The Cutting Season Read online

  The others were all the same: four leaning walls beneath sagging, shingled roofs, each with an open doorway but no actual door, and out front a tiny, square patch of dirt and weeds where vegetables and wildflowers once grew—a historical fact which Raymond Clancy had pointedly refused to re-create, even in a nod to verisimilitude, for fear of being accused of painting too pretty a picture of slave life, of being called an apologist or worse. Raymond hated the slave cabins, hated every damn thing they stood for, he’d said, and had more than once made a fervent pitch to tear them down completely, fairly begging, knowing that this was one curatorial decision he’d have to run by his father, Leland, a man beloved in the parish for preserving an important piece of history, for Louisianans, and black folks, in particular. Raymond had tried to rope Caren in once, asking her to author a memo on company letterhead stating all the ways it would boost the plantation’s bottom line if the unsightly cabins were done away with. They could build a second reception hall, he’d said, or expand parking. It was the only instance, in all the time Caren had worked for Raymond, maybe even in all the years she’d known him, that she ever told him no.

  Raymond, she remembered, the one they used to call chicken.

  Caren and his baby brother, Bobby, used to spend long, rain-soaked afternoons daring Ray to walk alone through the slave village, daring him to spend even ten minutes inside the last cabin on the left, the one Caren was standing in front of now.

  Jason’s Cabin, they called it, because that was her mother’s name for it.

  She could still hear her hot, honeyed soprano.

  She could still hear her mother whispering that name.

  He was some kin to her, so the story went, some distant branch on the Gray family tree, thin and reedy as it was, pruned by time and circumstance; Caren was an only child, as was her mother before her, great-aunts and -uncles long gone. Jason, her great-great-great-grandfather on her mother’s side, she’d been told, had been a slave, born across the river on a neighboring plantation, brought to Belle Vie when he was just a boy. Her mother had always said he was a man to be proud of, slave or no slave. The stories her mother told, bits and pieces of history passed on from one generation to the next, painted a man who had lived with his head up and his back straight, a man who had lived a life of peace and fidelity . . . until he went mysteriously missing sometime after the Civil War. No one really knew what happened to him, but plantation lore was ripe with speculation. Some said he had tired of cutting cane and walked out of the fields after the war, leaving a wife and child. Some said he had problems with drink and women and that’s why he ran. And still others, like Caren’s mother, thought he had likely met trouble here on the plantation; that he’d died at Belle Vie, and his soul never left the grounds. Bobby’s tales were the most gruesome, often involving knife fights and fisticuffs and blood in the cane fields, anything his twelve-year-old mind could conjure to color his ghost stories, his proof of a real plantation haunting, a man without a final resting place. He would whisper in Caren’s ear, tap-tap her shoulders to the beat of spectral feet wandering the slave village, messing with her until she either screamed or fell into a fit of laughter, chest burning as she ran and ran, always looking back, hoping Bobby Clancy would catch her. Tall and lean, it never took him more than a few strides. He would throw himself down, rolling on the grass at her feet, strands of his black hair pasted against his damp, pink forehead. “Honest,” he would say, panting to catch his breath, staring up through a tangle of trees. Jason’s Cabin was haunted.

  Caren rested her hand on the cabin’s low-lying gate.

  It was washed over with rain, and the door was standing wide open.

  She paused over that, thinking it odd, that one detail.

  But it wasn’t until she crossed the dirt yard and stepped inside the cabin that she felt something was really wrong. Someone had been in here, she thought, inside this very cabin. It was the stillness that spooked her. Not the kind of emptiness that comes with actual vacancy, but rather a kind of strained quiet that was trying too hard, the tightness that comes when someone somewhere is trying very hard to be still, to restrain every twitch and wayward breath.

  She felt, for a moment, that she wasn’t alone.

  She couldn’t see two feet in front of her, the daylight stingy and withholding and stopping stubbornly at the door. She was standing in utter darkness, the air thick and dusty. She felt her chest close, her head go light. She’d had moments like this before, in this very cabin, when she’d felt overcome with dread, a heavy weight pressing in on her sternum. But today the feeling was worse. And Caren did something she’d never done, not in all the years she’d worked at Belle Vie. She didn’t wait for her eyes to adjust, didn’t wait until she could actually see . . . the tools on the wall and the rusting sugar kettle made over for laundering, a bar of lye soap and a hand wringer inside; the straw bed and pine table and the shallow pit in the floor that was dug out for cooking. She simply turned and walked out, cutting her inspection short. This cabin, the one set closest to the fields, was exactly the same as the others. At least that’s what she told the cops.

  Her last stop was the staff kitchen, located in a squat, stone-and-brick building a few yards from the main house. In the old days, a chance kitchen fire could mow down a Southern mansion in a matter of minutes, and the distance between the two buildings was meant to provide a measure of protection, and keep the big house cool in the worst summer months. The kitchen was an eight-hundred-square-foot box, one room that was bigger than any of the places Caren had lived in with her mom when she was a kid: guesthouses and garage apartments and one unbearably damp and hot summer spent in a two-room trailer parked on the back of somebody’s land. They were cheap rentals that provided shelter, but little else, places Helen Gray cared little for. The plantation’s eighteen acres were the whole of Caren’s only real idea of home, the only constant in her life. Belle Vie is home, her mother would say. It’s in our blood, ’Cakes. Caren had spent part of her childhood in this very kitchen, thumbing through her schoolwork or watching television. She’d learned to write her cursive letters in a single afternoon, sitting at one of the small tables by the stove, waiting for her mother to get off work.

