Dennis Lehane: Live by Night

There was no end to the money they’d make.

Graciela said Mendieta was Batista’s puppet and Batista was the puppet of United Fruit and the United States; he’d raid the coffers and rape the land, while the United States kept him propped in place because America believed good deeds could somehow follow bad money.

Joe didn’t argue. He also didn’t point out that they, themselves, had followed bad money with good deeds. Instead he asked her about this house she’d found.

It was a bankrupt tobacco plantation, actually, just outside the village of Arcenas, fifty miles farther west in the Pinar del Río province. It came with a guesthouse for her family and endless fields of black soil for Tomas to run in. The day Joe and Graciela purchased it from the widow, Domenica Gomez, she introduced them to Ilario Bacigalupi outside the attorney’s office. Ilario, she explained, would teach them everything there was to know about farming tobacco, if they were interested.

Joe looked at the small round man with the bandit’s mustache as the widow’s driver whisked her away in a two-toned Detroit Electric. He’d noticed Ilario with the Widow Gomez a few times, always in the background, and had assumed he was a bodyguard in a region where kidnapping wasn’t unheard of. But now he noticed the scarred, oversize hands, the prominence of their bones.

He’d never thought about what he’d do with all those fields.

Ilario Bacigalupi, on the other hand, had given it plenty of thought.

First, he explained to Joe and Graciela, no one called him Ilario; they called him Ciggy, which had nothing to do with tobacco. As a child he’d been incapable of pronouncing his own last name, always getting hung up on the second syllable.

Ciggy told them that 20 percent of the village of Arcenas had, until very recently, depended on the Gomez plantation for work. Since Senor Farmer Gomez had fallen to drink and then fallen off his horse and then fallen into insanity and sickness, there had been no work. For three harvests, Ciggy said, no work. It was why many of the children in the village wore no pants. Shirts, carefully tended to, could last a lifetime, but pants always gave way at some point in the seat or the knees.

Joe had noticed a prevalence of bare-assed children on his drives through Arcenas. Hell, if they weren’t bare-assed, they were naked. Arcenas, in the foothills of Pinar del Río, was more the hope of a village than an actual one. It was a collection of sagging huts with roofs and walls constructed of dried palm fronds. Human waste exited through a trio of ditches that flowed into the same river from which the villagers drank. There was no mayor or town leader to speak of. The streets were cuts of mud.

“We don’t know anything about farming,” Graciela said.

By this point, they were in a cantina in Pinar del Río City.

“I do,” Ciggy said. “I know so much, senorita, that whatever I’ve forgotten is not worth teaching.”

Joe looked into Ciggy’s cagey, knowing eyes and reevaluated the relationship between the foreman and the widow. He’d thought the widow had kept Ciggy for protection, but he now realized Ciggy had spent the sales process watching after his livelihood and making sure the Widow Gomez knew what was expected of her.

“How would you start?” Joe asked him, pouring them all another glass of rum.

“You will need to prepare the seed beds and plow the fields. First thing, patrón . First thing. The season starts next month.”

“Can you stay out of my wife’s way while she fixes up the house?”

He nodded at Graciela several times. “Of course, of course.”

“How many men will you need for this?” she asked.

Ciggy explained that they would need men and children to seed and men to build the seedbeds. They would need men or children to monitor the soil for fungus and disease and mold. They would need men and children to plant and hoe and plow some more and kill the cut worms and mole crickets and stinkbugs. They would need a pilot who didn’t drink too much to dust the crops.

“Jesus Christ,” Joe said. “How much work does this take?”

“We haven’t even discussed topping, suckering, or harvesting,” Ciggy said. “Then there is the stringing, the hanging, the curing, having someone tend the fire in the barn.” He waved his big hand at the breadth of the labor.

Graciela asked, “How much would we make?”

Ciggy pushed the figures across the table to them.

Joe sipped his rum as he looked them over. “So, a good year, if there’s no blue mold or locusts or hailstorms and God shines his light down on Pinar del Río without stop, we make four percent back on our investment.” He looked across the table at Ciggy. “That right?”

“Yes. Because you are only using a quarter of your land. But if you invest in your other fields, bring them back to the state they were in fifteen years ago? In five years, you will be rich.”

“We’re already rich,” Graciela said.

“You will be richer.”

“What if we don’t care about being richer?”

“Then think of it this way,” Ciggy said, “if you leave the village to starve, you may find them all sleeping in your field one morning.”

Joe sat up in his chair. “Is that a threat?”

Ciggy shook his head. “We all know who you are, Mr. Coughlin. Famous Yankee gangster. Friend of the colonel. It would be safer for a man to swim into the middle of the ocean and cut his own throat than to threaten you.” He solemnly made the sign of the cross. “But when people starve and have nowhere to go, where would you have them end up?”

“Not on my land,” Joe said.

“But it’s not your land. It’s God’s. You are renting it. This rum? This life?” He patted his chest. “We are all just renting from God.”

The main house needed almost as much work as the farm.

While the planting season began outside, the nesting season took over on the inside. Graciela had all the walls replastered and repainted, had the flooring in half the house ripped up and replaced when they arrived. There was only one toilet; there were four by the time Ciggy started the topping process.

By then, the rows of tobacco stood about four feet high. Joe woke one morning to air so sweet and fragrant it immediately made him consider the curve of Graciela’s neck with lust. Tomas lay sleeping in his crib when Graciela and Joe went to the balcony and looked out on the fields. They’d been brown when Joe went to sleep, but now a carpet of green sported pink and white blossoms that glittered in the soft morning light. Joe and Graciela looked across the breadth of their land, from the balcony of their house to the foothills of Sierra del Rosario, and the blossoms glittered as far as they could see.

Graciela, standing in front of him, reached back and placed her hand to his neck. He put his arms around her abdomen and placed his chin in the hollow of her neck.

“And you don’t believe in God,” she said.

He took a deep breath of her. “And you don’t believe good deeds can follow bad money.”

She chuckled and he could feel it in his hands and against his chin.

Later that morning, the workers and their children arrived and went through the fields, stalk by stalk, removing the blossoms. Plants spread their leaves as if they were great birds, and from his window the next morning Joe could no longer see the soil, nor any blossoms. The farm, under Ciggy’s stewardship, continued to work without a hitch. For the next stage, he brought in even more children from the village, dozens of them, and sometimes Tomas would laugh uncontrollably because he could hear their laughter in the fields. Joe sat up some nights, listening to the sounds of the boys playing baseball in one of the fallow fields. They’d play until the last of the light had left the sky, using only a broomstick and what remained of a regulation ball they’d found somewhere. The cowhide covering and the wool yarn was long gone, but they’d managed to salvage the cork center.