Hunter's Moon (46 page)

Seconds later he saw Graham and George appear at the top of the drop-off. Both of them looked down on Richard, and if CJ wasn’t mistaken, it looked as if George spit on his fallen nephew. Then George raised his eyes in an attempt to scan the woods. When he began to speak, in something like a tempered shout, CJ almost jumped out of his skin.

“All fathers hurt their children, CJ. All of them. Usually it’s with the biases we carry, our scars—all the stuff we’ve picked up through our lives. And we transfer them to you kids. It’s unavoidable. It’s not malicious. Just the way things are.” He paused, then added, “This is just another rung on that ladder.”

“There’s only one problem with that,” CJ called back. “I’m sure you’ve known for a long time that I’m not your son.”

His voice caused George’s eyes to jerk to where CJ stood, and he saw a change in the man’s features that made him shudder. But before George could say anything else, or so much as raise his gun in CJ’s direction, CJ heard a gunshot and saw George pitch forward, clutching the place where his kneecap had been.

From his position behind the tree, CJ watched Graham freeze for just a second. And then he leaped from the ledge. When he landed he disappeared from CJ’s line of sight.

Leading with his gun, CJ left the cover of the tree and rushed forward. He caught sight of Graham again and noticed he still had the Kimber with him. Quickly, CJ found another, smaller tree. He could see Graham from here, and now that he had a better view, it looked as though his brother might have broken his ankle.

“I always wondered why,” CJ said. “For the last twenty-five years I’ve wondered.” He stopped when he felt himself choking on the words. He swallowed and added, “And I guess what I should have wondered was, when is it going to be me?”

Graham laughed. CJ saw him shift his position, testing the injury to his ankle.

“Only reason we’re here, CJ, is because of that lousy article of yours. You don’t publish that, we don’t have a problem.”

“Just answer me this,” CJ said. “Was it your idea or George’s?”

“Weidman’s actually.”

That was unexpected, and for some reason CJ found himself hurt by the revelation that Weidman had betrayed him.

“So what now?” CJ asked.

He could see Graham searching for him, trying to find the tree that he was using for cover. Then, before CJ could react, Graham was on his feet.

“What happens is we finish this,” Graham said.

“Why? It’s over, Graham. Even if you kill me, there’s no way you’re getting off this mountain. Not with Dennis and Artie behind you. And even if by some miracle you do make it out of here, you’ve left a wide enough trail that they’ll be knocking on your door in less than twenty-four hours.”

Graham’s reply was accompanied by a smile. “None of that matters,” he said.

When CJ heard those words—when he understood the depth of the chasm between him and Graham that they signified—there came such a feeling of revulsion that he thought he might throw up. Adelia had changed him in these last weeks, in the same fashion it had formed and shaped him as a boy. Then, it had forced him to run so that he might live; this time it had brought him back to die.

When he’d returned, he was a man in the process of losing everything without realizing it was happening. He was still that same person, except that he’d since become aware of the thievery. And he was only now coming to understand the nature of the thief. For years he’d allowed this place, these people, to wear the villain’s dark hat. It was easier than acknowledging the darkness that was his to own. Things that didn’t belong to Graham or George or any other Baxter, things for which they bore no responsibility— regardless of how much he wanted to blame everything on them, on the one horrible thing they’d done.

“Would you take it back?” he asked, and his own voice sounded strange to him.

Graham smirked. “It’s certainly complicated things, hasn’t it?”

CJ thought that was as apt a summary as any he could have come up with. Eddie’s death had complicated things. It hadn’t defined them; that had been CJ’s doing. Despite himself, he chuckled.

“You didn’t want to be angry with him, so you weren’t.”
It was something Artie had said about Thor, yet it seemed appropriate for this moment.

He’d never been good at forgiveness; it just wasn’t in him. It had been beaten out of him as a child and it had never returned. And he didn’t want it to return now, but he was finding it was something he had no control over, something that was becoming a part of him, despite his efforts to keep it at bay.

Even so, he couldn’t forgive Graham for killing Eddie. That wasn’t his to forgive. All he could do was pardon Graham for how the ripples of that act had helped to define CJ’s life.

CJ tossed his gun to the ground—far enough away that Graham could see he had no chance of reclaiming it.

“I’m not going to shoot you, Graham,” he said. He knew what that meant, what throwing the gun down had cost him. But he wouldn’t do forgiveness halfway. He wouldn’t be his brother’s executioner.

“That was dumb, CJ,” Graham said.

“Maybe, but I’m not going to shoot you. It doesn’t matter what happens now.”

