by Bret Lott
“And talk, dear Leland, of items missing will do nothing to stop work here. Though a child’s knickknacks proved the undoing of barren, sterile Constance, they have no genuine discernible consequence this evening. The king’s ransom we are about to unearth will make each cache of African memorabilia thus far sold pale in comparison. Each coffin is filled to the brim, each item fetching prices one might not believe, were it not for the fact of the vogue value these items seem to carry. Carved wooden pomegranates at two hundred thousand a set, a quiver of arrows for two hundred fifty, a cowhide shield for five hundred, a full-sized sweetgrass rice basket for eight hundred thousand dollars. And imagine, these sums multiplied by twelve! So much disposable income, so many buyers: Hollywood types, dignitaries, foreign statesmen like our potentate. Why, one of the busts, the Daughter herself, is owned by a former Grand Dragon and failed gubernatorial candidate from a sister state of ours, which will go unnamed here, for obvious embarrassing reasons. He keeps it, I am told, in the foyer of his summer home on the Gulf. A kind of slave ownership, I imagine, without all the fuss of civil rights and its attendant—”
“Will you just shut the fuck up?” Thigpen said, and looked at Simons. He took in a quick breath, grimaced for it again. “Fucking doctors. Every one of you thinks he knows everything, and thinks people really want to hear it.” He looked back at Unc. “So just shut up.”
Simons quick looked at Mom, at me, at Unc on the ground. “You are correct, in that this is a waste of time. Daylight will be upon us in a matter of two hours.” He let the hammer back, brought the gun down.
Unc got to his knees now, coughed again, slowly stood.
He said, “Tommy, you know all about Charlie’s money in Grand Cayman? About his insurance?” He was trying to stand up straight again. He wouldn’t give up.
“Don’t even try,” Thigpen said, and I thought I could see him smile. “I know what he’s making, and what he’s paying me. I’ve got things on him, he’s got things on me.” He shook his head, then squinted hard, held his breath a moment. “I don’t get my money, or I disappear, I’ve got things rigged, and the world knows about him. And I let on what I know about him, I’m sure he’s got things rigged to take care of me. Right, doc?” He looked back to Simons.
“As rain, my fellow malefactor. Honor among thieves, this sort of thing.”
“So you just shut the fuck up, too, Leland,” Thigpen said, trying at the smile again. “Just shut the fuck up, and know you’ll be dead before the sun’s up.”
“To business,” Simons said, and shone the beam on Tabitha and me. “Dig?” he said, and laughed.
There were things I thought of while we worked, the ground like everywhere down at the water, more clay than sand, heavy. But with each turn of the shovel, each lift of it out and onto the ground to my right, things came to me: the months Unc lay in bed in the trailer, and the nest, the antler, the feather I’d brought him. I thought of the way his hand’d wrapped itself around the paperweight in the warm dark of Benjamin Gaillard’s shack, and how he’d then given it up to me, and I thought of a minivan out front of a house with two oaks, and of the smell of that dead body. I thought of my mother curled up on a cot beside my bed, and the way the sun set just this evening on Charleston Harbor as we drove over the bridge from Mount Pleasant, and the light on the water, the red in the sky, the last sunset I’d see.
And of course I still hadn’t yet thought it was true, any of this: our being killed.
It had to do, maybe, with the way Tabitha worked at shoveling, like this was what, finally, we’d been born to do, our only job: dig up a coffin, lay ourselves to rest in the hole we’d made. We faced each other, stood a few feet from each other, and when she put the shovel to the ground, she stepped on the edge with both feet each time, slicing as best she could through the roots we’d come on now and again, and then she’d lift it up, a shovelful of black earth, and lift it, lift it, let it fall on the pile growing to my right, and start again.
Each time, too, she looked at me, her eyes glancing up at me to see if I was doing the same, working to do what had to be done. She wanted to see, I knew, that I was moving too, that I hadn’t yet died. That I was alive, like her, and doing something, because everything else had shut down on us, and there came a shovelful again and again when I had to remember to breathe in and out, everything so near being done around us. This whole world, over and done with.
