The Cutting Season (15 page)

“Another possible explanation for Morgan’s behavior in the classroom is that she is simply too bright for this environment,” Ms. Rivera was saying, speaking over Caren’s shoulder. “There are some excellent advanced programs at other schools in the state. They’re worth looking into. It might be a better fit for someone like Morgan.”

In the hallway, Morgan broke into a huge grin.

“Daddy!” she screamed, running down the hall.

Stunned, Caren walked out of the classroom, turning to her left, where she saw her daughter pushing through the crowd of students, racing to the waiting arms of her father. He swept her up, lifting her. Morgan laid her head on his shoulder, a place where she had always felt safe. Eric looked down the length of hallway to Caren. He was wearing a light-gray suit, looking as if he’d just come straight from work, as if he’d decided at his desk, just a few hours earlier, to catch the next flight to New Orleans. The tail of a paisley tie was peeking out of his side pocket, and his shirt collar was unbuttoned. Holding his only child in his arms, he gave Caren a small shrug that suggested he couldn’t help himself:
I’m here
. She was struck by how thin he looked. He’d changed his glasses, and his hair was shorter. But it was Eric all right, and Caren felt at once the regret, cutting and familiar, but also, as their eyes met across the noisy school hallway, a sense of joy, relief almost, that this man was Morgan’s father.

11

“S
he’s not talking,” he said.

Eric folded his arms across his chest and leaned back against the cheap Formica countertop of Caren’s small kitchen. His suit jacket was in the other room, along with a small overnight bag, set at the foot of the parlor’s leather couch. Morgan was upstairs, changing out of her school clothes and washing up before an early dinner. She’d chosen to ride home in her dad’s rental car, just the two of them, and he’d again tried to get her to open up, expressing to her the gravity of the situation. “She swears she doesn’t know anything about it, that she never even left the house that night,” he said wearily. “And she’s sticking to her story that the shirt probably isn’t even hers. She doesn’t know how any blood got there.” He shrugged his shoulders, not sure what to make of this entire situation, the very fact that he was standing in her kitchen. He was looking right at her, and Caren felt shy all of a sudden. She felt his eyes on her back as she turned, standing over the hot stove, stirring an array of steaming pots on the burners. Letty had left a chicken casserole in the fridge before leaving work, but Caren had taken one look at it and decided against it. Eric hadn’t been in Louisiana in a long, long time, and she wanted him to have the real deal. So she’d borrowed the golf cart from security and driven over to Lorraine’s kitchen, begging off bits and pieces of the menu she was working on for tomorrow, and grabbing a bottle of Bordeaux from the wine room. Lorraine had kindly asked few questions, but was plainly enjoying Caren’s nerves. “Word is you got a visitor out there, baby,” she said, smiling big.

At her own stove now, she heated Lorraine’s food: shrimp fritters; steak
grillade
over sticky rice, roasted cauliflower brushed with salted butter and coriander, and butternut squash mashed with candied yams and ginger. Smoke and steam filled the kitchen, and Caren thought to open a window. The heat was starting to get to her.

Carefully, she said, “Someone came by Morgan’s school today.”

Eric looked up at her. “What?”

“I thought it was a cop . . . but maybe not.”

It was a man in Wranglers, the woman in the front office had said.

Caren had a sudden memory of that red pickup truck on the highway, the one that had tailed them from Laurel Springs the day before, the same truck she’d seen on the farm road by Belle Vie, circling and doubling back, a white man behind the wheel.

“How scared should I be, Caren?”

“I don’t know.”

“And you’re sure it was blood?”

“Yes,” she said, hearing aloud the kernel of doubt in her mind. Now, with Eric here, standing in the same room, she wasn’t feeling sure of anything, could hardly think straight. “And, anyway, she’s acting weird. She’s acting like she’s hiding something.”

She left out the rest of it.

Her panic Thursday night, what she’d done with Morgan’s shirt.

She was hiding something, too.

Eric shook his head. “I don’t understand. Why would she lie?”

