The Cutting Season

Still, she took it as a sign. A reminder, really, that Belle Vie, its beauty, was not to be trusted. That beneath its loamy topsoil, the manicured grounds and gardens, two centuries of breathtaking wealth and spectacle, lay a land both black and bitter, soft to the touch, but pressing in its power. She should have known that one day it would spit out what it no longer has use for, the secrets it would no longer keep.

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.

She’d gone over the ballot three or four times, standing alone in the booth, tracing a finger under the first line, the word President. She wondered what her mother would have made of that, if she’d lived to see it.

The law, she knew, is a narrow little box, and it only takes a single misstep to find yourself on the outside of it.

She had long known there were things they didn’t tell her, as a rule […] They didn’t consider her one of them. Apart from Lorraine, Ennis, and Luis, they didn’t know her personal history, her upbringing as the daughter of the plantation’s cook. To them, she was management, with a capital M, the eyes and ears of Raymond Clancy.

It was only supposed to be for one year. But the place got a hold of her, from that first day, the first hour even.

He’d never seen anything like it, and Caren found herself wanting to reach for his hand, because no person should experience this moment alone, this face-to-face meeting with one’s own history, the family you never knew you had.

Caren should have paid more attention […] She could only recall the soft whispers in her ear, nights her mother tried to tell her, over and over, that Jason’s life mattered, that his story was in their blood.

Someone had been out here searching for whatever it was that lay beneath the surface.

Were they so different really, Jason and Ines, two cane workers separated by time and not much else?

The scene of an ancient murder trial played before them.

“What is this?” one of the Groveland employees asked.

“Belle Vie,” Caren said.

This is what you bought.

“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.