The Hunt Club
Page 24
But in my hand I carried the hickory stick.
He’d made coffee before I was even up, and bacon, eggs. We’d sat at the counter in the kitchen, the only light that from the stove hood, and said nothing, only ate.
Mom was still asleep, back in her old room. She had to work later today, and’d stayed up long past midnight. Tabitha had been here, and Miss Dinah too. But now it was only Unc and me.
And just before he’d closed my door last night—he was sleeping on the couch in the front room, me in his room—he’d told me he’d wake me early, that he had somewhere he wanted to show me.
——
Things have happened.
Thigpen hasn’t said anything, is only in the county facility while the sorting of charges continues. He’s got a pile of money somewhere, we’re sure. But we’ve told our side, all five of us.
And there’s the island, already cordoned off.
Like Simons said would happen, there’s plans already for a museum of what’s left, and there’s been proclamations made, state archaeologists out for measurements and photographs, probes into smuggled goods and their recipients. There is debate, too, on whether or not to dig up the Father of Fathers, put on display the treasures inside, or to leave him alone, there in the ground.
Someday something will happen here, and Hungry Neck will no longer be as empty as I or Unc needs it. But Unc has told me already he’ll donate the island, whenever they get to setting something up.
The senate-committee hearings haven’t started, but Delbert Yandle still calls every other day, representing the board without hiding the fact anymore. He asks how I’m doing, wants to make sure I’m feeling fine, and that Unc is feeling fine, and that this next bid might be enough to make us feel fine for the rest of our lives.
Mom has been here more nights than not. And one night a week or so ago, when they thought I was asleep in Unc’s room, I heard them talking out in the kitchen, and heard Mom’s laughter, heard it from Unc, too. The two of them, and laughter.
I haven’t been back to school yet, and Tabitha brings books over, or I go over there, and we read, and we talk.
Dr. Joe Cray’s MRI shop is empty, a FOR LEASE sign set up out front, and Mrs. Dupree has somewhere in her house two paperweights.
And I killed a man.
But what’s strange is that killing Simons isn’t what comes to me nights, when I am alone and trying to sleep. Nor is it a body with hardly any head, or the killings of Yandle and Ravenel and Patrick and Reynold, though there are moments when those things sneak up on me, make my pulse pick up, my hands go hot.
What comes to me is the statue. The Son, and his eyes, green glass, the years those eyes have seen come and go, every one of them spent here at Hungry Neck, seasons in and out and in again.
And the Father of Fathers, that sound when my shovel hit the coffin. Just that sound, the thick scratch of the tip into pitch-painted oak, the jolt through my arm.
They’re the only ones left out there. The father and the son. That’s what comes to me when I am alone, and in the dark.
I had a Thermos of coffee in the daypack I wore, and on our way here Unc told me which roads to follow, which way to turn. And when we came to the sweet gum he’d told me to watch for, the one with a perfect elbow parallel to the road, he let go my arm, hooked his hand on my belt, and pushed me off the road and into the woods.
The sky had gone violet by this time, still too dark to see the hands on a watch. But Unc led me, as best he could, by pushing, and subtle pulls, a kind of blind tack through a woods he seemed to know better even than the roads we’d walked on our way here.
And as we steered through the woods, I came to know what I’d begun to feel that night on the island: there is another kind of seeing, a way of looking in front of you and seeing maybe what you can’t really see, a way of knowing something without knowing it. There is a kind of darkness that allows you to see itself, and the trees are suddenly there before you, and the leaves, the fallen branches and low places where water fills in, all of it there before you and shrouded in a kind of knowledge you can only get with being inside the dark of it.
There’s no way to tell you about it. Only that it’s a kind of seeing when there is light and no light, and that I came to it, finally, through no one but Unc.
And then here we were, Unc and me, at an old tree stand deep inside Hungry Neck, two-by-four steps up the trunk of a live oak, a platform fifteen feet up, the wood weathered the same gray as the trunk itself, gray melted into gray in the light before dawn.
I’d never seen this one before.
He let go the belt, and I turned to him. He smiled, nodded.
I went first, like every time we ever climbed one of these, so that once on the platform I could reach down to him at the last, take hold a hand, and pull him up.
But this morning was different: I had my arm in the sling, and I put my foot to the first two-by-four, took hold of the board above me with my right hand, and pulled, the flesh in my left shoulder still tender just beneath my collarbone, where the bullet went through.
But it was a good pain I felt, and I stepped up, leaned into the trunk, let go my hand, reached to the next board up, pulled, so that climbing the tree stand became a series of holding tight and letting go, holding tight and letting go, and it seemed in doing this there was something larger than what I was doing.
Then I was at the platform itself, and pulled myself up to it, brought up my legs.
I turned, sat with my legs hanging off, and looked down from the platform to him: that baseball cap, the sunglasses.
He leaned the stick against the trunk, then started up, and I reached to him, whispered, “Unc,” and he took my hand. I pulled, pulled, felt the pain in my shoulder again, a pain I would take, I knew, and he was beside me, brought here by his own strength and mine.
His hand stayed in mine then, and we sat.
“We built this one together,” Unc said. “Your daddy and me. And we never hunted off it. Only came here, to sit.”
I said nothing for a moment, only took in a breath, whispered, “I remember you two talking about this place one time. When I was little.”
It was all I knew to say, but it seemed enough, because now I saw what he was giving me by taking me here on this new day, in a new year, the next one of a new life I’d been given:
Before us lay the land, daylight coming up, a perfect daylight that gave color to everything.
They’d built it, brother and brother, for what they could see: land thick with palmetto and loblolly pine, oak and hickory, dogwood and wax myrtle and wisteria vine.
And there, through a curtain of two ancient live oaks it seemed spread open just for us, lay the Ashepoo, maybe a hundred yards off, the wide cold blue of it, past it the spartina and yellow grass and salt-marsh hay, all the way to Edisto.
Spread across it islands with no names.
I closed my eyes, felt the tree move in the small breeze up here, smelled the marsh, heard a squirrel bark from somewhere behind us.
“Huger Dillard,” I whispered. Two words, brand-new.
Unc held my hand tighter, my eyes still closed, and I watched this all, watched colors rise, the marsh now a green I couldn’t name, mixed in and down inside it browns and reds and a color like bone. Miles of color.
I watched it all, there with my father.
This book is for
Jeff Adkins, John Astles, John Astles, senior,
Jeff Deal, and, especially, Joel Curé.
And this is for Melanie and Marian,
with thanks for your faith.
ALSO BY BRET LOTT
The Man Who Owned Vermont
A Stranger’s House
A Dream of Old Leaves
Jewel
How to Get Home
Reed’s Beach
Fathers, Sons, and Brothers
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BRET LOTT is the author of the novels Jewel, Reed’s Beach, A Stranger’s House, and The Man Who
Owned Vermont; the story collections How to Get Home and A Dream of Old Leaves; and the memoir Fathers, Sons, and Brothers. His stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines, among them The Southern Review, The Yale Review, The Iowa Review, the Chicago Tribune, and Story, and have been widely anthologized. He lives with his wife, Melanie, and their two sons, Zebulun and Jacob, in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and teaches at the College of Charleston and Vermont College.