The Cutting Season

by Attica Locke

  That day in the kitchen she was harsh and childish.

  She made it clear to her mother that she wasn’t ever going to be like her.

  She wasn’t going to be attached to this place for the rest of her life.

  “Yes, you are,” Helen said, just before Caren turned and walked out.

  22

  The box had been resting on a top shelf in Caren’s closet since she’d returned to Belle Vie four years earlier; she’d placed it there the very first day she and Morgan moved in. Helen had packed it neatly, securing the paisley-covered sides with a strip of purple ribbon, a spool of which, Caren remembered, used to sit in the bottom of her mother’s plastic sewing kit, among loose buttons and beads. Helen had wrapped it just as she might have any other gift for her only daughter, and pressed it into Lorraine’s hands, making her promise that it would find its way to Caren in the event that Helen didn’t get to hang out in this world for quite as long as she had a mind to. Caren had received it in this exact condition and had preserved its contents, essentially by never opening it. She had tried only once before, and become so overcome with grief—all the more powerful for the words that could not be formed to give it proper shape. It simply enveloped her from all sides, lingering like the smell of her mother’s perfume.

  She’d closed it and put it away.

  This was years ago, at their place in Carrollton.

  The box eventually traveled with her to the duplex in Lakeview, and in the days before that brewing storm, the one that drove her out of New Orleans for good, it was one of the few personal items she threw into the back seat of her Volvo. She had carried it in her arms as she walked once again through the gates of Belle Vie. Her mother had, in that way, been by her side for years.

  Upstairs, Caren shut her bedroom door.

  She set the paisley-covered box in the center of her bed, tugging at the frayed edges of the purple ribbon and watching it unfurl and spill off to the sides. Then, slowly, she lifted the square lid. The air inside felt very cold, as if the memories stored there had been packed in ice. Caren felt her fingers stiffen as she reached in and pulled out the piece of paper that was sitting on top. It was a report card from her first semester at Dillard, when she still bothered to send them home, and beneath that was a clipping of a newspaper article about the law clinic in New Orleans and its partnership with Tulane University—a news story that had mentioned Caren’s name in passing, which her mother had underlined in pencil. Caren Gray. Going back in time, there were high school football programs, even though Caren had neither played nor cheered from the sidelines; there was a card she’d made her mother in the sixth grade, and a school photograph for nearly every year Caren had ever spent in a classroom, her face growing longer with each passing year. Her senior class ring was there, and a pair of gold-plated hoop earrings, along with a swatch of fabric from a dress she and her mother had tried to make when Caren was just six years old. She’d picked the fabric herself. It was green with bright-yellow stars outlined in gold. They’d bought yards and yards of it.

  Caren smiled.

  The sudden movement loosened her tears.

  They fell in large, cloudy drops, dotting the colorful fabric.

  Caren set each item on top of the patchwork quilt, her life’s history spread like puzzle pieces across the bed. Then . . . at the very bottom of the paisley box she found a Big Chief notebook, wide-ruled, just like the kind Caren had used as a child. The pages were nearly all blank, the notebook serving as a kind of accordion file folder; it was stuffed with dozens of loose papers and photographs, some wrapped gingerly in plastic sandwich bags to protect the thin, yellowing paper. Caren found pictures of her grandparents, a newspaper clipping announcing their marriage in 1938, and an envelope stub, on the back of which her grandfather had tried to make mathematical sense of his piece of the cane farm’s sugar profits for the year 1946, his end-of-the-harvest pay based on the money the Clancys made out of the fields.

  One by one, Caren flipped through the items in the notebook.

  And again, she had the sensation of falling backward through time.

  Somewhere near to the very back of the red Big Chief, she came across a single item that stole her breath away. It was an old newspaper clipping, as thin and fragile as a fall leaf, dried and nearly forgotten in the wind. It was from something called the Negro Advocate, and it was dated June 1871.

