The Cutting Season (34 page)

28

C
aren woke up next to an empty space.

Downstairs, Eric was sleeping on the parlor sofa, where he must have returned sometime in the middle of the night. He was lying flat on his back, his glasses open across his sternum. She didn’t wake him, nor did he stir at the sound of her movement, her footsteps across the wood floor. She slipped her arms into the sleeves of her quilted jacket, zipping herself in. Then she moved the shotgun and the pistol, well out of Morgan’s eyesight. She put them inside the storage room where the plantation’s records were kept, and then she left a note for Eric. They couldn’t stay here anymore, not after last night. She told him to go. Pack Morgan’s things and drive to the airport and don’t look back. Don’t worry about me, she wrote. She would check into a motel if she had to. There were just a few last things she had to take care of first.

It was a Saturday, always a big day at Belle Vie.

Three shows, tours hourly, and fresh coffee in the gift shop.

She climbed behind the steering wheel of the golf cart to begin her usual inspection of the grounds, marveling at how few more times she had left to do this, to observe Belle Vie at daybreak. Dewdrops twinkled in the pinkish light. The sky was streaked with thin, wispy clouds, and Caren thought they might even have sun today. In the distance, the white columns of the main house rose majestically, casting short, pale-gray shadows across the bricks on the main road.

She made three stops initially.

The gift shop: to unlock the door and turn on the lights.

The main house: to unlock the doors on the first floor and turn on her laptop.

The stone kitchen: where she checked to see if Lorraine had arrived yet.

She found the building empty, and so she continued on, inspecting the southwest end of the property, the guest cottages, and the slave cabins.

The rise of land behind the quarters was as dull and depressed as ever.

This morning, however, the sight of it stoked Caren’s curiosity.

The land, a patch of yellowed weeds and dirt about twelve feet by fourteen, grown over the foundation of some long-lost building, sat on the exact spot where Jason had once built a small edifice—as was noted on the map she’d found among her mother’s things, the bits and pieces of Belle Vie’s history Helen had saved, a map her great-great-great-grandfather had filed with the federal land office in New Orleans.

That last little bit hung in the air like a low, cold fog.

Caren leaned against the steering wheel, thinking.

Eventually, she put the cart into gear, pulling in a wide arc and heading back to the main house and her office. Upstairs, she found Jason’s map, which she’d photocopied here before she ever showed it to Danny. It was hand-drawn, a thing of beauty, really. The big house and the cottages, the kitchen and the rose garden, and the quarters, of course. It was all here. And with a careful hand, Jason had drawn in the twelve-by-fourteen structure he built behind the slave village . . . shortly before he died. The map, as she remembered it, was dated the fall of 1872, November, and it was stamped by federal seal by the Homestead Land Office in New Orleans. Jason had filed the map with the land grant office . . . yet it was Tynan who ended up with the deed.

Tynan
, she remembered.

The last man to see Jason alive.

Caren ran her finger over the lines of the map, connecting one piece to another.

Reaching across her desk, she picked up her office telephone. She used the number Owens had given her, his office at the paper. He wasn’t at his desk, but she left a message anyway. There were records of this stuff, right, in the archives at the newspaper? she said. At a time when landowners were the most prominent members of a community, weren’t land deals and real estate sales reported openly in the newspaper and its predecessor, the
Picayune
? Could Owens take a look? She hung up the phone, thinking about the sheriff and his suspicions about William P. Tynan. She was close to something, she felt, within spitting distance of the truth. Five generations on, maybe Caren would finally find out what happened to Jason . . . and why.

I
t was after nine by the time she made it to the old schoolhouse.

The first show was almost always tourists; locals usually brought their kids, parents, and family from out of town only after a late breakfast or soccer practice or other weekend goings-on, usually straggling in late for the eleven-o’clock show. For the first performance this morning, there were fewer than ten people in the audience, including an East Indian couple in matching baseball caps and sneakers, sipping coffee, Lorraine’s finest, out of paper cups. The woman had a pocket-sized camera hanging from a string on her wrist. The man, gray at the temples, had a state map folded and tucked beneath the belt of his khaki pants as he sat, taking in the whole of the antebellum spectacle before him. Caren knew the scene onstage. It was the play’s climax.

