The Cutting Season (3 page)

Lorraine turned to Caren. “Peach.”

Caren nodded. “Sounds great.”

Of course it did, she thought. She and Lorraine both knew those were Caren’s mother’s recipes. Lorraine held her gaze for a moment, narrowing eyes the color of burnt butter, and daring Caren to say something about it. “Oh, yes, ma’am, baby.”

C
aren’s office was on the second floor of the main house, above the formal parlor. It was long and narrow and always warm, as the room’s single window faced south. She could see a swatch of the parking lot from here, and the cane fields beyond.

She was never allowed in the main house as a kid.

She and Bobby had the run of the grounds and would sometimes sneak over the levee to hide from Raymond. But she never once stepped foot inside Bobby’s bedroom or sat to dinner with the family. And her mother never made it past the foyer. She would cook, but Helen would not
serve
, leaving trays of hot food on a pedestal table by the back door or sending Lorraine in her stead. The Grays, for generations, had stayed clear of the main house, either by fate or by choice. And now, six days out of the week, Caren sat comfortably at her desk, looking out over fields where her ancestors had cut sugarcane by hand, both before and after the Civil War. Days she felt tempted to sit and ruminate about mistakes she’d made, choices that had led like a series of stale bread crumbs back to the gates of Belle, there was always this one thought. She had gone farther and risen higher than anyone in her family might have dreamed. It was not nearly the life she thought she’d have, not at thirty-seven. But it was something.

The machines were in the fields today.

October to January, they were out from sunup to sundown, mowing row after row, plucking ripe stalks from the ground and stacking the bounty in advance of its long ride to the sugar mill in Thibodaux. Every year, during the cutting season, she watched them from her desk for hours on end, their whole repetitive existence providing the background hum of Caren’s life on the plantation during the fall.

That Thursday was the first dry morning in a week.

Though the air was still damp and thick as wet cotton, fogging up her office window with tiny beads of dew, there was no rain today, and that meant there were laborers in the fields. She watched them work in teams of two. They dropped whole stalks of cane into shallow furrows dug into fields that had been left empty and fallow; they were planting for next year’s crop, work that ordinarily would have been completed by early September, well before the harvest, if this season hadn’t been so unusually wet. They’d had nearly fifteen inches of rain in August alone, the stuff of records. And every wet day was a day a farm couldn’t plant, putting Groveland and everybody else behind for the season—and creating a small band of underemployed field-workers hanging around outside the Ace Hardware or the T&H Superette in Donaldsonville, looking for extra work. Ed Renfrew always hired locally, mostly blacks and poor whites, as had the Clancys when they still ran the farm, but for the past three years, the Groveland Corporation had been pulling in laborers from out of state, as far west as Beaumont, Texas, and even some coming all the way from Georgia and Alabama; they were Mexicans mostly, and some Guatemalans, plucked out of rice fields and fruit groves for a few months of working Louisiana sugarcane, before moving on to somewhere else. If the weather had held, the cops would later say, Inés Avalo would have already been gone. She would have likely still been alive.

The plantation was about fifty miles south of the capital.

Out here, they got only a few radio stations, mostly out of Baton Rouge, an endless stream of adult contemporary and country, Lionel Richie and Randy Travis. The music played softly as Caren got to work on the morning’s first task: a memo to her supervisor, Raymond Clancy, outlining the particulars of the Donovan Isaacs problem.

It had started over the summer.

Mr. Isaacs, an “actor” with the Belle Vie Players who’d had a lead part in
The Olden Days of Belle Vie
for over a year, had taken a basic, first-year U.S. history course at his community college and come out a new man, he said. He’d had a personal awakening of sorts and suddenly taken grave issue with the staged play, refusing to utter, on principle, the scripted words that were being “put into his mouth.”

The play was, admittedly, bad, a fact that Caren didn’t drive home in her memo.

It was written by a state senator’s wife, following Belle Vie’s formal recognition as a historical treasure (worthy of state funding), and not a period or comma had changed in the twenty-five years hence. It was as soapy as
Gone With the Wind
, full of belles and balls and star-crossed lovers, noble Confederates and happy darkies and more dirty Yankees than you could count. And the tourists
loved
it. Senior groups and war buffs and New Englanders in shorts and flip-flops. And middle school teachers, of course, many of whom ordered items in bulk from the gift shop as takeaways for their students.

