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Virginia TellNovel(972) 897-884471,300 WordsBORNE FROM THE CUTOFFPrologueCharlie didn’t know Francis before that dreadful night, and Francis knew nothing of Charlie’sslaughterings. Nor would they have sought out each other’s company had not the strict mores of prison life segregated them. The only thing they had in common that day was their proximity tothe woods when lightening cracked too near the chain gang’s guard, or rather, his mount.Roadside convicts were an almost unnoticeable element of Iberville Parish scenery, but that was before Charlie and Francis, before they slipped into the ten-foot-high sugar cane rows that led tothe woods a sprintable hundred yards away.* * * * *At nighttime, any passersby could see the slivers of light that slipped through cracks inthe half-inch by four-inch wallboards of our home. My ancestors built our house generations before, settled in a soggy delta, the place of our heritage. Ours was a land where canopies of Live Oaks the age of my ancestors towered over our roofs, where the smell of the bayous was thecrisp pineyness of Cypress.

On that last night, the breeze that traveled with the waters of The Great Mississippi blewthrough the quiet of my bedroom, billowing the thin shears hung over French doors andexpansive windows, like slow soap bubbles that fatten then suddenly pop. In gentle waves itrocked the mighty limbs of those old oaks, a delicate sachet of giant arms against the roof,swishing like a lady’s party petticoats. The lulling swish and the ping of rain on our tin roof when time to sleep were my favorite sounds, along with the mysterious song of my horses.Most nights, the sounds of the delta - its crickets and tree frogs and cicadas - harmonizedwith the chorus of my beloved equine like the waltzes played at the gala events I dreamed of attending, though my name never graced an invitation. No invitations to Mardi Gras Balls, nor coming-out parties, not even a sip-and-see. None of the many celebrations for a myriad of occasions my Highlander neighbors prided themselves in hosting and attending. We weren’ttheir kind.But the waltz of our land was agitated that last night, and my family found no comfort inthe hum of our homeland.

Hurricane Valerie

, no more than a hundred and fifty miles off thecoast of Grand Isle (the tiny gulf islet a scant eighty miles south of our home, in Louisiana’ssouthernmost delta) had dutifully warned us that she would be a storm never to be forgotten.And all of God’s creatures knew it, one by one becoming more and more restless. The cattle hadlong ago migrated to a common, treed area. Incessant cackling from the hen house persisted for hours, and other insects and animals would soon follow suit, nature’s warning system alerting usthrough body and voice.It was late October and we had already dismissed as preposterous any expectations of yetanother hurricane. Each season, we start at

to name the big storms, then proceed through thealphabet, but never had the South made its way to

, and the season was all but finished. Back

when

Valerie

was still a tropical storm, we simply assumed the new she-devil would sooner or later fall apart or veer off in some other direction. And we continued to assume she would alter her course even five days prior to her arrival, when she passed over the Florida Keys and into theGulf. But she kept coming, kept growing. For almost two weeks she’d been out there,nonchalant, at her leisure making way toward us. Her path never veered from its direct route toour home, day after day creeping a little closer.At my window that night, in the breeze preceding the storm, I shuddered in mythreadbare shift not for the coolness of night air, but for the remnants of childhood guilt I couldnever quite expunge from memory – guilt for what I had said in my grandmother’s kitchen whenI was nine and stood at her window looking out into the rains that came at the very fringes of ahurricane whose eye had altered its course and made landfall over two-hundred miles away. I pouted, “I wish that stupid thing would come this way. Nothing interesting ever happens here.”And I felt guilty about spending so much energy lamenting over my relativelyinsignificant personal issues when the following day would write its history as a tragedy for our land and, along with it, a tragedy for our people as a whole. Though in retrospect my troublesseemed insignificant in the grand scheme of life, that day’s trials, that day’s tribulations were myentire world, my past and my future.At Sunday Mass two days before the storm, Father’s Rabalais’ sermon explained thatGod gives us guilt when we need to take some type of action, to do or say something. But Icouldn’t figure out what action I should have attempted, whether there was someone with whomI was supposed to make amends, or seek forgiveness. Perhaps He merely wanted me to stopfeeling sorry for myself, grieving about how I had managed to tear apart my life limb by limb.

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Borne from the Cutoff - Southern Literary Fiction

BORNE FROM THE CUTOFF

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Family skeletons, hate, and scornful bigotry kidnap the peaceful lives of a South Louisiana people. A mother’s deceit and cunning bloom... (More)

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Category:	Creative Writing > Novels
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Upload Date:	07/02/2009
Copyright:	Attribution Non-commercial
Tags:	literary hurricane Fiction Southern literary hurricane Fiction Southern (fewer)