Authors: Bret Lott
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.
I stopped. She’d have found the note hours ago, when she went into my room and tried to wake me up for the first day back to school after Thanksgiving. And now the woods went cold on me, the wind up in the treetops sharp and loud, the dead leaves everywhere making more noise than I could take in. Mom would most likely have called the police on me by now and would be crying there at our kitchen table over where I was.
That, or she’d be at the trailer this very second, the Stanza pulled up out front, waiting for us. Like that was where we’d be.
I looked up to the treetops, saw them sway in the wind, saw the bitter blue sky up there above it all, a midday sky in November. Somewhere deer were feeding, chomping on acorns, living like they had nothing to fear, because, it seemed to me, they didn’t. Sure, they heard something, they got spooked, took off. But what did they know of what they heard? It was only sound, and if it was a hunter, and if that hunter got what he’d come looking for, then one of those deer was just gone, and the next morning these same deer would be out there in that same field, chomping on the same acorns, walking the same trails, settling down in the high grass for night, and that life gone, the one taken by that hunter, whether he was a South-of-Broad
surgeon or me, a fifteen-year-old kid who didn’t know shit about how the world worked, those same deer would just take a look around, maybe, and see one of them was gone, and everything would just start over again, like that deer’d never existed, like he’d just been some dumb dream all those deer’d been having together.
And I wanted, I guess, to be one of those deer right then. Then nothing would worry me, a sound out in the woods only something to duck away from and run for cover. And then next day I could just pick up again.
Because now I knew there were things out there, things that weren’t going to be reconciled and tossed away with just going to sleep at night. Somebody was out there, waiting for something to happen from Unc. For him to sell off the land in order just to let Unc live.
Tell him the people who count don’t give a good flying fuck where he’s hid out. The only way through this all is for him to do what he’s been asked to do
.
Sell Hungry Neck.
I jammed my hands into my pockets deep as they could go, shoulders up, that bitter blue sky too big, too wide, me too small against this all.
I felt stuff in my pockets: in the right, the money, that wad of bills Tommy Thigpen’d given me.
And in the other, the paperweight, there at the bottom of my pocket.
You tell him he’s got forty-eight hours, and it’s over and done with
.
I ran.
There stood Miss Dinah Gaillard’s place, half trailer, half shanty, the whole of it painted haint purple.
I’d been here a few times before, driving Unc over to deliver a ham at Christmas and Easter, flowers on Miss Dinah’s and Tabitha’s birthdays, and every time we pulled up in the Luv I sort of shook my head at the place, at the way these people thought painting a house a hideous color might actually scare off ghosts and demons and all.
I was in the backyard, if you could call it that, and like in the front yard there were those tires painted white and split up to make planters, pansies in them. There was a clothesline strung up out here, an old dead refrigerator, next to it a dead washing machine, the two of them side by side beneath a live oak.
Same as always.
But as I went up the cinder blocks and onto the back porch, reached for the screen door, pulled it open to knock, I thought for a second this color wasn’t such a bad thing, saw for an instant Unc’s place painted this same shade, and I wondered if, had our trailer been painted this color years ago, all the bad that had happened since might not have been averted somehow: Unc’s accident, my daddy taking off, a murder.
Haint purple. It was a thought.
The door opened before I could knock.
There stood Tabitha, a smirk on her face:
What took you so long?
She nodded, pulled the door open, and Miss Dinah hollered from inside, “She can feel in the floor somebody coming up the porch. No surprises round here.”
The first thing I took in, even before I got through the door, was the smell: biscuits, bacon. Hot food waiting, no matter I’d been expected at six o’clock this morning.
I stepped in, and stopped.
I didn’t know what I’d expected of the place; though I’d been here so many times before, I’d never actually been inside. I’d never given it a thought, really, only assumed it’d be like every other black’s house I’d been in: a TV, a sofa, a table and chairs, and somewhere a picture of Jesus on the wall. Deevonne’s house, and Jessup’s, LaKeisha’s and Tyrone’s houses. The only blacks’ houses I’d ever been in.
Not any different from my own, to tell the truth.
But here.
Here there were books. Everywhere.
Bookshelves lined the walls, from floor to ceiling. Books were piled in stacks on the floor, too, and lay on a coffee table to my right.
A sofa sat just past the coffee table, behind it bookshelves, floor to ceiling, and at either end of the sofa were more books piled up.
The only clear wall space in the whole room was across from the sofa, where a set of shelves stopped three feet from the ceiling. There, centered on the wood paneling, was a framed photograph of Benjamin Gaillard in full Marine dress uniform. The American flag was behind him, and he seemed maybe about to smile, his eyes right on me, like he was ready to tell me something I could use.
