The Cutting Season

by Attica Locke

  “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.

  They 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.

  At her invitation, Eric leaned his head over the threshold.

  “I just wanted to say good night,” he said, hanging behind the door, kind of, careful not to make any assumptions about where he was welcome in her home.

  She turned Danny’s manuscript face down on the bed.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You can come in.”

  He stepped over the threshold in his bare feet, stopping just a few inches beyond the door, determined to put limits on the situation, for both of them. He leaned against her maple chest of drawers, the one by the door. She felt a hot batch of nerves, pinpricks down her spine. She hadn’t had a man in her bedroom, or her bed, in years.

  “How is she?” she asked. “Lela.”

  “Worried.”

  “About you being here with me?”

  They were the first words out of her mouth, and she regretted them immediately.

  Across the room, Eric smiled.

  He adjusted and readjusted his glasses, grinning to himself, tickled in some way he did not choose to share with her. “No, not that,” he said, making her feel foolish for presuming to know anything about Lela’s feelings or her faith in her future marriage. “It’s just that I left so suddenly,” he said. “She’s as worried about Morgan as I am.”

  “You told her, then?”

  “Well, yes,” he said, a peculiar look on his face, as if he just now realized how little she understood about his life anymore. “She would have come down, too, but . . .” He wisely let the rest of that thought, and all its uncomfortable social implications, wilt away. At that moment, Caren felt she could go the rest of her life without ever meeting Lela Gramm. “Listen, Caren,” Eric said, getting back to the issue at hand. “I’ll talk to Morgan again in the morning. I’m sure it’s nothing, just a bit of confusion is all. We’ll get it all figured out, I promise.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Okay, then.”

  He lingered in the doorway, rolling something around in his mind. He was biting his bottom lip, chewing a corner of his own flesh, eyeing her on top of the bed. She was wearing one of his old Tulane T-shirts, faded and torn. He tapped his fingers on the dented wood of the door’s frame. “It’s good to see you again,” he said quietly.

  As he started out the door, she called his name. “Eric.”

  She didn’t know why she was about to tell him this, except that she didn’t have many people in her life she could talk to anymore.

  “I think Raymond is going to sell the plantation.”

  Eric paused, his hand on the door. “When?”

  “Soon.”

  The conversation in his office had done nothing to clear this notion, and it suddenly occurred to Caren that if she were forced to choose between Raymond and Lorraine as the one most likely to tell her the truth, she would pick Lorraine every time.

  Raymond is definitely up to something, she thought.

  “He had a guy in his office today,” she said. “A Larry Becht, I think. They were talking politics, and they were both telling me over and over not to talk to the press about what happened. There was definitely an air of damage control in the room.”

  “Larry Becht? Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “That guy’s a Republican strategist. He runs an office out of Alexandria, Virginia.”

  Caren shook her head. “No, they were talking about the Democratic primary.”

  “Caren, Larry Becht is part of that whole take-back-the-country crowd. He definitely swings hard to the right. If he’s down here to launch a campaign, then Clancy is planning to run as a Democrat in name only, some kind of bait-and-switch.”

  “He’s trading on his family name is what he’s doing, the way black people, in particular, feel about the Clancys,” she said. “It’s his ticket to the Senate, he thinks.”

  Eric made a humming sound. “No kidding.”

  “You know, Leland was the main one pushing to integrate the public schools in this state, way back in the late fifties and early sixties. When every other businessman and politician in power was dragging his feet or just out-and-out swearing against it.”

  “And now Raymond’s claiming it as his legacy? To court the black vote?”

  Caren nodded. “The Clancys have always been big on ‘Negro education.’ ” Her tone was not bitter, but there was something dry and distant there. Eric was scratching at his chin. She knew this information was of a more than casual interest to Eric, himself a political player. “I wonder why he would sell his place now?” he said. “Hasn’t it been in his family for generations? I thought you Southerners liked all this Civil War shit.”

  Caren shot him a dirty look.

  Tulane or no Tulane, what Eric didn’t know about the South could fill several shelves of his office in Washington. But she didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to give the impression that she was in any way defending Belle Vie or what it stood for.

  She wasn’t.

  “That ought to be Becht’s pitch,” Eric said. “Positioning Clancy as a legacy, a keeper of America’s true heritage,” he said. “That’s how I’d do it, anyway.”

  “I don’t really know what he’s thinking or what he plans to do with the land.” She pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around her legs the way Morgan sometimes did when she was feeling particularly insecure. “This place is over a hundred and fifty years old. I guess I just thought it would always be here.”

  “You think someone would tear it down?”

  “I think if Raymond and his brother let it go, anything could happen.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  She looked down, fingering a knot of thread on the bed’s quilt. “I guess I need to start making some contingency plans. I have to start thinking about where we would go. I could get a place in Baton Rouge, I guess, start over there. It’s not far from her school.” When she caught Eric’s eye again, she could see he was frowning. He grew quiet, pensive, his mouth turned down in a way that made him look sad.

  “They have good schools in D.C., too, Caren.”

  Here we go, she thought.

  “I’d love to have Morgan in Washington,” he said. “You know that.”

  “And, what, send her to Sidwell Friends with Malia and Sasha?” She was teasing him about his social connections, his new life inside a White House administration. He’d been working in Obama’s Office of Urban Affairs for the past ten months, one of the very first hired.

  “Maybe,” Eric said matter-of-factly, as if a spot in a private school were the very least of what was available to him in D.C. “I mean, I could make a call.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “We’d love to have Morgan in D.C.”

  The word, we, cut a little.

  He slid his glasses along the bridge of his nose. “Well, at least think about it,” he said, and she nodded, feeling a queer warmth at the back of her throat, a vague sense that she might cry. For a moment, she actually wished she’d never called him at all.

 
“I will,” she said.

  “Well,” he said. “Goodnight, then, Caren.”

  She could still smell him in the room, long after he was gone.

  She lay awake in the dark, unable to sleep, seeing his face every time she closed her eyes. Restless and agitated, she rolled over onto her left side, feeling the cool, empty spot beside her. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying in vain to push him out of her thoughts . . . until finally, alone in the dark, she surrendered. Eric, she said, whispering his name and letting her mind drift all the way back to their beginning.

  It was an unlikely and unexpected romance. They hadn’t actually started dating until long after they’d met, almost a year after she’d walked out of Tulane; it was, not coincidentally, around the same time she’d asked her dad, one last time, for help with school. There had been checks here and there during her undergraduate studies, but now, trying to finish law school, she told him she needed something more.

  He asked after her mother.

  She didn’t mention their falling-out.

  Instead, she told him that if she reenrolled in law school now, full-time, she could still catch up. She could still graduate on time. She just couldn’t do it on her own, she said. But her dad said no. His daughter, the real one, she guessed, was getting married the following spring. There was simply a limit to what he could do, he said. Caren had left his office in the Seventh Ward and walked back to work empty-handed. She had a full-time job by then, at the Grand Luxe Hotel on Poydras, a few blocks from the convention center, where she managed the bar. She was good at it, the managing of other people’s problems, staff quibbles, and guest complaints. She liked even the smallest, dullest tasks. It passed the time, and kept her mind off other things.

  She was doing a sweep of the floor, checking in with the night staff, when Eric Ellis walked in. He was wearing a trim, dark-blue suit, his shirt unbuttoned at the collar. He was there for happy hour with a handful of third-years from Tulane, two of whom Caren recognized. They’d all worked in the same law clinic the year before.