CJ stepped out from behind the tree, his hands in the air.

When his brother raised his gun, CJ said, “I forgive you, Graham.”

Still, CJ’s epiphany wasn’t absent all elements of self-preservation. Just before Graham pulled the trigger, CJ drew back and released the medium-sized round rock he’d been hiding in his fist. It was the first slider he’d thrown since college, and it was the most perfect pitch he’d ever delivered, striking his brother in the temple.

It took CJ a few seconds to register that there had been a deafening
boom
, and then to see the blood spreading over his shattered arm. It was the last thing he saw before he fell. The last thing he saw before his eyes closed.

CJ heard a sound from somewhere far away, but when he opened his eyes, all he saw was Dennis’s face. He heard disjointed words, phrases strung together—“helicopter,” “going to be okay”— but none of it meant anything to him.

Then Dennis leaned in close, and while it seemed to CJ that his friend whispered his next words, he understood them perfectly. “That was s-stupid,” Dennis said.

CJ could smell the old mahogany, a scent made richer by the passage of two hundred years’ worth of hands sliding up and down the banister. He could save half the balusters, maybe a few more than that. He’d turn on a lathe the new ones to match, and he already knew that when he finished, no one would know the difference. He’d keep the newel posts, even with the crack in the one. For some reason, the thought of replacing them seemed wrong. Anyway, when he was finished, their imperfections would be as invisible as would the newness of the balusters.

Thor, observing CJ from his spot on the stone surrounding the fireplace, seemed to agree. With his cast-encased leg stretched out at an odd angle, the dog gave what looked like a wink before snorting once and lowering his head to return to his nap.

Dennis was installing the kitchen floor; CJ could hear the saw blade cutting through the white oak. He was grateful that Dennis was here working with him, for his friend could do the things that CJ, with his injured arm, could not.

He wasn’t sure how long he would stay, but he knew it wouldn’t be longer than the job required. Just long enough to fix what needed fixing. It was Dennis who’d put it into words. He’d said that preserving history was difficult when exorcising ghosts. They’d been standing on the porch, looking out over Adelia at the time, and it seemed to CJ more appropriate than anything he could have said, even if he felt unsure that exorcising ghosts was what he was doing.

Janet had called a couple of times since they’d brought him off the mountain. She’d almost come to see him in the hospital, but he had talked her out of it. He didn’t think he had the strength to fix more than one thing at a time. It was enough for him to know that she might be willing to hoist a hammer along with him. It granted him the absolution he needed, to do what he had to here.

Sal Jr. and Edward had agreed to let him sell the house on Lyndale, and he was grateful for that. He knew what losing the place meant to them. Neither, though, could have marshaled a defense of the familial claim with the ferocity George might have mustered. And since he and Graham were busy with the upkeep of their long-term ten-by-ten-foot residences, the house and acreage would pass into different hands with hardly a whimper. The prospective buyer came from England, and CJ thought that fitting, if for no other reason than that the man’s long-dead countrymen, who had gone to their deaths under the guns of Baxter patriots, would at long last find themselves interred in friendly soil.

When the saw blade stopped, the peculiar silence native to an old house—a vacuum made up of groans and creaks and the knocking of ancient pipes—returned. CJ stood at the foot of the steps for a while and listened to all of it, and at some point he came to realize that, like the smell of aged wood, none of these things had ever left him despite his best efforts. And he was surprised to find that he was thankful for that.

Sometime later, when he heard the sound of a power tool spring to life, which had nothing to do with floor installation, he smiled and headed toward the kitchen.

Acknowledgments

Once again I’d like to offer my sincere thanks to Luke Hinrichs and Dave Long at Bethany House for their hard work, from the time I first brought them the idea for
Hunter’s Moon
, all the way through the final edit. I’d also like to thank the rest of the Bethany House team—especially Noelle Buss—who have been so supportive of both my books.

I am in debt to my family, who give me the time I need to do this, as well as hugs that work magic on writer’s block.

Lastly I’d like to thank
you
, the reader, because I’m assuming that if you’re reading this, you’ve bought the book. Or maybe you checked it out of the library, which is good too. Support your local library!

About the Author

Don Hoesel, the acclaimed author of
Elisha’s Bones
, lives in Spring Hill, Tennessee, with his wife and two children.
Hunter’s Moon
is his second novel. He has also published short fiction in
Relief: A
Quarterly Christian Expression
. Don holds a bachelor’s degree in mass communication from Taylor University. When not writing novels, he spends his days working in the communications department of a large company.