The Cutting Season

by Attica Locke

  He had the two beers and a bag of chips to share.

  Caren didn’t touch any of it.

  “You were right about Clancy,” he said first off. “The Groveland deal, all of it.”

  He popped open the bag of chips, shoving a handful into his mouth. “I talked to one of the political reporters at the paper, and from what they fished out and what you told me, we’re able to put together an angle on Clancy’s plans. It’s smart, actually, what he’s doing. Selling the plantation to Groveland gives the company a foothold in the state’s sugar business, and that launches Clancy’s platform. ‘It’s the economy, stupid,’ or something like that. He gets to position himself as the man with answers, a plan to broaden the state’s economy and take the pressure off the gas outfits on the coast. And Groveland ain’t stupid. Their executives are already pouring donations into a political action committee run by a crony of Larry Becht’s. And where do you think that money’s going to end up?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “In thirty-second spots running every fifteen minutes all over the state. Your boy Clancy is not playing around about this Senate run. He’s got the seed money, the platform, and a family history that plays well across color lines.”

  She knew all this last night.

  “What about the girl?”

  Owens nodded, getting to that, washing down salt and oil with his beer. “Which makes this whole thing a much bigger story. The paper’s planning a feature to run in the front section. It’s big-league stuff now. I mean, we’re talking about a U.S. Senate seat. We might even beat his announcement. This business with the girl, a Groveland worker killed, it could really mess up Clancy’s deal and derail his political plans.”

  “What did Akerele say?”

  “Oh, God,” Owens said, taking another swig. “That girl was terrified of him.”

  “Of Abrams?”

  He nodded. “Apparently they got into it about a week or so back.”

  “She found something, you said.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Abrams had a small crew digging a fence out there. Inés, her beau, and another man, and lo and behold she pulls a bone up out of the dirt.”

  “A human bone?”

  “That’s what Akerele said,” Owens added, and Caren felt a strange chill. She wiped at the cold sweat across her forehead. “He didn’t see it, of course, but Inés was supposedly pretty spooked. She’s real Catholic, you know, from the old country and all that, and she did not like the idea of digging around a bunch of bones or disturbing a final resting place. To hear Akerele tell it, it was long, maybe a femur bone, and too big to belong to an animal. No telling how long it’s been there or where it came from. It’s the rain that brought it up, probably. I understand y’all had it coming down hard in the parish . . . plus all that digging in the field.”

  “And she told Abrams about it?”

  “Later she did,” Owens said. “First she tried to put it back, bury it under dirt, you know, make it proper. At first she was too scared to say anything to anybody about it. But it weighed on her, I guess, and she brought the news to her priest, and he’s the one said she ought to tell her employer.” He nodded toward her unopened can of beer. “You gonna drink that?” Caren shook her head. He reached for it, but didn’t open it right away. “Father Akerele suggested it could be something serious, part of a crime scene or whatnot, and he said if she was too afraid to tell the police herself, then it was her employer’s responsibility, at the very least, to alert the Sheriff’s Department as to what she’d found.”

  “She must have been scared out of her mind,” Caren mumbled, picturing this woman far from home, far from her kids, and stumbling onto something so vile.

  “Oh, yes, ma’am.”

  He cracked the second beer open, emptying the can in two swallows.

  “So she tells Abrams all right,” he said, burping softly. “And he nods and says, ‘Yeah, okay,’ but then she waits a day or two and nothing happens. Abrams halts work on the fence but never says another word about the bone.” Owens set the empty can on the table. “And who knows if there’s more where that came from, if there’s a body buried out in the fields.”

  “And the cops never came?”

  “The cops never came.”

  Across the room, in the bubblegum-pink display of the jukebox, the record changed, one 45 lifted and set aside, and another laid down in its place. It was Irma Thomas, local queen of soul, singing “Soul of a Man.” Owens leaned both elbows across the plastic tablecloth, checkered in blue and white. “She waited and waited for something to happen,” he said. “And all the while she’s losing sleep over taking a shovel to somebody’s grave. So finally she got up the nerve to confront Abrams about it, saying something about getting the police involved.” The door to the icehouse opened and closed again, and Caren looked up, studying the face of a white man in his late forties, his hair cropped and gelled, new sneakers on his feet. He hardly glanced in her direction. Caren, out of nowhere, asked to use Owens’s phone. He slid it across the table, and she picked it up and immediately dialed her cell. As she heard the rolling trills in her ear, she took a good survey of the slightly drunk patrons at Rainey’s, looking and listening. She heard no sharp sounds, saw no visible movement. No one reached into a back jeans pocket, or seemed in any way to react to the vibration of a cell phone anywhere on his or her person. What’s more, not a single person had come down the hallway from the bathroom, nor opened the door from the back patio. She was no closer to knowing who had her cell phone or who was driving that red truck parked outside. She handed the phone back to the reporter. Owens slid it into his pocket. He drummed his fingertips on the tabletop.