The women of Belle Vie, Madame Duquesne and her unmarried daughter, Manette, virtuous gentlewomen reduced to tattered rags and begging food on credit, fall to tears on news of Yankee soldiers commandeering plantations throughout the parish—ordering slaves to leave their work in the fields; stealing jewels and silver hair combs for their mothers and girlfriends up north; and burning pianos for firewood, or just for fun. When the Duquesnes’ trusty driver, played with magniloquent obsequiousness by Ennis Mabry, delivers the news, Madame Duquesne faints at once, collapsing into her daughter’s arms. The slaves are gathered ’round, a last order given by Mademoiselle. That day, Ennis gave what would have been Donovan’s big speech. Onstage he laid his hat to his chest. “Dem Yankee whites can’t make me leave dis here land. Dis here mah home. Freedom weren’t meant nothin’ without Belle Vie.” It was a grand soliloquy, meant to paint the slaves as loyal to the mostly good white people of the South. But the soul of the show was always meant to rest with the ladies Duquesne, women who would rather lose everything than watch their way of life turned over for ridicule or sport. Having lost their men to war—husband and son, father and brother—Madame and Manette, played by Val Marchand and Kimberly Reece, respectively, chose to leave the plantation for good, seeking shelter with distant relatives in Virginia. “It’s over, Paul and Delphine, Anthony and Sera,” Manette said, walking down the line of her slaves, like Dorothy bidding good-bye to her improvised, makeshift family in
The Wizard of Oz
. The final word from Mademoiselle: “Belle Vie is no more.” Arm-in-arm, the women Duquesne walked off the stage while a boom box on the stairs played a cassette tape of a scratchy Brahms recording. The slaves, left behind on the plantation, did not jump for joy at the end of their incarceration, nor did they hear in the martial drums in the distance—and the coming of Union soldiers—a life of freedom. They fell against each other, weeping for the end of an era.

Belle Vie is no more.

Later, it fell to Caren to tell the staff the same.

As the audience cleared the schoolhouse, she gathered the cast and crew in the main room in front of the stage: Luis, Pearl and Lorraine, Cornelius and Shep and the rest of the cast, Val and Kimberly, Eddie, Bo, Nikki, Shauna and Dell, as well as Gerald from security.

Caren sat on the edge of the stage, in front of her motley crew.

They had about twenty minutes before the start of the next show.

“It’s done, guys,” she said. “Lorraine was right.”

And then, because their silence was unsettling, very nearly unbearable, she made sure her words were clear, that each and every one of them understood. “Clancy’s shutting us down.”

Lorraine sucked her teeth. Pearl sank into one of the white folding chairs, resting her chin in her hands. Luis, the most senior employee, put his head down. The others were all looking at each other, waiting for somebody to speak first.

“When?” Cornelius said.

“A week, tops. The Whitman wedding will be our last.”

Nikki Hubbard, of all people, started to cry. She was clinging to Bo Johnston’s arm. Together, they made a strange romantic pair, Nikki in her slave rags and Bo dressed as the white overseer. Bo kissed the top of Nikki’s head, holding her hand.

“I can put most of you guys on for the Whitman event, if you want to make some overtime. And I’ll gladly write a recommendation for anybody who wants one,” Caren said. She would do anything for any one of them, she thought, just as she would for Donovan.

“But, either way, it’s time to start packing up your things,” she said.

“Is it Merryvale?” Val asked. Her nails were painted bright pink today, just like the lipstick bleeding into the corners of her mouth. “Are they building a new subdivision?” She, more than anyone in the room, looked at least vaguely hopeful.

“No. The Groveland Corporation is taking over the land.”

“No shit,” Shep said.

“Groveland?”

“The farm people?”

Val looked disappointed.

