by Bret Lott
Slowly I stood.
There on the shack porch—a door lying flat on cinder blocks—stood Unc, in his hand the walking stick, Braves cap and sunglasses on.
And next to him Miss Dinah Gaillard, Tabitha’s mom, a double-barrel shotgun pointed at us.
I said, “Sir?”
“You better be alone.”
Tabitha slowly stood, blinking and blinking.
“Just Tabitha with me, sir,” I said.
“You don’t be calling her by that demon name,” Miss Dinah said, and lowered the gun, let back both hammers. “It’s Dorcas. Dorcas only.”
She had on a powder-blue parka over a flowery purple dress down past her knees, duck boots on her feet. “That name you call her a demon name for that program Bewitched come on while back.” I glanced at Tabitha, her head down and shaking slow, eyes closed: she’d seen all these words before. “Them TV people take a godly girl’s name and give it to a witch. No Tabitha round here. None I know.”
Unc didn’t move.
She stepped down from the porch. The shack was only gray boards, one window, a rusted tin roof. A stovepipe came out at the peak, smoke snaking up out of it, white in the light everywhere.
The light. I turned, looked around, still squinting: floodlights twenty feet up in a couple trees behind us, in a few trees on either side of us, and at the top of two poles, one at each end of the shack. It might as well have been noon.
Here came Miss Dinah, shotgun crooked in her arm as natural as a shopping bag, heading for Tabitha.
“Certainly weren’t any surprise, you two loud as elephants coming in,” she said. “No surprise, too, when I find Missy Dorcas bed empty as the tomb Easter morning. Truck gone, too. No surprise whatsoever.”
She was to us now and took hold of Tabitha’s arm.
Tabitha jerked her arm up and around at her mother’s touch. Her eyes shot open, her chin up. She looked out into the woods past the shed, mouth shut tight.
It was the first I’d seen her in light this whole time: that white hairband holding back a big, full turn of straight black hair, her skin smooth and brown, that jaw set hard as concrete.
She was beautiful. It was something I’d never seen before, this beauty. Tabitha. Before this, she’d only been the girl I’d looked at after being told stories about the Mothers and Fathers, the Gray Ghost, the girl I’d shivered with.
But now.
“We got a mile and a half walk now, Missy Dorcas, breakfast to make up for these two not three hours from now, too,” Miss Dinah said, making certain to be in Tabitha’s line of sight so she could see her mouth the words. “I be surprised if the Mothers and Fathers don’t haint us on home,” she went on, “chase us through the woods, they green eyes a-glittering, a moon like this and that far to go.”
I cut my eyes to Tabitha one last time, saw her roll her eyes at her mother’s words: as though the old ghost story were all we had to worry over.
They started away then, to the left and toward the black out past the ring of daylight the floods gave, Tabitha out in front, Miss Dinah talking to the back of her deaf daughter: “You be safe out to here,” Miss Dinah called from nowhere. “You got nothing to worry over out to here.”
I knew these words were meant for me and Unc, not Tabitha.
“Six-thirty, Miss Dinah,” Unc said, his voice still flat. “We’ll be there.”
They passed the post at the left end of the shed, and the dark swallowed them up.
He let the stick hang off the edge of the porch, touch the ground. He leaned on it and stepped off.
He said, “Come here, boy.”
Between us lay thirty feet or so of dry leaves. I thought of Tabitha with her eyes closed, her mom headed straight for her. But Unc was going nowhere, was waiting for me to head to him, so he could give me whatever hell he thought I was owed.
Thirty feet of ground. I swallowed, started for him.
He held the stick above the ground now, his hand holding on tight, knuckles white, the other at his side, in a fist.
Then I was in front of him, all this light around us, light so clear and sharp I could see myself in his sunglasses, just like I’d been able to see myself in them Saturday morning, two of me reflected there, still just as small and far away as I’d felt there on the tail end of the Luv.
