The Cutting Season (37 page)

She left the engine idling and entered the house through the back door, pausing in the darkened foyer. She held the gun by her side as she walked beneath the winding staircase toward the dining hall, the door to which was cracked open. On the other side, she saw a flicker of light. She crept across the parquet floor, trying to center most of the weight in her hips so her feet fell lightly, making little sound. It was only as she got closer to the door that she heard heavy breathing, like a rattling whisper. Raising the pistol, she pushed open the carved wood door. Inside the dining hall she found Raymond sitting alone, reclining by lamplight. He was stone drunk and sleeping across the wide bottoms of two of Belle Vie’s best dining chairs, within arm’s reach of a bottle of Cuvée, which was open and stood half-finished on the floor next to him. Caren felt for a light switch on the wall, brightening the crystal chandeliers overhead.

Clancy stirred.

He opened his eyes and looked at Caren, grinning widely. “Gray.”

“What are you doing here, Raymond?”

He sat up, chuckling to himself at this situation, him drunk and laid out. When he sat up to his full height, his knees were nearly pressed to his chest in the short dining chair. “Sit down,” he said to her, as if she were just dropping by for a visit or an after-dinner spirit. He reached for the bottle of brandy, one she was sure he’d lifted from Lorraine’s kitchen. Pouring a small bit into a snifter, he then offered it to her. Caren refused. Raymond took his straight from the bottle.

He rolled his eyes to the ceiling and sighed.

“They’re going to tear it down, Gray. I got the call a few hours ago.”

“What did you expect?”

Raymond shrugged, and Caren decided she hated him, for, as much as anything else, his smug indifference to all this. Sure, he was sad about losing this place, but sad for all the wrong reasons, a man in midlife coming to terms with the knowledge of what, given the chance, he’d trade for politics. There was nothing but self-pity in this room, and Caren wanted nothing to do with it. There was only one thing she wanted from him before she went.

“I want to see it,” she said. “I want to see the deed.”

Raymond paused, staring into his brandy.

He tapped a lean finger along the belly of the bottle.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Gray.”

“Yes you do.”

Clancy took a long sip of brandy, not answering her, behaving for a moment as if she’d never said a word, as if she weren’t standing right in front of him. “Listen to me, Gray,” he said finally, his voice as hard and cold as a shard of ice. “Listen good . . . my brother is not a well man, hasn’t been for years. I don’t know what in God’s name got into him, why he went crazy on that girl like that. But I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“You knew the story of what happened to Jason, and you lied when you said you’d never heard that your own relative had been the suspected killer. You were the one who took the records out of the archives, trying to erase the true chain of ownership. And when Abrams reported to you—still the stated owner of this land—what Inés had found in the fields, you had a hunch what it was, that the bone belonged to Jason, and you wanted to erase that, too. You had your brother dig up the fields out there, looking for the rest of his remains. And
you
put Bobby on Inés’s trail,” she said acidly, the words burning on her tongue. “And look what happened.”

“He was just supposed to watch that girl, make sure she didn’t go blabbing to anyone else,” Raymond said. “But I swear, Gray, I think my brother saw an opportunity to tank all I had coming to me, and he was willing to take a life to do it.” He lifted the bottle. “I swear he did it to spite me, leaving her in the dirt like that.”

“I just need to see it,” Caren said. “I just need to see the piece of paper that said this place would have been Jason’s if Tynan hadn’t killed him. I just need to see it.”

Raymond didn’t say anything.

He was staring into the dregs of his bottle, the whites of his eyes dull and gray.

“This was never just about Groveland, was it?” she said. “The sale?”

Raymond’s voice, when he finally spoke, was hushed and wistful.

“People are funny about this place, Gray,” he said. “I’ve met whites who love it, blacks who can’t stand it, and the other way around, and not a damn thing in between. Everybody’s got their own idea of what Belle Vie ought to be, who it really belongs to.”

“It belonged to Jason,” Caren said. “This was all his.”

“You’ll never prove that, Gray.”

