The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [14]
But the Luv was mine. And it’d been Benjamin Gaillard’s.
“Go,” he said, and I gave it the gas, let out the clutch.
I drove out Baldwin, then on to Social Hall Cut, then to Cemetery, where the road goes close to the Ashepoo. That’s where I stopped, a place I’d gone to since I could remember, just to look out at the marsh.
Which is what I did: looked out over the marsh to Bear Island and Settlement Island and White House Woods, past them all those little squat islands didn’t even have names scattered around, four or five miles away the tree line of Edisto.
All these miles on the truck, I was thinking. Eight and a half times around the world, the ghost of Benjamin Gaillard thrown in for free. And out there looking at the marsh, I thought of Miss Dinah, how she’d always just been a part of the way things worked here at Hungry Neck, cooking for the members for as long as I’d ever known, and I thought, too, of her daughter, Dorcas, the deaf-and-dumb girl, and how she and Unc seemed somehow to share something, the two of them working their hands to talk to each other, and the laughter with it.
Unc had a life, it came to me. He knew people, laughed, talked, lived. All of it out here to Hungry Neck.
And then the sun going down, back behind me and just touching the tops of the trees, hit that point where everything changes. The marsh went a green you couldn’t name, mixed in and down inside it browns and reds and a color like bone, miles of colors you can’t see except for that time of day.
And past it all, above and behind it, the blue sky, going a darker blue every second.
I sat there, watched it all, until the marsh grass went dark and the colors started to bleed out. Until those islands parked out in the marsh became these dark humps, islands of no color. Just there, never even named. I sat there on into dark, past that time when, back when I was a kid, the stories of the ghosts that haunted these woods and islands and everywhere down here used to start creeping in on me, stories I’d hear from Miss Dinah herself while she cooked up the breakfasts, me watching her in the kitchen of the clubhouse, Dorcas on a stool, reading her mother’s lips to hear of the Gray Man up to Pawley’s Island, and of the Silver Trade, a ghost ship that appeared out in St. Helena Sound only at new moon, shipwrecked two hundred years ago in a storm.
Or she would tell us the best story of all, the one every kid knew but wanted to hear as many times as he could: the Mothers and Fathers, those first slaves to work this land, the holy kings and queens and princes and princesses all buried together on a plot guarded by their green-eyed ghosts, ghosts who would come up on children lost in the woods at night, ghosts that swarmed and swooped and swirled around you, their green eyes a kind of fire that struck anyone who saw them with a kind of fear that would turn their hearts inside out, make their hair fall out, make their minds turn into grits.
And once the stories were over, Dorcas would turn to me, look at me, and sometimes we’d shiver at the same time at the scare of it, and then we’d grin, locked for a second inside the story, though everyone knew these stories for the myths they were, especially the one about the Mothers and Fathers, the way those ghosts would follow you through woods if you were out too late.
But the myth of it didn’t matter. It all seemed the truth in the moment of that shiver, me and a black girl I didn’t really know sharing for that instant fear and delight at the same moment.
These were the ghosts that were with me that evening—my childhood, that shared look with Dorcas, all the stories I’d ever heard about this place—me now in my own truck and no longer fearful of the dark out here on Hungry Neck for the presence, it seemed, of Benjamin’s ghost himself.
But then I shivered in that dark, and headed on home, back to Unc.
That’s what I saw, there in my hospital bed: those nameless islands, the long stretches of marsh, the tree line, the herons and egrets,