The Cutting Season

by Attica Locke

  There was a knock on the library’s front door.

  It was tentative at first, then loud and growing more frantic.

  Eric stood, but it was Caren who opened the front door. Pearl was standing on the other side, panting and out of breath. She’d run all the way from the kitchen with an urgent message from Miss Lorraine. There was some movement down at the courthouse. They were putting Donovan in front of a judge.

  Caren turned to Eric.

  “They’re arraigning him,” she said.

  Eric nodded and grabbed his car keys.

  The judge was a black woman, fair-skinned and heavyset, with a ring of pearls choked around her neck. Her traveling nameplate read JONETTA PAULS. She was a circuit court judge, one they’d brought in just for this, the formal reading of charges against Donovan James Isaacs. Eric and Caren were sitting in the front row. Lorraine had come on her own, taking a seat behind them. The room was small, like a miniaturized version of a courtroom scene on television. The wood was fake paneling, and the banker’s lamps on the desks didn’t work. They were all drowning instead under the sharp white of fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. Caren looked around the courtroom. Betty wasn’t here, she noticed, a fact that spelled trouble. She couldn’t think of any good reason that would keep Betty Collier from her grandson.

  Donovan looked awful.

  He was handcuffed when they brought him in, two armed deputies at his sides, and he kept his head down, his chin pressed against his sternum. He didn’t look around the room much, didn’t make eye contact with Caren or anyone else, just stood there, shaking his head every time his lawyer whispered something in his ear. He was unshaven, his hair in knots, and Caren had the awful thought that they’d kept him in lockup for the past few days for the sole purpose of aging him, curing him like a cut of meat, making him look more like the thug they were here to charge. It was a reminder of the ways an arrest can often work backward, making a criminal of any life it touches. It pained her to see him this way.

  Eric nudged her, asking why she hadn’t given Donovan or his grandmother the list of attorneys he’d suggested—and that was the first time Caren took a good, long look at Donovan’s lawyer. She had initially taken him for a court-appointed attorney, but now she wasn’t so sure. He was in his midfifties and nicely dressed, too nice, she thought, to be taking work from the parish. And he looked vaguely familiar to Caren, in a way she could not get her hands around. He seemed too tall, and too big in the way he carried himself, for this small, country courtroom. He kept a proprietary hand on Donovan’s shoulder through the whole thing. Where had she seen him before?

  Up first, there was the reading of the charge.

  The court clerk stood and officially named the matter: “The state of Louisiana versus Donovan James Isaacs, who, pursuant to Louisiana State Penal Code, Title 14, Section 30, is hereby charged with the crime of Homicide in the First Degree.”

  “What?” Caren turned to Eric and whispered, “Wait, what happened to trespassing?”

  Eric shook his head. “They must have gotten something else on him.”

  “What is going on, Eric?”

  She felt sick all of a sudden, a rush of blood heating her from the inside out. She unzipped her jacket, pulling it away from her damp skin.

  At the bench, the judge asked, “How do you plead, son?”

  His attorney squeezed his shoulder and tried to whisper something in his ear.

  Donovan kept shaking his head. “I ain’t kill nobody, judge.”

  Bail was denied, with little apparent argument from Donovan’s attorney. Caren didn’t think he’d have gotten bail anyway, but it bothered her the way the lawyer didn’t even try. What kind of defense attorney was this? She sat through the various housekeeping matters that followed—the official filing of papers, the comparing of calendars to set a trial date—all the while thinking of the mess this boy had gotten himself into, all over his plans to retake and retell a history with his movie project.

  The thought nearly pushed her out of her chair.

  That’s right.

  Donovan had made a movie. He had rented video equipment.

  Just as the deputies started to escort him out, she stood up. He looked at Lorraine first, and then at Caren in the front row of the gallery. His eyes were puffy and red. Donovan, she realized, had been crying. “Miss C,” he said, calling to her. “Tell my grandmother I didn’t do this. Tell her I didn’t have nothing to do with it.”