  The kitchen’s door was propped open. Inside, Lorraine, the current cook, had her feet up on a card table covered with vegetable scraps and newspapers and discarded oyster shells.

  “Morning, baby,” she said, seeing Caren at the back door. Lorraine called everyone baby, and Caren had long learned not to take it personally.

  In the hot, steamy kitchen, she unzipped her down jacket.

  “You have a menu for me, Lorraine?”

  “Now, what you think, baby?”

  Lorraine had a bottle of hot sauce sticking out of the pocket of her stained apron and was sucking down raw oysters for breakfast and watching Fox & Friends on a small black-and-white television set. Caren could have stood there all day before she moved an inch. “Lorraine,” she sighed, because they went through this every time.

  “Yes, baby?” she said, in a way that suggested she had already carried this conversation farther than she intended to. Lorraine was openly suspicious of Caren and her sudden return to Belle Vie four years ago. It was possible that she even held an irrational belief that Caren had come for her job, to claim her rightful place in line. That Raymond Clancy had made her general manager, Lorraine’s boss essentially, certainly didn’t help things. Lorraine delighted in small acts of insubordination, putting through purchase orders without Caren’s permission, serving pickled chow-chow out of crusty jars from her home kitchen, and often changing menus at the last minute. She considered herself an artist, and not one to be tied down by fixed pricing. To Lorraine, Caren was a nuisance, with her little clipboard and her endless list of questions. Worse, she saw Caren as a woman who was rootless and unsure of where she belonged—and therefore not someone who, by Lorraine’s standards, ought to be consulted
about the intricacies of local cuisine. Lorraine was tall and black and unabashedly fat, carrying most of her excess weight around her middle, wearing it as a walking billboard for her talents, and she likewise regarded Caren’s relatively lean frame as further evidence that she shouldn’t be trusted in a kitchen. She was nothing like her mother, Lorraine was fond of saying.

  “Lorraine, we have eighty-five guests due here at five o’clock.”

  “Plenty of time.”

  “The host is expecting a five-course meal,” Caren said, repeating a fact of which she knew Lorraine was well aware. “I’d like to be able to tell them just what all that might entail.”

  Lorraine pondered the request before deciding, impulsively, to grant it.

  “What’d we say, Pearl?”

  She glanced over her shoulder at her line cook, a child-sized black woman in her sixties who had to stand on an orange crate to man the stove, which she was hovering over now. She didn’t bother to look up from the pot that was fogging her glasses.

  “ ’Gator,” Pearl said.

  Lorraine turned, reporting this news to Caren. “ ’Gator.”

  “And?”

  Lorraine sighed then, making a grand show of being ordered onto her feet. She crossed the kitchen to a large, stainless-steel fridge. There, she planted one hand on the curve of her right hip and stood in front of the open refrigerator door, searching the stored contents with her eyes. After a few moments of silence, she ticked off the night’s menu: “Grits, rolled with smoked Gouda, spinach, and bacon; chard out of the garden, with garlic and lemon; and potatoes creamed with butter and drippings.” She bent down a little, checking a lower shelf. “And I guess I could do a mushroom soup to start.” Then, nodding to her assistant, she added, “Pearl did a cobbler last night.”

  “Peach,” Pearl said.

  Lorraine turned to Caren. “Peach.”

  Caren nodded. “Sounds great.”

  Of course it did, she thought. She and Lorraine both knew those were Caren’s mother’s recipes. Lorraine held her gaze for a moment, narrowing eyes the color of burnt butter, and daring Caren to say something about it. “Oh, yes, ma’am, baby.”

  Caren’s office was on the second floor of the main house, above the formal parlor. It was long and narrow and always warm, as the room’s single window faced south. She could see a swatch of the parking lot from here, and the cane fields beyond.

  She was never allowed in the main house as a kid.

  She and Bobby had the run of the grounds and would sometimes sneak over the levee to hide from Raymond. But she never once stepped foot inside Bobby’s bedroom or sat to dinner with the family. And her mother never made it past the foyer. She would cook, but Helen would not serve, leaving trays of hot food on a pedestal table by the back door or sending Lorraine in her stead. The Grays, for generations, had stayed clear of the main house, either by fate or by choice. And now, six days out of the week, Caren sat comfortably at her desk, looking out over fields where her ancestors had cut sugarcane by hand, both before and after the Civil War. Days she felt tempted to sit and ruminate about mistakes she’d made, choices that had led like a series of stale bread crumbs back to the gates of Belle, there was always this one thought. She had gone farther and risen higher than anyone in her family might have dreamed. It was not nearly the life she thought she’d have, not at thirty-seven. But it was something.

  The machines were in the fields today.

