The Cutting Season (27 page)

And then she understood.

Raymond Clancy wanted a shill, a race-neutral messenger.

He wanted her, the black woman, to deliver the news to the plantation’s staff.

“I think you owe me this much,” he said. Back here again, she thought, twice in one week. “My family’s been good to you, Gray. I gave you a job when you needed one, gave you a place to stay, and you and I both know the Clancys took care of your family in more ways than one. Now, I’ve never cashed in on any of it, made your mama a promise that I never would. But I figure you can do me at least this much.”

Fine, she told him.

“It’s not going to go down easy,” she warned. “We’re under a lot of stress out here. The staff is worried about Donovan. His arrest caught all of us by surprise.”

“It’s a goddamned mess, I know.”

“It’s a mistake is what it is.”

Raymond shot her a curious look. He appeared confused at first, and then troubled, or else irritated by the fact that there might be any loose ends to this story.

“What do you mean?”

“Donovan told the police he was here Wednesday night—”

“The report I got indicated he
stole
a master key.”

“Yes,” she said. “But I swear it’s not what it looks like. Donovan had been sneaking onto the grounds for weeks, but only so he could work on a school project.”

“What kind of a ‘school project’?”

Here, she paused.

She knew how this would sound.

“A movie.”

“A
movie
?”

“A film,” she said, thinking that sounded better.

Clancy was growing frustrated. “Gray, what in the hell are you talking about?”

“There’s a story about this place, about the history, that he wants told.”

Raymond made a face, and Caren added, “Look, he’s not a bad kid,” feeling as surprised as Donovan might have been to hear those words coming out of her mouth. “He’s got a few misguided ideas about what to make of Belle Vie and what it means, but surely you can understand that, for a lot of people, this place is . . .
complicated
.”

“What in the world does this have to do with the dead woman, Gray?”

“Nothing,” she said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The cops are making a big mistake.”

“Well, I don’t have a goddamned thing to do with that. I don’t have any say over how the sheriff runs his department. I don’t know what all you think I can do about it. The kid admitted to breaking and entering, for heaven’s sake,” he said. Then, wagging a finger again, he added, “And you ought to stay out of it, too, Gray. Don’t involve yourself any further. Those detectives already have their eye on you as it is.”

“Excuse me?”

“Lang was asking about you, how well I know you and all that,” he said. “Don’t you go doing something stupid trying to protect this kid, hear? He’s not your problem. Take it from me, Gray, sometimes the only way to get ahead yourself is to cut your losses where you can. Don’t let a kid like that drag you down. He’s not family. You come from better people than that.” He came around from behind her desk, reaching out to pat her on the shoulder, as if he’d just paid her a great compliment. She shook off his hand. He took no offense by it, was already reaching for his overcoat.

“Let me ask you something,” she said.

Raymond nodded absently, slipping his arms through the sleeves.

“Your family ever find out what happened to Jason?”

At this Raymond looked up. “Jason?” he said, repeating a name with which she knew he was familiar. Of all the Belle Vie Clancys, he was the least enamored of its history, taking as an affront even the suggestion that the beautiful land on which he’d been raised had served any purpose other than a pretty backdrop for weddings and fancy parties. It was the elder Clancy who made preservation a priority, and Raymond publicly fell in line behind the family’s deeply felt duty to the past, all the while holding his nose closed.

“He worked for your great-great-grandfather, William Tynan,” Caren reminded him. “He cut cane as a slave and then worked the fields for Tynan after the war.”

“For a wage, I’m told.” He wanted that made clear.

Caren nodded. “That’s right. He worked the farm after Tynan became the legal owner of the plantation. That is . . . until he disappeared sometime in the year 1872.”

“What’s this all about, Gray?”

“Did you know there had been an investigation into his disappearance?” she said. “There was a newly elected black sheriff digging into it, sure he’d met foul play.”

“No, I never heard anything like that.”

“Yeah,” Caren said. “I hadn’t either.”

“Well, that was a long time ago.”

“That’s the story, anyway,” she said. “The one Donovan is trying to tell.”

Raymond sighed. “Look, I’ll have a talk with Lang, make sure they’re coming at this from all angles. We’ll get to the bottom of it.”

He started for the door.

“One more thing, though,” he said. “When the Groveland brass comes through here, I want you to arrange a special VIP tour for some of their folks, let ’em see the plantation up close, see all the history and all that. I just want the execs to get a good look before they make any final decisions, one last pitch to see if they’ll consider preserving at least part of the plantation—the main house, or the library. Daddy would want that.” He buttoned his wool coat. “And you’ll talk to the staff?”