The heat in the kitchen swelled. Caren felt hungry and light-headed. She started for the small casement window next to the washer and dryer, turning her body sideways to pass Eric. Cracking open the windowpane let in a cool stream of air that shot down the length of the kitchenette, parting the heat and steam. She wiped a film of sweat from her forehead, drying her palm on the front of her jeans. When she crossed from the window back toward the stove, again turning sideways to pass Eric, they came face-to-face for the first time, and he reached for her arm. It wasn’t an embrace exactly, and yet the touch paralyzed her, pinning her in place, so close to him that she could feel his breath against her cheek. She could smell his aftershave, a sweet, musky scent that made her think of summer, nights he used to sit out on their old porch. She wondered if Lela let him smoke—or if there were parts of his life, this trip even, that were outside of her authority. “If Morgan saw something . . .” he whispered, his voice trailing off at the mere suggestion of what that could mean for his daughter. He could hardly tolerate the thought and backed away from it almost as quickly as it had come to him. He was trying to stay levelheaded, to be practical about this. “What are the cops saying?”

“They think the woman was killed over here, somewhere on the plantation. There was a knife missing from one of the slave cottages, an antique cane knife.”

“A what?”

“It’s a knife for cutting sugarcane,” she said, holding her hands a foot or so apart to offer some idea of what she was talking about, a knife capable of cutting through a stalk of cane in a single swipe. “The thing might have been over a hundred years old.”

“And they haven’t found it?”

She shook her head.

“Well, who all have they been talking to?”

“The staff mostly. They took Donovan Isaacs to the station this morning.”

“Why him?”

“He didn’t come to work yesterday morning. And I get the sense they don’t think he’s being completely truthful about where he was the night she was killed.”

“What do
you
think?”

“I’m not entirely convinced Donovan knows there’s been a murder at all.”

Eric sighed, shoving his hands into the pockets of his now wrinkled slacks. He looked exhausted. Standing this close, Caren could see gray hairs creeping in at his temples. That’s new, she thought.

“Who was she?” he asked. “The dead woman.”

For some reason, it made her sad to say her name out loud. “She was a planter out in the cane fields,” Caren said, and left it at that.

“They talk to any of the crew out there?”

“Yes,” she said with a nod. “But I don’t know much more than that.”

Eric folded and unfolded his arms again, as if he couldn’t decide what to do with his nervous hands, finally resting them in the damp pits of his dress shirt. “What I don’t understand . . . if she was a field-worker, what was she doing on this side of the fence. Why was she over
here
. . . on the plantation?”

Caren shrugged.

She’d been wondering the same thing.

There were soft footsteps on the stairs, which she noticed before Eric did because she had lived in this apartment for four years and knew the sound of her daughter’s movements. She had some vague sense that it was a mistake for her and Eric to be caught standing together this way, so close that their knees were touching, that it might confuse or upset Morgan in some way. But she didn’t move right away, and soon it was too late. Morgan was standing with them in the kitchen. She’d changed into a jean skirt and a long-sleeve purple T-shirt, and she’d borrowed one of Caren’s leather belts, which hung loose around her girlish hips. She stood still for a moment at the foot of the stairs, staring at the rare sight of her mother and father, together in the same space. She looked at both of them and smiled brightly. Eric turned and saw her then. He had the same conservative impulse Caren had had . . . only he didn’t hesitate to put distance between the two of them, dropping her arm at once.

T
hey took a walk after dinner, under the willows at dusk.

Eric, in all the years Caren had lived here, had been to the plantation only once before, and even then he’d hardly left the main house, playing with Morgan for an hour or so on the front lawn before taking her to the zoo in Baton Rouge. And the whole time they were dating, even after Morgan was born, Caren never once brought him home, to Ascension Parish; it was years before she told him what her mother did for a living, or described the grass behind the plantation kitchen where Caren had played as a child. He’d never crossed Belle Vie’s green fields or walked the main road at dusk or paused before the garden to take in the autumn crocus and white hydrangea, or the bed of pansies planted in a rusted, three-foot-wide sugar kettle, once used for boiling cane into molasses. She could sense Morgan’s delight in showing her dad where she lived. Eric was holding her hand while craning his neck, glancing up at the arch of magnolias overhead. It was a beautiful evening, cool and moist and nicely lit by the setting sun. But it would be dark soon, and Caren wanted everyone home, behind closed doors.

