by Bret Lott
But I didn’t see that body, that black kid. And I remember school after that happened, the counselors they had lined up in the office wanting to talk to anybody who was cracked about that kid getting killed. Like we don’t need anybody to talk to until one of us gets killed?
I didn’t see that body, but I do remember feeling like death was there with us, like it’d been walking the halls, and maybe I just missed it, just walked into my first-period class a second or so before he turned the corner, headed along the lockers toward me. I just hadn’t seen him.
But I saw him today.
And Mom thinks my staying with Unc is a necessary evil: she makes me stay down there, and Unc cuts her a check each month off his insurance from the fire.
She thinks I don’t know about the money, but I do. And she thinks she’s making me go there. Truth is, I’d pay her, if it came to that.
It takes close to an hour to get to Hungry Neck from where we live in North Charleston, a neighborhood called Liberty Hills. There’s no hills there, of course. Just houses, square ones like ours.
I lay there in the hospital bed, listening to my mom talk and the TV playing on and on, and thought of the drive there, that hour, saw myself climb in the Luv parked in our driveway of a Friday afternoon, school over, then heading out to Hungry Neck Hunt Club: the clubhouse, next to it the butcher shed, where we haul the deer in and dress them, past the clubhouse and shed the single-wide, beige with a brown racing stripe all the way around, cinder blocks leading up to the front door.
Hungry Neck Hunt Club. Where my mom lived with my dad for eight years, me there for seven of them. And with Unc for one more year after that, Mom nursing him and taking care of me. That whole year, I saw my dad talk to Unc maybe twice, their words never much more than sharp knives meant to cut out the heart of one or the other of them. Nothing like when Unc and Aunt Sarah used to come out for Easter and Christmas, when there’d be laughter and stories, usually about Hungry Neck and wild pigs they’d snared, or the secret deer stands they used to put up just for watching the woods, the river. Back when I used to envy them being brothers, me having none, not even a sister.
Not a week after Unc took that stick from me, sat up in bed for the first time, my daddy was gone.
Which is why sometimes I blame myself for the whole thing. If I hadn’t found that stick.
I’ve driven this route so many times I don’t even have to think about it, a drive I’ve been doing one way or the other every Friday night since I was eight and we moved to that square house in Liberty Hills, when we’d come back to take care of Unc over the weekend, heading home late Sunday night.
Then, when I turned ten, she took to just dropping me off Friday nights, and going home, me here to tend to him.
But in April, when I got my learner’s permit, Unc bought me the Luv from Miss Dinah Gaillard. Now I drive out there myself.
The Friday he gave it to me, Mom just dropped me off, Unc sitting like always on the cinder-block steps up. He waved at her like always, then she was gone.
He’d said, “Let’s go,” and stood, started around the back end of the trailer.
I followed him around back, saw him standing next to the Luv, navy blue and rust, his hand on the hood like one of those bubba car salesmen we make jokes about when we stay up late Friday and Saturday night in front of the television. He was smiling.
“It’s yours,” he said. He pulled a key chain from his front shirt pocket, tossed it to me. The keys hit my chest, and I hadn’t said a word, not yet able to figure this out.
“This was Benjamin Gaillard’s. Miss Dinah’s son,” he said, and opened the driver’s-side door. “Been sitting out to her place since he died. She told me she knew she could trust it to you, knows you’re a responsible young man.” He paused, grinned. “Not like me on deer-hunt Saturdays, sitting in the kitchen and shooting the breeze with her and Dorcas. She says she’s seen you making certain to get that fire going, and saying thank you for the coffee. Guess good manners and following orders sometimes pays off.” He nodded. “So take good care of it.”
“Yessir,” I said. He didn’t have to say anything after that. I knew who Benjamin was. Everyone did. He died in Desert Storm, one of those people in the cafeteria when the SCUD missile hit. The Luv had 218,143 miles on it when I climbed in, and I remember pulling closed the door, the hard screech of metal on metal in the door hinges.
