Cane

When the mule balked, he hit him sometimes with the flat of a hand upside the head; more often the stick he carried did its angry trick. The mule’s job was to power the press, iron on iron that wrung the sugar out of cane, circling under the coarse beam attached to his shoulders and neck. That mule of my childhood was black, remained blackly obedient as round and round he made himself the splintered hand of a clock, the groan and squeak of machinery chewing the reedy stalks to pulp, each second delivering another sweet thin drop into the black pot at the center. He hit him with a rag, old headrag, but the animal winced only with the thrash of a cane stalk itself—he squinted under the rule of that bamboo. The sun was another caning on his black-hot flesh. He was slow as the blackstrap syrup the boiled sugar made, so true to the circle he dragged we hardly saw him. We loved the rustling house of green cane, blind in that field of tropical grasses whose white plumes announced the long season’s wait. We yearned for the six-foot stem, the eventual six pieces the machete sliced at the joints, then the woody exterior peeled back lengthwise with a blade. It was a black hand we waited for, his job to lay bare the grainy fiber we chewed. That juice on our tongues was his sweetness at work. Chester was his name, he kept the mule.