The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [100]
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.
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.