Simons was back at the statue with the cable saw, Thigpen too broken to do anything except watch over us. Mom and Miss Dinah sat on the ground to my left, their wrists tied behind their backs; Unc, beside Tabitha’s end of the hole, had his hands tied to his ankles. Behind them stood Thigpen with the flashlight, the shadow heads and shoulders of Mom and Miss Dinah and Unc falling down on us, watching over us, so that each shovelful of dirt came from the black hole at our feet, then up through their lives, these shadows, and into the beam, and onto that pile.
And still I thought of things: of the lights off the paper mill and how sometimes when I woke up at night I thought for a second it was daytime, my eyes so adjusted to the pale dark in my room, and I thought of the way moss hung from the branches of live oak here at Hungry Neck two nights ago, and I thought of Mrs. Dupree and her white-gloved hands holding the paperweights, looking at them, unable to tell any difference between sin and love, and I thought of when I kissed Tabitha, not because it was a sin to kiss a black girl or because it was love between us, but because it’d been a moment when someone had been close to me, and our lips had touched and there’d seemed something past meaning I could know as a fifteen-year-old with a learner’s permit, a nothing kid who knew nothing and would die knowing nothing of love, really, except for a mother who’d spent her life lying to me because of her own sin, and an uncle who’d accompanied her right along with it, who’d led me to love him as I’d love my own father, though I’d not thought of him as that because he wasn’t, because my father had left, and I didn’t want, ever, to love someone who could leave.
It was my uncle I loved, not my father. It was my uncle.
The beam down on us moved now and again with Thigpen’s being near dead, I figured, broken ribs, arm shot. And between shovelfuls I could hear behind us and away the rhythm of the cable saw, the quiet and perfect empty whisper of it in the night, and I pictured the doctor the world thought dead pulling that saw back and forth through tabby three hundred years old just for the money it’d give, pictured him sweating for it, his arms aching for the pull and pull, and still I dug, even though I knew that when it was over, when I’d finished digging, there would come all our deaths, just as when the doctor finally cut through that statue and this last grave had been robbed, there’d be an end to the evidence the Mothers and Fathers had ever been here, and the Dillards would be gone, too, and the Gaillards, and I thought of the deer I’d butchered, and of the does, and of the fetus I’d pulled from them, white ghost deer no bigger than the palm of your hand, perfect hooves and ears and closed eyes, and I thought of how they’d never been born, and how they’d been killed even before they were born, and I wanted again and again only to be a deer, maybe these deer, these deer that’d never been born and’d been killed even before that, wanted more than anything to be them, and knew at the same time I was alive and that as long as I kept digging, and as long as Tabitha kept digging, we were alive. We were alive, and so I dug.
But it was me to hit it first.
My shovel stopped hard, made a thick scratch of sound, jolted through my arm.
I looked up at Tabitha, her eyes already on me. Her mouth was closed tight, a thin line, and I could see she knew what I knew: once we finished this job, we were dead.
Thigpen moved, the beam suddenly over us from a different angle. He was behind Tabitha now, and I couldn’t see her anymore.
He shone it down into the hole. The hole was about four feet deep, the beam falling on only black dirt, the tip of my shovel a few inches in.
“Keep going,” Thigpen said, his voice eve
n shallower now.
Still the cable saw worked, off and away from us.
We were here.
“Huger,” Unc said.
The word came to me as if from across water, like some shadow of itself, light from behind it.
“You shut the fuck up, old man,” Thigpen said, and shone the light on Unc.
But I looked at Tabitha.
Huger. My name.
“You just keep your fucking mouth shut, Leland, or I’ll kill you now.”
“Son,” Unc said, on it the same distance, the same depth.
“Last warning,” Thigpen said.
And now I closed my eyes.
I could see things: this hole, four feet deep. Thigpen above and behind Tabitha, Mom and Miss Dinah, and Unc. I could see it all.
I heard the cable saw stop, heard Simons call out, “You find it?” and then I saw him, too, saw the distance from the statue to here, the narrow path he’d have to walk to get here, the time it would take, and I saw the gun tucked into Thigpen’s waist, saw one arm useless at his side, in the other the flashlight, pointed at Unc.
