The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [93]
Tabitha looked up at him. She knew what he’d asked. She looked from him to Miss Dinah, and I thought maybe she’d glanced at me.
She moved her hands.
Simons looked at Miss Dinah. “Translation, please?”
She was quiet, slowly turned back to the statue.
“Miss Dinah?” he said again.
But it was me to answer. “The first slaves here,” I said. “Their burial plot.”
“My dear Jesus,” Miss Dinah breathed out.
“Very good, Lord Huger.” He held the gun out at me. He smiled, said, “We’ve work to do. Let’s go,” and motioned with the gun for me to turn, move on.
There to the left of the statue led that trail, even more a tunnel now the deeper we went on the island.
He’d found the Mothers and Fathers. Here. A story, something just a lie kids told to scare one another, now truth. The place the first slaves were buried, but not just the first slaves—the holy ones, a family of kings, we’d been told.
A family.
“The shovel, Miss Eugenie?” Simons said.
Mom let go of me, stepped back and away, her eyes on me. Then she knelt, picked it up. I could see in the light her face twisted up, her looking at me, and I turned, walked.
But it was only a few feet before the trail ended altogether at a curtain of growth, the flashlight penetrating no farther, only giving me washed-out wax myrtle, thick brown tendrils of wisteria vine.
It looked odd, even given the ugly shadows the flashlight cast. The wax myrtle was dead, I could see, the leaves drooping, some gone brown, and I shone the beam to the ground. No base, no trunk. Only dead leaves, and the bottom of this curtain.
I reached to it, heard Simons chuckle behind me. “That’s right, heir apparent. Just give it a push.”
The curtain fell back, twisted away and to the right to show it was a kind of doorway propped up to keep what was past it hidden.
I leaned in, swept the flashlight beam from one side to the other.
There lay cleared ground, a large patch of low weeds, spread about it wooden stakes driven into the ground, each a foot or so high, and in the play of light across it all I saw, too, strings between them all, strips of cloth hung here and there on them.
Together the strings and stakes made a large, rough circle, walled all around by the same growth as everywhere, and from the circle led more strings and stakes to the center, like spokes on a wheel. But they stopped at a set of stakes in the middle of the circle, making another, smaller circle in the center, all of it cleared.
“The hallowed ground,” Simons said. “A kind of North American Tomb of Tutankhamen, a burial site untouched for nearly three hundred years, only now yielding its bounty, the spoils most lucrative, though those busts have made the greatest contribution to the lives of the harelipped in Bangladesh.”
I started in, stepped over a string, shone the light on it for the others. “There’s a string up,” I said to Unc once Mom and Miss Dinah were in, “about a foot high. Step over it.”
Unc bent down, touched it, and stepped over, and then came Simons and Tabitha.
I shone the light around again, looking. The ground where we stood was soft, as though we were in a carpeted, hollowed-out cavern, above us the moon again.
“Museums never pay enough,” Simons said, “and demand clean bills of sale as well as germ-free documentation. Of course were anyone, from the National Historic Trust on down to those mewling Wetlands Commission prisses, to find a single potsherd out here, things would be sealed off immediately, grand proclamations made, museums erected. Not what I have in mind.”
“And what you have in mind,” Unc said, “is just to kill us all, haul out what you can, and get away with it.”
“Why, what else, Leland? In a few minutes, Deputy Thigpen will arrive