The kitchen was to my left, a little counter right there where, if it’d been any other place, there might have been a couple of stools so you could sit, eat, talk to whoever was at work in the kitchen. But beneath the counter were bookshelves, all full. A hallway led off the kitchen, back into the house, and from where I stood I could see bookshelves down that way as well.
Unc sat at the table in the kitchen, sunglasses on but with the baseball cap off. He was smiling at me, one leg crossed over the other, stick behind him and leaned against the bookshelves, floor to ceiling, behind him.
Bookshelves in the kitchen.
Miss Dinah, dressed in one of the same old flowery print dresses she always wore, was bent over in front of the oven, then stood, in her hand a plate heaped with biscuits and bacon, a puddle of grits.
“Breakfast at noon,” she said, and gave me something of the same smirk Tabitha had:
What took you so long?
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, and turned, looked for Tabitha. She was gone.
“Hurry ’fore it goes cold,” Miss Dinah said, and I went around the counter, stood at the table, next to Unc. A place had already been set: napkin, fork, knife.
“Quite a luxury,” he said. “Sleeping till noon. Like you’re the Prince of Wales or whatnot.”
Miss Dinah put a hand at her hip, the plate still in her other hand.
Unc said, “Take a load off, son.” He’d lost the smile now.
I said, “Why’d you let me sleep for so long? Unc, we got to get
going,” and soon as I said it, I wondered, Get going for what? To where? Forty-eight hours to get what done?
“You don’t have a good breakfast, you not going to have a good
day
,” Miss Dinah said, and set the plate on the table.
I’d kissed this woman’s daughter.
I sat down, looked from her to Unc to her again. I said, “Where’s Tab—” and stopped. Miss Dinah’s jaw got a little bit tighter, her eyes narrowing the smallest bit.
I scooted my chair in, without looking at her said, “Where’s Dorcas?”
“She’s got a little homework assignment,” Unc said.
He had his Braves cap in his hand, was turning it with his fingers, a habit I’d seen him do a million times when he was worried over something: somebody at the club saying something nasty to someone else, the two of them threatening to quit their membership; Patrick or Reynold beating holy shit out of one of their dogs for no reason whatsoever; those few times a doe’d be brought up for butchering and we’d find a fetus.
I said, “What’s the plan?”
He was looking down, chin almost to his chest, thinking. Miss Dinah put a plastic tub of butter down on the table, and a cup of coffee, heavy on the milk. Just like I liked it. She’d seen me fix it this way for years at the club.
She leaned against the kitchen counter, arms crossed. Books were stacked on the kitchen counter, too.
Unc fingered his hat, Miss Dinah stared at me. Something was going on here already.
I tried a smile, said, “What’s with all these books?”
“As a rule,” she said, and turned her head, gave me the other side of her jaw, “we read them.”
“Ease off on the boy,” Unc said. “He’s scared as the rest of us, Dinah. So please.” Still he worked the hat.
I turned back to Miss Dinah. “I guess I meant how is it you got so many of them. Books, I mean.” I shrugged. “I mean, what did—”
“You mean how come a shanty like this one have a better library than any high school in the county. That’s because I know what to spend my money on. My baby.” She seemed to soften then, talk turned to her daughter. She smiled, looked out to the front room, all those shelves, all those books. She nodded at them. “We go to the library sale every year, stock up and stock up. Proud to say, too, Dorcas read every one of them.” She gave a sharp nod. “I home-school that girl since day one. She never seen the inside of a public school, and already she got the universities of Duke, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford banging down the door to get ahold of her. Not to mention ten dozen other schools we don’t even wink at.” She nodded hard again. “She going be somebody of noteworthy mention. I tell you.”
Duke, I thought. Harvard and Yale. Stanford.
Shit.
I read. I’ve read all my life, and right then, right there, something started to twist in me, something had nothing to do with the matter at hand, namely what the hell was going to happen next. And I thought maybe that something had to do somehow with the word
jealousy
.
Here was Tabitha with offers already from places I’d only dreamed of.
“She got fifteen-twenty combined on her SAT, and she only a junior,” Miss Dinah said.
Shit.
Then here came Tabitha, walking fast from the hallway that led out of the kitchen. She had some paper in her hand, her forehead all worried up, and I thought she was even more beautiful than last night.
Fifteen-twenty SAT. Shit.
I looked down at my plate and didn’t feel like eating anymore.
“What you find, Missy Dorcas?” Unc said.
She sat beside him, spread the papers out on the table. She hadn’t yet looked at me, and it seemed she had no plans of it, either. She
started in with her hands, motioning and motioning, her eyes right on Unc, as though he knew exactly what she was saying.
“She get in, start to download the information,” Miss Dinah said. Her eyes were on Tabitha, focused, translating. “Had seven baffles between the password and the line in.” She paused, watched Tabitha.
Unc nodded.
“Once she make it in, she find the file you looking for.” She paused, watched.
“Hello?” I said.