Cutler 02 - Secrets of the Morning

sky grew more overcast and what had been cloudy and misty became murky, especially under the spreading magnolia trees. Fields and houses were draped in dim, purplish shadows everywhere.
    Soon the nice, small farmhouses and tiny villages became few and far between. We passed long, dry, drab brown empty fields and when we did come to a house, it was usually sick looking with bleached clapboard siding and porches that leaned, their railings cracked or missing. I saw poor black children playing in front of many of these houses, the lawns covered with parts of automobiles or broken wooden chairs. The children stopped their make-believe and stared at us with empty eyes only vaguely curious.
    Finally, I saw a road sign announcing our arrival in Upland Station. I recalled Grandmother Cutler telling me this was the closest town to the plantation. As we entered it, I realized it wasn't much—a general store which also served as the post office, a gas station, a small restaurant that looked like part of the gas station, a barber shop, and a large stone and wood house with a sign in front describing it as a mortuary. At the far end there was a railroad station that looked like it had been closed for ages. All the windows were boarded and there were NO TRESPASSING signs posted all over it. There were no sidewalks in Upland Station, and there was no one in the street, just a couple of hound dogs lying in the mud. It was one of the most depressing places I had ever seen and I had been in many rundown villages and towns when Daddy and Momma Longchamp took us from one place to another.
    Luther turned as soon as we passed the old railroad station and started down a more narrow road that had only an occasional house here and there, all of them looking like poor farms on which people barely scratched out a living. The road began to look rougher and older, its macadam cracked and broken. The truck rocked from side to side as Luther tried to navigate it over the most solid pieces. He slowed down and turned right on what was nothing more than a dirt road with a mound of yellow grass running down its center. He drove slowly, but that didn't stop the truck from swaying so much it made me nauseous again.
    "All this land still belongs to The Meadows," he said when we reached a broken wooden fence. I saw sections of it running far off to the right and far off to the left on both sides of the road. The fields were overgrown with bushes and dry grass, but it looked like acres and acres of it.
    "They own all this?" I said, impressed. Luther grunted.
    "Lotta good that does them now," he replied.
    But how could it not do them good to own so much land? I wondered. They must be very, very rich people. I sat back, looking forward to setting my eyes on a wealthy southern plantation. I knew how some of these places could be, how some old southern families had held on to their wealth as well as their heritage. Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad here, I thought. After all I would rest, eat good food, and be in fresh, country air. It would be good for the baby.
    Luther began to slow down even more. I leaned forward. Over the tops of the trees I could see the tips of the brick chimneys and the long, gabled roof of the plantation house. It looked enormous. At the entrance to the driveway were two stone pillars, each crowned with a ball of granite, but the driveway itself was nothing more than crushed rocks and dirt. As Luther turned into it, I gazed ahead and saw what was better described as a corpse, the remains of what must have once been a blossoming flower of the South, but what was now a phantom of itself.
    I saw the dry and broken marble fountains, some leaning over precipitously. I saw the dead and scraggly hedges, the pockmarked flower beds with their gaping empty spaces, the chipped and battered stone walks, and the large, but ugly lawn only spotted here and there with patches of yellow grass. The shadows that had fallen with the twilight looked permanently glued on the immense two-story wood structure.
    Over the great round columns of the full-facade porch ran thin leafless vines that looked more like rotting rope. Some of the multipane front windows had black shutters and decorative crowns; some had lost their shutters and looked naked. There was only the dim glow of light behind the lower ones.
    Luther drove toward the right side of the house and I could see that behind the house was the barn and stables, all the buildings tottering and in need of