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.”
20
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.