He reached down and lifted the cloth sack out of her hand and tied its loose end to his saddle pommel.
“The pepper juice giving you blisters. You need to soak your hands in milk at night. It gonna take the sting right out,” he said.
“They don’t be hurting, Legion. I promise. I got to get my row,” Ladice said.
This time he didn’t reply. He turned his horse in a circle and came up behind her and let the horse’s forequarters knock against her.
“Legion, my daddy expecting to see me this afternoon. He coming down from the quarters. I got to be out here in the row where he can see me,” she said.
“You ain’t got a daddy, girl. Don’t make me ax you again, no,” Legion said.
The other workers, bent over in the pepper bushes, never looked up from their own fear and grief with the sun and heat and blistered fingers and the ball of pain that grew steadily in the small of the back through the long afternoon. Ladice wiped the dust and sweat off her face with her dress and began the walk to the gum trees in whose midst was a thorn bush, one with deep green leaves and red flowers that looked like drops of blood in the hot shade.
She heard a car honk on the road. She turned and saw Mr. Julian in his Lincoln Continental, its whitewall tires and wirewheels gleaming in the sunlight, like a shining invention that had appeared out of a cloud. He got out in the road, wearing a long-sleeved white shirt with purple garters on the sleeves and seersucker pants and a Panama hat on the back of his head. His smile was wonderful, and he was looking at her, his face filled with goodness, the influence of his presence so immediate that Legion dropped her sack to the ground and dismounted from the saddle and led his horse toward the road, so his employer would not be forced to look up at him and address him on horseback.
The easy smile never left Mr. Julian’s face, but she could hear his words drifting across the rows on the wind.
“I’m surprised to see you bump a young woman with your horse like that, Legion. I suspect that was an accident, wasn’t it?” he said.
“Yes, sir. I tole her I was sorry about that,” Legion said.
“That’s good. ’Cause you’re a good man. Let’s don’t have a conversation like this again.”
Ladice picked up her sack and got back in the row and stooped over and began picking the peppers whose juice sometimes caused her hands to swell as though they had been stung by bumblebees. She glanced sideways at Mr. Julian, at the way he held himself, the cleft in his chin, the sheen on his hair when he removed his hat, his red tie blowing over his shoulder in the wind. Physically, Legion towered over Mr. Julian, but Legion stood in silence, like a chastised child, motionless, while Mr. Julian unsnapped the cover on his gold vest watch and looked at the time and snapped the cover shut again, then began discussing a deep-sea fishing trip he wanted to take.
While he talked his eyes remained fastened on Ladice.
“Don’t be t’inking you special, girl. Don’t be that kind of fool,” an old woman in the next row said.
A week later Mr. Julian gave Ladice a job in the big house and new dresses to wear to work and the apartment over the garage to live in. She knew the price he would extract but did not think less of him for it. In fact, his obvious need, his male dependency, the fact that he wanted her, that he had chosen her out of all the women in the quarters, that any night he would come for her, all his weaknesses exposed, these thoughts made her cheeks burn and her breath rise like a shard of glass in her chest.
She entertained herself with fantasies as she worked in the ornate silence of his house, dusting the antique chairs that were never sat in, placing cut flowers in a large silver bowl on a dining room table that was never used, listening for the little bell by Mrs. LaSalle’s bedside, the only lifeline the old woman had to the world beyond her bedroom. The Negro boys who had courted Ladice only a week earlier seemed part of a distant memory now, one of parked cars behind juke joints and insects humming in the hot darkness or a hurried coupling on a stale-smelling mattress in a corncrib.
She sensed a new power in herself among all those who lived by the rules and strange parameters that governed life on Poinciana Island. On her first visit to the plantation store after moving up to the big house, the clerk called her “Miss Ladice,” and Legion and another white man stepped aside when she crossed the gallery to the parking lot.
It was during her second week at the big house, just after sunset, when she was fresh from her bath and dressed in clean clothes, that she heard the weight of Mr. Julian’s footsteps on the garage apartment stairs. Her hand moved to the switch for the outside light.
“There’s no need to turn that on. It’s only I,” he said through the screen door.
She stood still, her hands folded demurely in front of her, unsure whether she should act first by pushing open the door for him, wondering if even that small a courtesy would indicate a foreknowledge about his behavior that he would find insulting and presumptuous.
When she didn’t speak, he said, “Am I disturbing you, Ladice?”
“No, suh, you ain’t. I mean, you aren’t.” She held the door open. “Would you like to come in, suh?”
“Yes, I couldn’t sleep. I left Miz LaSalle’s window open so I could listen for her bell. I understand you’ve graduated from high school.”
“Yes, suh. I went t’ree years at plantation school and one at St. Edward’s.”
“Have you thought about college?”
“The closest for colored is Southern in Baton Rouge. I ain’t got the money for that.”
“There’re scholarships. I could help with one,” he said.
But he was not hearing his own words now. His eyes lingered on her mouth, the thickness of her hair, her skin that was as smooth as melted chocolate, the lovely heart shape of her face. She saw him swallow and an expression like both shame and lust suffuse his face. His hands cupped her shoulders, then he bent toward her and kissed her cheek and let his hands slip down her arms and over her waist and onto the small of her back.
“I’m a foolish old man who has little in the way of a married life, Ladice. If you wish, I’ll leave,” he said.