The Cutting Season

by Attica Locke

  “She is in a good school.”

  “You said she’d be happy.”

  Caren fell quiet then, looking down at the tips of her boots.

  Somewhere deep down she knew. Morgan wasn’t happy here.

  She could finally admit it to herself. Caren was the one who’d grown comfortable, feeling safe in the familiar, letting one year turn to two, and then three, hardly noticing when four years of her life had passed, right here on this same old plantation. “You said this would be good for both of you, and I trusted you, Caren. I don’t understand how in the hell you let something like this happen.”

  “Oh, fuck you, Eric. Really.”

  “What the hell was she doing out in the middle of the night?”

  “It’s eighteen fenced acres. It’s not like she was out at a nightclub.”

  “Still,” he said. He was as angry as she’d ever seen him.

  She sighed, feeling the weight of her own guilt, not just for this, but for all of it, every little thing that had led them here. “I’m raising her out here on my own, Eric.”

  “That was your choice, Caren.” He wasn’t giving an inch. She looked away, fixing her gaze on a shelf at her side, because she was afraid that if she didn’t she might cry, and she didn’t want that. “I’m doing everything I can out here, Eric. I hired Letty, I’ve got the staff, but it’s not like I can watch her every minute of the day.”

  “If this is something you can’t handle, Caren, raising our child, then I sure as shit wish you had said something sooner.”

  Softly, he said, “I’m getting her out of here.”

  “I can’t just up and leave my job, Eric.”

  “This is not a job,” he said. “I don’t know what this place is, but it’s not a job.”

  His tone was sharp and ugly, but not particularly unkind. If anything, she sensed in him a desire to rescue her along with Morgan, to tear them both away from the plantation. “You said Clancy is going to sell,” he said. “You were going to have to leave anyway.” He was still holding her hand. “You’re better than this place, Caren.”

  She let go, pulling away to the farthest corner of the room.

  She stared at the wall, the faded wallpaper in gray and blue, the lines of painted finches and jaybirds staring back. “I have a wedding here in a week. There are school tours scheduled every week for the next two months. I can’t just leave, Eric. I walk out, and the whole staff, they don’t get paid, not unless I process payroll. I owe them something more than that.”

  “I’m willing to give you some time, but I’m not going to wait around forever. My daughter is not staying here, Caren.”

  And then he turned and walked out.

  A few seconds later, she heard him in the parlor, on his cell phone with Lela.

  Caren felt trapped in this hot little room, unwilling or unable to run the emotional gauntlet that lay on the other side of the door.

  It started as a way to kill time, picking through the plantation’s records while she waited for Eric to get off the phone. The opening of drawers, leafing through the aging, yellowed papers, was at first mindless. In all the years she’d worked at Belle Vie, she’d never once come into this room to read through these documents, to touch the real history of Belle Vie, to hold it in her hands. It was obvious to her now that she’d been avoiding this quiet confrontation for years. There were no brides in here, no catered affairs, no twinkling lights on the north lawn. There was no spectacle, no scenery sure to charm. There was just history, naked and plain. It was right here, on the papers all around her, in flat text that belied the complicated nature of the narrative, the story of one American plantation.

  She picked through the pieces.

  One of the printer’s cabinets—made of aged oak, the lacquer peeling in some corners—held farm records, arranged by decade, going forward into the 1930s. In each drawer, there were production records and bills of sale, registering the bounty of each year’s harvest. Some eight hundred hogsheads in the good years, the years before the war, and down to as few as fifty hogsheads during the worst of it, the 1864–’65 season, when local planters had it particularly bad, when the ones who didn’t abandon their land nearly starved to death. There were handwritten notes on loose sheets of coarse paper, marking, in great detail, the difficulties of finding hardy men and women to work the fields on the other side of Lincoln’s war, when Negro labor was no longer the law of the land. Belle Vie had nevertheless survived, thrived even, in the hands of William P. Tynan, the former overseer for the Duquesne family who took it over after the Civil War. He eventually passed it along to his daughter and her husband, James Clancy, and then on to three more generations of the Clancy family.