And still with my eyes closed I saw two shovels, one in Tabitha’s hands, the other in mine, and I saw behind her Thigpen turned a moment from us, saw he was close enough, close enough, and saw Simons start from the statue, and toward us, here, now.
Now.
I opened my eyes. There was light, more than I could need, more than the world of this night could ever need, all of it from a flashlight held on a man who could not see it.
I’d seen all of this, all of it, in an instant.
Son, he’d said.
I put my hand out in front of me, held it out to Tabitha, my index and middle fingers together, held them out for her to see, then brought them to my chest.
Trust me.
“Don’t blink, son,” Unc said.
She looked at my hand, looked at me. She nodded.
“That’s it, you fuck,” Thigpen said, and turned from behind Tabitha, took a step toward Unc.
I held my shovel handle with both hands like a baseball bat, nodded hard at her, with my eyes looked up at Thigpen.
She knew.
I saw Simons, still on the trail, still moving.
Tabitha turned, swung the shovel at Thigpen, caught him hard behind the knees, and he fell back, slammed full on the ground, and with it let out a jagged and deep cry, the air out of him in a moment, the flashlight flying like it’d done when I’d fallen, sending shadows and light everywhere, confused and torn light that made no sense.
But I didn’t need it. I’d seen what I had to do, seen how we might live.
I was out of the hole in the same moment Unc rolled to his side, tried hard to kick at Thigpen, though his hands were tied to his ankles, and in the same moment Mom and Miss Dinah cried out, the light finally settling, pointing away, and then I was on Thigpen, and pulled from his waist the gun, and turned, backed away from him and away from the hole, looking toward where in a moment I knew Simons would emerge.
Tabitha was up from the hole now, too, held the shovel above Thigpen’s head, ready to hit him.
I cocked the hammer and saw in the new angle of light Charles Middleton Simons, his own pistol drawn, step through the green and into the circle.
“Clever,” he said, and stopped.
He had the gun up, his arm straight and stiff, pointing at me, and slowly started toward us. Between him and me lay them all, watching him: Mom, Miss Dinah, Unc. Tabitha with the shovel.
Thigpen groaned, rolled his head back and forth, and Tabitha lifted the shovel, ready.
Simons pointed the gun at her, arm still out stiff, and Mom and Miss Dinah gave out quick yelps. “Her first?” he said, and stepped over a string.
Tabitha stood frozen.
“Or Mother?” Simons said, and quick moved the gun toward Mom.
She winced, her eyes on me, leaned hard away, and Simons took another step.
I’d seen what I would do. I’d seen it. But I hadn’t seen him with the gun at her. Only on me. That’s what I’d seen with my eyes closed, with that gift of sight I’d been given by my uncle.
My father.
Yet I’d seen the gun on me, the one to shoot or be shot.
“But of course,” Simons said, and now swung the gun to Unc, there in front of him, twenty feet away. “It will have to be Leland. Unc.” He paused, took another step. “Daddy. Of course it will have to be him, because he’s the only one I fear.” He took another step, another. “A wild card. He’s willing to die, willing to kill or be killed. All because of this land, this place.” He took another step, now stood only a few feet from Mom and Miss Dinah, huddled into each other. “And because he carries with him some guilt over the life he’s led, from squiring you to the suicide of his wife to the bum deal lost eyesight can be.” He took another step, leveled the gun at Unc sitting there on the ground. “And logic would dictate I would kill him first for Constance, for the fact that she loved him more than me.”
Still he looked at me. “As I said, Leland, all of this is horribly predictable. For money, yes. And unrequited love. Predictable.” He paused. “And so you ought to die first, for predictability’s sake, for the symmetry of it.”
He held his arm even straighter, angled it level with Unc’s head.
Then he swung it to me.
I fired, and felt fire inside me, saw the flash and smoke from off his gun.
