The Cutting Season

by Attica Locke

  “I’m sure he would have said something,” she said, only just then remembering Bobby’s sudden appearance in the parish, his sly report that he was keeping an eye on things, most especially what his brother might be up to. He’d made the same complaint as Lorraine, the bitter observation that his brother, Raymond, was all about money.

  “Ask him, then,” Lorraine said, hands on her hips, as if she were daring Caren to do just that. “Go on and ask Raymond what he and his daddy were talking about today. I’m not stupid, baby. I know what I heard.” She tucked the unlit cigarette back behind her ear. Pearl, standing a full foot below Lorraine’s chin, nodded her support.

  “Yeah, you ask him,” Ennis said. “We got a right to know.”

  “Shit,” said Cornelius. “I need to know if I need to be looking for a job.”

  “Slow down, y’all,” Dell said.

  Dell, the third-oldest among the cast, behind Ennis and Eddie Knoxville, was wearing a red jogging suit and white sneakers, Keds knockoffs from Walmart or the Family Dollar. Caren had always appreciated her practical, no-nonsense manner. “Let’s just wait and see what she finds out,” Dell said. Even she seemed to demand an answer, one way or another. And it fell to Caren, their boss and the only one on the plantation besides Lorraine who’d ever spoken two words to Raymond Clancy, to find it.

  “Would you?” Ennis asked. “Would you talk to him, Miss C?”

  Outside, the line for the next show was already forming.

  She heard voices, women mostly, a sorority, or a book club maybe.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” Caren said, urging them to get back to work, even as she felt her own legs unsteady beneath her. What was Raymond up to? She, too, thought she had a right to know.

  Within minutes, the audience members were filing in. Caren hung around just long enough to introduce the play, slipping out quietly at the start of Monsieur Duquesne’s first lines, words to his new bride upon arriving at their new homestead. “Ah, ma chère,” he says, “we shall make a fine life here indeed.”

  The same lines, three days a week.

  The whole thing was on a continuous loop, had been for years.

  She walked to the main house and placed a call to Raymond’s office. Joyce, his secretary, was unable to produce her boss or be in any way specific about when he might be available. Not once, but three times Caren called, trying to get a hold of him. By lunchtime, she’d already decided on a more direct approach. She left early to get Morgan from school, planning a single stop along the way. On the highway, she passed the exit for Laurel Springs, heading straight for Clancy’s law office in Baton Rouge.

  10

  She’d never taken to the city. Nor did she have any deep love for sleepy Donaldsonville, the town where she was born, where she’d gone to grade school and high school, her mother driving her to town every day before she went to work in the heat of Belle Vie’s kitchen. It was New Orleans that had always held Caren’s imagination, held her heart in the palm of its jeweled hand, in the breath of every blue note creeping out of somebody’s window, down streets glowing coral and pink, where folks drank French coffee and bourbon on their porch steps, chatted up their neighbors through the night. She was twelve years old when she first laid eyes on it, a city that never lost the luster and magic she affixed to it in girlhood, the lens through which she first viewed it, one warm day in March. She’d been pulled out of class unexpectedly, her mother making a rare appearance at school midday. Helen Gray wasn’t dressed for work, had at some point taken the time to go home and change. She was tall and slim, Helen, possessed of the same sharp features as Caren, cheekbones cut into the putty of her nut-brown skin and a mouth set in a tight line, softened only by sudden laughter, when she would throw her head back, showing the tiny gap between her two front teeth. She was wearing a long skirt that day and a blue sweater set, had slipped on a pair of heels, and on her neck set a circle of pearls. She was dressed for church, it seemed, for some solemn task that lay ahead for both of them.

  She nodded toward the passenger seat. “Get in,” she said.

  Caren slid in without a word and rode the first fifty miles in silence.

  She fiddled with the radio until the signal gave out. And only once did she trouble to ask her mother, “Where are we going?” Helen stared at the road ahead.

  They came into the city from the west.

  Helen rolled down the window at a certain point and lit a cigarette.

  She was tense, Caren could tell, but also loving and openly solicitous the further east they got, reaching across the upholstered front seat from time to time to pat Caren’s leg. She wanted her daughter to know she was on her side, no matter what came next.

