by Bret Lott
“Let them go,” Unc said. “Let them all go. You want me. It’s only me, Charlie.”
“Noble, certainly,” Simons said. I still couldn’t make out his face for the shadow across it, only pictured that file footage, him standing at a podium and waving in triumph, his wife seated beside him, looking up at him.
“Noble, unto death. But if you believe I’m merely after a blood sacrifice, you are mistaken, and prove yet again you haven’t the ability to grasp the scope of things around you. To my way of thinking”—and now he turned us again, the moon swinging through the sky above us, the walls of marsh grass the same, all of us weaving deeper and deeper into the marsh—“there is a vast array of information that has been disseminated by hook or by crook to each one of you, including the deaf-and-mute young virgin beside me.” He nudged Tabitha, and she flinched again. She had no idea what was being said here, her eyes on us. “Even Miss Dorcas here possesses information quite detrimental to my endeavors, and though you, Leland Dillard, are responsible for her sifting through cybertrash, that responsibility isn’t enough to have you serve as stand-in at her execution.”
“Goddamn you, sir,” Miss Dinah said, and I heard on the words a tremble, and heard steel at the same time.
“There is no God, Miss Gaillard,” Simons said, in his voice a kind of laugh. “But if it gives you a certain semblance of comfort to call down on me the wrath of your empty faith, please do so.”
“No need,” she said, that tremble gone now. “You done that work yourself.”
“Quick-witted to the end,” Simons said, “and just in case I forget later on when things will get ugly between us, let me say thank you for all those biscuits and eggs and bacon and grits and fried chicken you’ve served me over the years Saturday mornings at Hungry Neck.” He turned the boat again, that moon moving once more, and now in my line of sight fell one of those nameless islands, a small one, a rough rise of brush and a single palmetto, black and silhouetted in black above the marsh. It was maybe a hundred yards off, the snake of this cut maybe headed there, maybe not, and I wondered if the plan was just to kill us all and bury us out on one of these islands and be done with it, head back to Hungry Neck and whatever was so valuable even the land itself was taking a backseat.
“What do you want?” Unc said, his voice low, too hard and sharp for a whisper but nearly silent all the same.
“What you don’t know will kill you, Leland,” Simons said, and gave that same sort of laugh. “But if you must know, it’s money. Hate to be as vulgar as all that, and as predictable, but it’s money. And with the money to which I am laying claim comes all its attendant joys, chief among them a new life. Born again, as it were, Miss Gaillard.” He leaned to his left, looked past us and nodded at her.
She said nothing. Mom had stopped her crying, was breathing quick and shallow.
He looked back at Unc, that gun still out and pointed. “It occurred to me only a few years ago,” he said, “after having lost a patient to anaphylactic shock, that there were certain fiduciary amenities available only to the dead, Leland. This was a woman of great standing in Charleston society, a fervent supporter of Spoleto, a Junior League charter member.” He gave a shake of his head. “In for a breast implant and liposuction, two birds with one stone. But with her cadaver there on the table before me, what had only moments before been a South of Broad force of culture, I realized that there were great luxuries she had initiated simply with passing on, chief among them her life insurance. For the first time, believe it or not, it occurred to me that a graying cadaver could suddenly, in its passing, become worth whatever policy had been taken out on it, and that all that money would be given to someone else.” He laughed. “A travesty, certainly. And it was at this point I began taking measures that have brought us to this moonlit evening in the marshlands of the Carolina coast.”
“And to killing Constance,” Unc said, his voice the same low and cold whisper. He moved his hand from the bench beside him to his lap.
“Constance, Constance, Constance,” Simons said, in it nothing. Only three words. “A necessary evil, to my way of thinking. Of course she never quite got over you, Leland, and many were the times amidst tears shed at bedtime that your name was offered up as a sort of votive. There was no love lost between us, as I’m not quite certain there had ever been any to begin with. But the harridan of a mother she had was, chiefly because of my middle and last names, on my side from the beginning: a Dupree-Middleton union by way of the Simons family. What greater cachet hereabouts, Leland?”