  INFORMATION WANTED:

  JASON, AGE 29, OF BELLE VIE PLANTATION, ASCENSION PARISH, LA., WISHES TO OFFER A REWARD OF $30 FOR INFORMATION AS TO THE WHEREABOUTS OF AN ELEANOR, AGE 27, WHO WAS SOLD FROM BELLE VIE ON AUG 4TH, 1859. LAST SEEN AT THE SALE PEN OF GEOFFREY PULLMAN OF BATON ROUGE. SEND WORD, ALL WHO HAVE INFORMATION, TO A MISS NADINE WOODS AT THE PLANTATION SCHOOL. THANKFULLY YOURS AND GOD BLESS.

  Caren held the paper in her hands, feeling a stir in her chest.

  So that’s why he stayed, she thought.

  For her.

  For Eleanor.

  He stayed on the plantation, long after the war, because it was the only place Eleanor would have known to look for him; he was, after all those years, waiting for his wife. She’d been sold, Caren remembered, just before the war, and Jason would have had no way of knowing to whom . . . and he would have had no one to ask. Monsieur Duquesne had dropped dead before Union soldiers even made it to Belle Vie; his heart gave out on word they’d taken New Orleans. Le Roy, his only son, was killed in the first battle at Donaldsonville, shortly thereafter. Madame and the Duquesnes’ only daughter, Manette, fled the coarse and grotesque authority of the Yankee soldiers, abandoning Belle Vie for good, thus laying the way for Tynan, the Clancys’ distant ancestor, to take over the land. There were records left behind, of course. Caren had held them in her hands. But she could read, and Jason couldn’t. Not without help.

  Nadine Woods was the colored woman who worked at the plantation’s school for ex-slaves.

  She had been Jason’s teacher.

  It was a relationship that grew close over time, during those years Jason was waiting for his wife’s return. This was made plain in dozens of letters Caren found in her mother’s notebook—letters in which Miss Nadine expressed her fondness for her pupil, and admitted that she, too, would have liked to have known Jason under a different set of circumstances. She referred to him as principled and strong. He called her smart and kind on the eyes, in the only surviving letter written in his strained hand.

  All of this, Helen had wanted Caren to have. Including her own handwritten jottings on a few of the notebook’s back pages, places where she’d tried to get down on paper the stories she’d heard passed on and on, through the generations, all the way down to the last of the Grays. Jason, her mother wrote, had lived on at Belle Vie until the fall of 1872, until the cutting season, which is when he’d gone missing. Eleanor had returned suddenly and unexpectedly that spring, to try to rebuild a life with a man she hadn’t seen in years. And when one night he didn’t come home, she repeatedly told anyone who would listen that she was certain he wouldn’t have just up and left her, not after all the time they’d been apart and all he’d gone through to find her. Whatever she knew of Jason’s special relationship with the schoolteacher was unclear. But Miss Nadine likewise had no idea what had become of Jason. It was Tynan, his employer, who had been the last to see Jason, claiming the man simply walked out of the fields one day.

  Caren ran her finger over her mother’s handwriting, felt the bumps and ridges from where Helen’s pen had pressed into the lined paper. Then she turned to the last page of the notebook.

  There, pressed between two sheets of wax paper, she found a plantation map. Strange, she thought, as she studied the thin paper.

  The thing had to be more than a century old, and parts of it were nearly unrecognizable to Caren. In the top-left corner was a crude rendering of the old carriage house, which had been torn down decades ago, and hadn’t appeared on any plantation m
ap after the Civil War. There were other parts of the map that she didn’t recognize, either—specifically the hand-drawn image of a structure, twelve feet by fourteen, just behind the slave quarters. In a stiff hand, someone had written the words, built by my hand, August 1872. The map was signed in the same handwriting . . . Jason. According to this, the structure he built just months before he died happened to sit right on the patch of land behind the slave village, where, for years now, grass had refused to grow.

  Danny didn’t show his face at Belle Vie on Tuesday.

  By Wednesday, Caren set out to find him herself, heading north in her car.