Caren had a certain appreciation for Donovan’s newfound rage and even let him vent in her office for a solid twenty minutes, as he enumerated the many ways “this cracker-ass bullshit” fell well short of the
real
history of plantation life across Louisiana. Donovan wanted the whole play axed, which Caren was in no position to authorize. She did admit to encouraging him, though. It was actually her idea that he create some kind of alternative document, “like a history report,” that would tell a more accurate version of antebellum life, using Belle Vie’s own library, if he wanted, and that he present it to the Clancy family and the state’s Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism, which paid his small salary. She was thinking of a one-sheet, something they could photocopy and include as a handout along with the play’s programs. But Donovan had taken it a step further. He showed up in her office one hot July morning, clutching a stack of wrinkled yellow legal papers, smudged with pencil marks and ink. He had rewritten the play, top to bottom. Even the title was new:
Truth and Consequences: The Straight Story of the South
. The handwriting was illegible and difficult to follow, and at first she thought he was joking. “I’m as serious as a heart attack,” he said, leaving the pages on Caren’s desk.

She never even got past the third page, on which, as far as she could tell, a slave revolt took out half the French Creoles in Ascension Parish. There were three beheadings in a single paragraph. The whole thing read like bad comic-book fan fiction: slaves firing weapons without any gunpowder in sight, Yankee soldiers making telephone calls in the middle of the Civil War, and there was at least one musical interlude. It was an absolute mess, a boyish fantasy, an overcorrection that favored Donovan’s own misguided ideas about power and score-settling over any real semblance of the truth. And besides, it wasn’t exactly the kind of feel-good fare that pulls tourists in off the highway. Raymond Clancy said as much when she’d pitched the idea over the phone. His instructions could not have been more explicit: the play, and Belle Vie itself, his family homestead, would stay the way they had always been. When she reported this news to Donovan, he nodded stoically, as if he’d been expecting this. Then he threatened a walkout of the whole cast in protest—inducting Shauna Hayes and Cornelius McCrary on the spot, before finally convincing Dell Blanchett, Nikki Hubbard, and Ennis Mabry to join the fight if push came to shove—leaving Caren with the task of figuring a way to run Belle Vie without any slaves. He’d left her office that day with a parting admonition that the truth would come out, one way or another.

In some ways, Caren understood Donovan.

She understood his pining for a history he could take some pride in. She was the daughter of a plantation cook, after all, the great-great-great-granddaughter of slaves, facts that had caused her no small amount of shame when she was Donovan’s age.

She just didn’t like him much.

She didn’t want to be his
sister
.

He was a twenty-two-year-old kid, undereducated and overentitled, of a generation long out of the shadow of the hard work that had made a life like his possible. He had nice clothes and a decent car, paid for by his grandmother, no less, the same grandmother who scrounged up bail money from emptied-out coffee cans whenever her boy got in trouble, which he did on an almost quarterly basis. It was little stuff mostly—petty theft or disorderly conduct, drunken fights outside of nightclubs and house parties. They were the impulsive acts of a knucklehead, not a hardened criminal, which in Caren’s mind somehow made them worse. She’d been in court with kids who didn’t have even half the resources Donovan did, kids who would spend their lives in jail, most of them, kids who had no chance. She thought Donovan should have known better, shown some self-restraint, made his grandmother’s heart ache less. Betty Collier was in her eighties now, had raised him since he was in grade school. She would some days keep Caren on the phone at all hours, wanting her to know how hard she worked to keep her grandson out of trouble, often ending these calls by asking if there was more Caren could hire Donovan to do on the place to keep him busy. And Caren would have to explain that the only open work was for maintenance jobs, and that Donovan had made it plain he wasn’t putting his hands in any dirt.

“What the fuck I’m in college for?” he’d said.

These unexplained absences were his latest stunt. Caren was listing them in chronological order, starting back from August, when the news finally reached her. There was a faint crackle at her hip, then Luis’s lilting voice on her walkie-talkie.

