Authors: Bret Lott
“Keep going on down Old Georgetown,” he said. “Turn right at the second street.” These were the first words he’d said since we were inside the MRI place, and his voice was low, near a whisper. “Won’t take but a second. Then we need to head downtown. To the Battery.”
I looked at him. We were at the light at Bowman and Old Georgetown, a few cars back, traffic heavy down from the Mark Clark for rush hour, everybody hurrying home to their neat houses with neat lawns here in Mount Pleasant.
“Where’re we going?” I asked. “And when are we going back to Hungry Neck?” I paused. “Or did you forget about my mother?”
I knew I was being smart-mouthed. But that’s what I’d intended. I wanted a rise out of him, wanted to wake him up out of whatever stupor he was in.
He didn’t even look at me.
I turned right at the light, drove down Old Georgetown away from the Mark Clark, and took the second right.
It was a neighborhood, nothing else. On either corner, right
where we’d turned in, were brick stands a couple feet wide, five feet tall and painted white, the words
HICKORY PLANTATION
painted on both of them, entryway into a tract of homes.
There were trees, yards, brick houses and vinyl-siding houses. There were driveways with RV’s and jon boats parked in them, some with bikes just dumped, kids in a hurry to get in the house for supper.
“Turn left,” Unc said, and here was a street on the left, and I turned.
“Fourth house on the right,” he whispered.
I slowed down, pulled to the curb in front of the fourth house on the right. A mailbox stood out front, the numbers 2032 on the side in those reflective stickers.
I turned my headlights off and looked at him. “We going in?”
He was turned to the house, away from me. “What does it look like?”
“Looks like a house.”
Slowly he shook his head, then whispered, “Tell me.”
I leaned over the steering wheel to see past him to the house. I said, “There’s a green Dodge Caravan parked out front. It’s a two-story house, light blue siding. The garage door’s open, and there’s a workbench in there, no room for a car for all the junk. Two bicycles on the sidewalk up to the front door, both of them flat on the ground.”
I leaned back. “It’s a family,” I said. “A family lives there.”
“Two oaks out front,” he whispered.
He was right. Two oaks stood off to the left of the front yard, and I saw where somebody’d hung a rope swing off one of the branches, just a loop of rope and a piece of two-by-four.
I said, “Unc, we going in? Because if we are, then we need to go.”
He turned to me. He put out his hand for me, and I saw it was shaking.
I took hold of it, squeezed hard. “Unc, what’s wrong?”
“Greed,” he whispered. “Maybe it’s me being greedy.” His hand
was cold in mine, and I squeezed harder. “Maybe I ought to sell it. Because my wanting it’s just the other side of their wanting it.”
“Who?” I said. “Who wants what?”
He looked at me a long second, then pulled his hand out of mine, turned and pointed at the house. He said, “This is where we lived.”
It took a second, but it sank in.
Aunt Sarah, Unc. Where she died, where Unc lost his eyes. And his life, the first one.
Where the next life, the one out to Hungry Neck, started. The one empty of any real family, just me out on the weekends.
It was a family living in there. Now.
“She killed herself,” he whispered, “my Sarah.” He touched the glass of his window. “It’s my own greed made her do it. My own.”
I said nothing, only put both hands to the steering wheel, held on tight.
I wasn’t ready for this. Not news of Aunt Sarah, of another suicide.
I gripped and regripped the wheel, tried hard to make some sense out of all this, any of it: my mom, the club, Unc, and Dr. Cray. And this.
But there was nothing for me to make of it, and suddenly the only thing came clear to me was the why behind Mom telling me only of facts that day I’d asked, the trailer choked with boxes, us ready to move to North Charleston, Unc still as a stone on the sofa out in the front room: there was a fire, Aunt Sarah died, Unc’s eyes were blinded with exploding glass.
The only thing came clear to me was the veil over it all, a veil of love, black and opaque: love was at the bottom of things, it came to me, always. Unc loved Aunt Sarah, and saw her die. Unc’s love of Hungry Neck was at the bottom of why Mom was kidnapped. Now my own love for my mom was why I wanted out of here, away from where another suicide had taken place, why I wanted to get away from Unc and his preoccupations with his own guilt: love was the why of too much.