  October to January, they were out from sunup to sundown, mowing row after row, plucking ripe stalks from the ground and stacking the bounty in advance of its long ride to the sugar mill in Thibodaux. Every year, during the cutting season, she watched them from her desk for hours on end, their whole repetitive existence providing the background hum of Caren’s life on the plantation during the fall.

  That Thursday was the first dry morning in a week.

  Though the air was still damp and thick as wet cotton, fogging up her office window with tiny beads of dew, there was no rain today, and that meant there were laborers in the fields. She watched them work in teams of two. They dropped whole stalks of cane into shallow furrows dug into fields that had been left empty and fallow; they were planting for next year’s crop, work that ordinarily would have been completed by early September, well before the harvest, if this season hadn’t been so unusually wet. They’d had nearly fifteen inches of rain in August alone, the stuff of records. And every wet day was a day a farm couldn’t plant, putting Groveland and everybody else behind for the season—and creating a small band of underemployed field-workers hanging around outside the Ace Hardware or the T&H Superette in Donaldsonville, looking for extra work. Ed Renfrew always hired locally, mostly blacks and poor whites, as had the Clancys when they still ran the farm, but for the past three years, the Groveland Corporation had been pulling in laborers from out of state, as far west as Beaumont, Texas, and even some coming all the way from Georgia and Alabama; they were Mexicans mostly, and some Guatemalans, plucked out of rice fields and fruit groves for a few months of working Louisiana sugarcane, before moving on to somewhere else. If the weather had held, the cops would later say, Inés Avalo would have already been gone. She would have likely still been alive.

  The plantation was about fifty miles south of the capital.

  Out here, they got only a few radio stations, mostly out of Baton Rouge, an endless stream of adult contemporary and country, Lionel Richie and Randy Travis. The music played softly as Caren got to work on the morning’s first task: a memo to her supervisor, Raymond Clancy, outlining the particulars of the Donovan Isaacs problem.

  It had started over the summer.

  Mr. Isaacs, an “actor” with the Belle Vie Players who’d had a lead part in The Olden Days of Belle Vie for over a year, had taken a basic, first-year U.S. history course at his community college and come out a new man, he said. He’d had a personal awakening of sorts and suddenly taken grave issue with the staged play, refusing to utter, on principle, the scripted words that were being “put into his mouth.”

  The play was, admittedly, bad, a fact that Caren didn’t drive home in her memo.

  It was written by a state senator’s wife, following Belle Vie’s formal recognition as a historical treasure (worthy of state funding), and not a period or comma had changed in the twenty-five years hence. It was as soapy as Gone With the Wind, full of belles and balls and star-crossed lovers, noble Confederates and happy darkies and more dirty Yankees than you could count. And the tourists loved it. Senior groups and war buffs and New Englanders in shorts and flip-flops. And middle school teachers, of course, many of whom ordered items in bulk from the gift shop as takeaways for their students.

  Caren had a certain appreciation for Donovan’s newfound rage and even let him vent in her office for a solid twenty minutes, as he enumerated the many ways “this cracker-ass bullshit” fell well short of the real history of plantation life across Louisiana. Donovan wanted the whole play axed, which Caren was in no position to authorize. She did admit to encouraging him, though. It was actually her idea that he create some kind of alternative document, “like a history report,” that would tell a more accurate version of antebellum life, using Belle Vie’s own library, if he wanted, and that he present it to the Clancy family and the state’s Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism, which paid his small salary. She was thinking of a one-sheet, something they could photocopy and include as a handout along with the play’s programs. But Donovan had taken it a step further. He showed up in her office one hot July morning, clutching a stack of wrinkled yellow legal papers, smudged with pencil marks and ink. He had rewritten the play, top to bottom. Even the title was new: Truth and Consequences: The Straight Story of the South. The handwriting was illegible and difficult to follow, and at first she thought he was joking. “I’m as serious as a heart attack,” he said, leaving the pages on Caren’s desk.

  She never even go
t past the third page, on which, as far as she could tell, a slave revolt took out half the French Creoles in Ascension Parish. There were three beheadings in a single paragraph. The whole thing read like bad comic-book fan fiction: slaves firing weapons without any gunpowder in sight, Yankee soldiers making telephone calls in the middle of the Civil War, and there was at least one musical interlude. It was an absolute mess, a boyish fantasy, an overcorrection that favored Donovan’s own misguided ideas about power and score-settling over any real semblance of the truth. And besides, it wasn’t exactly the kind of feel-good fare that pulls tourists in off the highway. Raymond Clancy said as much when she’d pitched the idea over the phone. His instructions could not have been more explicit: the play, and Belle Vie itself, his family homestead, would stay the way they had always been. When she reported this news to Donovan, he nodded stoically, as if he’d been expecting this. Then he threatened a walkout of the whole cast in protest—inducting Shauna Hayes and Cornelius McCrary on the spot, before finally convincing Dell Blanchett, Nikki Hubbard, and Ennis Mabry to join the fight if push came to shove—leaving Caren with the task of figuring a way to run Belle Vie without any slaves. He’d left her office that day with a parting admonition that the truth would come out, one way or another.