The Hunt Club (30 page)

The paperweight I’d thought nothing of, worth that much money.

But it wasn’t the money that mattered, I saw. It wasn’t that at all. It was that she’d thought enough to risk heading into a hospital to give it to me. To give to Unc, the one she loved.

Cherish your mother
, she’d said, and I saw even she knew who my mother was, and knew who my father was, and knew something about love, and about death.

She knew enough to give the other to her own mother, upon it the disclaimer of sin, on Unc’s the curse of love.

“Curiously intelligent, these first savages,” Simons said. “We’ve found in each casket—carved out of oak, lined inside and out with pitch—a perfect sort of mummification, both bodies and possessions. Each item with which they have been interred, and believe me there are troves in each casket, has been encased in resin, rendering everything, from the shields and spears the men are buried with to the sweetgrass baskets the women bear, a delightful perfection, yielding top dollar again and again. Ingenious, actually, using this resin, every item intact. Especially considering the capital gains I’m making from their own world of the dead. Imagine that.” He
laughed, the beam falling from the bare ground there to the weeds at my feet. “I’ve become a contemporary of theirs with passing through the great veil. And not only am I taking
mine
with me, but I’m taking theirs as well.”

I heard crying from behind me, turned to see Miss Dinah now leaning on Mom, her hands to her face, shoulders shivering.

Tabitha moved then, took a step away from Simons and toward her mother. But Simons reached out, took hold her arm, pushed her toward me. He stepped to Miss Dinah, the gun still pointed at me, and took from her hand a shovel, with the same hand took the other shovel from Mom’s hand, and held them both out to Tabitha. She looked at them, at him, and took them.

“Lord Huger, the two of you will be our excavators for the evening, and we’ll see what the Father of Fathers himself yields up. A trove beyond troves, I am certain.”

I looked at Tabitha, slowly held my hand out to her.

She looked at Miss Dinah, still weeping, then at me, at Simons. She took a step away from him, put out her hand to me. I took it, then took one of the shovels.

Her hand was cold.

I stepped through the low grass toward that center, Simons shining the beam past us so that our shadows were big enough, it seemed, to move past all this, move away and to some other life. Somewhere else.

Here was the string of the center circle. Only string between two stakes, and a rag. But something else, a circle into which we’d step, and start digging the hole where we’d pull up a coffin, replace it with our own bodies once the harvest had been completed.

Unc said, “Constance came to Huger in the hospital, gave him one of those baskets. Told him to give it to me.”

I stopped, looked at him.

He was facing Simons, his back to me, his head moving, listening. He’d heard something again, something none of us heard. Mom was looking at him, too, Miss Dinah still with a hand to her face.

“And?” Simons said.

“I told him to give it to Mrs. Dupree,” he said. “Your harridan. He did.”

I let go of Tabitha’s hand. She looked at me, turned with me.

“Thigpen reported to me he lost the missus for an hour or so the evening in question,” Simons said, matter-of-fact. “But he rounded her up in time for her reservation at the Rantowles Motel. So, as I see it, no harm, no foul. Mrs. Dupree has them, she can keep them.”

“Someone will see them,” Unc said. “Evidence of something. Someone will ask one thing, another.”

“Let me kill him,” a thin voice said from the darkness past Simons. “Let me kill the fucker now.”

Thigpen came into the backwash of light off the flashlight, there beside Simons. Unc’d heard him coming up and’d started talking in the hopes of stirring something up.

Thigpen looked dead, his face white, his breathing shallow and small for the broken ribs. His jacket was off, his left arm tied round with an old towel up near his shoulder. A pistol was tucked into his jeans.

Simons hadn’t moved, only laughed. “What, and surrender too soon to the great beyond the love of my late wife’s life? A blind trailerman on social security and policeman’s compensation? The latter-day saint of the redneck set? And besides, were you to kill him, I’m afraid we’d have something of a morale problem in the meantime.” He paused, looked at Thigpen, down and up. “You’re in no condition to work, it appears to me. We need them. But we don’t need them looking at their dead patriarch all the while.”

Thigpen took a couple of breaths, said, “He’s just stalling. Talking about them damned tiny pieces she took off with.” He took a step toward Unc, who tensed up, stood taller, his head weaving, listening.

“Unc,” I said.

But it was too late, and meant nothing besides: Thigpen swung at Unc, his fist buried into Unc’s stomach, and Unc bent in half, met with Thigpen’s knee in his chest, and hit the ground.

I took a step to him but heard the hammer cocked on Simons’s gun, and I stopped.

He said, “You would do well, Lord Huger the bastard son, to dig rather than tend to the weak of eye.”