“Now Eugenie’s in it, my greed, and you too. And it’s greed killed Constance and Charlie Simons both. Good as killed Cray back there. So I’ll sell. To those investors.” He paused. “Let them have it. I’ve had enough.”
It sounded good to me. If it meant getting Mom back.
But sell it to who? What did he know now that I didn’t?
“Who?” I said again. “Who are the investors? And what does that have to do with what Cray said?”
He looked at me again, on his face now something past disbelief, something past giving up. He said. “The doctors. The members of the club.” He swallowed. “My own men. They’re the ones trying to buy me out.” He slowly shook his head, whispered, “Greed.”
He faced forward, put that hand to the dash. “Let’s go,” he said. “Twenty-six East Battery.”
“Unc,” I said.
I wanted to tell him I cared for Aunt Sarah, cared about her dying. I wanted to tell him, too, I cared about Hungry Neck, but that selling it, finally, seemed the best way through this all, the best way out. The best way to get back my mom.
I wanted to tell him all this. But I only said, “Unc,” again, and nothing came after.
“Let’s go,” he said, and reached over, touched one of my hands at the wheel. “We have things to do.”
I could see a couple stars by the time we made it to the top of the first bridge over the Cooper River. We were on the old one, only two lanes wide, the railing so close out my window I could have reached out, touched it.
But the stars. Only two or three of them, the sky to the west a dark orange, to the east already a blue so deep you almost couldn’t tell where the Atlantic stopped and the sky picked up.
And there lay Charleston, to my left and below as we drove down from the first bridge, crossed over Drum Island, the flat piece of land the city used to dump its dredge mud on, then on up the second bridge.
Charleston. Below us now was the wharf, a couple tugboats, a small freighter. Next to that was the railyard, where somewhere a container’d been loaded with goods, whatever that meant.
And past all that were the lights of Charleston, all of them starting up, the spires on the churches lit so that it seemed for a second all that romance and what have you you hear about this place, the charm of the Old South and all, might for a few seconds actually be true.
From up here.
But they lived down there, the members of the club. The sons of bitches, cowards all, trying to buy out Hungry Neck from under Unc in order to bring in the next Hilton Head. The next Myrtle Beach.
Then we started down from the top of the second bridge and into the projects just to the right, those two-story brick rows of apartments with laundry lines strung up between them, to the left the old gray houses about to collapse on themselves.
The best way to East Battery was by going to East Bay Street, the street that paralleled the railyard and then made a straight shot for the Market, and so I turned to the right, followed streets that doubled back, past the projects and the elementary school, and we were on East Bay, above us the bridge we’d just come down.
We drove south, passed the post office and a couple restaurants, then hit the traffic at the Market.
People milled about down here, hanging out, heading into restaurants, buying trash at the open-air stalls all set up and selling varnished seashells glued together to make a palmetto tree, and T-shirts with pictures of sunsets, baseball caps with little fans that blew air in your face. This sort of thing. Gone were the dead buildings now, in their place an Applebee’s, a Häagen Dazs, a Smithfield Ham shop, all of it.
And sweetgrass baskets.
On the corners, even in this growing dark, sat the black women in their folding chairs, spread out at their feet the sweetgrass baskets, and sweetgrass trays and cup holders and platters.
Sweetgrass baskets, coiled sweetgrass and bulrushes.
There they sat, in these black women’s hands the coils they worked, coils the exact same as the one in my pocket, and it hit me.
There was something else to all this, other than just the greed of doctors ticked they wouldn’t be making a million a year much longer, doctors who wanted to go as far around Unc as they could in order to buy him out. There was something more.
Because why would Constance Simons come to me, there in the middle of a hospital, just to hand me this sweetgrass paperweight, a gift to Unc?
I said, “There’s something else going on, Unc. Not just selling Hungry Neck. There’s something else.”
We were past the Market now, beside us more shops—a bookstore, a tobacco shop, a chocolate shop, restaurants. People still everywhere, even on a Monday night.
Unc said nothing.
Then we were at the light for Broad Street, in front of us a horse and carriage tour, the driver standing there with his rebel soldier’s cap on and red sash around his waist, pointing at the customs house to the left of us, the huge old building with its porticoes and windows.