It was the deer that came to me in this instant, their settling into woods for the night, one of them gone—me—and none of them knowing the difference, my absence among them no absence at all, me nothing, and in this instant I felt the rush of night sky through me, felt all the ghosts of all the dead on Hungry Neck there’d ever been, and I knew them each, knew them black and white, old and newborn, these people what made the land this land, made a nameless island where I would die more than nameless, made it something to keep, to cherish, I knew, and I knew only then the difference between sin and love, knew only then both could be one and the same at any given moment, as life and death become the same in the moment between high tide and its beginning to wane, that moment when all the world holds its breath for the next thing to come, and then it comes, the tide letting out, the sea edging away to leave its debris behind. Sin and love could be the same, I knew, a fact maybe only knowable in the moment you stepped off the edge of a tub, a cord around your neck for the way your life had unwound before you, or maybe only knowable in the moment of the middle of your first night in a new town, the smell of death and decay summoning you from sleep, only to find here it is outside your back door, that smell of decay swallowing you whole, while here at your leg stands your only child, the hem of your nightgown bunched in his fist, him comforting you, telling you not to cry. Sin and love could be the same, a fact maybe only knowable in seeing your burning wife in her bed just before the explosion of hot glass, searing into your eyes the image for the rest of your life. Burned there, like the burning in me the instant he fired on me, the moment between sin and love as distant and close as a mother and father hidden from you your whole life, and yet present beside you every moment you breathed.
It was the deer that came to me, and these ghosts, and this land, all of it swept into me and around me and through me, the way my blood swept through me with each heartbeat, blood mine and in the same moment my mother’s and father’s both, me a part of them but only and always me, and then slowly, slowly, I fell away, and I disappeared into the black night above me, and into the ground beneath me, my blood carried out to sea, I knew, on this tide, beneath this moon, me the debris of this day, dead.
I saw things.
I saw a buzzard above a dawn sky, a jay’s nest, a hickory stick. I saw deer tracks, saw raccoon prints at a river’s edge, saw spartina green in a breeze. I saw these things.
And then I was cold, and I saw nothing, only black, and I heard the wash of water beneath me, felt fingers of wind pick at me, cold.
“Huger, we got you,” I heard Mom
say. “We got you, baby,” and I opened my eyes.
We were moving, above me Mom, past her a dawn sky still too close to night.
But there was color to it. Violet to one side of Mom, pale gray to the other.
I felt nothing, only cold.
“Huger,” she said, and now she cried above me, her mouth crumpled to nothing, eyebrows knotted, and she said, “Huger, you okay?” The wind pulled at her hair, moved it and moved it. “Oh, Huger,” she said, then glanced up and away. “He’s awake,” she cried, and there was movement, rocking with that movement.
I whispered, “Mom,” and she looked back down at me, smiled, cried, and leaned in close, kissed me.
I was on my back, and we were in a boat, and I was cold, and now Tabitha was beside Mom, and touched my face with her hand. She smiled, and I could see her face with this daylight coming on. She smiled, put her hand up close to my face, her first two fingers together, and brought them to her lips.
“Now,” Miss Dinah said from above and behind me. “Stop that.”
Then here was Unc, Tabitha moving away for him, Mom still here.
His nose was swollen up, his thin hair whipped by the wind. His marble eyes, the gnarled flesh above them.
Then he cried, his mouth going wide and crumbling, his eyes creasing closed, tears going.
“Huger,” he gave out. “Son.”
And I whispered, “Daddy,” though I was not certain he might hear it on the wind here on the marsh, and on the light coming up around us.
He leaned down, kissed me as Mom had, and as he pulled away I saw above us now the creeping edge of live-oak branches out over water, the green of them in a sky starting yellow.
We were home.
Epilogue
We left the trailer when it was still dark, got here before light. Three miles, about, the two of us walking. He wouldn’t tell me where we were going, and I didn’t ask.
There was no moon out, only stars.
New Year’s Day, closing day of deer season, a day bigger than the Saturdays after Thanksgiving. But this year it was only Unc and me, and we walked our dirt roads, Unc’s arm looped in my right arm, me with my left still in a sling.