  “That’s when Abrams lost it, got pissy with her, screaming at her. At least three people heard the confrontation in his trailer, thought it had actually gotten physical.”

  Caren finally told him about the earring she’d found in Hunt’s trailer. Had it somehow come loose in a tussle with Abrams? she wondered. Again, she cursed herself for being so careless. She should have led law enforcement to the dead woman’s earring, instead of putting it in her own hand—muddying a chain of evidence and weakening any case against Abrams. It wasn’t the smartest thing she’d ever done, and Owens didn’t disagree. But he didn’t dwell on it, or let it tear him from the story he had to tell.

  “Abrams told Inés he didn’t want to hear another word about it,” he said. “Nothing about bones or a body in the fields. He had no intention of inviting scrutiny or having anybody come out and tear into his sugar fields. It was too much money on the line.”

  “And this was, what, a week before she died?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So who the hell is buried out in those fields?”

  “No, telling, ma’am,” Owens said. He ran the tin tab of the beer can along the surface of the table. “But you’ve been working right next to the farm for years, see all the folks out there coming and going. You know of any other disturbances, another cane worker who might have been there one week, gone the next?” Caren shook her head. She’d never noticed anything like that. But there was something else she’d seen.

  “Come on,” she said, standing suddenly.

  Owens followed.

  Ever the gentleman, he walked her to her car outside.

  Then, he climbed into his Saturn on the other side of the parking lot. As she pulled out onto the highway, Caren noticed that the red pickup truck was nowhere to be seen.

  She drove north along the Mississippi, Owens following.

  When they got within spitting distance of the plantation, she took a short detour, driving past Belle Vie’s parking lot, passing the main gate. She continued on the old farm road, stopping at the head of the dirt path, the turn into Groveland’s farm, where she’d been just this morning, before her walk through the sugarcane to Abrams’s trailer. She parked her Volvo so that the car’s head
lights shone onto the open field nearest the road. Behind her, she heard the driver’s-side door to Owens’s car open and close. Within a few moments, he was standing beside her. “Look,” she said, pointing to the haphazard pattern of holes carved deep into the ground, where someone had clearly been digging. Sure, Hunt Abrams may have told Inés Avalo that he had no intention of tearing up his fields. But someone had, she said, turning to look at Owens. Someone had been out here searching for whatever it was that lay beneath the surface.

  20

  The following day was a Sunday, cold and cloudy. Caren made sure she was up and dressed by daybreak, in a solemn gray dress and dark tights. She braided her hair in the dark, as tightly as she could, before slipping downstairs in her bare feet. Only outside, having passed Eric’s sleeping form on the sofa, did she slide on her black pumps, the heels of which clicked on the bricks along the main road as she crossed the plantation to the parking lot. She followed the hymn that was playing in her head, had been for days, as she drove to the south, all the way to St. Joseph’s church.

  The congregation was not very big.

  There were the church ladies, the ones Caren remembered from the candlelight vigil, white women who sat together in the first two and three rows of the tiny sanctuary, elbows and thighs pressed together, seemingly bound together in fellowship and worship. And behind them were the field-workers from Groveland and other nearby farms, the ones who could get away for the day. The women wore ill-fitting dresses with satin ribbons in their hair, and the men sat with black cowboy hats resting in their laps, their starched cotton shirts buttoned to their necks, though not one of them was wearing a tie. This was Inés’s family here, the people who loved and cared for her on this side of the border. Caren searched out a seat in the bank of pews on the left side of the church. She sat alone, surrounded by voices singing, the congregation and Father Akerele, belting the words to “No Greater Love Than This.” Caren sat through the whole of the service, through the first and second reading, following the lilt of Akerele’s voice.

  She didn’t take communion.

  She didn’t know the words to the closing song.

  And as the parishioners filed out of St. Joseph’s, shaking hands with Father Akerele on the front steps, Caren waited until she was the last in line. The priest took her hand, too, just as he had the others, his touch warm and friendly, his grip quite strong. He smiled at her, his black eyes a mix of mica and coal. “We found them,” he said.

  Inés’s family, he told her.

  “We found them, dear.”

  At his beck, she followed him back inside the church, where he inquired about a small donation toward a fund to ship the body back to El Salvador. She emptied her wallet, forty-three dollars and a few quarters. There was a young church usher in the sanctuary, a teenage girl in a modest yellow dress with a lace collar, who was picking up discarded programs and replacing hymnals. But otherwise, Caren and Akerele were completely alone. “They’re heartbroken, of course,” he said. “But there is some peace in knowing she can come home.” Caren nodded, saying absently, “I’m sure.” The priest stressed that they were still planning a proper memorial service for her loved ones here.

  He stared at Caren for a while, reading something in her expression.

  He slid his hands into the hidden pockets of his robe.

  “But that is not why you came,” he said.