“What makes you think this isn’t anything other than just stupid greed?” Unc said.
I turned to him. “The paperweight.”
He shook his head. “A paperweight. A pine-sap paperweight. The woman’s about to commit suicide, and she came to you, because she couldn’t find me.” He paused. “It’s a gift. Her to me. Now me to you.”
The light changed, and the carriage started off.
I leaned over, saw no oncoming traffic, drove around them.
“But she told me she didn’t do it,” I said. “She told me to tell you she didn’t do it. Didn’t kill her husband.”
Now we were south of Broad, East Bay now East Battery, where the mansions were, that layer of shops and trinkets and restaurants, then that layer of slums on top of that gone now, like it’d never existed.
Only these homes mattered now, all else forgotten for the piazzas and joggling boards and perfect walled gardens.
“If she didn’t kill her husband, which you got to believe is the truth, then who did? And why?” I glanced at him again, then back to the street. To the left was the seawall, past it Charleston Harbor itself, on the right these mansions, and I slowed down, looked for the number 26.
“Third house past Atlantic Street,” Unc whispered.
But there was something different on his voice, that whisper not the mournful one he’d given when we’d stopped at the place in Hickory Plantation.
He was thinking on what I’d said.
“So if you think this is all just over who’s going to buy the land,” I said, not quite certain of what I would say, where I was going, “and if you think she was just handing out a paperweight for fun, then you think she did it. And you give up.”
“He’d gone maverick on them,” Unc said. “Charlie did.”
“And goods. Goods. They want the land, what has goods got to do with anything?”
Here was Atlantic Street, a narrow alley off East Battery. I counted three houses down.
And there was a parking spot, right in front.
“We got to get Mom,” I said, and cut the engine. “And we got to get who killed Simons. I think it’s Yandle. Maybe Thigpen. Maybe one of those shits in the truck Thigpen rolled.”
He turned to me, popped open his door. He said, “You keep your mouth clean. We’re here to pay respects.”
A black wreath hung on the huge oak door. We were high above the street, the flight of steps up a good fifteen feet on this three-story brick house, the porch itself as long and wide as the single-wide. White pillars, porch painted gray, the ceiling above us a mint green.
A heavy black woman answered the door. She had on a black
maid’s dress, white apron. She looked at us, the door open barely a foot.
Unc’d left the stick in the cab, and he held on to my arm.
She said, “Mrs. Dupree is receiving no more mourners today,” and started to close the door.
He quick let go my arm and took off his hat. He bowed a little, said, “My name is Leland Dillard, and I have come to give my condolences to Mrs. Dupree.”
“Leland?” came a feeble voice from behind the maid, and she looked to her right, and to Unc, then opened wide the door.
A Persian rug ran from one end of the foyer to the other, what seemed fifty feet, to where a staircase emptied out, big and wide. What parts of the wood floor you could see gleamed in the light from a chandelier above us, and already I could smell the flowers, though I couldn’t yet see any. Dark oak went halfway up the walls, above the wood wallpaper thick with a flowered pattern, all golds and reds, the ceiling twelve or fourteen feet in here.
I put a hand to my hair, raked it over, started to tuck in my shirt, one tail hanging out from under my Levi’s jacket, and saw the maid looking at me and Unc both, a hand at the door into the room to our right.
I smiled, nodded at her, and she slid the door into the wall.
There at the far end of the room, surrounded by huge arrangements of flowers, sat a shriveled woman in an overstuffed chair. She was tiny, the glasses on her face thick, her eyes bleary behind them. She had white hair, a blue dress, and sat with her hands in her lap.
She had on white gloves.
“Mr. Leland Dillard,” she said, and put out a hand.
Unc walked across the room to her. He tucked his Braves cap in his back pocket, and without my telling him her hand was out to him, he put both his out, moved them a few inches one way and the other.
Mrs. Dupree did nothing to help him find hers, only held her white-gloved hand out, steady.
Unc found her hand, bowed to her.
“I am deeply sorrowed at the passing of your daughter,” Unc said. I’d never seen him like this, never heard him talk this way: formal, sorry. “She will always hold a special place in my heart,” he said, still holding her hand.