Then he slapped me, the hand up from his side so quick I couldn’t have flinched if I’d wanted to, the pain of it white and sharp, a blast of cutting light through my jaw and teeth and tongue.
But I didn’t move.
The stick fell to the ground, lost for the force of his other hand across my cheek.
He said, “You don’t have a clue, do you?”
It wasn’t a question at all, I knew, and now I could taste blood in my mouth, the inside of my cheek cut.
“Miss Dinah comes out here about two o’clock,” Unc said, his mouth barely moving. “Walked a mile and a half through the woods to tell me she just got a call from somebody won’t give his name but who tells her he knows where I am. Tells her, too, her daughter and you are on your way here.” He paused. His voice hadn’t changed at all from when he’d called out my name: just there, and knowing everything. “Says you about got killed out on the Mark Clark, and that he gave you money for gas, and to be expecting you.”
He stopped. “Now,” he said, his voice gone to a whisper meant not for a secret, but for the anger in him. “Now you’re in it, and you don’t even know. You. And your momma. You don’t even know it, but you are, and so is Dorcas, and Miss Dinah, who’s probably going to spend the rest of this night playing watchdog with that shotgun, waiting for somebody to show and look to drag me away.”
“He ain’t coming for you,” I said quick, and Unc flinched at the words, like they’d scared and surprised him both. Like he’d figured I had nothing to say.
But I had words, words hidden inside the blood and metal and dark red of my mouth, inside that blast of pain he’d given to me, a piece of the hell he thought I was owed. I’d had no idea they were there, lined up and ready to go, but here they were, and the next ones, too: “And I know who it is.”
I leaned over, spit red on the leaves between us, my tongue thick in my mouth.
Unc was wrong. I had plenty of clues.
Thigpen’s words, to begin with: Leland’s sinking in seven kinds of shit, and he thinks he knows how to swim.
I leaned over, picked up the stick. For a moment I thought to throw it far and deep into the black past all this false light, throw it somewhere he’d never find. Then maybe he’d see how he had no choice in this matter whatsoever: that I was here, and that it’d be my arm he’d have to hang on to, and that whatever end this all came to I was part and parcel to it. For better and worse.
He was what I had. And I was what he had.
I leaned the stick against his chest.
He stood there, mouth open, like every word he’d had ready for me had suddenly dried up, turned to dead leaves underfoot, my blood and spit on them all some kind of pact sealed between us.
I moved around him and onto the porch, for the door standing open, inside it more black.
But mounted on the gray board beside the door was a switch, one of those industrial kind, a red plastic handle on it you pulled down and clapped into place to turn it on or off. The switch for all these lights, and I wondered for a second how Benjamin Gaillard had gotten electric all the way out here.
I reached to the switch, pulled hard on it, clapped it back.
Here was the night again, only now it was pitch black for the way my eyes’d adjusted to the floods. I stood there, waited, waited, and then the shadows surfaced again and I could see.
“Unc,” I said. “Let’s go.”
He didn’t move, a gray man in gray light, piecemeal shadows moving above and beside him.
Then he turned, and I could see the stick in his hand. He leaned over, laid it against the porch floor, stood.
We were silent a long while, and I heard again the empty so
ng of wind down on us from above.
Then he held up his hand to me.
I took it, our hands the same color gray in this moonlight, and helped him up.
I talked.
I just sat in the dark in a big chair, the armrests under my hands, the material pulled and torn, the stuffing and wood right there at my fingertips. Some old hunk of furniture from the Gaillards’ shanty, parked here by Benjamin for drinking and hunting and sometimes, I figured, even nights like this, when talk was all that mattered.
Unc’d led me in, had gone to the far end of the room, where a cot was laid out. I couldn’t see this at first, saw only black, my eyes needing time to adjust even more to this newer, deeper dark. The window across from me was papered over, I finally could make out, the moonlight through it just the barest hint of gray.
