The Cutting Season

by Attica Locke

  Outside, Eric was leaning against a small pin oak tree, smoking a cigarette. She walked within a few feet of him, slowing as she neared, shoving her hands into the pockets of her jeans. Her eyes were red and puffy, the skin on her cheeks rubbed raw from the stubble on Eric’s face. She had been turned completely inside out.

  It was a while before either of them spoke.

  “Eric,” she said.

  He sucked on his cigarette, the filter pinched between two of his fingers, not exactly looking her in the eye. “Donovan did go to school Wednesday night, by the way,” he said, blowing smoke into the wind. “The night that girl was killed, he was there, long before the cops say the Avalo woman was killed.”

  She let out a sigh. “Come on, Eric.”

  But he just shook his head.

  “I can’t, Caren,” he said, taking another drag. “I can’t talk about this right now, okay. I just can’t. You asked me to do you a favor and I did you a favor. The kid was on the college campus, just like he said. He needs a criminal defense attorney.”

  He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a folded-up piece of paper. On one side, otherwise blank, he’d scribbled the names of several attorneys and their phone numbers, each with a 504 area code. On the other side of the paper was a messy table of handwritten names and dates and times in two columns, labeled “In” and “Out,” next to lists of words she didn’t, at first glance, understand. It appeared to be a sign-up sheet of some sort, with the heading: RIVER VALLEY COMMUNITY COLLEGE AUDIO & VISUAL ARTS CENTER. “I copied this myself,” Eric said, tapping the paper with his index finger. “He checked in camera equipment to the school’s video lab a little before twelve-thirty in the morning. I talked to a girl who works at the lab who’s sure she was the one who signed in the equipment when Donovan returned it. She said he brought it all back himself.”

  Caren grabbed the paper from Eric, studying it more closely.

  Donovan’s was the second-to-last name in the far-left column.

  According to this, at 12:22 a.m. he returned a Sony DSR DVCAM camcorder, an Audix miniature condenser microphone with a 50-inch boom arm and two sets of headphones, a Lowel two-light kit, four 25-foot extension cords . . . and a tripod.

  Oh, God, she whispered.

  She looked up at Eric, shaking her head in disbelief.

  “What?” he said.

  “He was here Wednesday night, that’s what you said before?”

  “He said he was working on some kind of a school project,” Eric said. And then, clearing up an earlier misconception, he added, “It turns out he has not, in fact, quit school, but is on some kind of academic probation for carrying too light a load.”

  “And he was here?”

  Eric nodded. “But he says he left a little before midnight, before the murder. He left Belle Vie and went straight to the River Valley campus in Donaldsonville. He didn’t mention it when the detectives first cornered him in your office because he thought he could talk his way around it. I told you, I don’t think he had any idea those were two homicide cops he was talking to. I don’t think he really thought it was a big deal, him being on the plantation after hours.”

  “With camera equipment?” Caren said, repeating what she took to be the most revealing part of what Eric was saying. She had a pretty good idea this was another one of Donovan’s stunts. Only this time he’d gone too far, landing himself in real trouble.

  “I can’t believe he did this,” she mumbled.

  “Did what?”

  It would have taken too much time to explain the origins of her growing suspicion, her guess as to why Donovan had snuck onto the plantation after hours, with camera equipment no less. She would have to go all the way back to the summer, when Donovan came into her office with a handwritten script and a story he was dying to tell about life at a place like Belle Vie. “The truth is going to come out,” he’d said.

  Oh, Donovan, she sighed.

  She turned back to the library. Inside, she grabbed her key ring and jacket.

  When she stepped outside again, Eric was on his second cigarette.

  “Are you going to be here when I get back?” she said. Eric, who was standing on the grounds of an antebellum plantation wearing the same clothes as yesterday, clothes that were only minutes before crumpled on the floor beside her bed, looked dazed. “Where am I going?” he said, shrugging at the absurdity of it all.

  Caren started for the main house alone.

