The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [101]
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,