  All of this was recorded and stored in an antique leather portfolio that told the story of the plantation’s chain of ownership, containing the various deeds to the property.

  The organization was sloppy, which surprised Caren.

  She noticed a serrated edge along the inside of the folder’s binding.

  She ran her fingers down the center spine. A few small, jagged triangles, dry flecks of old paper, fluttered to the carpet below. It appeared that some of the papers had been torn straight from the binding. She had a brief suspicion about Danny. She didn’t put it past him to treat the plantation like his own private fire sale, lifting pieces from Belle Vie’s historical records, which he clearly coveted. A real score for the university, he’d said.

  There were many other documents in this room: Maps detailing the plantation and its many ornate structures, plus government documents, including one signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, sanctioning the transfer of title and deeding the plantation to the Clancys’ ancestor, William Tynan, in the year 1872, eight years after the Union took possession of this stretch of Confederate land.

  1872, Caren thought.

  The same year Aaron Nathan Sweats was elected sheriff.

  The same year he investigated the mysterious disappearance of an ex-slave.

  What, she wanted to know, had really happened to Jason?

  She wondered if some clue lay here, in this very room.

  She poked through the slave accounts next, the records of every man, woman, and child born, bought, or sold from the estate. They were in a cabinet marked INVENTORY, together with notes about farm equipment and supplies in the storehouse. There were pages and pages, listing every slave ever owned by Monsieur Duquesne before the war.

  Margaret and Julianne, Charles and Henry, Mathilde and Sarah Anne. All listed as American-born Creoles, their values ranging from two hundred to one thousand dollars.

  There were also a Doe and a Rosine, two house slaves.

  And Paul, Leandre, and Emile, a cooper, a blacksmith, and a mason, respectively.

  Under the long list of American-born Negroes, Caren ran her finger past the names Anthony and Augustine, past Delphine and Dolphus, all the way down to Jason, the only man so named. He was brought to the plantation in the year 1853, though no more information was given, nothing about who his parents were. He was granted permission to wed an Eleanor, another slave, in 1859, when she was seventeen years old. It had been an empty promise, though. Within months, Eleanor was sold to a trader from Georgia, just one year before the war. Jason was eighteen years old. Though he didn’t know it at the time, he was a man on the verge of freedom.

  What was most striking to Caren, of all the things she read, was the fact that he stayed on the plantation, long after the war. Jason stayed, right here at Belle Vie, in the shadow of the big house, working the same land he’d farmed since he was a child, since the first day someone put a cane knife in his hand. He could have fled the parish, of course. He could have moved to New Orleans, or sought work up north. His life and his labor now belonged freely to him, and for a brief, bewitching moment, Caren tried to picture how her life might have been different if her distant ancestor had, ba
ck then, struck a path for something wholly new, a way of life that led all of them out of the fields. She felt a sudden and peculiar sensation, a longing that gnawed at her and made her head hurt; it was a feeling akin to trying to recall a dream when none of the details were in color.

  Jason had stayed.

  He learned to read here, on the plantation, taught by a colored woman named Nadine, inside the walls of the old schoolhouse. And for the first time in his life, he earned a monthly wage. He lived and worked at Belle Vie until, as was noted in Tynan’s diary-like notations, he went missing in the Year of Our Lord 1872. Of his best employee, Tynan wrote plainly that Jason had simply walked off the job one day.

  Caren closed the drawer on the file cabinet.

  She tried to hear her mother’s voice, the stories she used to tell.

  She stood among a virtual mountain of documents, the official history of Belle Vie, and tried to remember the parts that weren’t written down, the pieces that had been passed on, in stories and songs, for generations. She tried hard to put herself back at her mother’s feet, nights Helen used to braid her hair, nights they slept back-to-back on a shared bed, nights Caren should have paid more attention. She would never get them back now and could recall few of the details, only the memory of her touch, the smell of olive oil on her hands, which she rubbed onto her raw knuckles after work in the kitchen. She could only recall the soft whispers in her ear, nights her mother tried to tell her, over and over, that Jason’s life mattered, that his story was in their blood.

