The man with the lantern quit his ringing as they exited town. The ground they trod was swampy marshland, although folks had still managed to build farms here and there along the winding webs of water. Each home had a lantern out front glowing faintly like a minor star in the morning dark. To Caleb the lanterns felt like guideposts urging him on, but to what exactly was unclear, and the gang of men always turned off the road before ever drawing near enough for him to contemplate their meaning further.
“Mr. Whitney wants his usual lot,” the man with the lantern said.
There were those landowners who wanted the same men day after day, the ones they were happy with. Caleb and Prentiss had fallen in with Mr. Whitney in their early days in Convent and had never gone elsewhere. They stepped forward with the others, eight in all, and the man with the lantern told them to get on.
The road led to a sugar mill, a wooden structure with no roof and no walls. Whitney greeted the men with a single piece of fried bread each. Their chewing was so loud it snuffed out the sounds of the river down the way.
“Five minutes,” Whitney said.
In the biting cold the men huddled as one, eating like wolves in a pack. The temperature would rise once the kettles got boiling.
“I been chopping wood all morning,” Whitney said, as if to suggest the morning had passed them by, when it had yet to come at all. “’Spect three of you to take that over. The rest of you man them kettles like yesterday. Caleb, get yourself on them barrels.”
He knew Caleb by name, for he was the only white man on a crew that otherwise comprised Indians and Negroes, and he was often singled out for the job of least labor. He had once tried to switch roles and hand it off to another man, and it was one of the few times he’d drawn Prentiss’s ire; he’d left his kettle and confronted him with a face covered in sweat.
“You gonna fill those hogsheads,” Prentiss told him. “Heed that man’s words now. Acting up ’cause you got it easy. Too much of your father in you.” That was that. Caleb never made the same mistake.
The routine rarely wavered, and this day was like the others. The men not chopping wood lit the flames beneath their kettles. There were four in all, lined up in a train. When the water boiled off from the first, the syrup was ladled to the next, and the process of refinement finished with Caleb, who stood by the hogsheads, watching the syrup flow in, and when a barrel was full he’d install the lid, store it in the corner as it cooled, and bring the next one out to fill.
The heat built upon itself unabated, and their coughing was incessant, long barks that began to carry the signature of each man’s toil. At day’s end they’d rush down to the freezing water, jumping in like animals, shedding the grime of the day and floating still-like so their limbs might have a moment’s reprieve from the endless stirring, the endless standing.
Caleb recalled his first week of work, when a young man, no older than himself, had dropped his ladle. The syrup oozed like lava, and they watched the man’s silent calamity, his eyes overtaking his face, his hands crinkling together into balls of pain. It was a fascinating interaction, so much so that no one moved for a moment: the syrup seeping through the man’s boot, the grim realization, when pulling it from his foot, that the leather had latched itself to his skin. He later described the pain of the doctor finally removing the boot: like his tongue being ripped from his mouth. Caleb hadn’t forgotten that. He doubted any of them had.
He did his job carefully, and often watched Prentiss from the nearest kettle; Prentiss had a beard now, having grown it out of some fear that he and Caleb might be sought out early on, that he might need some disguise. He had never cut it, and while in the intervening months he had managed only a small clump at the chin and a middling mustache, he looked older these days, though Caleb knew the younger version was still in there somewhere, waiting for the proper time to return. At least that was his hope.
Mr. Whitney was seventy and nearly toothless. He walked among them with one hand in his pants and the other holding his chronograph. The sugar boiled off at precise intervals, and it was strange that he kept the time at all, considering how regularly he spoke of his instinct for knowing when to end the process based on sight alone. Over time, his actions—the fondling of his groin, the incessant clicking of his watch—began to seem less involved with their work and more a symptom of his mania, a means to calm his nerves.
It was midday before Whitney called for a break. The men walked out in single file. A bucket of water sat beneath a tree beside the mill, and they each took a swig, sitting among themselves, their bodies beaded with sweat in the cold, all of them silent. Whitney took a moment to expound, once more, on his intent to purchase an evaporator, which would make them all expendable, for the boiling would be exact to the machine’s standards, but the talk had been repeated so many times that no one paid him any mind.