The woodstove sat against the wall on my left, the iron door of it dull red for the fire must’ve been burning in there since sometime early in the evening. Now and again Unc’d tell me to chunk up the stove, him able to tell precisely when the cold’d start seeping in, and I’d go to the stack of wood next to the stove, pick up a piece, then with my other hand pick up the small hooked stick that lay on the floor before the stove, with it lift the latch on the door. Here came firelight, strong and harsh, and I’d settle in that piece of wood, quick close the door, head back to my chair.
I told him of Tommy Thigpen, to start off, and how it’d been him to call Miss Dinah, or must have been, because he was the only one saw us. Except, of course, for the two bubbas in the pickup who’d been rolled, and I told him of the way the driver’s arm’d hung in the window with that gun, and I told him of the gun, too, and stood, pulled it from my pants, handed it to him. In that dark I could see him, the barest figure of a ghost holding the gun, thinking on it. Then he held it out to me, and without a word I took it.
It was mine now.
I told him of how it hadn’t been me to strike out for this place on my own, told him of how Tabitha—“Dorcas,” he interrupted me, “is what her momma named her, so you make sure and observe that fact”—had tapped on my window, and I told him of the walk in the woods here, the quiet of it all, and how much the floodlights’d hurt my eyes.
But I didn’t tell him about kissing her.
Now and again I stopped, waited for him to say something. At times I thought maybe he’d gone on to sleep, and I listened for his deep, steady breaths in and out. But each time I stopped there’d be only a few moments before he’d let out, “Go on, Huger.”
I told him of the two SLED clods when we were on our way out of the hospital, and how they believed it was him to call in Constance Dupree’s suicide, and I told him of what I’d seen on the eleven o’clock news. I waited for something from him. But still nothing came, only “Go on, Huger.”
So I waited for last to tell him what seemed the biggest items to me. This would get him, I hoped, these words next:
I said, “Doug Yandle was outside the hospital when we left. He was looking at us, Mom and me, and he had his arm in a sling, and with his free hand he made like he was pointing a gun at me, and pulled the trigger.”
“He’s a pussy, plain and simple,” Unc said. He was quiet, then said, “Next?”
“Next what?”
“Next thing you want to tell me.”
I looked up, said, “Tommy Thigpen said to tell you the people who count don’t give a good flying fuck where you’re hiding.” I paused. I’d never talked like this in front of him. But I’d never carried news like this before, either. “He said the only way through this is for you to do what you’ve been asked to do. He said to tell you things’ll be fixed. All you have to do is what they’ve asked you to do.” I stopped. “He said you have forty-eight hours.”
I let that hang in the dark, waited, waited, then said, “What did they ask you to do?”
He said nothing.
I was quiet a little while longer, then said the one last piece I had, something I hoped might flush him out: “Constance Dupree Middleton came to my room last night. At the hospital. And she said to tell you she loved you.”
He moved. It was just the squeak of the wooden cot, but I heard him move.
I said, “And she told me to give this to you.” I stood again, crossed the shack to him, pulled out the paperweight.
In the dark it was nothing I could see, only the same warm glass thing Constance’d handed me last night, and for a moment I thought I might know a piece of what it was like to be Unc, and be blind. Here was the thing in my hand that all of this had come to, and I couldn’t see it.
I said, “It’s like a paperweight. It’s made of something like brown glass, but I’m not sure. But inside it is the center of a sweetgrass basket, a little coil of a sweetgrass basket.”
His fingers stopped dead. “Inside it? A sweetgrass coil?”
“Yes,” I said, then put to him what I was sure was a connection now. “A sweetgrass coil, just like the ones you were drawing in the dirt with your stick.” I paused. “After we found Simons.”
He moved his hand up and down, like he was weighing it. “I don’t know what this means,” he said. “When she called Wednesday night, she was crazy, crying and all. Threatening to kill him.” He gave it a small toss, caught it. “She said something about sweetgrass baskets. Something about graves and sweetgrass baskets. I took it to be crazy talk, her raving on about what a bastard her husband was.” He paused. “And she told you to give it to me?”
“Yessir.”
