by Attica Locke
She stared at him, the line of his profile in the dark.
“What do you mean I called again?”
“You called me,” he said, sounding overheated and agitated. “Not ten minutes after the call from the parking lot, you rang the house again. I picked up the line, but I couldn’t hear a thing, just someone there and not talking, and I guess I got scared.”
“I called you?”
“I thought you were in some kind of trouble out here.”
Caren felt the same panic she’d felt on the dirt road in the tent city, she and Owens running from someone or something she couldn’t see.
“The number,” she said. “That second call came from my cell phone?”
“Yes.”
“Eric, that wasn’t me.”
According to the map on her computer screen, the call had bounced off a cell tower not even a half a mile away in the parish countryside, and the closest source location the phone company’s website could offer was an address on the river road, a street number that happened to correspond with the Belle Vie Plantation. Whoever made the call might well have been inside the locked gates right now. Eric blanched, backing away from the screen. Caren went for the home phone . . . and then stopped herself. A 911 call about a missing cell phone was almost certain to be ignored. Even to a dispatcher, she couldn’t say for sure that the eighteen acres had been breached, that there’d been a break-in at all. And she wasn’t going out there in the dead of night to check, not even to open and unlock the gates for Lang. Her only child asleep upstairs, she locked the front door, then double-checked it. She handed Eric the .32, taking the shotgun for herself. They would guard the homestead as best they could.
Eric was sitting on the leather sofa.
It’s then she saw his canvas overnight bag, zipped at his feet. There was a printed travel itinerary resting on top. She stared at the duffel bag, and then she looked up at him. “I didn’t know if I was supposed to buy two plane tickets or three,” he said.
“I still have to tell the staff, Eric. I owe them that much.”
He didn’t say anything right away, just stared down at his hands.
“And we still have the Whitman wedding next week. It’s work I promised them.”
“What about Morgan? You heard her today.”
“She’ll be with her father.”
“She wants you, too. She wants her mother, too.”
It seemed they were veering toward a larger discussion of what would happen after the Whitman wedding, after this place closed for good. “I don’t know yet, Eric.”
It was the best she could offer right then.
He told her he’d booked a flight for Monday morning, three seats.
“I guess I’m still hoping you’ll change your mind.”
He was waiting for her, she realized.
He had been for days.
She smiled.
“You hungry?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “No.”
“ ’Night, then, Eric.”
She didn’t realize he was behind her until she was all the way to the foot of the stairs, didn’t realize until that very moment that he’d been following her on her way up to her bedroom. “What are you doing?” she asked, and of course he had no answer, at least none he could put into words. And it frankly didn’t matter, anyway. She was perfectly willing to be pulled along by their history, whatever was left of it and still imposing its will on this little moment in time, the two of them on the stairs. She didn’t have the energy to fight it. He kissed her right there, her back against the wall, which was papered with linen and pink roses. She took his hand, leading the rest of the way.
They didn’t have sex.
She didn’t try, and he didn’t ask.
Instead, they lay side by side in the dark, staring at the ceiling.
He was so still and silent for so long that Caren started to think he’d drifted off. But when she turned her head, Eric was wide awake. He had one forearm behind him, tucked under his head like a slim pillow. She watched the rise and fall of his chest.
“I lied,” he said softly. “When I told you I didn’t think I would ever marry you, I was lying.” He gazed in her direction, but the look in his eyes was lost to the darkness. “I was just mad.”
“I know.”
It was her own little lie.
“I had a ring,” he said, lifting his eyes to the ceiling again.
This detail hurt more than the rest of it. Fleetingly, she thought to ask where it was. Not to wear it, but just to have it, as a remembrance, something to hold in her hand.
Eric reached across the bed to touch her arm.
“I love her, Caren,” he said. “I mean, this is real for me.”
“I know that, Eric.”
He fell silent for a moment, then whispered the rest.
“Lela’s pregnant.”
Of course she is.
Eric waited to hear something from her, and when he didn’t he let his hand fall from her arm. In the dark, he said, “I want my family together, Caren. I want that.”
They lay beside each other for a long time, each growing drowsy in the absence of knowing what more there was to say, the shotgun and the pistol across the foot of the bed. Eric fell asleep first, and then Caren, lulled by his heavy, somnolent breathing, waking only once to tell him, to say it out loud, “I’m sorry, Eric.” More than you know.
She drifted off thinking about family, the little one that fit beneath this roof, but also the one beyond the library’s doors. Lorraine and Pearl and Ennis. Luis and Dell and Donovan, and all the Belle Vie Players. And she thought of the ones who were gone. Her mother and grandparents and great-grands, stretching all the way back to Jason. Which made her think of Inés, too. They were, each of them, connected across time, across the rolling land of a place called Belle Vie, each navigating a life shaped by the raw power of labor, but also love, their relationships built on river silt, thin and shape-shifting, their family lives a work of improvisational art, crafted from whatever was at hand, like the glistening bottles of Akerele’s bottle tree.
28
Caren 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.
It 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 tak
e 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.”