The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [97]
Each time, too, she looked at me, her eyes glancing up at me to see if I was doing the same, working to do what had to be done. She wanted to see, I knew, that I was moving too, that I hadn’t yet died. That I was alive, like her, and doing something, because everything else had shut down on us, and there came a shovelful again and again when I had to remember to breathe in and out, everything so near being done around us. This whole world, over and done with.
Simons was back at the statue with the cable saw, Thigpen too broken to do anything except watch over us. Mom and Miss Dinah sat on the ground to my left, their wrists tied behind their backs; Unc, beside Tabitha’s end of the hole, had his hands tied to his ankles. Behind them stood Thigpen with the flashlight, the shadow heads and shoulders of Mom and Miss Dinah and Unc falling down on us, watching over us, so that each shovelful of dirt came from the black hole at our feet, then up through their lives, these shadows, and into the beam, and onto that pile.
And still I thought of things: of the lights off the paper mill and how sometimes when I woke up at night I thought for a second it was daytime, my eyes so adjusted to the pale dark in my room, and I thought of the way moss hung from the branches of live oak here at Hungry Neck two nights ago, and I thought of Mrs. Dupree and her white-gloved hands holding the paperweights, looking at them, unable to tell any difference between sin and love, and I thought of when I kissed Tabitha, not because it was a sin to kiss a black girl or because it was love between us, but because it’d been a moment when someone had been close to me, and our lips had touched and there’d seemed something past meaning I could know as a fifteen-year-old with a learner’s permit, a nothing kid who knew nothing and would die knowing nothing of love, really, except for a mother who’d spent her life lying to me because of her own sin, and an uncle who’d accompanied her right along with it, who’d led me to love him as I’d love my own father, though I’d not thought of him as that because he wasn’t, because my father had left, and I didn’t want, ever, to love someone who could leave.
It was my uncle I loved, not my father. It was my uncle.
The beam down on us moved now and again with Thigpen’s being near dead, I figured, broken ribs, arm shot. And between shovelfuls I could hear behind us and away the rhythm of the cable saw, the quiet and perfect empty whisper of it in the night, and I pictured the doctor the world thought dead pulling that saw back and forth through tabby three hundred years old just for the money it’d give, pictured him sweating for it, his arms aching for the pull and pull, and still I dug, even though I knew that when it was over, when I’d finished digging, there would come all our deaths, just as when the doctor finally cut through that statue and this last grave had been robbed, there’d be an end to the evidence the Mothers and Fathers had ever been here, and the Dillards would be gone, too, and the Gaillards, and I thought of the deer I’d butchered, and of the does, and of the fetus I’d pulled from them, white ghost deer no bigger than the palm of your hand, perfect hooves and ears and closed eyes, and I thought of how they’d never been born, and how they’d been killed even before they were born, and I wanted again and again only to be a deer, maybe these deer, these deer that’d never been born and’d been killed even before that, wanted more than anything to be them, and knew at the same time I was alive and that as long as I kept digging, and as long as Tabitha kept digging, we were alive. We were alive, and so I dug.
But it was me to hit it first.
My shovel stopped hard, made a