The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [38]
“Yessir.”
“Well,” he said. He brought it to his nose, sniffed it, turned it. “It’s resin. Pine. Hard as a rock.” He made a fist again, with his thumbnail tried to pick at it. “And she didn’t say anything else. About this thing, this paperweight.”
“No sir.” I paused. “Just the part about telling you she loved you.”
He was silent.
“And she told me to cherish my momma,” I said, not certain why I ought to tell him that, except that now it seemed all the more important, and all the more impossible. “She said she could tell Mom cared for me. Mom was sleeping in a cot under the window. She spent the night there for me.”
Now I couldn’t even hear him breathing. He was holding on to something had hold of him in a way must have been bigger than anything yet to hold him.
He said, “They want me to sell the land. Hungry Neck.”
“Who?” I said, my voice whole and loud, and I quick sat down beside him on the cot, leaned forward, said, “No!”
“Settle down,” Unc said, and now here was his breath, let out low and long, a hollow whisper of air in the dark. “Settle down. And no, it wasn’t me to call it in. About Constance.” He paused, took in another breath, but let this one right back out. “I only heard of it on the radio,” he whispered. “Over to Miss Dinah’s.”
I leaned back, the shack wall hard and cold through my jacket.
“Unc,” I said, “Unc, I don’t know what’s happening.”
“Join the big ugly club,” he said, and reached in the dark for my hand. I held it up for him, and he put in it the paperweight, still warm. “You hold on to this,” he whispered.
I woke up, didn’t remember falling asleep. I was on Unc’s cot, and there was light in through the papered window, and in through cracks here and there in the walls, and I sat up, called out, “Unc!” to the empty room.
The chair, the stove. This cot. That was all.
It was an old sleeping bag I was wrapped up in, and I’d slept in my clothes. I sat up, saw on the floor my duck boots, taken off by Unc, set next to each other and waiting, neat as could be.
And there, rolled up and slipped into the top of the right one, was a piece of paper. I picked it up, saw it was a note, handwriting on it: Unc’s scrawl, big and wide. He could write still, left me notes now and again if he was out somewheres when I came in on Friday afternoons.
I’m at Miss Dinah’s. Follow the electric wire. Hot food waiting.
Then, beneath it in letters too small for the hand I’d come to know so well, was the single word love, and Unc.
I slipped on the boots, went to the stove, took what little heat was left from what had become a dead black stove, that warm red long gone. I put on my jacket and started out, stepped off the porch and looked up to the trees for those floods from last night. A wire came down from one to the right, took off back and away, the same direction Tabitha and Miss Dinah’d taken last night, and I was off.
It was the same old woods as everywhere down here, same low water spots and water oak and whatnot as always, only colder than the day before. But it seemed different in a big way now, and for a second I couldn’t get it, couldn’t feel what it was.
And then last night started in on me, and I knew what it was: somebody was trying to get the land away from us, trying to get Unc to sell it. Hungry Neck, a place for some reason people were being killed over—a plastic surgeon, his wife—and trying to take it out of my family’s hands, who the hunt club belonged to.
Me, I knew. Hungry Neck belonged to me, and I didn’t feel a second of remorse for that feeling, this big selfishness I had in me for wanting our land, all 2,200 acres of it, no matter some of it was trash land, some of it good for nothing.
It was what we had.
But to kill over it? To kill a man, a son-of-a-bitch doctor, and then to tack on a suicide too, when the place didn’t belong to any of them?
I walked through the woods, an eye up now and again to catch that wire. Wild grapevine had grown over it this spring and summer, now only the gray dead fingers of vines here and there, the wire tacked