  19

  Eric was not in the parlor when she emerged. Upstairs, Morgan was on the computer in the sitting room. Caren didn’t know what, if anything, she’d heard of her parents’ fight, and she told her to go to bed. In her own room, she smoothed the bedsheets because she couldn’t bear to see them so tangled, the way she and Eric had left them only a few hours ago. He was outside right now, talking to Lela on the phone.

  Alone, she lay on top of the covers.

  He was right, she knew.

  Clancy was going to sell Belle Vie, and she would have to find another place to live. It was only a matter of time. She rolled over onto her side, staring at the wall, when the phone beside her bed rang, startling her. She glanced at the bedside clock. It was late, well after eleven o’clock. She couldn’t imagine who would be calling at this hour. She sat up, reaching for the cordless on the nightstand. But by the time she answered, whoever was on the other end of the line had hung up. She scrolled through the caller ID screen on the telephone . . . feeling a sharp jolt when she saw the last call received. It was a phone number she recognized immediately: her own.

  Someone had just called her from her own cell phone.

  She remembered losing it last night, when she’d been startled by the presence of Lee Owens on the plantation after dark, and she had a fleeting thought that he, the reporter, had gotten his hands on it somehow. When the phone rang again, as it did just a few seconds later, she actually said his name out loud. There was no response, no words of any kind, only a slow, steady breath, the sure presence of another person.

  And then . . . the line went dead.

  Maybe, she thought, someone had found her phone on the grounds and was trying to return it to her . . . though something about this seemed highly unlikely.

  She hung up the phone and stepped into the hall. The door to Morgan’s bedroom was closed. Caren stood and listened, making sure she was asleep. Then she went straight to the computer in the sitting room and turned it on. In minutes, she found a customer-service number for her wireless provider. At this hour, the girl on duty was not able to give her any information about where the last call came from. She was, however, willing to sell an add-on to Caren’s service account, a navigator that would track the location of her phone or any of the family members on her account. The girl probably took Caren for a nervous parent, making a desperate call to a cell phone company after eleven o’clock at night, hoping to discover the whereabouts of her kid. She probably made a lot of sales ’round about midnight. “It’s easy,” she said repeatedly. She could set it up right now, right over the phone, for $9.99 a month.

  “Okay,” Caren said.

  And just like that she was hooked up.

  There was a special link, the salesgirl said, that would show the exact location on a detailed map, as long as the cell phone was in use. Caren hung up and made her first test. She dialed her cell number, holding her breath through three rings, exhaling when someone finally picked up the line. She heard music, voices in the background. “This is Caren Gray,” she said, waiting. But whoever it was on the other end hung up.

  Caren stared at her computer screen.

  In less than ninety seconds she had it.

  There was a flashing blue light blinking back at her, telling her the call was coming from a spot just off State Highway 1, between here and Donaldsonville, not even fifteen minutes away. It was quiet in the house. By the time she made it downstairs, Eric was lying on the couch, eyes closed. He was off the phone now, but she could tell he wasn’t asleep. He was just refusing to speak to her. So be it, she thought. She went for her coat and car keys. “Stay here with Morgan,” she said. Eric turned his head to look at her. What he saw must have caused concern. She had just slid the .32 into the pocket of her coat.

  “Where are you going?” he said, sitting up.

  “I lost my cell phone,” was all she said, before walking out the door.