  Caren was still standing. “Where are the tapes, Donovan?”

  The tapes.

  She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of them earlier.

  They were a piece of evidence that had been at their fingertips this whole time.

  “Donovan . . . where are the tapes?”

  By now the two deputies were pulling him out of the courtroom. His lawyer had a hand on his back, nudging Donovan along. Caren called out again. He turned and looked once more over his shoulder. Their eyes met, and for a single second she thought he understood. “Go to my grandmama’s house,” he said, as the cops pulled him out of the courtroom toward a holding cell. “Tell her it wasn’t me.”

  When Caren arrived at her house an hour later, Betty Collier was in the front yard. She was wearing a housecoat and slippers, and she was, despite her eighty-two years, on her knees in the dirt, patting soil around a small bed of primrose and sweet alyssum, shaking her head to herself as she worked. She heard the rental car’s engine shudder to a stop and looked up immediately. But she was no more comforted by the sight of Caren than she was by the state of her garden. Caren told Eric to wait in the car while she got out on the passenger’s side. She could hear Betty all the way from the street. The elderly woman was muttering under her breath, turning the black dirt this way and that. “Just look at this,” she said. “Just look what they did to my yard. No home training, not a nary a one of ’em.” She was speaking of the policemen, she said. The ones who had tramped through her house that morning, she said, waving a search warrant; they’d been careless and heavy-handed, tossing her things and crushing her flower garden. “Just look at this mess.” Her voice rose into a high-pitched wail.

  “Detectives Lang and Bertrand were here?”

  Caren remembered Eric’s courtroom observation, that the detectives must have gotten something else on Donovan to change the charge from trespassing to murder.

  “I don’t know who all it was,” Betty said.

  She tried to stand tall a felled stalk of yellow primrose, but when she gave the plant the tiniest tug, the whole thing came up in her hand, roots and all. Betty lowered her head and started to cry. “I’m so mad I could spit,” she said, her dark eyes piercing from beneath the many folds of her copper-colored skin. “I’d swat his little behind if I could.”

  It was hard to know who had hurt her worse: the cops or her grandson, whom she seemed to blame for getting himself into this mess in the first place, and dragging her one good home into it. Caren knelt down beside her and put a gentle hand on her elbow, helping the older woman to her feet. Betty felt for Caren’s free hand and, finding it, squeezed so tightly it made Caren wince. Betty was holding on for dear life, it seemed. Together, the two went inside. In the kitchen, Betty cleaned herself up at the porcelain sink, drying her hands on a faded yellow washcloth hanging from the handle of an old gas stove. Then she reached across the kitchen counter for an open bottle of Maker’s Mark. “For my nerves,” she said. She poured two fingers into a chipped coffee mug and sipped slowly. Twice Caren asked her why she hadn’t come to court this afternoon, but Betty never answered her. She set the mug on the tiled countertop and reached into the front pocket of her housecoat for a handkerchief. She blew her nose and then pulled from the same pocket a two-page, folded document that bore a stamp from the parish courthouse. “Here,” she said. “They came with this.”

  The warrant was signed by the same
JUDGE JONETTA PAULS and, below that, DETECTIVE NESTOR LANG. Caren read the list of items authorized for removal by law enforcement from 168 Crescent Place, Donaldsonville, LA 70346. The very first thing on the list was a knife, of at least eight inches in length, with a wooden handle—KNOWN COLLOQUIALLY AS A “CANE KNIFE.” The warrant went on to list almost any and every article of clothing that might belong to a man Donovan’s age, noting that detectives were limited to collecting bloody clothing or shoes or items soiled with dirt and grass. There was nothing in print about videotapes or even copies of Donovan’s unfinished script, the school project, he’d told the cops, that had brought him to Belle Vie after hours. Either the detectives didn’t believe him, or they’d missed the significance of his admission.

  But Caren knew what tapes meant.