  Caren kept her face pressed to the passenger-side window, taking in the suburban sprawl of Kenner and Metairie, the flat, gray strip malls and big-box stores and houses made of cheap wood, their back sides pressed up against the interstate, all the while catching glimpses of her reflection in the glass. She hadn’t combed her hair, hadn’t bothered to smooth the kinks along her hairline or change her clothes. She was still in her school jeans, her green-and-white gym sneakers, and a worn T-shirt. This, too, she would come to hold against her mother. She’d never been given a chance.

  He lived in Uptown, on Chestnut Street.

  He was a doctor, a specialist of some sort, one of the few blacks who’d been welcomed into the oak-lined neighborhood of colonials and Victorians, of bankers and lawyers and retired businessmen. Even as early as the 1970s, Glenn Carle was a respected member of that community, a family man, with a wife and two kids.

  They were in the front yard that day, all of them.

  Helen parked their white Pontiac across the street.

  The house was only a few blocks from Napoleon Avenue. Caren could hear music from a nearby restaurant—not ragtime, but something like it, something bluesy and full of long notes, wafting from two streets over. The sun was almost setting. She asked her mother why they were here, and Helen nodded to the man in the yard of the butter-yellow house. He was sitting on the porch steps with a newspaper folded into a tight square, slippers on his feet, looking up from time to time to watch his kids playing . . . which is how he saw them, parked across the street, hidden in the shade of an old oak.

  “That,” her mother said matter-of-factly, “is your father.”

  He stepped down from the porch, suddenly ushering his family inside for the evening, the wife and his two kids, a boy and a girl, the girl not that much older than Caren. He waited and watched them gathering balls and books and a folded-up lawn chair that, in this neighborhood, would have been gauche to leave sitting outside overnight. He waited until his whole family was inside the house before crossing the street. Caren was slouched in the front seat of her mother’s car, feeling her stomach lift and then sink, feeling a clammy sweat across her back and chest. He didn’t look anything like her, she thought, with his thick arms, his dark skin, and narrow, almost delicate features. He put one hand on the roof of the car, the other on the window frame, leaning in, addressing her mother first. He didn’t seem angry, or even exasperated. Still, there was no joy in his face, no pleasure in their sudden appearance here, outside of his home. Looking at Caren’s mother, he sighed and shook his head.

  “Come on, Helen,” was all he said.

  Then he looked at Caren, for a long time actually, the corners of his mouth turning up, not so much into a smile as an expression of marvel, wonder, and what-if. Caren felt her cheeks burn. He reached into the car, reached all the way across the front seat for her left hand, his skin incredibly soft. He held her hand, gave it a squeeze, then nodded to Helen and turned and walked back across the street to the front steps of his house. Years later, when he thought Caren was old enough to understand, to accept his version of an apology, he would say he felt he owed something to the people with whom he had set down roots. Family is fate, he’d said;
but it’s also a choice.

  Her mother seemed to think this would finally put the whole ugly thing to rest, this question of where and to whom Caren really belonged. The facts about her father had been made plain, hadn’t they? He was a man neither one of them could have. “I’m your mother,” she’d said on that long car ride home. “I’m your family.” But a seed of resentment was planted that day, one that grew through Caren’s teen years. Up till then, she had only ever known herself as a Gray, as the daughter of a woman whose whole life had been spent in Ascension Parish, whose very identity had been formed around a legacy of labor on a plantation. And now Caren wanted something more. She peppered her mother with questions about her dad, finally in her seventeenth year getting the barest of details, including the story of her parents’ meeting at a wedding reception at Belle Vie, where her father was a guest. He’d ended up hanging around the kitchen after hours, a doctor with his tie hanging loose, looking for the pretty girl who’d served him earlier. She came down the steps with a smile. They were, both of them, testing out a mutual attraction that had come on strong and unexpected. It was an affection that held on for a few months, actually, with Caren’s father making the nearly hundred-mile drive at least once a week, until he just didn’t anymore, until he went back to his wife and his doctor’s life and the butter-yellow house in Uptown—an outcome Helen swore she saw coming. She was a country girl, after all, a cook, and a woman men like Caren’s father just didn’t marry. Helen said she knew he would never leave his world in New Orleans. But what Caren could never understand is why they didn’t leave theirs. She couldn’t understand staying at Belle Vie, in the tiny world of Ascension Parish, when just down the highway there was a father, a man, and a life that Caren imagined was far better than the one her mother had given her, a childhood spent on a plantation, in the shadow of the big house. She started to hate her mother a little after that, for not wanting more. And she started dreaming of a way out.

