Chapter 14: The Tour

Luc put his napkin down.

"She doesn't work here, Mémère. I fired her."

"You fired her from your payroll." Mémère stood up, which takes her a while. "She's on mine now. Monday, six o'clock, chère. Don't be late."

"I've never been late," I said.

"Then don't start."

Luc stared in shock.

He'd said those same words to me on Red Day morning.

His own voice seemed to echo back at him from an old woman's mouth.

On Monday I walked into the aging barn at a quarter to six.

The whole crew was there already.

Twenty of them, in boots and blue shirts, standing along the 2023 row with the lids pulled.

Nobody said anything.

Then the foreman stepped forward with something wrapped in a feed sack.

He unwrapped it.

It was a paddle.

This one was older and darker, the handle worn smooth and pale where a hand had held it for fifty years.

"Mémère sent it down," the foreman said. "Says you'll know whose it was."

I knew.

I'd watched her hold it every Monday from the time I was nine.

I took it.

"Well," the foreman said, and cleared his throat. "Go on, then. We're not getting any younger and neither's the mash."

Somebody at the back started clapping.

Then they all did.

Twenty people in rubber boots, clapping in a pepper barn at six in the morning, for the woman from the Facebook group.

I had to look at the barrels for a minute.

Then I dipped the paddle and tasted.

Salt, heat, old oak, three good years.

"Yes," I said.

The next one.

"Yes."

When I walked out, my eyes were watering, and I told everybody it was the mash.

The Houston buyer came the next Monday, the last one in September.

Luc had planned it like a wedding.

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