“And there was no way in hell you could run for office in a state with a population this
colored
, no way to run on your daddy’s good name, and then have the whole world find out your family stole this land from a black man.”

Raymond leaped to his feet, knocking over his chair.

He made a move, as if to take hold of her arm, but she still had the revolver in her right hand.

At the sight of it, he backed off, stammering his words. “I didn’t steal shit, Gray,” he said. “That was Tynan. That don’t have a thing to do with me. I didn’t steal a goddamned thing. And hell if I’m going to be held responsible for what some crooked white man, family or no family, did two hundred years ago. It ain’t fair to me. It ain’t fair to anybody. And I don’t want it on my back anymore. I wish to God Daddy’d never fooled with any of it, never put it on his kids, passing this shit down, on and on. I don’t want it. People been after me for years to sell this land, and I put it off, but I’m finally ready to be done with it.” He then turned and fixed a stare out the windows. “Groveland is a good deal, good for the state,” he said. “People want history, they can read books.”

“Where’s the deed, Raymond?”

“It’s gone.”

The admission wasn’t mean-spirited. It was the truth.

She would never see it, not in this lifetime.

“I can still make 2010 work,” he said, speaking of his place in the political landscape. “That’s a whole year away.” He sank into a chair with the bottle of brandy. “People have short memories.”

“I remember.”

Clancy looked up at her, rolling his shoulders, trying to compose himself. “So I suppose this means you’re going to try to block the Groveland deal, lay some claim to the land,” he said. “I suppose you’re going to pick through dusty records in your family’s name, try to find any old thing that says Belle Vie belonged to you all along.”

Caren shook her head.

“I don’t want it,” she said firmly. “Any more than you do.”

She repeated the words she’d said over her mother’s grave, that it was time for her to leave it behind.

“Where you headed, then?”

“D.C.,” she said, finally saying it out loud. “I’m moving to D.C.”

“Washington, huh?” he said, making a face, as if he didn’t realize they let anybody in the place without an elected seat in government. “You got family there?”

“Something like that.”

She left him alone, in the big house, driving herself home in the company of the plantation’s aged oaks and weeping willows, each branch and leaf dusted with silvery moonlight.

T
hey went all out for the Whitman deal.

Peonies out of season, in shades of plum and rose, with a supporting cast of hothouse orchids, shipped all the way from Memphis; tables set with silver and china trimmed in gold; and a dusky pink carpet sprinkled with white petals, leading from the rose garden to the main house. Lorraine, as instructed, spared nothing for the food: chilled oysters with a mignonette sauce awaited guests on the front porch as soon as the last vows were said; along with a rare Viognier, enough for each guest to have two and three glasses before dinner, served with both Roquefort and Comté cheeses and complemented with a cherry jam dotted with cane crystals. And that was all just to start.

In the dining hall, while Shannon Whitman, resplendent in winter white, beads, and silk, cried through four rounds of drunken wedding toasts, the guests were treated to red cabbage sautéed in cider vinegar; andouille sausage over coarse grits and butter; pork roast in apples and wine; and a whole roasted chicken for each and every table. It was a feast the likes of which Belle Vie hadn’t seen in more than a hundred years. Caren watched it all from the back of the hall, overseeing every last detail.

Later, long after the sun went down and the guests had gone, she helped Lorraine and Pearl wheel a cart full of leftovers—buttercream cake and wine and cheese and champagne—down to the quarters, where the staff had gathered. In the end, they’d all begged off the overtime and the prospect of dressing up as slaves and slave masters for a paying audience one last time. They’d spent the evening filming instead, way down by the quarters and out of sight of the goings-on in the big house.

The scene was Jason’s funeral.

The stage was still set.