Unc was quiet a moment, the only sound the dull, empty hum of the engine. Unc moved, settled himself, his hand on his knee now. He said, “You are evil.”
“But as there is no God,” Simons said, and turned the boat again, “then there is no evil, simply each organism for itself. This organism—namely, Charles Middleton Simons, M.D.—with the wheeling away of a dead, still lipidinally and mammarially challenged South of Broad matron, immediately set about upgrading his insurance and adapting his will to plans set in motion. When I died, all proceeds were to go directly to poor, devoted Constance, who, as an aside, wrote out her death confession with no more prompting from me than three whiskey sours and a Magic Marker one night not a month ago.” He chuckled, his shoulders up and down with it, and Tabitha pulled away from him an inch, squirmed a moment beside him. “The degloving, of course, was a touch anvil-like in its irony, the wife of a plastic surgeon having skinned her murdered husband’s hands. But it served as well to eliminate any corroboration of fingerprints.”
He turned us again, that island I’d seen now gone. “And were Constance to die,” he went on, “all benefits go directly to the Christian Children’s Reconstructive Surgery Foundation, a charitable organization I set up that treats needy children with cleft palates and harelips in Third World countries, headquarters of which is nestled in the pleasant little town of Lucerne, Switzerland, which feeds a branch office in Bangkok, which in turn wires funds to its satellite facility in the Cayman Islands.” He shrugged. “As warned, Leland, this is awfully predictable: filthy lucre and all that. But now that I am dead, and as this foundation exists only on paper, and as my murder has been solved by a signed confession and the murderer’s suicide to boot, there will be waiting for me in a matter of weeks the tidy sum of six million dollars at that branch office, this in addition to thirty-three million I’ve managed to sock away one way and another. Not bad for a four-year setup. A sort of business-administration project for the passed-away, proving that yes, indeed, Miss Gaillard”—and now he leaned left again, nodded behind me again—“there is life after death, but also dispelling that nasty rumor you can’t take it with you. I can.”
“But why now?” Unc said. His hand was still on his knee, but I could feel him begin to lean forward in the smallest way, felt his leg touching mine tense up. He was getting ready for something.
“Things have been pushed toward fruition on this day, Leland, because of a change of heart our dear departed Constance had in the last few weeks, culminating with her telephone call to you last Wednesday. A change of heart our late Carolina Museum of History trustee undertook once our buried treasure yielded a bit of history for which she hadn’t prepared her emotions. Trinkets, really, two of them.”
He looked past us again and stood in the boat, the tiller still in hand, but now he put the gun to Tabitha’s head, held it there as he looked forward.
Tabitha’s hard breaths came back, and that high-pitched shard of sound from deep inside her.
“By the way, Leland, I realize you are about to try and jump me, thereby sacrificing yourself in Jesus fashion, one death for all. But the gun is now at Little Eva’s head for the duration, the destination of our clandestine junket not far ahead. So don’t try.” He paused, turned the tiller. There behind him was another island, smaller, farther away. Or maybe it was the same one. “In a few moments all will be made clear. Unexpected gravy. Buried treasure. The pièce de résistance, as it were. The pièce d
’Africain.” He laughed. “And though Miss Gaillard and the nubile nubian here are not on the original guest list, it seems most apropos they are with us nonetheless.”
Unc eased off, let his head drop, leaned back. He let out a breath.
And then the bow scratched bottom, a sound like sandpaper from beneath us, and we stopped.
“Everyone out,” Simons said.
I turned, looked forward. There sat Miss Gaillard and Mom, both turned, too, looking.
The bow was nosed into marsh grass, just beyond it an island, black trees and bushes, a single palmetto, all silhouetted against a black sky. One of those nameless ones, way off and small, you could see from Hungry Neck.
Buried treasure, I thought. Two trinkets.
One is sin, and the other is love. And I can’t tell the difference.
The paperweights.
But I was thinking, too, of Eugenie and Leland. My mother, and my father.
