The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [48]
We left the trailer, headed right back into the land like we’d started out on Saturday morning, headed down Lannear Road toward the levee, around us the heavy shroud of oak and pine, everywhere a cold kind of lushness, winter on its way. We were headed back, Unc informed me only once we were in the Luv, to try and find precisely where Cleve Ravenel lost his way.
Cherish your momma, Constance’d told me, when all I’d done was abandon her back to the house in North Charleston, led her out here only to get kidnapped, sucked in deeper than Unc and me both.
Cherish your momma. Good advice. But it’d been given to me, an idiot. Just me. Just nothing.
We reached the levee, where Lannear hits Levee Road going to the right and left. To the left, the road headed back toward those stands we’d been letting men off at on Saturday morning. Unc said, “Stop here.”
Here was beside that clear-cut field, not far from where Patrick and Reynold had let out the dogs.
I looked out across the field, dry white weeds no different from the ones I’d parked the Luv in last night, and the levee itself to the right of it all, a twenty-foot rise of dirt.
Unc said, “What time was it when Cleve left?”
I looked at him. “You mean when you sent him off?”
“Yep.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe six-fifteen? Six-thirty?”
“Turn right.”
I turned to the right, followed the back side of the levee. We rotated which parcels we used for hunts and were headed back deep now onto the property, back to parcels we wouldn’t be using until near Christmas.
If ever again, I thought.
“Six-fifteen would have been no more than an hour off high tide,” Unc said as we bucked through a low spot, that shroud even heavier, the lane narrower the deeper we got. “Go toward the river when we hit Trestle Road, then take the fork off to the right.”
I had an idea now what he was thinking, and here came Trestle, Levee Road dead-ending into it.
It was called Trestle Road because it led up to the trestle, though it was gone now, taken down by the WPA, Unc told me once, in some sort of project supposed to keep people working, never mind it was dismantling and not building. But by the 1930s the lumber trains were long gone anyway, the land stripped bare. The track bed still ran through the property, only the gravel left, the tracks themselves hauled away as well for scrap by the same boys took down the trestle.
This was one of my favorite places when I was a kid, where the track bed started its slow rise up to where the trestle used to be. I’d ride my bike all the way back here and on that track bed, and then, at the top, there where the bed ended in a man-made bluff on the bank of the Ashepoo, I’d stop, look both ways up and down the river bending away from me on both sides, the trees right up to the edge of the river like giant men on horseback, I used to think, watching over all the marsh.
Hungry Neck. Our land.
But that didn’t matter now. They had Mom. They had her.
Straight across from the bluff and on the other side of the river was the marsh, stretching wide all the way to Edisto, littered across it all those green islands, nameless, empty, the only remains of the trestle out in the marsh the black tips of pylons now and again stretching off into the distance, like the spine of some huge dead animal. Nothing more.
“Stop,” Unc said, and I hit the brakes. We were parallel to the tracks, the dead end of this fork of Trestle Road another quarter mile or so.
Unc climbed out, stick in hand, and I followed.
Not ten yards in front of the Luv was where the road dipped lowest, where at high tide a finger off the Ashepoo found its way in, covered the road in a good six inches of water.
He’d found it blind, ticked off in his head the distance as we drove, the directions I’d turned, worked out in his head even the tide tables.
Hungry Neck was his.
We knelt at the low spot, the road muddy still, twice a day covered with water. And there, clear and clean and obvious as a message in lipstick or a homemade tattoo, were the tracks: two of them, big tires, perfect for a Ram 2500