Sounded good to me.
I leaned out the window, said, “Unc, let’s go.”
He stepped back from the truck, started swinging his arm like a traffic cop for me to get going. “She’s yours,” he said. “You go try her out. Report back to me.”
I sat there a second or so, not certain what to do. It was a small truck, the cab tiny compared to the old fenderless GMC pickup he’d let me drive all over the place since I was twelve. The truck my dad’d left here.
But the Luv was mine. And it’d been Benjamin Gaillard’s.
“Go,” he said, and I gave it the gas, let out the clutch.
I drove out Baldwin, then on to Social Hall Cut, then to Cemetery, where the road goes close to the Ashepoo. That’s where I stopped, a place I’d gone to since I could remember, just to look out at the marsh.
Which is what I did: looked out over the marsh to Bear Island and Settlement Island and White House Woods, past them all those little squat islands didn’t even have names scattered around, four or five miles away the tree line of Edisto.
All these miles on the truck, I was thinking. Eight and a half times around the world, the ghost of Benjamin Gaillard thrown in for free. And out there looking at the marsh, I thought of Miss Dinah, how she’d always just been a part of the way things worked here at Hungry Neck, cooking for the members for as long as I’d ever known, and I thought, too, of her daughter, Dorcas, the deaf-and-dumb girl, and how she and Unc seemed somehow to share something, the two of them working their hands to talk to each other, and the laughter with it.
Unc had a life, it came to me. He knew people, laughed, talked, lived. All of it out here to Hungry Neck.
And then the sun going down, back behind me and just touching the tops of the trees, hit that point where everything changes. The marsh went a green you couldn’t name, mixed in and down inside it browns and reds and a color like bone, miles of colors you can’t see except for that time of day.
And past it all, above and behind it, the blue sky, going a darker blue every second.
I sat there, watched it all, until the marsh grass went dark and the colors started to bleed out. Until those islands parked out in the marsh became these dark humps, islands of no color. Just there, never even named. I sat there on into dark, past that time when, back when I was a kid, the stories of the ghosts that haunted these woods and islands and everywhere down here used to start creeping in on me, stories I’d hear from Miss Dinah herself while she cooked up the breakfasts, me watching her in the kitchen of the clubhouse, Dorcas on a stool, reading her mother’s lips to hear of the Gray Man up to Pawley’s Island, and of the Silver Trade, a ghost ship that appeared out in St. Helena Sound only at new moon, shipwrecked two hundred years ago in a storm.
Or she would tell us the best story of all, the one every kid knew but wanted to hear as many times as he could: the Mothers and Fathers, those first slaves to work this land, the holy kings and queens and princes and princesses all buried together on a plot guarded by their green-eyed ghosts, ghosts who would come up on children lost in the woods at night, ghosts that swarmed and swooped and swirled around you, their green eyes a kind of fire that struck anyone who saw them with a kind of fear that would turn their hearts inside out, make their hair fall out, make their minds turn into grits.
And once the stories were over, Dorcas would turn to me, look at me, and sometimes we’d shiver at the same time at the scare of it, and then we’d grin, locked for a second inside the story, though everyone knew these stories for the myths they were, especially the one about the Mothers and Fathers, the way those
ghosts would follow you through woods if you were out too late.
But the myth of it didn’t matter. It all seemed the truth in the moment of that shiver, me and a black girl I didn’t really know sharing for that instant fear and delight at the same moment.
These were the ghosts that were with me that evening—my childhood, that shared look with Dorcas, all the stories I’d ever heard about this place—me now in my own truck and no longer fearful of the dark out here on Hungry Neck for the presence, it seemed, of Benjamin’s ghost himself.
But then I shivered in that dark, and headed on home, back to Unc.
That’s what I saw, there in my hospital bed: those nameless islands, the long stretches of marsh, the tree line, the herons and egrets, the red-tail hawk and the marsh hens, the green-eyed ghosts of the Mothers and Fathers.