  Louisiana State University sat along the Mississippi River just south of the state capitol building. Its handsome campus, manicured without being staid, was dotted here and there by aged oaks, venerable and strong, much like the ones that rose up out of the ground at Belle Vie. There were flat, green lawns and sidewalks lined with purple and rose-colored flowers and dozens of red-tiled buildings, plus a watchtower reaching a height of nearly two hundred feet. Driving through the school grounds that morning, Caren couldn’t believe how long it had been since she’d been on a university campus. She parked her car behind Foster Hall—walking distance, she was told at the main gate, from the offices of the History Department, where she could find Danny Olmsted.

  Himes Hall was a Spanish-style building with an open walkway on one side, separated from its nearest courtyard by a row of grand arches. And according to the lobby directory, Danny’s office was on the second floor, room 209. The door was closed, but unlocked. It pushed open slightly when she knocked. Inside, Danny was standing behind an aluminum desk stacked with manila file folders, loose papers, and takeout menus. He was hunched over his laptop, staring at the screen. Behind him there were crumpled cigarettes on the windowsill. He looked up once, and then did a double take. Caren Gray was about the last person he expected to see in his office.

  “Hey,” he said—nervously, she thought.

  Gingerly, she pulled out the map, still encased in wax paper, from her mother’s Big Chief notebook. “You ever seen this before?” she asked. Danny hesitated a moment, not sure what this visit was all about. He glanced over her shoulder into the hallway, as if he was concerned about who might be watching, and then reached for the plantation map. He stared at it for quite a long time. Caren could hear the squeak of shoe soles on the linoleum outside his office door. It was dark in here, a gray haze in the air. Danny turned on his desk lamp before collapsing into the rolling chair behind him, his eyes never leaving the map.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “What is it?” she said.

  He looked up. “Where did you get this?”

  “It was made the same year Jason disappeared,” she said, showing him the reverse side of the map, which had been stamped by federal seal at a Homestead Land Office in New Orleans in November of 1872, right around the time Jason went missing.

  Danny was clearing space on his desktop.

  He set down the map so that he could study it more closely.

  “I’d like to hold on to this.”

  “No,” Caren said, shaking her head.

  The map was hers.

  Her mother had made sure of that.

  Danny bit his thumbnail, shaking his head. “No, I’ve never seen it before.”

  Caren stepped across the dull carpet to his desk, lifting the map and returning it to the safety of her own two hands.

  “I know about the movie,” she said.

  “Oh,” Danny said, his lips curling into an impish smile. He looked somewhat sheepish, but also greatly amused, as if the whole thing had been little more than a prank. “I suppose people were bound to find out about it sooner or later.”

  “He’s in jail over this mess, you know.”

  Danny’s face blanched. “What?”

  “The cops know he was at Belle Vie on Wednesday night.”

  “But they can’t honestly believe he had something to do with that girl.”

  “He’s in jail.”

  Danny fell silent a moment. “I had a bad feeling about this.”

  “You’ve gotten him in a shitload of trouble, Danny.”

  “Me?”

  “You didn’t write that script?”

  “God, no,” Danny said. “I mean, I supplied some of the research. I suppose that’s fairly obvious. But this was Donovan’s deal, from start to finish.” He shook his head to himself. “I thought it was the wrong story to tell. I told him it was a mistake.”

  “Why?”

  “Well,” Danny said cryptically, “it doesn’t end well.”

  “What do you mean?” Then, remembering his university paper, its abrupt ending on page 25, she asked him, “Why didn’t you ever finish your dissertation?”

  “I didn’t not finish it,” Danny said emphatically. “I merely shifted focus.”

  “But why?”

  Danny sighed impatiently. “Look, Jason’s story is a fascinating one; at least it appeared so initially. My whole field of study is about labor issues, post-Emancipation. And here was a man who’d been a slave and then worked the very same plantation, under contract. There’s even some evidence that he tried to organize the other workers into a labor collective, to up their wages. He was looking for a way to have more profit participation, real ownership. He was ahead of his time in that way. And then all of a sudden he goes missing, is presumed murdered, and there’s this black man, this newly elected sheriff charged to investigate, a man who is living evidence that the old rules don’t apply, that a Negro’s death won’t go unpunished. It’s a rich area, for sure,” Danny said. “Donovan went crazy for it, the idea of a black man in charge—what, six years after slavery is declared illegal? It was a story he’d never heard before.” He reached into the jacket of his trench coat, which was draped over his chair, and came out with a loose cigarette and a plastic lighter. “Though I wouldn’t consider it a shining moment of African-American history.”

