The Sugar Mill Sued Me After the Flood. Their Attorney Was the Girl I Was Supposed to Marry Twenty-Five Years Ago

My name is Beau Thibodeaux. I’m 46, and I grow sugarcane on eleven hundred acres in St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, down near the bayou where my family has farmed for six generations.

Cajun country. Live oaks, Spanish moss, crawfish boils on Sunday, and cane fields as far as you can see.

When I was twenty-one, I was going to marry Celeste Marchand.

We’d been together since we were sixteen. Prom, homecoming, summers on my uncle’s boat. I bought a ring with two years of savings from cutting cane. I had the whole thing planned for the Fourth of July, on the levee, with fireworks.

On July second, she told me she’d been accepted to law school in New York.

“Come with me,” she said.

“I can’t leave the farm,” I said. “My daddy’s sick.”

“Then I can’t stay,” she said.

She left. I kept the ring in a cigar box in my closet for twenty-five years.

I married someone else at thirty. It lasted six years. We’re still friendly. She says I never really unpacked my heart.

Last August, the rain came.

Twenty-two inches in three days. The bayou came over its banks and the levee on the back side of my property gave way. Four hundred acres of cane sat underwater for a week.

I lost most of the crop.

My flood insurance covered the house and the equipment barn. It didn’t cover the cane.

And I had a contract with the sugar mill in Franklin to deliver forty thousand tons that fall.

I delivered nine.

In January, the mill sued me for breach of contract. They wanted eight hundred thousand dollars in damages.

The court ordered mediation first. I drove to a law office in Lafayette on a rainy Tuesday morning in the only suit I owned.

I walked into the conference room.

And there she was.