The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [91]
I was on my hands and knees, the flashlight a couple feet ahead of me, pointed up and away inside the tangle of growth. It was shining on something down here, something black and solid, no shadow to it but for those cast by the dead vines that shrouded it: nothing more than black rock, like a piece of wall two feet wide in front of me.
“My dear Lord,” Miss Dinah whispered. And Mom quick whispered, “Oh, oh.”
I got to my knees, looked up.
The flashlight shone on it from below, like a spotlight: a head, carved in this stone; the piece of black rock I’d seen was its base, the whole thing one piece of rock six feet tall.
I picked up the flashlight, stepped back, shone it at the head, and as I brought up the beam, it seemed for a moment it had eyes, eyes that sparked and took me in, moved over me, green light from in them.
It had eyes.
“My dear Lord in Heaven,” Miss Dinah whispered out again. “I know where we are.”
“What?” Unc said. “What is it?”
They were glass. Green glass eyes set into the black stone head of a black man. Eyes that swallowed up the beam and sent it back at me, at all of us.
It was a black man: lips, nose, jaw, all worn, soft with time, and though I believed in this moment that I ought to be afraid, I wasn’t.
It was those eyes, I knew, that kept me from being afraid. Something in them—the way they took in the light from the flashlight, the flicker of them, the way they moved without moving—gave me no fear.
“We have arrived,” Simons said. “But tell me, Miss Gaillard, where is it we have arrived?”
I stared at the eyes.
“Huger?” Unc whispered.
“Quiet, Leland,” Simons said. “Miss Gaillard?”
“The Mothers and Fathers,” she whispered.
“Precisely,” Simons said. “The fabled place.”
No one moved, made a sound.
I turned to him, still with the light on the statue.
They were all looking past me, all these ghosts, white and black both, all of them lost in the wash of light shining at that head.
I’d heard of this place. Everyone down here had. The Mothers and Fathers. But it wasn’t anything anybody ever talked about, because it was just a story. Like Miss Dinah painting her house haint purple to keep the demons away. Campfire stories. Just stories.
Slowly Unc’s head moved, no more than the nod Tabitha had given me. It was a move of emptiness and knowledge at once: he couldn’t see this, but he knew what it was. And here were his white marble eyes, swallowing the little light given up by a flashlight pointed away.
“Right where we’re standing, home of the Mothers and Fathers. Stumbled upon a few months ago by surveyors I dispatched to take stock of precisely what made up Hungry Neck. Back when I was with the boys, still thinking small: the next Hilton Head.”
I turned back to it, looked at those eyes.
Maybe this was what made me unafraid: his eyes and Unc’s: both empty, both seeing everything.
“As doctors are wont to do, no one of them could make the decision to send out surveyors for fear of a lawsuit from Unc, though we were each of us, I must admit, salivating over this place, with the senate about to plow under the University Medical Consortium, our cash cow about to be sacrificed. And so it fell to me to send them out, unbeknownst to any of the others.” He paused. “Jackson Filliault, my surveyor, reported back to me he wasn’t able to finish the job, that his boy Jimmy Horry slipped a cog or three when he saw what we’re looking at.”
“Jimmy Horry,” Miss Dinah said. “He dead.”
Simons sighed. “As is Jackson Filliault. June twelfth, a roadside accident, two surveyors killed off 17 South, hit and run. This, after I’d told dear Constance of what Filliault relayed to me, and after my late wife, trustee and former director of Acquisitions for the Carolina Museum of History, informed me of who the Mothers and Fathers were, and of the legend of these heads with eyes. And the potential value of such items on the black