Every few minutes, the men whistled to Huey Boy, who flipped a switch causing the hydraulic arm to shove cane from the front of the wagon to the back, closer to where Charley and the crew were pulling stalks. It felt to her that a tsunami of cane was coming at her. But there was no stopping. Each time the cane got low, the men whistled and more stalks got pushed back. At the end of the row, the tractor lumbered onto the headlands, moved five rows over, and the work began again. It was simple, mindless labor, but grueling and treacherous all the same. As the workers grabbed armloads of cane, the long stalks knocked Charley in the head before she learned she needed to duck. When the men dropped the cane in the rows, it landed on her feet and she stumbled. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought they were doing it on purpose. But there was no time to wonder. The cane wagon kept moving. Men kept whistling. The hydraulic arm kept shoving the cane to the back edge of the wagon, and Charley kept working.
The sun rose higher, the temperature leaped by ten degrees in the time it took to reach the side of the field where they’d started, and Charley’s clothes were drenched. One of the men stooped beneath the wagon, grabbed a metal cup from the hook, and held it beneath the watercooler strapped to the axle. When it was full, he offered it to Charley and she gulped it down, not caring that she’d heard members of the crew hack and cough and spit before drinking from that very cup. The water was sweet and cold and trickled down the front of her shirt.
Every few rows, Huey Boy shifted the tractor into neutral, climbed out of the cab, and scaled the plant wagon to check on their progress, his expression, as he looked down at Charley, a mixture of amusement and admiration. Charley imagined what he’d tell his buddies when he met them for a beer after work: that he was working for a crazy black woman from California who not only owned the land, but got behind the wagon and planted cane herself. Then Huey Boy climbed back inside the cab and Charley heard the faint beat of hip-hop over the engine’s rumble.
Finally, the wagon was empty. The men fell back. And as the tractor lurched away, the men gathered handfuls of leaves into small nests and sat down right in the middle of the field, cowboy hats shielding their faces from the sun, and Charley sat too, glad to watch the tractor roll down the headland and out of sight, grateful for the few minutes to rest. One man smoked, but the others took the opportunity to eat, ripping the outer husks off the cane stalks, gnawing at the sweet fibers, sucking and chewing, and finally spitting the pulpy wads in the dirt.
“You work hard,” Romero said, offering Charley a length of cane.
Charley sucked the juice greedily and spat. “Where will you go after this?” The money Romero would make during these next four months was good, Charley thought, but it wouldn’t last all year.
“Arkansas to pick apples,” Romero said, “then home to my village. I have a small farm.”
Charley thought of all the men like Romero — Native Americans and indentured servants from Ireland and Germany, Chinese, West Indians, and former black slaves — who, through the centuries, had left their families and their homelands behind, sometimes voluntarily but sometimes not, to work sugarcane. “I hope you’ll come back next year.”
It wasn’t long before Huey Boy, pulling an empty wagon, appeared and made his way along the furrows. Groaning as they rose, Charley and the rest of the crew didn’t bother to dust off their jeans as they fell in line and the work began again.
• • •
By lunchtime, it was hotter than the Congo Basin, the air heavy with humidity, the few clouds flat against the sky, the trees at the edge of the field blurry through the heat rising from the field. Denton and Alison brought Charley’s lunch from the shop, and the three of them camped out in the tractor’s meager shade.
“I’m impressed,” Denton said. “I thought you’d quit after the first row.”
“My hat goes off to these guys,” Charley said. Normally, the heat lessened her appetite, but the hours of work had left her ravenous and slightly dizzy. “I don’t know how they do it.” She thought about the sick worker she’d driven to the clinic. Whatever he had, she hoped it only lasted twenty-four hours because she doubted she could keep up this pace much longer. Still, as Charley looked at the progress they’d made that morning, there was no denying the thrill of it, no ignoring the simple delicious fact that she had reached this stage in the game.
“Looks like your plan worked, Denton,” Alison said. Indeed, word of their pay package had spread. In addition to the men Denton had hired earlier in the summer, twenty-five more had stopped by the shop in the last week, interested in hiring on, and they’d had the rare luxury of handpicking the crews. “Keep up this pace, we’ll have the back quadrant planted in ten days. Even the locals are putting out a hundred percent.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Charley said, though she knew exactly what Alison was saying. She’d stopped counting the number of times she’d heard people refer to black folks as “locals,” and was weary of their suggestion, sometimes their outright declaration that black folks would rather sit home and collect welfare than put in an honest day’s work.
“Nothing personal,” Alison said.
“I get so tired—” Charley began, and thought, at least call them pioches, which was the term the eighteenth-century planters used in referring to their black slaves and more honestly captured the feeling of disdain, but Denton interrupted.
“Just heard on the radio they’re talking about a hurricane.”
Alison pushed his cigarette into the dirt. “Jesus, Denton. Why you want to go and jinx us?”
“I’m just telling you what I heard. Right now, it’s a tropical storm off Haiti, but it’s getting stronger. Next forty-eight hours it’s supposed to hit between here and Port Arthur.”
“That’s almost a hundred and fifty miles,” Alison said. “May as well say between here and the moon.”
“Maybe,” Denton said. “But it means we’re east of it.”
“What difference does that make?” Charley said, trying to imagine what a hurricane might be like. Earthquakes she knew; but with the exception of the one or two truly devastating ones that had occurred in her lifetime, she didn’t think much of them, they were more of a nuisance, really, and she always laughed to herself when she talked to someone from the East Coast or Midwest who spoke of their unpredictability with what seemed to her an almost irrational fear.
“Winds are always stronger east of a storm,” Denton said, “and there’s usually more water. Has to do with how the storm turns.” He looked out to the horizon and frowned. “I’m telling you now, that storm makes landfall, we’re in big trouble.”
• • •
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.