Thigpen stood straight, his free hand holding his side. He was winded with the effort, grimaced with the pain. Unc lay twisted on the ground, his back to the flashlight so that his face was in shadow, lost. He groaned, coughed out a breath.

“And talk, dear Leland, of items missing will do nothing to stop work here. Though a child’s knickknacks proved the undoing of barren, sterile Constance, they have no genuine discernible consequence this evening. The king’s ransom we are about to unearth will make each cache of African memorabilia thus far sold pale in comparison. Each coffin is filled to the brim, each item fetching prices one might not believe, were it not for the fact of the vogue value these items seem to carry. Carved wooden pomegranates at two hundred thousand a set, a quiver of arrows for two hundred fifty, a cowhide shield for five hundred, a full-sized sweetgrass rice basket for eight hundred thousand dollars. And imagine, these sums multiplied by twelve! So much disposable income, so many buyers: Hollywood types, dignitaries, foreign statesmen like our potentate. Why, one of the busts, the Daughter herself, is owned by a former Grand Dragon and failed gubernatorial candidate from a sister state of ours, which will go unnamed here, for obvious embarrassing reasons. He keeps it, I am told, in the foyer of his summer home on the Gulf. A kind of slave ownership, I imagine, without all the fuss of civil rights and its attendant—”

“Will you just shut the fuck up?” Thigpen said, and looked at Simons. He took in a quick breath, grimaced for it again. “Fucking doctors. Every one of you thinks he knows everything, and thinks people really want to hear it.” He looked back at Unc. “So just shut up.”

Simons quick looked at Mom, at me, at Unc on the ground. “You are correct, in that this is a waste of time. Daylight will be upon us
in a matter of two hours.” He let the hammer back, brought the gun down.

Unc got to his knees now, coughed again, slowly stood.

He said, “Tommy, you know all about Charlie’s money in Grand Cayman? About his insurance?” He was trying to stand up straight again. He wouldn’t give up.

“Don’t even try,” Thigpen said, and I thought I could see him smile. “I know what he’s making, and what he’s paying me. I’ve got things on him, he’s got things on me.” He shook his head, then squinted hard, held his breath a moment. “I don’t get my money, or I disappear, I’ve got things rigged, and the world knows about him. And I let on what I know about him, I’m sure he’s got things rigged to take care of me. Right, doc?” He looked back to Simons.

“As rain, my fellow malefactor. Honor among thieves, this sort of thing.”

“So you just shut the fuck up, too, Leland,” Thigpen said, trying at the smile again. “Just shut the fuck up, and know you’ll be dead before the sun’s up.”

“To business,” Simons said, and shone the beam on Tabitha and me. “Dig?” he said, and laughed.

There were things I thought of while we worked, the ground like everywhere down at the water, more clay than sand, heavy. But with each turn of the shovel, each lift of it out and onto the ground to my right, things came to me: the months Unc lay in bed in the trailer, and the nest, the antler, the feather I’d brought him. I thought of the way his hand’d wrapped itself around the paperweight in the warm dark of Benjamin Gaillard’s shack, and how he’d then given it up to me, and I thought of a minivan out front of a house with two oaks, and of the smell of that dead body. I thought of my mother curled up on a cot beside my bed, and the way the sun set just this evening on Charleston Harbor as we drove over the bridge from Mount Pleasant, and the light on the water, the red in the sky, the last sunset I’d see.

And of course I still hadn’t yet thought it was true, any of this: our being killed.

It had to do, maybe, with the way Tabitha worked at shoveling, like this was what, finally, we’d been born to do, our only job: dig up a coffin, lay ourselves to rest in the hole we’d made. We faced each other, stood a few feet from each other, and when she put the shovel to the ground, she stepped on the edge with both feet each time, slicing as best she could through the roots we’d come on now and again, and then she’d lift it up, a shovelful of black earth, and lift it, lift it, let it fall on the pile growing to my right, and start again.

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 thick scratch of sound, jolted through my arm.

I looked up at Tabitha, her eyes already on me. Her mouth was closed tight, a thin line, and I could see she knew what I knew: once we finished this job, we were dead.

Thigpen moved, the beam suddenly over us from a different angle. He was behind Tabitha now, and I couldn’t see her anymore.

He shone it down into the hole. The hole was about four feet deep, the beam falling on only black dirt, the tip of my shovel a few inches in.

“Keep going,” Thigpen said, his voice even shallower now.

Still the cable saw worked, off and away from us.

We were here.

“Huger,” Unc said.

The word came to me as if from across water, like some shadow of itself, light from behind it.

“You shut the fuck up, old man,” Thigpen said, and shone the light on Unc.

But I looked at Tabitha.

Huger
. My name.

“You just keep your fucking mouth shut, Leland, or I’ll kill you now.”

“Son,” Unc said, on it the same distance, the same depth.