Lorraine, too, though for entirely different reasons. “It’s gon’ be nothing but cane out here,” she sulked. “Nothing but Mexicans and machines for days. You know black folks can’t never hold on to nothing good.”

Dell, more sullen than usual, said, “It’s a
plantation
, Lorraine.”

“Yeah, but it was ours.”

“Oh, hell, Lorraine, it was never
ours
.”

Dell, who played the mammy in the stage play, pulled a loose cigarette from the front pocket of her costume’s apron, and Caren didn’t bother to stop her when she lit up brazenly, right there inside the schoolhouse. What difference would it make, really, if the whole thing were to burn down now? What exactly was she trying to save? Whatever the plantation had meant to each and every one of them, they would have to take it with them.

“What about Danny?” Ennis said. “He could talk to Clancy, couldn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Cornelius added. “Danny ought to talk to him.”

“I don’t think Danny’s going to change his mind,” Caren said.

“Oh, it’s done, y’all, just let it go,” Dell said. Shauna, seated beside her, had her head down. Eddie Knoxville, apropos of nothing, announced that he’d like to travel. Lorraine, however, was still steaming. “It’s not nothing, Dell, it’s history,
our
history.”

Dell blew a puff of white cigarette smoke.

Poof
.

It would, all of it, be gone.

“Shit, man,” Shep mumbled. “Guess it’s back to working at Walmart.”

“That’s if you’re lucky,” someone else muttered.

“You better hope Walmart will take your country ass back,” Cornelius said.

Shauna, her straightened hair held by a knotted kerchief, had said very little this morning. She’d spent most of the meeting fiddling with the hem of her costume. “What about Donovan?” she asked softly.

“It’s not good,” Caren said.

“Oh, hell,” Ennis cussed, twisting his hat in his hands.

“He’s got a lawyer, one of the men from Clancy’s firm, and they’re telling him to take a deal.”

“They can’t do that.”

“Not without his say-so, no.”

“Aw, Donovan ain’t kill that girl,” Lorraine said.

“Then why would he take a deal?” Gerald said.

Cornelius made a face. “Brother-man done lost his head in there, that’s all.”

Kimberly Reece was looking at all of them like they were fools. “Innocent people don’t go around confessing to crimes, y’all,” she said, her voice squeaky and righteous and impatient, that of an older sister urging them to grow up. She tucked a lock of blond hair behind her ear and reminded them of Donovan’s past troubles with the law. “He was here the night that woman was killed and every one of you knows it, too.”

She cut her eyes at Caren, realizing she’d maybe said too much.

“I already know about the movie,” Caren said. “I saw the DVDs.”

She waved off their surprised looks, their nervous anticipation of a reprimand that she wasn’t in the least interested in giving. She no longer cared about breaking the rules. “And the cops know about it, too,” she said. “He’s liable to pick up a trespassing charge while he’s at it. The detectives know he was out here on Wednesday night.”

Kimberly Reece nodded, adding, “My cousin works at the courthouse, and I happen to know for a fact they found the murder weapon in Donovan’s car.”

Caren felt the air in the room cool.

They were trying it on, she knew, the idea of Donovan, their coworker, as a violent criminal, a killer. Cornelius shook his nappy, uncombed head. He didn’t like the picture it painted, but there it was.

Shep mumbled to himself, “Fuck, man.”

Lorraine had heard about enough.

“Does Leland know about this?” she said.

“About Donovan?”

“About the sale.”

“I’m sure Raymond told his father,” Caren said. “He had to sign off, too.”

“I don’t know,” Lorraine said, shaking her head and looking around the room at the others. “Raymond’s played dirty in the past. He bought Bobby out years ago for some little bit, knowing that boy can’t hold a dollar, drunk as he stay. And now he’s gon’ make millions selling out to Groveland. I wouldn’t put it past him to cheat his own daddy.” She had half a mind to drive up to Baker right now and have a bedside talk with Leland, to let him know what his firstborn was up to, to make sure everything was on the up-and-up. “Raymond,” Lorraine spat. “With his capped teeth and his dyed hair.” She shook her head, turning up her nose at the plastic image.