hadn’t spoken to Leland Clancy in years, not since she was first hired for the job in 2005. Already well into retirement by then, he used to drive down from his house in Baker for lunch a few times a week. Lorraine would make him a hot plate—chicken and gravy or crawfish with red beans and rice or sometimes just pea soup and biscuits. And after, Leland would sit with a book under one of the old oak trees, his long legs stretched out toward the river. Or some days he would take a nap in the library. He was newly widowed then and alone a lot during the day, and he seemed to appreciate the company he found at Belle Vie, where someone was “always home,” as he put it. He took a particular liking to Morgan, plying her with peanut butter candies, which seemed to stream in an endless supply from the pockets of his patched cardigan sweaters, which he wore year-round, and sometimes he read storybooks to her in the rose garden. He asked after Helen from time to time, forgetting she was gone.
Caren liked Leland, always had.
It often pained her to ask him to please move from his post on the front lawn so they could set up chairs for an outdoor wedding reception or request that he not park in the spots reserved for school buses and chartered vans. He always did as he was told, thanking her for the job she was doing. But his demeanor struck her as lonely and displaced; he could spend whole afternoons wandering the grounds of his property, as if he were searching for something he’d lost. He’d inherited Belle Vie from his father, who’d inherited it from his father, a long line of ownership that went back to Clancy’s ancestor William P. Tynan, who acquired the land after the Civil War. Leland raised his own family there for a while, until his growing law practice in Baton Rouge required them to move. The family eventually settled into a four-bedroom split-level ranch just north of the capital, and Belle Vie became his wife’s pet project, in time lovingly restored to its original antebellum glory, and eventually becoming a state showpiece—a long way from the overgrown land, weather-beaten and forgotten, that had been Leland’s boyhood home. Though the Clancys were beloved in Ascension Parish for what they had done, making the land available to the public and preserving the history for posterity (not to mention the scholarships they had endowed, the money they poured into local, and mostly black, schools), he once confessed to Caren that he wished he’d never bothered with any of it, turning Belle Vie into an events venue and tourist stop. He was eighty now and in failing health, and once a month Lorraine carried a plate up to his house in Baker, as Caren’s mother had done, in the years when Lorraine was her number two.
Caren had made the trip with her mom only once before, when she was barely a teenager. Twelve years old, she’d ridden in the front seat of her mother’s white Pontiac, finally working up the nerve to ask her mother something painfully delicate. She knew Helen didn’t like her spending so much time with Bobby Clancy, didn’t like the way he sometimes looked at her, lingering sideways glances that hadn’t escaped Raymond’s attention either, even though she and Bobby were both just kids, more brother and sister than anything. And once that last thought took hold, Caren locked on to it and wouldn’t let it go. It was an answer, maybe, an explanation for the life that kept them both pinned in place, tethered to a plantation. Caren told herself she could accept it, her mother’s job, her devotion to Belle Vie, if she could just make sense of it. And that day, on the car ride, she asked her mother, point-blank, if Leland James Clancy was her father. Helen laughed out loud, the muscles in her neck rolling like waves, up and down. “Oh, ’Cakes,” she said. And then just as suddenly she fell into a cold, stony silence. She barely spoke to Caren for three days after that, pulling into herself. Caren
Caren liked Leland, always had.
It often pained her to ask him to please move from his post on the front lawn so they could set up chairs for an outdoor wedding reception or request that he not park in the spots reserved for school buses and chartered vans. He always did as he was told, thanking her for the job she was doing. But his demeanor struck her as lonely and displaced; he could spend whole afternoons wandering the grounds of his property, as if he were searching for something he’d lost. He’d inherited Belle Vie from his father, who’d inherited it from his father, a long line of ownership that went back to Clancy’s ancestor William P. Tynan, who acquired the land after the Civil War. Leland raised his own family there for a while, until his growing law practice in Baton Rouge required them to move. The family eventually settled into a four-bedroom split-level ranch just north of the capital, and Belle Vie became his wife’s pet project, in time lovingly restored to its original antebellum glory, and eventually becoming a state showpiece—a long way from the overgrown land, weather-beaten and forgotten, that had been Leland’s boyhood home. Though the Clancys were beloved in Ascension Parish for what they had done, making the land available to the public and preserving the history for posterity (not to mention the scholarships they had endowed, the money they poured into local, and mostly black, schools), he once confessed to Caren that he wished he’d never bothered with any of it, turning Belle Vie into an events venue and tourist stop. He was eighty now and in failing health, and once a month Lorraine carried a plate up to his house in Baker, as Caren’s mother had done, in the years when Lorraine was her number two.
Caren had made the trip with her mom only once before, when she was barely a teenager. Twelve years old, she’d ridden in the front seat of her mother’s white Pontiac, finally working up the nerve to ask her mother something painfully delicate. She knew Helen didn’t like her spending so much time with Bobby Clancy, didn’t like the way he sometimes looked at her, lingering sideways glances that hadn’t escaped Raymond’s attention either, even though she and Bobby were both just kids, more brother and sister than anything. And once that last thought took hold, Caren locked on to it and wouldn’t let it go. It was an answer, maybe, an explanation for the life that kept them both pinned in place, tethered to a plantation. Caren told herself she could accept it, her mother’s job, her devotion to Belle Vie, if she could just make sense of it. And that day, on the car ride, she asked her mother, point-blank, if Leland James Clancy was her father. Helen laughed out loud, the muscles in her neck rolling like waves, up and down. “Oh, ’Cakes,” she said. And then just as suddenly she fell into a cold, stony silence. She barely spoke to Caren for three days after that, pulling into herself. Caren