The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [79]
He said, “Ain’t you ever wondered why your auntie burned herself alive, and why your daddy hauled ass out of Dodge not too long after?”
Here was Jeb’s head again, down at the ground. I couldn’t see Thigpen anymore for how close he was. Only Jeb’s hooves, his head, looking at us.
And now it was me trembling, me breathing hard, me falling deeper into this hole under a log, this hole of my life, because there was something happening here, Unc with a cold hand on mine, Mom pressed into me and whispering words I wasn’t sure were words at all, maybe dreams of words circling me, circling me like that buzzard’d circled the body of Charles Middleton Simons, M.D., good riddance to bad rubbish, that dead body leading me finally here to solve a problem I’d not wanted to solve my entire life: why my daddy left me and Mom and Unc here at Hungry Neck. Added now was the news my Aunt Sarah killed herself, the burning of Unc’s house never explained to me, a mystery neither my mom nor Unc ever thought to make clear to me. Only that she’d died, Unc injured for life.
She killed herself, my Sarah, Unc’d said at that house in Mount Pleasant. Their home.
It’s my own greed made her do it, he’d said. My own.
My mom and dad, howling at each other out to the kitchen.
Leland, Eugenie.
And me.
Something I’d known before I even knew. But something I never wanted to know.
“Huger,” Thigpen said, nearly in a whisper. Jeb’s head shot up, and I couldn’t see him at all anymore, just his legs, four stalks in the darkness, a darkness closing around me, closing and closing as tight around my heart as what I knew, finally, was coming next.
What was happening, and had already happened.
Who I was. No news at all.
“Huger, if your momma’s at all like most every fuck I ever had, the night Leland give it to her she squealed like a rabbit in a trap.”
“Huger,” Mom whispered again, then cried, air out of her like knives into my back, my neck.
“Imagine that, Huger: your momma and your uncle fucking to beat the band, making what turned out to be you, you little shit. A love child. Kind of makes you think twice on that word bastard now, don’t it?”
Unc clutched my hand in his.
The world went tighter, the hole I could see out of, this thin slip of night, going smaller and smaller.
“Huger Dillard,” Thigpen said. “Bastard child of Eugenie and her husband’s brother, Leland Dillard.”
What I’d known, and never knew.
I broke my hand free of Unc’s, pushed at him and pushed over him and to that hole closing down over me now, before me only the legs of this horse, and then the horse reared, and I was out of that hole, my own legs kicking against Unc behind me, and I could taste my heart pounding in my throat, the source of all the dark red metal on earth in my throat and pounding, and the horse reared higher, whinnied, and now I was standing, above me this horse, Tommy Thigpen falling back in the saddle, startled, one hand with the reins, the other with the shotgun, and I saw his eyes as clear as any day, saw him looking down at me, saw the cigar fall from his lips, saw that mouth turn into a smile, all this while the horse reared up, all of this in the dark, all of this surrounded by trees and stars and this night, and I jumped at him, grabbed his arm, the one Patrick’d shot, and pulled at him, pulled at him, because I wanted to kill him.
He screamed out when I pulled that arm, lost his balance a moment while the horse came down for the first time, and he dropped the shotgun.
“Huger!” Mom cried out from behind me, and even in this instant of all things happening I didn’t recognize the word as meaning anything I could know.
And the horse reared again, this time higher, and I held hard Thigpen’s arm, pulled at him, pulled at him, while he still tried to hold on to the saddle, and I could feel my feet off the ground, me hanging on to only that arm, him hanging