“Ma’am . . . ,” he said.

She lifted the clunky device from the waist of her jeans. “Luis, could you or Miguel make sure to pull one of the heat lamps from the storage closet for this evening?”

“Uh . . . Mrs. Gray?”

She sighed.

She must have told him at least a dozen times she wasn’t married, repeating just as frequently that she, thirty years his junior, was the one who ought to be calling him
sir
.

“Yes,” she said, still typing. “What is it, Luis?”

“There’s something out here, ma’am, something you need to see.”

2

H
er first call was to the Sheriff’s Department.

They sent a kid in uniform, hardly older than the high school students who came through on the big yellow buses for field trips. He was, bless his heart, trying to secure the scene, where already a small crowd had gathered: Luis and Miguel, who kept crossing himself every five minutes and kissing his rosary; Lorraine and Pearl, who was craning to see, as was Gerald from security; and a few members of the cast. Nikki Hubbard was standing behind Bo Johnston, peering wide-eyed over the rise of Bo’s broad shoulders. There were two snow-white iPod buds in her ears. Her red-and-black letterman’s jacket was zipped all the way to her chin. Caren could see her breath.

She wanted everyone out of there at once.

She repeated her earlier instruction that no one was to touch anything.

To the Players—Nikki and Bo, Shauna and Dell, Cornelius McCrary and Ennis, who was already wearing Donovan’s ill-fitting costume—she told them to wait in the old schoolhouse for further instruction. Lorraine started for the kitchen on her own, if only to rob Caren of the satisfaction of ordering her to do anything. Pearl followed her leader in silence. Caren asked Luis and Miguel to pull the heat lamps from the storage closet. Both men nodded in silence, as did Gerald, who moved away from the scene without being asked. In less than a minute Caren had accomplished what the young sheriff’s deputy had been unable to do, and he seemed to take her ease with the task as an affront, spitting in her general direction a reminder that no one was to leave the premises and ordering her to wait by the gate for homicide detectives.

As the group began to disperse, Danny Olmsted could be seen coming over the short hill behind the quarters. Having heard the news by now, he was walking fast, almost jogging, toward them. His trench coat was open and flapping behind him, and both of his shoes were untied. Caren wondered if he’d slept in the library again last night instead of driving back to his office or apartment or wherever it was he went when he wasn’t here. He was an adjunct professor in the history department at LSU, working on what must surely be the world’s most long-anticipated dissertation. Years ago he’d cooked up some arrangement with Leland Clancy giving him use of the plantation’s library, eventually acquiring his own key—a show of scholarship Caren had long suspected was bullshit. She had come upon him catnapping in the library’s Hall of Records one too many times not to know better. The plantation kept him off campus for long stretches of unsupervised time, and it provided a rather effective romantic backdrop for the seduction of unsuspecting coeds. He’d let more than a few of them paw through Belle Vie’s historical documents on file.

He arrived breathless at the mouth of the grave, ignoring the young deputy, who was telling him to stand back. Danny, who was tall and thin, and sloe-eyed behind his smudged glasses, put his hands on his hips and bent at the waist, peering down at the muddy corpse. “Jesus,” he whispered, his mouth hanging slack in a way that made him look drunk or stupid, as if he couldn’t make sense of what it was he was seeing.

“Y’all need to get on away from here,” the deputy said, hiking his pants up, the weight of his parish-issued sidearm pulling at his britches. Danny took a step backward, turning clumsily on his heels, coming, for a brief moment, to stand face-to-face with Caren. His was flushed, and a faint sheen of perspiration across his upper lip caught sunlight against his pale skin. He mumbled unintelligibly, then stumbled back the way he came, cutting through the quarters, which she’d asked him many times not to do.

The young deputy, still tugging at his waistband, turned to Caren next.

“You, too, ma’am,” he said. “I need to keep this area clear.”

T
he bus from St. Ignatius Middle School was already in the parking lot. They were the only ones Caren couldn’t get on the phone.