I saw above me this sky, the river right up against these woods, saw these ghosts.
I saw all of this, everything I love, exactly where I want to grow old and die.
Huger, I heard whispered.
My eyes opened, and I was in the bed in the dark. I lifted my head off the pillow, felt the pain in my head. The only light was that from the TV, still on, down past the footboard.
“Huger,” someone whispered next to me, and I quick turned, saw a woman.
She had on a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up, and a dark skirt. Color from off the TV caught in her gray hair like a halo.
On the TV was what looked like the end of a football game, the locker-room stuff, and I glanced off to my right, saw a cot set up under the window, my mom lying there, a blanket half covering her, still in her nurse’s outfit.
I lay back, ready for whatever this nurse was going to check on me about.
“Huger,” she whispered again.
I swallowed, my mouth thick and dry. “Ma’am?” I whispered.
She said nothing for a long few seconds, then whispered, “Tell Leland I didn’t do it.”
I felt my blood go fast, felt my face go hot. I blinked, swallowed again.
I looked at her.
“Constance?” I whispered, the word barely loud enough even for me to hear.
She looked toward my mom. I could see her profile now by the light off the TV: a small nose, sharp chin. She was smiling.
“You have a caring momma,” she whispered. “Cherish that.”
“Yes ma’am,” I whispered. It was all I could think to say.
Here she was: the woman who’d written that sign. The one who’d called Unc and told him what she was going to do. The woman who’d killed the son of a bitch Charlie Simons.
Then she turned to the TV.
The late news was coming on now, a bunch of quick shots of the Lowcountry: the bridges into Mount Pleasant, the mayor saying something, a couple ballet dancers, the beach.
And the lead story: the murder of Charles Middleton Simons, M.D., his body discovered at a hunt club near Jacksonboro.
The anchorman, his big forehead and tiny eyes all wrinkled with concern, gave out the words, quiet and right there in my ear, and now here was the video, all the orange caps and eight or ten uniformed deputies walking slow through the weeds, heads down, looking for whatever. Another shot showed the crime banner up, more men, these in black windbreakers, SLED in big yellow letters across the back. Then came the shot of a stretcher with a blanket over a body, the ambulance with its lights on and back doors open, the paramedics sliding it inside. Nobody in any big hurry.
I looked at her. She was watching it, no reaction. Just watching.
Then came a shot of a man at a podium, at the bottom of the screen the words FILE FOOTAGE. The man had on a gray suit and red tie, was reading something, though it was the anchorman’s voice I heard: “Dr. Simons was on the faculty at South Carolina Medical University, where only last June he was awarded the Distinguished Service Award by the president of the university for having founded the Christian Children’s Reconstructive Surgery Foundation, a charitable organization providing Third World children with needed reconstructive surgery.”
The man in the film footage finished what he was reading, smiled big, and waved to the crowd before him. The camera pulled away to show the whole head table at this party.
Cleve Ravenel was up there. And Dr. Buck. And two or three others from the club, all of them clapping and smiling.
And there was the woman next to me, looking up at him, her clapping, smiling.
Then it was over, the anchor’s big forehead here again. “State Law Enforcement Division officers as well as Charleston City Police and the County Sheriff’s Department are still searching for Mrs. Constance Dupree Simons, wife of Dr. Simons, in connection with the murder. Mrs. Simons, a trustee and former director of Acquisitions for the Carolina Museum of History, has as yet to be located.”
The anchor disappeared again, and here came more file footage, this time of the woman beside me. She was surrounded by children somewhere in the woods, before them a staked-off pit a couple feet deep, strings up around it. Inside the pit was a man stooped to the ground, who then pulled from the ground a piece of pottery, held it out to the kids. Constance smiled, nodded at them, touched the heads of the kids as they looked at the piece.
Then it was over, the anchorman back. “Anyone with information as to the whereabouts of Mrs. Constance Dupree Simons is urged to contact authorities immediately.”