Pluff mud went to my shins, and I used the shovel to keep my balance.
Here was the same smell as that first night in North Charleston, and the same smell as had started up off the body between stands 17 and 18 the second time we went back there, Thigpen and Yandle with us.
Charles Middleton Simons, M.D., hadn’t been anywhere near. We’d stood at only a body with next to no head, the hands degloved, he called it. A body nameless as this island.
In front of me was Miss Dinah with the other shovel, Mom in the lead. We stepped through the mud, arms or shovels out for balance as the mud swallowed our feet, let them go, swallowed them.
“Huger,” Unc said from behind me.
“Leland, you have anything to say, you need to say it to me,” Simons said, and I turned, saw Unc reached toward me. Past him were Tabitha and Simons, the gun now to her neck, his other hand holding tight her arm.
“Don’t,” Simons said, and I knew it was to me, and I turned around, kept going.
Mom stepped up out of the mud and onto the island itself, put a hand to the palmetto, leaned on it, and now Miss Dinah stood beside her, and it was my turn to step up and onto ground.
It was ground. An island, maybe an acre or so, thick with growth, like all of them, so thick there was nothing to see into, only black, pieces of shadow here and there, all of it thicker than the woods we’d run through for half the night.
Unc struggled through the last two steps of mud, then fell forward. His hands hit the ground, and I watched those pale hands in the moonlight search for something to hold, to help him pull himself up onto ground.
There was nothing, only weeds, and he was on his knees now, his feet finally free of the mud. He touched the base of the palmetto, got to one knee, the other, and stood.
Tabitha still gave out that sound, the gun still to her neck, and the two of them stepped up, all of us crowded now at this piece-of-dirt landing, and I stepped toward the black of the growth, looked into it.
Something cold took my free hand, and I turned, saw Mom, holding mine in hers.
“Give your mother the shovel, Lord Huger,” Simons said. “Then lead us to the Promised Land.”
I looked at him. The canopy of growth above us, all I could see was a silhouette holding something to the neck of a silhouette, behind them both stars, gray marsh.
“I can’t see anything,” I said.
“Sounds like something Leland might say,” Simons said, and laughed. He moved an arm to his side, brought it up. Then here was light: sharp, white, pointed at me.
He let the beam go to the ground, reached toward me with it, a circle of light moving over our feet, weeds. “Take this,” he said, “and do not imagine there is room here for heroics. Simply follow the trail.”
I stood there a moment, still. Light was with us, and I could see things, and I could feel my heart beat, and I could smell this mud, and I could feel the cold of my legs and feet, my arms, my mother’s cold hand in my cold hand.
This was all there was, I saw. Only this.
I let go her hand, gave her the shovel, then took the flashlight.
But before I turned away, I let the beam fall below Tabitha a moment, enough light to let me see her face full on. She was looking at me and breathing hard, the dull glint of gun at her throat.
Then she nodded. It was small, near nothing. But she’d nodded.
I brought the flashlight down, and it seemed she was the only one in the world who might know me.
I turned, started away.
The flashlight filled up the world after all this time in so much dark, a world lit only with moonlight and black, the fingers of branches and feathers of weeds and lines and angles and all those black shadows the only thing I knew all night long. Before this night I thought I knew about darkness, thought I knew how to make my way through it, whether it was climbing out my bedroom window into a dark in which waited Jessup or Tyrone or Deevonne, or if it was only driving the Luv before dawn back on Cemetery and dropping off men at the next stand and the next, my headlights off the whole time because I just wanted to see the gray and black world of Hungry Neck, and thought maybe it helped somehow to keep the deer down and at ease not to have all this light cutting up the place. I thought I knew how to make my way through dark.
But I didn’t. All I knew this night was a moon, Polaris, and that Mom and Unc had together betrayed me. Now here I was with a flashlight, the ugly power of it—with its light all those stars were gone now, all those shadows built on their own shadows disappeared—and now even the place I wanted to grow old on and die, Hungry Neck, seemed to betray me, too, that land a half mile away and standing alone, empty.
