Natalie Baszile - Queen Sugar

Charley felt a rush of excitement, a warm tingling that spread over her arms and down her spine, causing her to feel a little light-headed. “This is it.”

Dust billowed behind the Volvo until the path ended at a bank of trees. Woods stood tall and impassable to the left, but up ahead to the right sprawled open space. Charley’s heart raced as she imagined what was out there: fields so splendidly verdant she’d feel short of breath just looking at them. Her father left the door open and she had stepped through it.

Charley parked. Then she, Micah, and Miss Honey made their way over the clotted ground.

“Holy moly!” Micah cried. “It’s huge!” She took a picture with the ancient Polaroid, then hurled a stick far into the tangle of weeds and creeping vines.

“My God,” Charley muttered. “This can’t be.” Across the field, wide and long as ten city blocks, stunted cane stalks dotted the earth, their straggly leaves a starved shade of pale green with deeply sunburned edges. Grass and weeds grew thick and matted between the rows, which were preposterously rutted with tire tracks. Even to Charley’s untrained eye, it was clear no one had been out there in months. Where were the neatly tilled rows, the lush cane plants high as a man’s shoulder? Where was the moist soil, dark and rich as ground French Roast? Under a morning sky coated with clouds gray as concrete, Charley stared out over fields that should have looked like the hundreds of lush acres she passed on the drive down, but didn’t.

“I thought this Frasier fella was managing the place,” Miss Honey said, raising her hand to shield against the glare.

“He was.” Charley twisted her wedding ring absentmindedly. “Last time we talked, he said something about replacing a tractor belt.”

“Well, I’d say he’s got some explaining to do.”

Charley consulted her watch. They were five minutes late. “You think he’s been here and left already?”

“I couldn’t tell you what he might do,” Miss Honey said. “I don’t know this Frasier from Adam’s housecat.”

“I know where we should put the cows,” Micah declared, peering through her camera’s viewfinder. “They can live out by those trees.”

“This isn’t that kind of farm,” Charley said.

“But we can’t have a farm without cows,” Micah pressed. “What about goats?”

“No goats.”

“Well, what then?”

Charley glanced at her watch again, then squeezed the bridge of her nose. “Sweetheart, why don’t you walk around and take some pictures.” White clouds, thick as mashed potatoes, drifted across the sky. Something that looked like a flat-winged bee bounced between the blossoming vines as hot air rose from the dirt.

“My feet are starting to swell,” Miss Honey said. “I’ll be in the car.”

• • •

It was almost ten o’clock before an old Ford F-150 with a “Jesus is my co-pilot” license plate rambled down the road ahead of a long contrail of dust. George Strait’s crooning voice wafted through the truck’s open window. A white man sat behind the wheel.

“Thank God.” Charley waved. She had imagined Frasier as older, early sixties perhaps, and stocky as a lumberjack. She had imagined a man wearing embossed cowboy boots and a cowboy hat with a cane leaf braided around the band. But the man who climbed down from the truck looked much younger. Years of physical labor had worn any possibility of fat from his frame. His NASCAR jersey had Dale Earnhardt’s picture on the front and sun gilded his brown hair, which, at that moment, was wet. She walked over to greet him. “Mr. Frasier?”

“Miss Bordelon,” Frasier said, in the same flat tone she recognized from the phone. “Sorry about the time. Some accident on the road.”

“No, no, that’s okay,” Charley said, extending her hand. “It’s nice to finally meet you. In person, I mean.”

“Likewise.” Frasier gave her hand a firm shake but didn’t say anything more.

“I’ve been waiting a long time for this day.” Charley gestured toward the fields. “It’s good to see everything for myself. I’d have come down sooner, but I had to wait for my daughter to finish school. Now that I’m here, though, I’m ready to get down to business.” She waited for Frasier to respond, but he didn’t, so Charley, growing increasingly uneasy, plunged in deeper. “I know we talked about all the work to be done, but I have more questions. For starters, and I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, I was looking at the fields and I noticed… Well, they don’t look exactly like I thought they would.” Like they should.

“Yeah, well.” Frasier threaded his thumbs through his belt loops. He was hard-core Nashville and Grand Ole Opry. Jim Beam straight from the bottle.

“I don’t mean to question your work,” Charley said. “It’s just that I passed plenty of other fields on my drive into town and they were so neat, so orderly, and I—”

“Thought yours would look better,” Frasier said.

“Well, yes. But I don’t want you to think I’m criticizing—”

“Actually, Miss Bordelon.” Frasier looked at Charley with a pained expression, then straightened as though he’d practiced what he was about to say. “I won’t be working for you.”

“You won’t be what?”

“I took another job.”

“You what ?”

Frasier fell silent. He looked down at the ground, then out over the fields.

“But when?” Charley said. “Why didn’t you tell me?” She stared at Frasier. He had an honest face, the kind you’d want to see if you were stranded along the roadside with a flat tire late at night. “Are you working for someone else? Because if it’s money, I don’t have much, but I’m sure we can work something out.” Without thinking, she touched her wedding ring again, a platinum band that had been pounded thin in back where the jeweler made it larger. Six angled prongs framed an enormous diamond that had belonged to Davis’s mother before it became her engagement ring.

“My brother-in-law pulled some strings,” Frasier said. “Got me a job on a rig.”

“Rig?”

“Oil rig,” Frasier said. “Out in the Gulf.”

Charley twisted her ring so that the diamond pressed into her palm. “But I just talked to you two weeks ago. You didn’t say anything about another job.”

“I know. I wanted to try it out first.”

“You’re kidding, right? This is a joke. We’re supposed to harvest this cane in October. We only have five months.”

Frasier batted at the closest cane plant, then ripped a withering leaf from the stalk. “I’ve been working cane since I was sixteen, Miss Bordelon. I’m shamed to admit it, but I don’t have a penny saved. If I bust a knee, what’ll I do? Couple years back, Mr. LeJeune took—”

“Who?”

“Mr. LeJeune. The man who owned this farm before your daddy. When he got too sick to run this place himself, his kids stepped in. But they weren’t really interested. They were off in New Orleans, riding on floats, going to balls, drinking Pimm’s Cups at the Columns Hotel.”

“I won’t be riding on floats,” Charley said. “And I’ve never heard of a Pimm’s Cup. Mr. Frasier, please.”

Frasier crumpled the cane leaf in his palm. “I had to beg ’em to plant enough cane last year and they hardly took care of the cane that was here. When LeJeune died, they scraped by until they sold. Your daddy convinced me we could bring this place back. But now he’s gone too.”

“But I’m here,” Charley said. “Give me a chance.”

Frasier shredded another cane leaf. “If I don’t do something now, I’ll run out of money before I run out of air. I don’t want to be greeting folks at Walmart when I’m sixty-five.”