushed a man with a core temperature of one hundred six to the clinic. Two more degrees, the doctor warned, he would have died.
“Fever,” Romero said. The brim of his hat flared wide as a whirling dervish’s skirt. “It’s no good, I know. But if he works today, he will maybe make the others sick too.”
“Shit,” Charley said, but Romero was right, of course. After all the trouble she’d gone through to get the men up here — the H-2 visas and the bus tickets from Guanajuato, the expense of fixing up the workers’ house behind the shop so they’d have a decent place to sleep — the last thing she could afford was for them all to get sick. “I’ll drive him to the clinic.” Charley dug in her pocket for her keys. She pulled a black man who went by Huey Boy off the crew and told him to drive the tractor, then radioed Denton and Alison, already on their way to Micah’s Corner, that she’d return soon as she could.
• • •
It was after eight by the time Charley got back from town. In halting high school Spanish and with a series of hand gestures, she explained the prescriptions to the sick worker, set a bottle of water by his bed, then headed for Micah’s Corner. When she’d first arrived in Saint Josephine, this quadrant was the worst section of her land — blackjack land, Denton had said, ominously — overgrown with weeds, johnsongrass, and useless fourth-year stubble, the rows crooked as witch’s fingers and so deeply rutted they were almost beyond repair. But since they’d cleared everything out and started over, the rows were straight and evenly spaced. Every time Denton pulled the cultivator through, he’d climbed down from his tractor, shaking his head in wonder, saying, “If I hadn’t seen it for myself, I wouldn’t believe it. Cutter goes through there like a wind song.”
Now, standing at the edge of those fields, under a sky that had already faded from blue to white in the rising heat, it was obvious what the morning’s delay had cost her crew. The goal was to plant five rows at a time with each man responsible for a row. But with four men, not five, behind the wagon, they hadn’t made much progress. The crew moved slowly, pulling cane stalks from the wagon with extra care to ensure each row was filled, but Charley saw gaps where there was still simply no cane at all. Those spaces would be empty once the cane grew, which meant a lower yield next year.
Without another thought, Charley ran out to the field. Huey Boy was doing a good job of driving, so instead of replacing him, she joined the crew, pulling armloads of cane stalks off the back of the wagon. The men looked at her as though she’d lost her mind, whispered in Spanish, but there was no time to explain. Piled ten feet high in the wagon, the cane was still heavy with dew. Leaves and dirt were mixed in with the stalks, as if an enormous hand had ripped a ton of cane from the earth and dropped it into the wagon. Which was pretty much the way it had happened: after Denton cut the cane yesterday, Alison had used the derrick, which looked to Charley like a gigantic claw, to scoop the cane off the ground and dump it into the wagon until it was close to overflowing.
Positioning herself behind the wagon, Charley was surprised to discover that the tractor bumped along at a steady clip, and it was all she could do to pull a few stalks off and lay them end to end before the tractor was out of reach and she had to run to keep up. As she worked, she thought of the rats, snakes, rabbits, even wild pigs that might, at that very moment, be buried in each scoop. Chances were they’d outrun the combine when it went through, or were sliced up as it passed, but who knew for sure? She’d heard stories of rats leaping out of the wagon, of men being bitten by snakes coiled among the stalks. Then there was the broken glass and the cane leaves with their razor-sharp edges. That was only the beginning. After just a few minutes, dirt had caked her arms, her watch, and the front of her jeans and had even sifted into her pockets, and she wondered if she’d ever be clean again.