“Let’s start back, guys,” she called.

Eric held out a second hand for Morgan, who took a large knee-bending jump in his direction. They’d gone as far as the guest cottages, Manette and Le Roy, and Caren thought it just as well to avoid the quarters at this hour. She turned and led the way back to the library. She could hear them behind her. Morgan was telling Eric about a book she’d read for school, about a girl who had a magic coat made of colorful scraps of cloth. Skipping a few feet ahead, she tried to describe for her father the kind of dress she wanted to wear to his wedding. It involved rhinestones and lots of tulle.

At the house, Eric supervised homework and bedtime, while Caren cleaned the kitchen and made a bed for Eric on the couch out of blankets and flannel sheets. He came down as she was tucking the sheets underneath the couch cushions, smoothing the cotton with her hands. Her skin was rough–puckered on one side from dish-washing, and dry and ashy on the other. She wished she looked better, well-rested and fresh, that she’d prepared for this moment, Eric in her home. She knew it wouldn’t change anything, for either one of them. Still, it mattered to her in some small way.

“She’s asleep,” Eric said.

“She didn’t ask for me?”

“She’s tired, Caren.”

Caren nodded and said, “I know.”

“What time is it, anyway?”

She looked at her wristwatch. “It’s a little after eight.”

“Can I use your phone?” he asked. “I never charged my cell before I left.”

“Of course.”

She brought him the cordless from the kitchen, then closed the door to the parlor, giving him some privacy. Alone in the kitchen, she finished the bottle of wine from dinner, eventually heading upstairs when she realized she could hear Eric’s voice through the wall, when it became clear, by his gentle tone, that he was talking to Lela.

In her room, she changed clothes, then fished through her leather tote bag for a tube of plum-colored lip gloss, the last of her beauty rituals to survive motherhood. There, in the bag, she found the stack of photocopied pages she’d thrown into the bottom of her purse hours ago; it was the typed report that Morgan had been reading in class. Curious, she glanced again at the title: “Recovery and Reconciliation and the Emergence of a Free Labor System in Ascension Parish.” Looking at the author’s name, she made a face. The paper was a copy of Danny’s unpublished dissertation.

Recovery and Reconciliation and the Emergence of a Free Labor System in Ascension Parish

Daniel K. Olmsted

Louisiana State University

Department of History

Doctoral Program

Abstract:

In the fall of 1872, the election of Aaron Nathan Sweats as the first black sheriff of Ascension Parish marked the zenith of a period of racial reconciliation in a parish and a nation still wrecked socially, politically, and economically by the Civil War and the formal government-rebuilding program known as Reconstruction. A free man of color from birth, Sweats was a Boston native, transplanted to Louisiana in his formative years. It can be, and has been, argued that he was ill-prepared to pioneer for his race as the chief law enforcement officer in a sugar-rich parish that had known Negroes as chattel property for over one hundred years. But Sweats proved his presence as more than a token sign of progress. He was not two weeks in office when a cane worker, an ex-slave and a cutter in the fields behind the historic Belle Vie plantation, went missing and was believed to have been the victim of foul play. It is precisely the type of crime that would have gone unprosecuted, or outright ignored, in the days when slavery was legal. But Sweats’s determination to find the killer and prosecute the crime is a study of the ways in which both the region and the country’s relationship to black labor were profoundly altered for generations to come.

The paper was dated May 26, 2001, and stopped midsentence on page 25:

According to the only remaining records of the investigation, blood was discovered in the cane fields, but the victim, an ex-slave called “Jason,” was never found

Caren paused over the name.

She thought by now she’d heard all the stories, the legends and tall tales. But she had never heard anything about an investigation into Jason’s death, and by a black sheriff no less, just a few years after the Civil War. The suggestion here, in print, was that Jason, her great-great-great-grandfather, had been murdered.

She couldn’t understand how she’d never known about this.

And what’s more, she couldn’t understand why her nine-year-old daughter was reading a graduate-level thesis on the subject . . . or how she had gotten her hands on it.

She sat on the edge of her bed, skimming the pages.

There was a soft knock on her bedroom door.