  Upstairs, she tore through the drawers in her office, the mess of papers and files on the painted settee near the door, even lifting phone books beside her desk; she was looking for a stack of yellow legal paper. She couldn’t remember if she’d kept the handwritten script or if Donovan had taken his copy back. This whole mess could be cleared up in an instant, she thought. The cops needed to know that Donovan had his own reasons for being on the grounds after hours on Wednesday night, and they didn’t have a thing to do with Inés Avalo. When she couldn’t find the script in her office, she left the main house and walked across the lawn, heading for the old schoolhouse.

  They were all onstage for the eleven-o’clock show.

  Which meant the greenroom was vacant.

  She could hear their voices through the plaster wall as she snooped around the room—Bo Johnston and Eddie Knoxville, in character, were talking about the advance of Union troops on New Orleans. The place was littered with soda cans and used tissues and crumpled copies of the Times-Picayune, and somebody had left a half-eaten ham and onion sandwich in plastic wrap sitting out. Across the room, against the far-left wall, stood a column of twelve-by-twelve-inch-square lockers, none of which had ever been secured except the one belonging to Val Marchand, who brought her own padlock from home. Caren opened them one by one, picking through Dell’s Essence magazines and romance novels and an open pack of Virginia Slims, Bo Johnston’s tank tops and roll-on deodorant. Finally, she stumbled on Donovan’s personal locker. The cops had been in here yesterday, as part of their search. And this is what they left behind: a hairbrush; a couple of unmarked CDs; a pair of rubber, open-toed slippers; a tourist map of the plantation; and, at the very back of the locker, a stack of white paper, bound by brass brads, which the cops must have mistaken for a copy of the plantation’s official staged play. But Caren knew better. This script had Donovan’s name on the cover.

  RAISING CANE: A NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN, by Donovan James Isaacs.

  And below that, the words: Inspired by a True Story.

  It was a work in progress, maybe twenty or thirty pages long, with bits and pieces blacked out and handwritten notes scribbled in the margins. But the story was immediately familiar. The setting, as was noted in a surprisingly well-written opening, was 1872, three weeks after the election that put Ulysses S. Grant into his second term—the same election that, just a few years after Emancipation, put a black man in the highest law-enforcement office in the parish. There was, quite literally, a new sheriff in town, a man by the name of Aaron Nathan Sweats, a name Caren had seen once before, in the pages of Danny’s dissertation. Sweats was the lawman who had investigated Jason’s disappearance, who believed that he’d been the victim of foul play. Caren felt a tingle at the mention of the family name. Jason. A man missing one hundred and thirty-seven years, and yet here he was again, showing up in print right before Caren’s eyes. She flipped through the pages of the script, trying to understand how Donovan Isaacs, the same employee who’d once asked her if slaves could talk, had put a story like this one on paper. She would have put her next month’s salary on the fact that he’d had some help.

  It was Danny she wanted to talk to.

  Caren hadn’t seen him all day, so she started the quarter-mile trek to the plantation’s kitchen, to pay a visit to the eyes and ears of Belle Vie.

  Lorraine was drinking a beer when she walked in.

  The kitchen was unusually cluttered. The
re were torn sheets of notebook paper everywhere. Lorraine pulled a pencil stub from the front pocket of her soiled apron. She was making notes. “I’m going to need to order at least twenty pounds of crab legs for the Whitman gal. You can charge ’em what you want for it, baby. I don’t care. I’ve got a theme in mind, and that girl is just going to have to trust me on this one.”

  “Lorraine,” Caren said. “Have you seen Danny?”

  “No, ma’am, baby.”

  “Pearl?”

  She looked over at Lorraine’s second-in-command, who had her size-five feet set atop an orange crate in the corner; she was eating sour cream straight from a plastic tub. Pearl shook her head no. Lorraine said, “I believe he stays in town on Saturdays, baby.” She was still scribbling her menu notes. “You not likely to see him today.”

  Caren held up Donovan’s movie script. “Did you know about this?”