  The light outside the casement window changed color and direction, rolling dark shadows in waves across the flat carpet.

  Danny lit his cigarette, blowing smoke toward the ceiling.

  “I mean, the guy was run out of office.”

  “The sheriff?”

  “Ran himself out of office, really, by pushing for an indictment.”

  “He knew what had happened to Jason?”

  “Well, that depends on who you ask,” he said. “I mean, it sure looks like he was on to something, like the story is going to go one way, but then it all turns out to be some messy business over a broken heart.” He rolled his eyes, shaking his head at the operatic turn of events, as if the history had failed him personally in some way. “It turns out Jason was smack in the middle of a love triangle of some kind. His wife, Eleanor—”

  “And the schoolteacher,” Caren said, finishing the thought.

  Danny nodded. “Not exactly my field of study,” he said.

  He glanced down at his laptop, responding to some prompt on the screen. “The general consensus in the parish had Jason running off with one or the other,” he said. “Or that maybe one of the women got jealous and did him in.”

  “But Sweats didn’t believe it.”

  Danny shook his head, puffing on the end of his cigarette. “And made a fool of himself in the process . . . left himself open to accusations he didn’t know what he was doing, that he was unfit to serve in the office of sheriff,” he said, exhaling.

  “The thing is, Jason’s body was never found. There wasn’t any proof that a crime had even been committed. And certainly no clear motive to support the sheriff’s theory of the crime, which put the murder weapon in someone else’s hand, someone other than the two women Jason was involved with. The sheriff swore that Jason had been killed with his own cane knife, one loaned to him in the fields by his employer. He was in
sistent. Stubborn, some said. He actually wanted to put Tynan on trial for murder.”

  Caren felt her stomach drop.

  She wasn’t immediately sure she’d heard the name right.

  “William Tynan?” she said, and Danny nodded.

  “Raymond Clancy’s great-great-grandfather?”

  “Yes.”

  23

  Raymond had lied to her, she thought.

  By the time she made it back to Belle Vie, made it all the way back inside the cramped Hall of Records, she had a sickening suspicion that he’d lied to her when he said he didn’t know anything about an investigation into Jason’s disappearance. The room was exactly as she’d left it. The papers were still there, laid out on the low wood table in the center of the room, right where she’d left them. Slave records and bills of sale, farm receipts and the creased, worn photos of harvests past, the blank faces of sharecroppers and field-workers. And as Caren searched the file drawers, the many folders and leather binders in the room, she was again struck by the feeling that papers were missing—not just land records and such, but also pages and pages of William Tynan’s diary. Only now Caren suspected this was evidence of more than just sloppy record-keeping. It suddenly seemed to her that someone had been in here, removing, page by page, pieces of Belle Vie’s history, excising the parts he didn’t like—like the fact that Raymond Clancy’s great-great-grandfather was a suspect in the death of one of Caren’s ancestors. The thought was dizzying. What else, she thought, could Raymond be lying about?

  Slowly, meticulously, she put the papers back. One by one, she refiled the documents and historical records, leaving them just the way she’d found them.

  Eric was in the parlor when she walked in.

  He was sitting on the leather divan, and he was holding Morgan’s school records. He wanted her to know he was serious. He was taking their daughter away from here. He’d changed his clothes, out of the wrinkled suit and into khakis and a deep-blue T-shirt, both crisp and unlined and likely purchased in town. He was resting his elbows on his knees, leaning his weight forward. “Caren,” he said softly. “Look, about yesterday, what happened between us . . .” The words registered somewhere in Caren’s brain. It was an opening, she knew, if she wanted to take it. But now she was the one who couldn’t talk about this. She was still reeling from the news of Clancy’s possible cover-up.