Ernest N. Morial Elementary had, luckily, gotten her message before its fifth-graders left school grounds in Orleans Parish. The school’s vice principal thanked her for the update and promptly agreed that today might not be the best day for a tour of the plantation, what with police detectives en route, as well as the coroner.

A Ms. Patricia Quinlan—administrative assistant to Giles Schuyler, CEO of Merryvale Properties, Inc., the host of this evening’s dinner reception—said she would have to get back to Caren once she knew more about how Mr. Schuyler wanted to proceed. The woman sounded nervous, but also faintly annoyed, as if the discovery of a dead body on the property was something Caren should have been able to anticipate.

But no one in the main office at St. Ignatius could get the students’ chaperones or the bus driver on their cell phones, which left Caren standing in the parking lot, trying to explain a set of most unusual circumstances to two sixth-grade history teachers, one of whom was wearing a black sweatshirt with the state
of
Louisiana painted in gold glitter. Behind them, the kids were all out of their bus seats, jumping across the aisle, their high-pitched squeals enough to melt metal. Neither teacher looked as yet prepared to endure another ninety-minute drive back to Metairie.

Caren felt herself starting to sweat.

She offered them coffee and a sincere apology and promised a truncated tour of the property, one that would skirt, in a wide arc, anything unseemly. She personally escorted them to the old schoolhouse, where performances were held three days a week and all day on Saturdays. As the students shuffled into rows of plastic folding chairs, Caren ducked into the back room—a spacious closet behind the stage that acted as a greenroom for the cast. She told Ennis Mabry to feel free to draw out some of Donovan’s monologues, ad-libbing if need be, to fill time. Ennis stood, twisting a handkerchief in his arthritic hands. “Sorry, Miss C,” he said, before relaying the news that his nephew, the stand-in for the part of the plantation’s driver, had backed out of playing the part. “He don’t want nothing to do with no cops,” Ennis said.

“Just do the best you can,” she said to the cast.

The Belle Vie Players were unusually quiet this morning.

They looked spooked.

Cornelius McCrary, who was wearing a faded red-and-blue
OBAMA ’08
T-shirt over the tattered muslin pants that were his official FIELD SLAVE #2 costume, was staring at the floor. Nikki Hubbard, the plantation’s SEAMSTRESS, was playing with the zipper of her letterman’s jacket. Dell and Shauna, MAMMY and YOUNG HOUSE SLAVE, respectively, were tying each other’s aprons in place. Bo Johnston, who had the very important task of filling the boots of TYNAN, the former overseer and distant forefather of the Clancy clan who took over the plantation after the war, was putting on his costume. He and Dell kept looking over at Eddie Knoxville.

Caren couldn’t help feeling that something was going unsaid.

She tried to put them at ease.

“Okay,” she said, because she had some basic sense of how this would go. She’d been around the mechanics of a criminal investigation before. It wasn’t so long ago that she didn’t remember. “Here’s what will happen next. There’ll be homicide detectives here. They’re going to want to ask you some questions, each of you individually probably. It’s not something at all to be afraid of.” Here she tried to smile, and felt how incredibly tense she was, and afraid, all the while she was telling them to relax. “Just answer their questions simply and honestly,” she said. It’s what she used to tell her clients.

The room was dead quiet.

Val Marchand, or MADAME DUQUESNE, according to the playbill, was drinking a Pepsi, sitting next to Kimberly Reece and Terry “Shep” Shepard, who played the Duquesnes’ two grown children, MANETTE and LE ROY. Shep, a former high school football star, seemed anxious and fidgety, his left knee pumping up and down. Val rubbed a fleck of pink lipstick off her teeth. She wasn’t saying anything either. Eddie, who had played the part of MONSIEUR DUQUESNE ever since he retired from a water treatment plant in St. Charles Parish, was either elected or self-appointed as the one to speak. He took a wide step in Caren’s direction, standing close enough that she could smell the morning’s amaretto on his breath. His voice was flat and dry, just above a whisper. “Where
is
Donovan
?” he said. The others were all looking at her, too.

The question about Donovan’s whereabouts did not seem casual, and she actually paused before answering. At her hip, Gerald’s voice cut through a wave of static. From his roaming post, he announced, “Policemen are here, ma’am.”

