The Hunt Club (32 page)

I’d never seen this one before.

He let go the belt, and I turned to him. He smiled, nodded.

I went first, like every time we ever climbed one of these, so that once on the platform I could reach down to him at the last, take hold a hand, and pull him up.

But this morning was different: I had my arm in the sling, and I put my foot to the first two-by-four, took hold of the board above me with my right hand, and pulled, the flesh in my left shoulder still tender just beneath my collarbone, where the bullet went through.

But it was a good pain I felt, and I stepped up, leaned into the trunk, let go my hand, reached to the next board up, pulled, so that climbing the tree stand became a series of holding tight and letting go, holding tight and letting go, and it seemed in doing this there was something larger than what I was doing.

Then I was at the platform itself, and pulled myself up to it, brought up my legs.

I turned, sat with my legs hanging off, and looked down from the platform to him: that baseball cap, the sunglasses.

He leaned the stick against the trunk, then started up, and I reached to him, whispered, “Unc,” and he took my hand. I pulled, pulled, felt the pain in my shoulder again, a pain I would take, I knew, and he was beside me, brought here by his own strength and mine.

His hand stayed in mine then, and we sat.

“We built this one together,” Unc said. “Your daddy and me. And we never hunted off it. Only came here, to sit.”

I said nothing for a moment, only took in a breath, whispered, “I remember you two talking about this place one time. When I was little.”

It was all I knew to say, but it seemed enough, because now I saw what he was giving me by taking me here on this new day, in a new year, the next one of a new life I’d been given:

Before us lay the land, daylight coming up, a perfect daylight that gave color to everything.

They’d built it, brother and brother, for what they could see: land
thick with palmetto and loblolly pine, oak and hickory, dogwood and wax myrtle and wisteria vine.

And there, through a curtain of two ancient live oaks it seemed spread open just for us, lay the Ashepoo, maybe a hundred yards off, the wide cold blue of it, past it the spartina and yellow grass and salt-marsh hay, all the way to Edisto.

Spread across it islands with no names.

I closed my eyes, felt the tree move in the small breeze up here, smelled the marsh, heard a squirrel bark from somewhere behind us.

“Huger Dillard,” I whispered. Two words, brand-new.

Unc held my hand tighter, my eyes still closed, and I watched this all, watched colors rise, the marsh now a green I couldn’t name, mixed in and down inside it browns and reds and a color like bone. Miles of color.

I watched it all, there with my father.

B
RET
L
OTT
is the author of the novels
Jewel, Reed’s Beach, A Stranger’s House
, and
The Man Who Owned Vermont
; the story collections
How to Get Home
and
A Dream of Old Leaves
; and the memoir
Fathers, Sons, and Brothers
. His stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines, among them
The Southern Review, The Yale Review, The Iowa Review
, the
Chicago Tribune
, and
Story
, and have been widely anthologized. He lives with his wife, Melanie, and their two sons, Zebulun and Jacob, in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and teaches at the College of Charleston and Vermont College.