Thirty-Seven. The Sugar House
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The Sugar House
Numa came for him at the middle of the afternoon and walked him up the street and did not say what for until they were standing at the door of the building, and then all he said was:
“You sat up with fires.”
Nelson had said it once, on a Sunday, at somebody else’s fire, with a whetstone going in his hand and a knife across his knee, and it had gone somewhere.
—
The building was a hundred and thirty feet long and he had walked past the end of it twice a day for nine weeks.
The first thing was that he could not hear.
There was the engine, which was a sound like a large animal breathing on a beat and never getting to the end of the breath; and there was the mill, which was three iron rollers as long as a man and as thick through as a barrel, turning against each other with cane going in between them, and the noise the cane made going in was a wet tearing that came about once a second and did not stop; and under all of it there was the fire.
The second thing was the heat. He came in out of a December afternoon and by the time he was six paces inside he had sweat on his back.
The third thing was that it was not dark and it was not light.
It was full of steam. The steam came up off the kettles and stood in the roof and the openings in the walls could not take it away fast enough, and everything in that building was seen through it, so that a man twenty feet off was a shape with an arm moving.
He had expected a barn. It was not any kind of barn. It was a mouth.
—
He got it in pieces over the first three days, because nobody explained anything, and by the fourth he had the whole of it and it was this.
At the near end the cane came off the carts onto a carrier — a run of oak slats going up an incline on a chain — and men stood along it and laid the stalks on butt-first, evenly, so the rollers took them without choking.
The rollers crushed them. The juice went out at the bottom into a lead gutter and away up the building, and the cane came out the far side flat and pale and dead, and that was bagasse, and it was carted out the back door and it never stopped coming.
The juice went into a vat where a man put lime in it out of a measure and skimmed it, and then it was let along into the train.
The train was five kettles in a row, set in a brick bed with one flue running under all of them.
The furnace mouth was at the far end. So the fire was hottest under the last kettle and drew back under the four before it toward the chimney, and the juice went the other way — started in the biggest and farthest and coolest, and got ladled forward, kettle to kettle, getting less and hotter and thicker at every move, until it came into the last one, which was the smallest and sat almost over the fire, and which was called the batterie.
The other names came at him in the second week. The grande. The flambeau. The sirop. The fifth had a name he could not get his mouth around at all, and he went on not saying it.
Men stood on a plank platform along the train with copper ladles on handles six feet long and moved the sugar forward and took the scum off the top, and the scum went down a trough and out, and Nelson never did find out where it all went.
At the batterie there was one man, and everything in that building was for him.
—
His name was Anténor and he was somewhere past fifty and he had a bad hip and he did not talk.
What he did was watch a kettle of boiling syrup and, at one particular moment and not the moment before or the moment after, call it done — and when he decided it, six men moved at once and the batterie was emptied out into the cooler in about ninety seconds, and then it was filled again from the sirop and it began over.
That was a strike. There were six or seven of them in a watch.
Nelson watched him do it a dozen times before he understood that Anténor was not looking at the kettle.
He was looking at the syrup coming off the edge of his ladle.
When it ran off in a sheet it was not ready.
When it came off the lip in a thread that held together in the air and did not break, it was ready, and then it was ready for about as long as it takes to say so.
If Anténor struck it early you got sugar that would not grain and it went out of the hogshead as molasses and the difference on a crop was money.
If he struck it late it burned, and you lost the kettle, and you lost the taste of everything after it.
—
Nelson’s work was the furnace under the batterie.
There were two firemen on a watch and he was one, and it was cypress and it was bagasse, and the cypress had been cut out of the swamp at the back all year by men he had been digging ditches with in August, and the bagasse came up the building on a cart from the rollers still wet from the cane.
Bagasse burns fast and dirty and gives a hard short heat.
Cypress goes slow. You fed both and you fed them against each other and what you were holding was not a fire.
It was a temperature, in a brick flue, under a kettle of syrup sixty feet away, and a man you could not see was going to make a decision about a thread of sugar based on it.
They wanted it high and they wanted it level and they wanted it that way for eight hours.
On the second night, at some hour, Nelson had the fire going the way he thought a fire ought to go and he took the shovel and he pulled the coals forward and laid them flat and evened them out and closed the door down on it.
A man named Zénon came past with a bucket, looked in at the furnace, put the bucket down, and swore at him in a language he did not have.
Then he opened the door and threw in an armload of bagasse and stood there while it caught, and then he said, in English, slowly, so it would land:
“More.”
—
He did it again on the fourth night.
He did not do it on purpose. He was tired in a way he had not been tired before, and his hands did it.
He had the shovel and he came round the coals and drew them together and pressed the whole of it down flat with the back of the blade, which is the exact motion for laying a bed under wet sawdust in a tobacco barn at midnight in Louisa County so that a fire will breathe for four hours and not wake, and he had done it perhaps nine thousand times.
The batterie fell off in about six minutes.
Anténor did not come down the building. He did not send anybody.
He stood at the far end with his ladle up and watched the syrup run off it in a sheet and waited, with a full kettle and a crew standing round it doing nothing, for as long as it took, and everybody in that building knew whose fire it was.
When they finally struck it Nelson could hear the difference in the noise the men made.
Nobody hit him. Nobody reported it. Duplessis was not in the building.