She lifted the walkie-talkie from her waist, answering Gerald. “Okay.”

To the cast, she said, “Just let me know when the show is done.”

Not until she stepped outside did she realize her hands were shaking.

She closed her eyes and saw the blood and the dirt again, the open grave and the curl of that woman’s back. She leaned her weight against the trunk of the nearest tree, pressing a hand against her navel, holding it in, willing herself not to throw up, just as she had in those first months of pregnancy, when she had refused to be brought to her knees.

L
etty’s van was already gone from the parking lot. She and Morgan were probably halfway to school by now, a good thirty miles away in the tiny hamlet of Laurel Springs. Caren thought it was possible her daughter had made it off the property without the faintest idea of what had happened. She could hope, at least.

The bus driver from St. Ignatius was still behind the wheel, talking on her cell phone and eating a honey bun out of a saran wrapper. Her voice spilled out of the bus’s open windows, softened to a low hum in the humid midmorning air. The sun was higher now, baking the wet earth and encircling the southern end of Belle Vie with the damp fragrance of jasmine and dogwood. In another hour, it would be warm enough for short sleeves. Across the asphalt parking lot was a single-lane farm road, which, at a distance of several hundred yards to the east, curved around to meet State Highway 1, the road from which the detectives would have traveled, coming from the sheriff’s main office across the river in Gonzales. She didn’t see their car in the parking lot, only a dark red truck, rusted along its sides, chugging along on the farm road, eventually doubling back and passing in front of the parking lot a second time.

She thought the driver might be lost.

She started for the fence line, thinking the detectives must have already found their way to the grave. By the time she made it back by the cane fields, she saw that a crime-scene team was already in position. There were three of them, each decked head to toe in a crinkly, white synthetic fabric, with plastic booties over their shoes. They looked like moonwalkers, out of place in this verdant landscape. They hovered over the dead woman’s body, one technician photographing the scene while another measured the distance from the body to the nearly five-foot-high fence made of whitewashed steel. There was cane swaying on the sugar side of the fence. Through the bars, Hunt Abrams was watching the entire scene, two fists jammed into the pockets of his Wranglers. He was wearing a black
GROVELAND FARMS
windbreaker. Caren had met the man only once before, one particularly productive harvest when his machines were going eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. She’d sought him out one desperate Saturday morning, wading through rows of shoulder-high cane until she found the double-wide that housed his office in the fields. She had a sixty-thousand-dollar wedding starting at three o’clock that afternoon and fairly begged the man to halt his work, for a few hours at least. His answer was a polite, “No, ma’am.” Then he offered her a ride back to the plantation. She sat in the front seat of his black pickup truck, beside a loaded shotgun he kept propped within arm’s reach. “For the snakes,” he said.

Two police detectives stood a few feet from Caren.

They were already interviewing Miguel, Luis acting as a very nervous interpreter. One of the cops was taking notes on a small steno pad. He was tall and thick-necked, with a deep, ruddy complexion that gave the impression he was exerting himself even though he was standing perfectly still. The other detective was smaller and more compact. His hair was flecked with gray and cut in a stylish manner, his stance one of cool repose. He was making quiet calculations, his eyes scanning the pieces before him: the body, the black soil at his feet, the tall fence, Luis and poor Miguel, who was sweating openly, rubbing his forehead with the back of his hand.

It was the larger cop who noticed Caren first.

He nodded to his partner. “Nes,” he said.

Then he went right back to questioning Miguel, who was whispering something to Luis. The cop shook his head. “Tell him I don’t give a shit about Immigration.” Then, speaking more loudly, he said to Miguel, “No
migra
—get it? Just answer the questions.” Miguel was only nineteen and half the cop’s size. He looked scared out of his mind. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment across the river in Galvez with his girlfriend, her parents, and his two-year-old son. He was good-natured and quick to laugh and always on time. And now, of all days, Caren realized she would have to let him go. This was the first she’d heard that the Social Security card he showed when he was hired might not be worth the paper it was printed on. The plantation received state funding. Caren wasn’t allowed to take any chances. She was management now.

She felt her stomach turn.