He gave a small nod, turned to another camera, on the screen behind him now a lighthouse. “Sullivans Island authorities predict the new leash law—”
I turned to her. She was looking at me, smiling.
“No one more invisible than a doctor’s wife,” she whispered.
She brought her other hand from where it’d been in the pocket of her skirt. “You need to give this to him,” she whispered, and held that hand over mine on the bed, my fingers curled and holding on to the sheet.
I couldn’t move. This was her. Constance Dupree Simons.
She reached with her other hand to mine, gently folded open my fingers. Her hand was soft, just like her movements, and like her face, her hair. All soft, and suddenly, with the way she touched my hand, I believed her: she didn’t do it. Even if she was smiling after seeing her dead husband fed into the back of an ambulance.
She lifted my hand up, put something in it.
It was warm and hard, a little heavy, the size of the bottom end of a quart beer bottle: a warm, flat piece of round glass. I didn’t look at it, let her ease my hand back to the bed, my eyes on her.
She nodded at my mom again. “You cherish her,” she said, then, quieter, “I have no children of my own, and had always hoped to be cherished.”
I nodded.
“And tell Leland,” she said, “that I did not do it.” She paused, touched at my hand, in it that piece of glass. “And tell him I loved him.”
I tried hard to believe what was going on here, that she knew where I was, how to get to me to tell me what she needed Unc to know.
Finally, I whispered, “Yes ma’am.”
She turned, slow, like she might be sleepwalking, and started for the door, opened it. Light crashed in on her, made her a silhouette to me. She stood there in the doorway, staring straight ahead, then looked back to me one last time.
Still smiling, she nodded, and stepped out into the light.
I brought my hand up, wanted to see what it was she’d given me, so important she’d walk into a hospital, the sheriff and police both after her for murder.
I held it close to my eyes, tried to see it with the light from the doorway but only caught the reflection of that light. A piece of glass was all it was, a little rough on the edges.
I looked over at my mom, wondered if she’d wake up if I turned the lights on, then sat up, slow, so my head wouldn’t fall off, and scooted to where the rail stopped down near the foot. I turned, stepped to the cold floor. All I had on was the thin dresslike thing they gave you, and my underwear, and now my back went cold for the sweat, and I shivered.
I looked to Mom again, then started across the room, my head heavy and big, and I was at the oak door into the bathroom, and I opened it, pulled it to behind me before I turned on the light.
I forgot to close my eyes, and the room exploded white, shot through me for a second, and I squinted hard, opened my hand.
It was brown and shiny, just like glass.
But sealed inside the glass, or whatever it was, was a little pinwheel of pine straw or sweetgrass, every half inch or so a wrap around the straw with a strip of wider straw, like the very center of a sweetgrass basket. It was just three circles, a tiny spiral of a basket, there inside the glass.
A spiral.
Those shapes Unc’d made on the ground, then wrecked. He’d been drawing sweetgrass baskets.
I looked in the mirror, saw a kid with his mouth open, his hair all plastered to his head for sweating in his sleep.
Sweetgrass baskets?
Tell Leland I didn’t do it, she’d said.
But sweetgrass baskets?
Sweetgrass baskets, those baskets made of coiled sweetgrass and bulrushes and palmetto leaves, a craft brought here by the original slaves from West Africa, we all learned in school, the tradition passed down one generation to the next to the next, the only ones still to practice it the black women set up at the Market downtown, and on Broad and Meeting streets downtown, too, and at the tiny roadside stands along 17 on the way out of Charleston.
Then came three tiny knocks at the door, my mom’s voice: “Honey? You okay in there?” She paused. “Honey, the nurse is here to check up on you.”
I looked at the piece of brown glass again. Constance Dupree Simons had come all the way here, the world looking for her, to hand me this, what looked like a paperweight you might buy at the Market downtown, except for the rough edges of the thing.
No one more invisible than a doctor’s wife, she’d said.
And tell him I loved him, she’d said, too.