  At the counter, Betty finished the glass of bourbon.

  Caren asked her if she happened to see what the officers took.

  Betty shook her head. “All this mess, and they walked out of here with nothing,” she said. “Not a damn thing.” Caren turned and looked around the inside of the one-story house, which was made up of just a few small rooms. The living room and kitchen were divided by an oval table with a crocheted tablecloth laid gingerly on top. The television was a big black box, as old and bulky as a steamer trunk, and in front of it sat a daybed, painted a glossy white and adorned with a mound of throw pillows, some cross-stitched by hand. Betty must sleep here, Caren thought. The back bedroom was for her grandson, the only privacy in the house reserved for him. Through an open door, she could see the disarray left by the officers’ search. The mattress had been upended from its bed frame, and there were men’s clothes and shoes strewn about the floor, plus magazines and books open everywhere. A basketball had rolled into the hallway. “What about tapes?” Caren said. “Did you see the officers carry away any videotapes?” Donovan had told her to get to his grandmother’s house. Tell her I didn’t do it, he’d said. And when she’d asked about the tapes in open court, he mentioned Betty again. Caren felt sure the tapes were somewhere inside this house.

  Betty shook her head, her rheumy eyes gazing off in the distance, across the poorly lit room, fixed on some far-off thought. Caren wasn’t sure she was still listening.

  “Mrs. Collier,” she said gently. “Why weren’t you in court today?”

  Betty let out a teary sigh, shrugging her bony shoulders. “I’ve had him since he was eight. I did the best I could with him. His daddy was trouble, too, in and out of jail.” She dropped her hands into the pockets of her housecoat, the posture of a woman resigned to her fate. “I’m eighty-two years old, and I’m tired,” she said, as if Donovan’s story were already written in stone, had been since the day he was born. “I did the best I could,” she said, wiping tears that had settled in the deep creases beneath her eyes. There was dirt under her fingernails. She smelled of Dove soap and whiskey. Caren didn’t want her to give up on Donovan. Betty was the only blood family Donovan had.

  “That lawyer should have let you know about the court proceedings,” she said. “He should have demanded you be there today as a show of support.”

  “I don’t imagine it matters no way.”

  “It does, though,” Caren said. “You’re going to want the best representation you can get for Donovan. You need someone who’s going to walk your family through the whole process, not just somebody punching a clock or trying to get in good with the judge.”

  “Clancy’s got it all worked out.”

  “Who?”

  Raymond Clancy, Betty said.

  He’d sent Donovan that lawyer, right out of his firm in Baton Rouge.

  Caren shook her head. She thought Betty must have gotten it confused.

  “No, ma’am, it was Clancy, all right,” Betty said. “He called the house this morning, said not to worry on it. He was gon’ make sure Donovan was taken care of.”

  “Raymond said that?”

  Betty nodded. “And I want to thank you for that, Caren,” she said. She had assumed this was Caren’s doing, getting Clancy to go to bat for Donovan. “I know they’ve been good to your family over the years. He’s just like his daddy, that one,” she said. “The Clancys, they’ve always looked out for black folks.”

  No, Caren thought.

  Raymond was nothing like his father.

  She wanted to tell Betty to be wary, but she didn’t want to scare the woman any more than she already was, not until Caren had more information, not until she knew just what in the hell Raymond was up to. She asked if she could look in Donovan’s bedroom, making up a story about needing his work costume and other such items returned to the plantation. Betty nodded without saying anything. In her slippers, she shuffled in the direction of the open bottle of whiskey.

  They were not hard to find.

  Two unmarked DVDs—not tapes, not literally—inside a shoe box on the right side of the bed, near a stack of books on editing and camera techniques that he’d checked out from his local library, books that had Post-it notes and scraps of paper marking passages inside. Caren made a quick and easy guess as to the content of the DVDs. Stuck to the front of the clear plastic case was a taped note that bore a list of scribbled scene numbers.