  “Donovan Isaacs was arrested this week,” she said, surprised at how quickly the words tumbled out of her mouth, how bothered she was by what had happened to Donovan. Akerele sighed wearily. He turned and asked the girl—Megan or Mary or something like that—to please excuse them. He and Caren both watched in patient silence as the girl shuffled her patent-leather flats down the center aisle, eventually disappearing behind a floor-length velvet curtain that led to the church’s back offices.

  The sanctuary was empty now, just the two of them.

  Akerele said, “You work with him, yes? The young man they have in custody?”

  “Yes.”

  “The reporter,” he said, explaining how he came to know this particular news. “The day you were here, you and Mr. Owens, I made an assumption about the two of you, I’m afraid. But, no, he told me that you are not together, that you run the plantation . . . this ‘Beautiful Life,’ ” he said with a wry smile. It was presented as an inside joke between two colored souls, separated by a continent and a few tricks of fate. “And, of course, then I remembered you from the prayer vigil in the fields,” he said, his voice temperate and kind. “You were touched by Inés . . . I can see that about you.”

  “I don’t think he killed her.”

  Akerele raised an eyebrow. “You and the reporter,” he said. “Your theories.”

  Then he let out another weighty sigh, thick and morose, a sound all the more distressing for what it implied about the limits of what one man’s heart could take, God or no God. “As if I didn’t know,” he said. “We have this in my country, too, you know. Anywhere there is work to be done, someone somewhere will be standing with a boot to the neck of the one who must get down in the dirt and do it. Cane, cotton, rice . . . it is all of it the same. I did not need a reporter to tell me that Mr. Abrams is not kind to his crew.”

  “She found something in the fields,” Caren reminded him.

  Akerele stared at her for a long time. Outside, dark clouds were circling ’round, blackening the stained glass and painting the carpeted floor a deep red. “Yes.”

  “Someone was buried out there?”

  “That was her belief, yes,” he said. “It was an unsettling experience for her, to say the least. It haunted her for days, in fact. I urged her to make a full disclosure, to tell her employer, Mr. Abrams. But he took no action, told no one, as far as she could tell. And he grew angry after her repeated questions about the matter. She was frightened. A manager wields a great deal of power in the fields. He can, and has, docked her pay.” He shook his head slightly, remembering. “It was very upsetting for her, the idea that she had possibly disturbed a grave site. She only wanted to know that they were doing right by God.” The clouds darkened further and the light changed again, throwing shadows over Akerele’s round face. He pulled his hands from his pockets, clasping them behind his back. “The sheriff’s men, they have made me to understand that the Isaacs boy has had troubles with the law, that he is not without some criminal impulse. He was on the plantation without permission, yes? He was there at the crime scene.”

  Caren wanted to get back to Abrams and the bone in the fields.

  “Did you tell the police detectives what Inés found?”

  Akerele nodded. “They did not seem to place much significance in it. It appeared to be very old, easily damaged. Inés and a small crew had been out on the edge of the fields, near the farm road, digging to lay posts for a fence, when the blade of her shovel hit the bone. The policemen seemed to make of it what Abrams had when he’d learned of it. It was an artifact of some sort, they assumed, nothing more. Certainly nothing connected to Inés’s death.”

  “That’s it?” Caren said. “They never investigated any further?”

  She found this striking, this pointed lack of curiosity on the part of the cops about just what in the hell had been going on in the Groveland fields. “What about the other workers?” she said. “Did they talk to them? Were there ever any questions about Abrams and acts of violence or cruelty against the men and women working for him, stories of someone who may have gotten hurt . . . or gone missing, even?”

  Father Akerele stared at her, a weary look on his face.

  “The newspaper reporter, Mr. Owens, he asked me the same thing.” He shook his head. “I can only say what I told him, that I have tried to cooperate and assist the police officers in every way I can. Their questions for me, however, had more to do with her last day, the last hours of her life. I told them what little information I had. Wednesday had n
ot been in any way extraordinary. Inés was at work, and then she came by the church, as she often did in the afternoons, when she could get a ride.”

  “Wait—she was here?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Are you sure?” Caren said, confused. All this time, she had assumed that Inés had been taken by force as she was leaving work in the fields that day. But according to Akerele, Inés had left the cane farm . . . and then returned to Belle Vie, sometime that evening, after the sun had set. And Caren couldn’t imagine why. It was a fact that had continued to nag at her. Why in the world, on the last day of her life, had this woman ended up on the plantation grounds after dark? It was possible, Caren thought, that somewhere in the answer to that question lay a path toward clearing Donovan’s name.

  Akerele, who was still thinking back to that last day, said, “We are a safe place for fellowship. Our doors are always open. Ginny, our secretary, she sets aside a few hours in the afternoons, when work in the fields is done, to assist the workers. We try to help with child care, for those who have their families with them, or we help them find a doctor if needed, one who will take cash and ask few questions. Inés spoke passable English. She could get by. The others need a lot of hand-holding. Finding a landlord or a place where they can wash their clothes or send packages home. There can be a lot of fear in a foreign place, especially if there’s been any kind of trouble.”

  “Was Inés in some kind of trouble?”