  Raymond Clancy’s office was on Third Street, not far from the capitol building. Caren could see the octagonal tower from the twelfth-floor offices of Clancy, Strong, Burnham & Botts, where she was waiting now, looking slightly out of place among the well-heeled clients, men in fine-stitched suits and women in designer boots. Caren was still in jeans and her ropers, which were dotted with mud, having bothered only to change her shirt and tie up her hair with a rubber band before heading out.

  When Clancy came out to greet her, she stood, smoothing the line of her jeans. “Gray,” he said. “You must have read my mind.” His smile was broad and tight. He had large, white, capped teeth and his breath smelled of licorice, or else gin. He gripped her hand while patting her on the back. “I’ve been meaning to call you,” he said, somehow ignoring the fact that she’d phoned his office three times today. He led her down a long, overlit hallway, the walls of which were lined with photographs of partners, past and present, including a large portrait of a young and handsome Leland James Clancy, Esq. It was Bobby, Caren noted, who looked most like his father.

  His office was the last one on the right, large and professionally done, with floor-to-ceiling drapes of heavy brocade that framed his view of the Mississippi River, and a credenza that Caren happened to know he’d had his decorator pull from one of the cottages at Belle Vie. The guest chairs in his office matched the carpet, which matched the buttered-beige color of the walls. The décor was attractive and strong, but blander than she would have thought his wealth and position afforded him. Caren couldn’t see the point of having that much money if all of it led to beige.

  It wasn’t until Clancy closed the door behind her that she realized they weren’t alone. In a rear corner, on the left side of Clancy’s desk, two men were hunched over a laptop computer, the young one, a white guy in his thirties, sitting on a backless ergonomic chair, typing. Someone might have taken him for a young lawyer or a legal aide at the firm, but Caren didn’t think so. She’d gone to law school, for a while at least, and she’d lived with a lawyer once, one who had worked in an office just like this one–six, sometimes seven days a week. These two just didn’t look the part. The older gentleman was wearing a navy sports coat and no tie and Rockports on his feet. His arms folded across his chest, resting on the rounded topside of his middle-aged belly, he looked like a consultant of some sort, Caren thought. The man’s eyes were sharp and blue, and they were unapologetically trained on her, had been since she walked in.

  “I hear they got a kid in custody,” Clancy said.

  “Well, not exactly.”

  “One of ours, right?”

  “Donovan Isaacs. He’s one of the Belle Vie Players.”

  “So he’s the state’s problem, on paper at least.” He looked at the older man, the consultant-type, and directed this last bit toward him. “That’s good for us, Larry.”

  Caren looked back and forth between the two, not understanding the exchange or what Donovan’s legal troubles had to do with this man, Larry. “My understanding,” she said, to be clear, “is that the detectives from the Sheriff’s Department are just asking him some questions, Raymond, same as they did with the rest of the staff. Even me.”

  “Oh, yes,” Clancy said. “They mentioned you.”

  She started to ask what he meant by that, but he seemed distracted by the other action in the room. The younger aide-type had a BlackBerry that hadn’t stopped ringing since she’d walked into the office. He turned away from the computer to answer it, cradling the phone against his shoulder, unbuttoning and rolling his sleeves.

  “Yeah,” he was saying into the phone.

  Larry was listening, resting his chin in his hands.

  “Raymond,” Caren said.

  He turned to her, looking briefly as if he’d forgotten she was there. He slid his hands into his pockets. “Well, I sure hope they catch him, whoever did this thing. They’re saying that gal got her throat cut.”

  I’m here about the case, she told him.

  “I need to ask you something.”

  He was staring again at the two men, but he nodded. “Yeah, sure.”

  “Are you making plans to sell Belle Vie?”

  Raymond turned, his brow wrinkled. “What?”

  “Lorraine Banks, from the kitchen staff—”

  “I know who she is, Gray.”