  Lorraine screwed up her face at the sight, scrunching up the puffy flesh around her eyes. Pearl, seeing the script in Caren’s hand, froze, a cream-covered spoon a few inches from her mouth. She dropped the tub of sour cream, spilling it on the concrete floor, before scurrying out of the kitchen on her bare feet. Lorraine, watching her number two crumple in the presence of modest authority, rolled her eyes. She slid the pencil stub into her pocket and wiped her hands on her apron. “Well, for the record, baby,” she said to Caren, “I never approved of it. I knew it was going to lead to trouble, one way or another. But you can’t be after these people all the damn time,” she said, as if the very fact that Caren was coming to her for information was further proof that Lorraine was the one in charge here, the real lady of the house. “I firmly discouraged it,” she said. She gathered her menu notes, stacking them in a messy pile.

  Caren stood before her, dumbstruck.

  “Wait, who else knows about this?”

  “Well,” Lorraine said with a sigh. “There’s his cast . . .”

  “His cast?”

  “The cast,” Lorraine said, as if this were obvious. “The Belle Vie Players.”

  “They all know?”

  Lorraine nodded, and said, “Yes, ma’am, baby.”

  It was as if Lorraine had literally struck her in the face.

  She hadn’t realized, until maybe that very moment, the depths to which she’d come to think of them as family over the years, not just a family, but her family. Lorraine and Pearl and Luis, Nikki and Dell and Shauna and Ennis, Cornelius and Bo Johnston and the whole cast . . . even Donovan. “Why didn’t you all say anything?” she said, raising her voice at Lorraine for the first time ever. She was angry, but also hurt. Why didn’t any of them say anything to her? “Why in the world wouldn’t you tell this to police?”

  Lorraine gave a slight shrug, the gesture nearly lost in the rolls of fat on her neck and shoulders. Then, matter-of-factly, she said, “They didn’t ask.” She took her stack of handwritten notes to her “desk,” the card table on which sat her television set, today’s paper, and an open pack of menthol cigarettes. She shoved the loose papers into a grease-stained manila envelope. She didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the implications of the information she’d been withholding, the fact that Donovan had apparently been coming onto the grounds after hours for some time now and was here on the night a crime was committed, a murder. “I’m glad he done it, though, tell you the truth,” she said, meaning Donovan’s movie project. She reached into her apron pocket for a Zippo lighter, a gift, Caren remembered, from the entire staff. They’d had it engraved for her sixtieth birthday last spring. Lorraine lit a smoke, sucking hard before exhaling. “If Raymond’s gon’ let this place go, there ought to be some way to know it was ever here. It’s got to be some way to remember it.”

  Caren glanced down at Donovan’s script.

  Behind her, Pearl poked her head into the kitchen.

  She disappeared just as suddenly when she realized Caren was still here.

  “And just for the record,” Lorraine said, again insisting that she be seen as an innocent party in this, “I told Donovan to leave the little one out of it.”

  Caren looked up suddenly.

  There was a breeze blowing through the open door. It lifted the hairs on her skin, woke every raw nerve ending in her body.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Morgan,” Lorraine said, surprised that Caren hadn’t already guessed as much. “I told Donovan not to involve the girl, no matter how many different ways she asked.”

  “Morgan knows about this?”

  For the first time, Lorraine sensed she had waded into real trouble.

  She had no children of her own but had always shown great care where Morgan was concerned. “I made him promise, Caren,” she said, her voice hushed but firm. “I told Donovan—under no circumstances was he to have that baby out after dark.”

  That night, after Letty dropped Morgan off and left for home, her baked chicken and rice sat untouched on the kitchen table. Upstairs, it was just the three of them. Eric and Caren told Morgan it was time to talk. It was time for her to tell them the truth.

  “I did.”

  Caren shook her head. “No, Morgan, you didn’t.”

  She held up her purloined copy of Donovan’s script.

  Morgan merely glanced at it and shrugged, the way only a child would, one who has no earthly understanding of the consequences of her foolish actions, who believes a lie will close a door instead of opening twenty. Caren didn’t know if it was rage that gripped her . . . or pure terror. She grabbed one of Morgan’s pudgy, soft arms, squeezing until she felt bone, squeezing as hard as she might have to stop her daughter from marching into oncoming traffic or walking absentmindedly off a cliff.