She nodded.

Raymond looked deeply relieved.

“I knew you wouldn’t let me down,” he said. “I know you appreciate what all the Clancys have done for you and yours.” He touched her shoulder again on the way out. She watched him go, grateful for the stillness that came in his wake. She stood alone in the office, hers for as long as Belle Vie stood. For one lonely moment, she tried to picture it all gone, the house and the garden, the kitchen and the cottages, the library and the schoolhouse and the hundred-year-old oaks, all of it razed to nothing. The quarters, too, all of it flattened into a grid of cane, stretching as far as the Mississippi River, with only the wind remaining. She wasn’t sure what she was going to tell the staff, or when. One thing she did know: Leland Clancy would never delegate a good-bye.

T
here was one person she needed to tell first.

The Rose Hill Cemetery lay across the river, on the border between Ascension and Livingston parish. Helen always said she didn’t want to be buried in a crypt. She wanted to rest on high ground, up north where her people lay. There was a place for Caren, too, she’d said, a spot beneath a line of pines, an open space to the right of her mother’s granite headstone, which Caren had bought with her first paycheck from Belle Vie, replacing the one made of polished concrete that had been set up in her absence.

It’s done, Mother
.

They’re shutting down Belle Vie for good
, she said.

She didn’t sit, didn’t want to linger, afraid that if she got down on the ground she might never get up. So she stood over the gravestone, clearing pine needles, brushing dirt with her open palm. She told her what she came to say, what brought her out here at least a few times a year. She came to say, once again, that she was sorry.

She tried to picture Helen listening to all this.

She tried to picture her long, slim legs, the bony knees poking out from beneath her apron, the way she pressed her fingers into the small of her back when she was thinking about something, stretching the time between cigarettes. Caren would have given anything to hear a last laugh.

But almost always what came to her was their last fight, the last day they spoke. Helen was still in the kitchen, working for the Clancys. Caren was in her first year at Tulane, in law school, on her mother’s dime, or so she thought. That’s the way Helen sold it, of course, telling Caren that she had worked as hard as she had, spent a lifetime on the plantation, saving everything so that one day she could pay for Caren to go to school. She wanted her daughter to have that law degree, liked the idea of her flesh and blood being on the right side of things, putting the world back in its rightful order. She couldn’t think of anything more important for black folks, she said, than to have somebody in the family who could navigate the pricks and thorns of a bunch of rules they’d had no hand in creating. “That’s how they cheat you.”

Every family needed a lawyer, she said.

And that “One day you’ll understand why I did it this way.”

“You lied to me,” Caren said on their last day.

It wasn’t Helen’s money, she’d just found out. It never had been.

It was Leland Clancy’s . . . and Caren was just another charity case.

Raymond, on a visit home, had finally let it slip. For years her mother had pressed Leland to pay for her daughter’s school, making clear that he was the one who
owed
her . . . something Caren never understood. “You lied to me,” she said again, standing next to Helen in the kitchen.

“Oh, girl,” her mother said, waving off the very idea. She was standing over the table, a vinyl-top card table where Lorraine, to this day, cut vegetables and chopped onions. It was foolish, what Caren was saying, a splitting of hairs and wholly beside the point. “You’re going to finish law school, Caren, and that’s the end of it.”

But Caren wouldn’t have it.

The whole thing made her sick with shame, made her feel as small and worthless as the days when Bobby had stopped playing with her, had stopped seeing her as an equal, or the many times she’d not been allowed in the big house. She didn’t want the Clancys’ money, the benefactions of a plantation owner. It was no way to start what she considered a new life, one freed from the burdens of a legacy she never asked for, freed from the confines of a world that always put people like the Clancys on top.

“Listen to me, ’Cakes,” her mother said. “Belle Vie is
yours
. It’s yours, too.”

Caren stared at her, not understanding.

“Them people ain’t got no more real claim to this place than anybody in our family, and don’t think Leland Clancy don’t know it, either. He’s not stupid, Mr. Clancy, and he knows good and well he came into this place on someone else’s back, that it was a way that was paved for him to sit in that big house that had nothing to do with his labors. Now you go on and let him put back a little of what he took.”

Caren shook her head.

She could make it on her own, she said. It was the blustery protestation of a young woman for whom it would take years to understand the true pull of family, and the impossibility of escaping our bonds, or ever truly forgetting where we came from.

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

T
he 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 map 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.

D
anny 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.”