  Back home, she slid the first disc into the open drive on her computer, the one upstairs in her apartment. Raymond Clancy had left by the time they returned to the plantation, but she didn’t know when or if he’d be back and thought it best to view the footage here, the little part of Belle Vie over which she had sole, if temporary, domain. She was seated in front of the monitor, Eric behind her, watching as the disc loaded. The first image on-screen was a shot of the slave quarters.

  Caren felt a flutter in her chest at the sight.

  My God, she whispered.

  She had never seen anything like it, had never seen the quarters so alive, populated by real flesh and blood. It took her breath away. She saw at once what he was trying to do, Donovan, the history he wanted to record, to hold in his hands, to make sense of. He was trying to put it down for posterity in the only way he knew how, with video cameras and microphones, the tools of his generation. And it broke Caren’s heart, broke it wide open, in fact. She stared at the computer screen in awe. For there he was. There was Jason, her great-great-great-grandfather. And here was the schoolteacher, Miss Nadine. The scene was of a celebration, a cakewalk in the quarters, sometime in the years before Jason’s wife, Eleanor, returned—when Jason and his teacher were unwittingly falling in love. There was a feeling of felicity as the men and women fell in line for the cakewalk, a playful and flirtatious dance that got its start in slave quarters on plantations across the South. It was a tradition that had taken on a special tenderness on the other side of Emancipation, black folks holding on to some of the old ways, even as they moved forward into the still unknown world of freedom. And when Jason took Nadine’s hand for a dance, Caren, watching the scene unfold, felt her own heart skip a beat. It was just Cornelius and Shauna on-screen, playing the parts. She knew that. And those twinkling lights were not stars, but a string of ninety-nine-cent Christmas lights slung across the cabin doors and the wooden fences. That was just Ennis Mabry in a pageboy cap and Lee overalls, pretending to strum a string guitar, just Nikki Hubbard and a few of her high school friends filling out the cast of ex-slaves. But she didn’t care. She was seeing her own story, her own history reflected back to her, rounded out and in full color, and the feeling it stirred was something she would not, in this lifetime, forget.

  They watched for nearly an hour, scene after scene.

  But it wasn’t until the last recorded scene on the second disc that she understood the full significance of the evidence she’d uncovered. They watched the final scene, the last one Donovan filmed on Wednesday night, over and over, maybe a dozen times. The whole thing was one shot, less than thirty-five seconds long—the footage taken on the main road, outside of Manette cottage, just l
ike Morgan said. Her report of the night Inés Avalo was killed had included this fact: Donovan said he would wait around for his cast and crew, passing the time by getting some extra shots outside Manette house. And that’s exactly what was on Caren’s computer screen now.

  “Take a look at that,” she said to Eric, pointing at the screen. She held a finger to the top left part of the monitor, clicking the mouse to rewind the shot from the beginning. The image was dark, almost ashy, the strained result of trying to register true black on digital video; the scene had likely been lit with nothing more than a small bulb mounted on the camera itself. Donovan, manning the camera, swept the lens from the front of the cottage—the clapboard porch, the railing made of whitewashed pine—all the way down the length of the main road, pointing south toward the quarters. It was here that Donovan’s voice cut in. “What the hell is that?” he whispered. It was nothing urgent, his tone; in no way did he sound alarmed. The shot—an image of the main road all the way to the quarters—slipped in and out of focus as Donovan zoomed in on a white light off in the distance. “Look,” Caren said to Eric. He squinted at the screen.

  The closer the camera zoomed in, the greater the strain on the image. But it was clear that the light was coming from the cane fields, on the other side of Belle Vie’s fence. Eric’s eyes widened as something astonishing happened: the light, which at a distance seemed whole, split in two. And even though the digital magnification distorted the image somewhat, it was clear that the two white squares were headlights. Somebody was parked out there Wednesday night, out by the fields, twin headlights pointed toward the plantation, not even fifteen feet from where the body of Inés Avalo had been found.