  “Caren,” Eric said, stopping her.

  On the bed, Morgan started to cry.

  Her father knelt before the small, twin bed, turning his back to Caren. He reached for Morgan’s hands, two small fists that completely disappeared into his own. This is why nature intended two souls to raise a child, Caren thought. She wanted to shake her daughter by the shoulders until all her secrets spilled out like marbles onto the floor. Eric, on the other hand, was calm in his approach. “We need you to tell us what’s going on here, Morgan,” he said. “I can’t say enough how important it is for you to tell us the truth. Now, Morgan.”

  “Is Donovan going to prison?”

  Eric glanced at Caren.

  Alarmed, she asked, “Did you see him hurt someone?”

  Morgan shook her head.

  Caren repeated the old refrain. “How did you get blood on your shirt, Morgan?”

  Morgan looked at her mother, her eyes like two polished stones, hard and cold. “You sent him away,” she cried, pointing at her and blubbering through her fury. At first Caren thought she was talking about her father, accusing Caren of sending Eric away.

  But Eric understood.

  “Honey, your mother didn’t turn Donovan in,” he said.

  Morgan wiped her nose with the back of her hand, smearing snot across her plump, brown cheeks. “It wasn’t him,” she said emphatically. “He didn’t do anything.”

  “You need to tell us what you saw.”

  “It wasn’t him,” she kept saying, over and over.

  Eric waited for her to add something more, to explain herself. “Come on, Morgan,” he said, growing impatient. He looked at Caren at one point, his expression surprisingly helpless. “Morgan,” her mother said softly. By now, the girl’s bottom lip was trembling. She was looking at Caren, her eyes wide and pleading, waiting, maybe, for just the tiniest nudge. “What is it, ’Cakes?” Caren said. “Just tell us what you saw.”

  “The knife,” Morgan said finally, her eyes welling up again. “I saw the knife.”

  17

  Morgan had known about Donovan’s history project for over a month. He’d started working on it at the start of the fall semester
, dropping all his other classes so he could focus on the film full-time. He thought the project could earn him a solid A for his history class. But then the more he got into it, the more he decided he was thinking too small. The story was good, one that needed to be told, about life on the other side of slavery. He thought he might take it to New Orleans; they had an annual film festival, and those movies played in a real theater; some of them went on to make real money. He had the school’s equipment, a ready cast of actors, and a location that was already perfectly set-dressed. He had no intention of letting a no from Caren stop him, so he never asked for her permission. Instead, he copied one of Gerald’s keys and started casting the Belle Vie Players in his film. They would work at night, paid in cold pizza and warm beer and the promise of glory to come if the movie got picked up by a major distributor, or, failing that, found a life of notoriety on YouTube, Donovan’s name going viral. Raising Cane would be groundbreaking, a story to put to rest that “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” mess for good, he said. Donovan wanted to blow the world away with the story of a gun-toting sheriff who was kickin’ ass and takin’ names, just a few years after black folks “quit” being slaves. Donovan finally had a real story, one he could believe in, and he promptly cast himself as the sheriff.

  All of this Morgan learned by hanging out in the kitchen after school, where the Belle Vie staff treated her like a cousin or a baby sister who was loved and tolerated, if not particularly taken seriously. And, yes, just like Lorraine said, Morgan had asked Donovan if she could be in the movie. But Lorraine, who wanted no part in this elaborate misadventure—Dell and Val Marchand had likewise opted out—put her foot down about the girl. Donovan, within earshot of Lorraine, had turned Morgan down. He wouldn’t even let her on his crew, which consisted of him and Shep on camera and lights, respectively. Morgan backed off, making do with gossip and stories from the set. Her loyal silence and fervent avowal not to tell her mother bought her a ticket to the backstage drama. There were complaints about Eddie Knoxville’s drinking and the fact that he could never remember his lines. Shauna complained about the bugs and wanted to know if they could move some of the scenes into the main house. Oh, and Nikki didn’t like the fact that Shauna got to play the part of the pretty schoolteacher.