Land. Just land.
The flashlight seemed to ignite the vines and crepe myrtle and all else, the browns and greens all washed clean of most color for the light, like a body drained of blood. But Simons was right: here was a trail, and I followed it.
Growth hung over us, the trail almost a tunnel, and we walked slowly, the flashlight first on the ground at my feet, then on the ground ahead, at my feet again. I turned around a time or two, shone it on the ground behind me for the others, Mom next, Miss Dinah, Unc, then Tabitha and Simons.
Mom teetered for a moment, the shovel in her hand, Miss Dinah’s jacket on; Miss Dinah put out her hand to Mom’s shoulder a moment when it seemed she might fall forward, the other with the shovel; Unc took one step, paused, took another, with each measured step a hand reaching hard for the next hold on a branch or vine.
Then there was Tabitha, her arm still held by Simons, and I saw she had on only a long-sleeve T-shirt.
I stopped, held the flashlight in one hand while I slipped off the sleeve, then swapped hands with the light, the jungle suddenly flying with light, quick sharpened shadows here and gone as it moved, and then the jacket was off, and I stepped back among them, held it out to her.
“Those noble Dillards,” Simons said, the gun down from Tabitha’s neck, pointed now at me. She glanced up at Simons, then took the jacket, carefully shrugged it on, her eyes cutting from him to me to him.
“Move,” he said. “Deputy Thigpen will be here soon, and the festivities will continue. But there’s work to be done first.” He put the gun back to her neck.
I turned, started through the growth.
But this time it was me to teeter forward, my right foot caught for a second in a root or vine, and I put my hands in front of me, the flashlight flipping out of my hand, that beam flying again, bleeding color and forcing shadows out of everything in an instant, and I fell.
I was on my hands and knees, the flashlight a couple feet ahead of me, pointed up and away inside the tangle of growth. It was shining on something down here, something black and solid, no shadow to it but for those cast by the dead vines that shrouded it: nothing more than black rock, like a piece of wall two feet wide in front of me.
“My dear Lord,” Miss Dinah whispered. And Mom quick whispered, “Oh, oh.”
I got to my knees, looked up.
The flashlight shone on it from below, like a spot
light: a head, carved in this stone; the piece of black rock I’d seen was its base, the whole thing one piece of rock six feet tall.
I picked up the flashlight, stepped back, shone it at the head, and as I brought up the beam, it seemed for a moment it had eyes, eyes that sparked and took me in, moved over me, green light from in them.
It had eyes.
“My dear Lord in Heaven,” Miss Dinah whispered out again. “I know where we are.”
“What?” Unc said. “What is it?”
They were glass. Green glass eyes set into the black stone head of a black man. Eyes that swallowed up the beam and sent it back at me, at all of us.
It was a black man: lips, nose, jaw, all worn, soft with time, and though I believed in this moment that I ought to be afraid, I wasn’t.
It was those eyes, I knew, that kept me from being afraid. Something in them—the way they took in the light from the flashlight, the flicker of them, the way they moved without moving—gave me no fear.
“We have arrived,” Simons said. “But tell me, Miss Gaillard, where is it we have arrived?”
I stared at the eyes.
“Huger?” Unc whispered.
“Quiet, Leland,” Simons said. “Miss Gaillard?”
“The Mothers and Fathers,” she whispered.
“Precisely,” Simons said. “The fabled place.”
No one moved, made a sound.
I turned to him, still with the light on the statue.
They were all looking past me, all these ghosts, white and black both, all of them lost in the wash of light shining at that head.
I’d heard of this place. Everyone down here had. The Mothers and Fathers. But it wasn’t anything anybody ever talked about, because it was just a story. Like Miss Dinah painting her house haint purple to keep the demons away. Campfire stories. Just stories.
Slowly Unc’s head moved, no more than the nod Tabitha had given me. It was a move of emptiness and knowledge at once: he couldn’t see this, but he knew what it was. And here were his white marble eyes, swallowing the little light given up by a flashlight pointed away.