“Well,” he said. He brought it to his nose, sniffed it, turned it. “It’s resin. Pine. Hard as a rock.” He made a fist again, with his thumbnail tried to pick at it. “And she didn’t say anything else. About this thing, this paperweight.”
“No sir.” I paused. “Just the part about telling you she loved you.”
He was silent.
“And she told me to cherish my momma,” I said, not certain why I ought to tell him that, except that now it seemed all the more important, and all the more impossible. “She said she could tell Mom cared for me. Mom was sleeping in a cot under the window. She spent the night there for me.”
Now I couldn’t even hear him breathing. He was holding on to something had hold of him in a way must have been bigger than anything yet to hold him.
He said, “They want me to sell the land. Hungry Neck.”
“Who?” I said, my voice whole and loud, and I quick sat down beside him on the cot, leaned forward, said, “No!”
“Settle down,” Unc said, and now here was his breath, let out low and long, a hollow whisper of air in the dark. “Settle down. And no, it wasn’t me to call it in. About Constance.” He paused, took in another breath, but let this one right back out. “I only heard of it on the radio,” he whispered. “Over to Miss Dinah’s.”
I leaned back, the shack wall hard and cold through my jacket.
“Unc,” I said, “Unc, I don’t know what’s happening.”
“Join the big ugly club,” he said, and reached in the dark for my hand. I held it up for him, and he put in it the paperweight, still warm. “You hold on to this,” he whispered.
I woke up, didn’t remember falling asleep. I was on Unc’s cot, and there was light in through the papered window, and in through cracks here and there in the walls, and I sat up, called out, “Unc!” to the empty room.
The chair, the stove. This cot. That was all.
It was an old sleeping bag I was wrapped up in, and I’d slept in my clothes. I sat up, saw on the floor my duck boots, taken off by Unc, set next to each other and waiting, neat as could be.
And there, rolled up and slipped into the top of the right one, was a piece of paper. I picked it up, saw it was a note, handwriting on it: Unc’s scrawl, big and wide. He could write still, left me notes now and again if he was out somewheres when I came in on Friday afternoons.
I’m at Miss Dinah’s. Follow the electric wire. Hot food waiting.
Then, beneath it in letters too small for the hand
I’d come to know so well, was the single word love, and Unc.
I slipped on the boots, went to the stove, took what little heat was left from what had become a dead black stove, that warm red long gone. I put on my jacket and started out, stepped off the porch and looked up to the trees for those floods from last night. A wire came down from one to the right, took off back and away, the same direction Tabitha and Miss Dinah’d taken last night, and I was off.
It was the same old woods as everywhere down here, same low water spots and water oak and whatnot as always, only colder than the day before. But it seemed different in a big way now, and for a second I couldn’t get it, couldn’t feel what it was.
And then last night started in on me, and I knew what it was: somebody was trying to get the land away from us, trying to get Unc to sell it. Hungry Neck, a place for some reason people were being killed over—a plastic surgeon, his wife—and trying to take it out of my family’s hands, who the hunt club belonged to.
Me, I knew. Hungry Neck belonged to me, and I didn’t feel a second of remorse for that feeling, this big selfishness I had in me for wanting our land, all 2,200 acres of it, no matter some of it was trash land, some of it good for nothing.
It was what we had.
But to kill over it? To kill a man, a son-of-a-bitch doctor, and then to tack on a suicide too, when the place didn’t belong to any of them?
I walked through the woods, an eye up now and again to catch that wire. Wild grapevine had grown over it this spring and summer, now only the gray dead fingers of vines here and there, the wire tacked to a tree every few yards, the trunks nearly grown over the wire, swallowing it, telling me how long it’d been that Benjamin Gaillard had had this shack to himself. Most likely since he was a kid, I imagined, maybe since he was my age, and I wondered what it would have been like to be him, a kid living out here with these woods seven days a week, every day of the year.
Which is what I had before my father left us, and Mom decided to move us out. Back then it was Hungry Neck, every moment I breathed.
Mom.