  There are some places in rural Louisiana that are untouched, that have remained unchanged for the past sixty-some-odd years, only that somewhere along the way someone thought to add a satellite dish and wi-fi. Rainey’s was just such a place. It was a proper icehouse, a one-room building, long and lean, made of corrugated tin and painted wood slats, with a front porch that went all the way up to the edge of the highway. Caren had been inside only once, sent in to buy her mother a pack of cigarettes, exactly $1.75 in her hand; she’d been told to come straight back out, no dawdling. It was a farmers’ place mostly, though on game nights—LSU in the fall, Grambling and Southern, and the Dallas Mavs in spring—the place cast a wider net, attracting an array of folks from the river belt. Tonight, the parking lot was sparse. Caren drove past it twice, jackknifing the road to double back, making sure she had the right place. There wasn’t a building for half a mile in either direction. The phone call, she thought, had to have come from Rainey’s. She pulled into the gravel lot and parked.

  Stepping out, she had a clear view across the land, the cars and empty beer bottles . . . and a red pickup truck. It was rusted on its sides, and had a dent across the front grill. It was in every way identical to the one that had tailed her on the highway.

  “You following me, ma’am?”

  Caren spun on her heels, reaching for the .32 in her pocket.

  She came within a few fatal seconds of shooting . . . Lee Owens.

  When she saw his face, she quickly slipped the gun back into her pocket. He was in the same ball cap and khakis, had likely not been home to change in at least a day, still pecking away at his story, his investigation into Hunt Abrams and the murder of the cane worker. “What are you doing out here?” he said. He was grinning, excited to see her. Caren glanced back at the rusted red truck. She had no clue as to the driver’s identity, or if he and the cell-phone caller were one and the same. “Come on,” Owens said. “Let me buy you a drink.” He was already starting for the steps of the front porch, but Caren got cold feet, pulling away from him and the front door of Rainey’s, her boot heels digging in the gravel. “Can I ask you something?” she said.

  Owens turned. “Ma’am?”

  “You didn’t call me, by any chance, did you?”

  He smiled, plainly amused by the idea and treating it as if she had actually made him an invitation. “And when would this have been?” he said with a smirk.

  “Last night, you didn’t find my cell phone?�
��

  “You mean while I was being held at gunpoint? Did I find your cell phone?” He rolled his eyes, but he was smiling, too. “No, ma’am, I did not find your cellular telephone.” He started again for the slatted porch. She could hear the music inside, horns and guitar, the canned sound of blues from a jukebox, Johnnie Taylor, she thought, or maybe it was Bobby “Blue” Bland. She could smell beer and smoked meat. Owens stopped in the gravel, his sneakers shuffling up a curl of dust. “You coming?”

  “What are you still doing out here, this far from New Orleans?”

  “I got something out of that priest,” he said.

  He walked back toward her, coming so close she could see straight into his pale-green eyes, could see two days of stubble down his chin. “Apparently, Inés Avalo had some kind of an altercation with Abrams in the fields, about a week before she was killed. Akerele said she’d found something out there, something that shook her good.”

  “What?”

  “A bone.”

  “A bone?”

  Owens gave her a grim nod. “She found a human bone.”

  Inside, they got a table.

  Per local custom, there were two metal drums filled with ice by the doors, each one loaded with about ten different kinds of canned beer. Owens reached in and grabbed two Buds, waving his purchase at the girl behind the bar, who nodded and went back to texting on her cell phone. Caren took the corner seat at their table, scanning the faces in the bar. It was dark in here, the whole place cast in a blue haze, the only light coming from a television screen and the neon beer signs around the room. There were two Playboy bunnies painted on the back wall, and across from the bar was a display of monthly calendars going all the way back to 1989, dotted with a few RE-ELECT JUDGE ELMER B. HIMES flyers that had long ago been forgotten. There were maybe a half dozen men in Rainey’s tonight, mostly drinking alone, two white and the rest black, plus two women in their fifties, who were drinking beer out of lipstick-ringed plastic cups, their feathered bangs pressed close together in heated conference. They were either in love with the same man, or each other. She didn’t recognize a soul in here. Was it really possible that one of them had made that call from her cell phone? She found herself staring at the short hallway that led to the bathrooms. She remembered, too, that Rainey’s had a back porch, out by the propane tank. She thought to get up and take a look when Owens dropped into the seat across from her.