Nelson stood in front of that furnace with the shovel in his hand and his hands shaking with wanting to fix something that was now already six minutes in the past, and understood that he was, in this building, on the twelfth of December, a man who did not know how to keep a fire.
—
The watches were eight hours.
Two watches a day. So a man was in that building sixteen hours out of the twenty-four, and the sixteen came in two halves with four hours between them, and the four hours had your walk in them and your eating and your sleeping.
They did not stop for Sunday. The mill had lit on the nineteenth of October and it had not been out since and it would not be out until the cane was done, because cane cut and lying in the field goes sour in three days and a stopped train has to be brought back up from cold, and there is no such thing on a sugar place as putting the crop by until Monday.
Nelson did the sum in his head standing at the furnace.
A hundred and twelve hours in a week. He had thought, in the ditches in August, that he had found the bottom of the work on that place, and he had been wrong by about forty hours.
The other thing the sum told him was that it does not matter what time it is.
He came off a watch at two in the morning and walked down a street in the dark to a room and lay down, and came off the next one at ten in the morning and walked down the same street in the sun and lay down, and the difference between those two things went away inside of a week.
There was the mill going and there was the four hours. That was the whole of the day.
By the third week he had stopped knowing what day it was without working it out.
—
On the twenty-second of December a man named Sylvain lost his right arm to the rollers.
He was thirty-one and he had been born on that place and he was good at the work. That is the part.
He was on the carrier and the carrier was where the trouble is, because a stalk that goes in crossways will bring two more up on top of it and then the rollers are taking a bundle instead of a layer, and the whole of the mill will choke, and if the mill chokes the juice stops coming and the train runs dry and every kettle in the building has to be nursed on nothing.
So a man on the carrier reaches in and straightens the stalk.
Everybody reached in. It was how the work was done. You reached in above the rollers and put the stalk flat and took your hand back, and the hand was never nearer to the iron than eight or nine inches, and men did it two hundred times a night.
It was Sylvain’s sixteenth hour. He reached in and the cane he was straightening moved under his hand and carried the cuff of his shirt into the rollers with it, and the rollers are not fast and they are not sudden.
They turn about as fast as a man walks. They took the shirt and then the hand and then they went on taking, and they had no more idea they had a man in them than a millstone has, and there was no stopping them from where he stood, and the engine was at the other end of the building behind the steam.
He got out one sound and then he did not make any others.
They stopped the engine. It took a while — a man had to get there and a man had to understand and a valve had to be shut and the flywheel had to run itself down — and by the time the rollers stopped, Sylvain’s arm was into them past the elbow, and to get him out of the machine they had to back the rollers off, and that is a thing done by hand with bars.
Somebody had a belt above it inside of a minute. Anténor was the one who called out how to lay it, from the far end, without leaving the batterie.
They carried him out and up the street and Duplessis sent a boy on a horse to Thibodaux at seven o’clock and the doctor got there at about ten and by then there was no decision to be made about the arm; it had been made in the mill.
He was alive in the morning. He was alive the morning after that.
—
They lost about fifty minutes.
That is the number Nelson carried out of that night.
They washed the carrier and the rollers down with buckets, and they turned the engine over, and a man named Basile was put on the carrier in Sylvain’s place, and the mill started, and the cane went in with the same wet tearing about once a second, and the juice came up the gutter, and Anténor struck the batterie at some point after midnight and it was good sugar.
Nelson fed his fire the whole time, because the flue could not be let down. That was his work and there was no argument in the world for not doing it, and he did it while a man was being carried up the street.
Nobody was whipped for it. Duplessis did not call anybody drunk or lazy or careless.
He came down at the end of the watch and looked at the rollers and asked two questions and wrote something in the book he kept, and he did not write it against anybody’s name; he wrote it under the day’s work, between the wood and the hogsheads.
He could not find a face at the end of it. The machine had been doing exactly what it was for.
He thought about it through the rest of that watch and he could not get it to come out anywhere, and then the bagasse cart came and he stopped thinking about it and fed the fire.
—
Christmas was on a Tuesday and the mill ran.
He had known it was coming and he had heard men talk about it, and he had not understood the shape of what they were saying until it came, and then he did.
At Fair Prospect, Christmas was the one thing in the year.
The barns had been cold and empty since the middle of November.
There were four days and sometimes five.
There was the keg, and the beef, and Ashmore standing on the steps handing out what he handed out, and passes written for men to go to the Beasleys’ and the Dabneys’ and stay till Monday, and a fiddle in Anna’s house on the second night, and his mother making something out of nothing, and the whole place walking about in the middle of the day with its hands empty.
Here there was cane in the field.
They got a ration of beef and they got flour and they got tafia in the water bucket, and Bergeron came into the sugar house at the middle of the day with his hat off and went down the building and said a word to a good many men, and Numa walked behind him with a list, and Sylvain’s name was said off it the same as anybody’s and a woman carried his out to him, and every man on the place got something — a pair of shoes, or a handkerchief, or tobacco — and Nelson got tobacco and a pair of shoes that were nearly the right size.
Then the watch ran.
They struck the batterie seven times on Christmas Day.
Nelson fed the fire under all seven of them, and came off at two in the morning on the twenty-sixth, and stood outside the near door in the cold for a minute before he went down the street, because outside that building the air on your face was the best thing there was.
The chimneys were going. The whole top of the street was orange.
His sister was ten years old that month and he had the sum for that too.
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