The Cutting Season Read Free

the morning fog, the graying clapboard cottages lined up on each side, she said a short, fervent prayer, and the spell was effectively and immediately broken. The space opened itself up to her only after she privately acknowledged its power. It was the only way forward.
    She repeated the prayer this morning, mumbling the words softly.
    The wind lifted and changed direction, pushing at her back, nudging her on.
    She passed the bronze marker first, the heels of her boots sinking into the soft, damp earth. Raised some three feet off the ground and set just inside the gate to the first cabin, it dated the village to 1852, the year Monsieur and Madame Duquesne bought the land from the Mississippi all the way to the back swamp, christening it La Belle Vie . The six cabins were all that remained of what was once a THRIVING VILLAGE OF PLANTATION WORKERS . She wiped the words with her jacket sleeve, clearing the dew. Inside the first cabin, she paused long enough for her eyes to adjust to the darkness of the one-room shack. The air was thick, even the halest breeze unable or unwilling to cross the threshold. Caren gave the cabin a quick survey: straw pallet on the dirt floor; antique field tools hanging from rusty nails on the walls; a pine table with a tin cup and a kettle resting atop; a broom of twigs and brush; and a crudely made bench with a threadbare quilt lying on one end. It was neat and clean and ready for showing. Caren backed out, ducking her head beneath a low beam.
    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