Twinkling lights were strung from the wood gates, and bunches of pansies and daffodils in mismatched glass jars lined the dirt road, where the ex-slaves had gathered to say good-bye. It was kind of pretty actually, out here under the stars on a clear, black night. Sometime after midnight, Cornelius hooked his iPod to a boom box and plugged that into Donovan’s generator. It started to feel like a party instead of a funeral—a proper send-off with food and drink and good music, blues and some zydeco, and when it got really late, Earth, Wind & Fire. They danced, some of them; they sat and talked and laughed. Shauna, Nikki, Dell, and Bo Johnston. Luis and Shep and Kimberly, Val and Eddie Knoxville. Cornelius and Pearl and Ennis Mabry and Lorraine and Danny Olmsted . . . and Donovan, of course. Some of these people Caren knew she would never see again, a shame, really. Lorraine was drinking beer from a can, and when she finished, she stood and said it was time to head back, to pick up where the catering crew had left off—bussing dishes and breaking down tables, cleaning the kitchen and any left-behinds in the dining hall. But as Lorraine started to her feet, Caren asked her to please sit down. “Leave it, Lorraine,” she said, her tongue light with champagne, her mood brighter than it had been in weeks, years even.
Leave it just as it is.

Acknowledgments

T
his book would not exist without the guidance of my agent, Richard Abate; the unwavering trust of my editor, Dawn Davis; the support and candor of my Serpent’s Tail family, most especially Rebecca Gray; the love of my husband, Karl Fenske, who is a true feminist and took many a “second shift” so that I could write in the evenings; the sharp eyes of my sister, Tembi Locke, who read multiple drafts and offered great notes (as always); the timely patronage of Gene and Aubrey Locke and Sherra Aguirre; and the deep intelligence of Dr. Cheryl Arutt, who weekly opens my head and heart to the mysteries of human nature, starting with my own.

A special thank-you goes to Dennis Lehane for his generosity of spirit and his passionate support for new writers—and for inspiring me to go out into the world and do the same. And I also want to express my dearest gratitude to Claire Wachtel and the team at Dennis Lehane Books.

Additional thanks go to Pete Ayrton, Andrew Franklin, and Ruth Killick, for making a home for me across the pond; to Shanna Milkey, Maya Ziv, Katherine Beitner, Kendra Newton, Jonathan Burnham, Michael Morrison, and the rest of my HarperCollins family, for their professionalism and vision; to Megan Beatie and Lynn Goldberg for helping to introduce me to the world as a new author; and to Bob Myman, Philip Raskind, and Adriana Alberghetti, for being the great constants in my writing life.

And for driving me around in his pickup truck and explaining in great detail the Louisiana sugar industry, I thank Herman Waguespack, Jr., of the American Sugar Cane League. Thanks also to James Wilson at the Center for Louisiana Studies, who made sure I had all the historical research materials I needed, and to my dear neighbor Lowell Bernstein for checking my Spanish.

I could never forget to thank my brother-in-law, Rosario Gullo, for reminding me, so often, that I am right where I’m meant to be; or my brothers Nick, Doug, and Thomas, and the many friends and family members, who, each in their own way, let me know I had their full and undying support.

Finally, with this book in particular, I want to express my love and deep gratitude to the women who have mothered me in my lifetime: Sherra, my first love; Aubrey, who opened her heart to me from our very first meeting; Mrs. Odell C. Johnson, my literary soul mate; Fanny and Willie Jean, who is a light in my life; Altha Mae, Dolphus, and Douglass; Rhonda, Pam, Cheryl, Lennette, and Michela; Bernadette and Mrs. Willie Sampson; Helen, Opal, Versa, and Elsie; Connie Fenske; my dear sister, Tembi, who has always offered me a hand to hold; and Odelia, who is in my heart still.

And to my daughter, Clara, who made a mother out of me, I say thank you, my love.

About the Author

A
TTICA
L
OCKE
is the author of the widely acclaimed debut novel
Black Water Rising
, which was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, an Edgar Award, and an NAACP Image Award, and was short-listed for the UK’s Orange Prize. As a screenwriter, Locke has produced scripts for Paramount, Warner Bros., Disney, Twentieth Century Fox, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, and HBO. She was a fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmakers Lab and has served on the board of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. A native of Houston, Texas, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.

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