  “She says she was at your father’s house this morning.”

  She paused here, feeling awkward about relaying this secondhand information, gleaned from a woman who fully admitted to eavesdropping on a grown man speaking with his father. “She was at the house this morning, and she said you and your father were discussing a sale. She said you were talking about selling the plantation.”

  Raymond glanced briefly out the window at the Mississippi River, his expression as murky as its waters. “Well, Lorraine, of all people, ought to know Daddy’s not going to live forever. You, too, Gray,” he said. Then he turned, looking directly at her. He was being careful with his words, she thought, giving the impression that this whole line of talk was a rehearsal, a trial run. “Look, I don’t know what all Lorraine thinks she heard, but it’s no secret that Daddy’s getting on and my family and I are in the uncomfortable position of having to make decisions about his estate. I mean, the age he is now, I ask him at least a few times a month what he wants to do with all of it. The house in Baker, Belle Vie, even this building we’re standing in. Daddy owns this, too.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “And if I’m for real about 2010, then I think—”

  On the other side of the room, Larry cleared his throat.

  It was the first and only sound he’d uttered.

  Raymond nodded in his direction, but continued his remarks to Caren. “In the long run, I think it’s clear that I can’t keep up the day-to-day of the thing,” he said, and Caren nodded, as if this were perfectly understandable, even though she thought the whole day-to-day of Belle Vie was
the reason he’d hired her. “And my brother Bobby can’t handle that kind of stress. As it is, Bobby is just one more thing for me to worry over since he’s nearly forty-five years old and can’t be counted on for shit. No job, no home, no family, nothing that would ask him to work hard. He’s a goddamned scientific experiment, is what he is. Ought to turn him over to the nearest university, let ’em run whatever kind of test can tell me if he drank himself stupid or was born that way.” He sounded so harsh and agitated that Caren couldn’t imagine what had happened between the two brothers over the years to make them each speak so unkindly about the other. She made a quick decision to keep to herself the fact that Bobby had dropped by Belle Vie unexpectedly, checking on his brother’s handling of things.

  Raymond caught himself, softening his language.

  “It’s just . . . a lot of this stuff falls on me, making family decisions. And I got a lot to think about in the coming months, some opportunities that have come my way.” By this point, Larry was eyeing Raymond closely. His brow was arched, and Clancy realized he’d said enough. “I mean, that’s even if I’m running,” he was quick to add.

  Larry shook his head, a warning, it seemed.

  For some reason, this made Raymond smile.

  “Oh, hell, Becht, it’ll be in the papers tomorrow,” he said. “The guy is toast.”

  He looked back at Caren, his mood measurably brightened. He put a hand on her shoulder, leaning in conspiratorially, enjoying the moment, the telling of another man’s misfortune. “Look, something’s opened up for me, Gray, something big. You know Fred Dempsey, that Republican rep from the Seventh District, down to Lake Charles? Well, the man is getting himself a divorce from a bitter, bitter woman, and his whole life story is about to be laid wide open. We’re talking sex clubs and pornography,” he said, delighted. “And, even worse, it turns out he’s been paying all his house staff in cash. I mean, it’s going to get ugly. That shit just won’t fly, not in a Senate race. And it could open up the field for a guy like me. There’s no real contender in the Democratic primary. I could take the whole thing.” He smiled, and then caught himself, trying to tame his excitement, to find a note of humility. “People in this state know what we’re about, the Clancys. Daddy put his money where his mouth was, donating to the schools and such, scholarships and all that. Even way back when, when it wasn’t popular at all, he made sure that black kids got as good as whites. I mean, that’s just the kind of good public service that folks associate with a Clancy. And I could really do something with that.” In other words, Caren thought, Raymond had rightly calculated the impossibility of winning so much as a PTA seat in the state of Louisiana without the black vote, and this Larry Becht—whom Caren now understood to be a consultant hired not by the firm but for Clancy’s own political ambition—was here to help him turn the family name into political capital. Larry did not look the least bit pleased with Raymond’s lack of discretion. He didn’t look pleased with Caren, either, or her presence here. “But this is all down the line at this point,” Clancy said. “You can tell Lorraine nothing’s happening. Tell her to stop being so goddamned nosy for once.”