He didn’t know Guyon well. The first time he’d met him was in the fall of 1919, when several local mill owners organized a hunting trip to introduce Guyon to the community. Three carloads of men had traveled south from Gastonia through Columbia and on to Savannah before taking a ferry out to Hilton Head Island. The whole operation had been started just a few years earlier by an old man named Silling, who owned a handful of mills over in Kings Mountain. He’d rallied a group of investors from Tennessee and the Carolinas to fund the Hilton Head Agricultural Company, which sounded grand at the time, but after Richard and his group arrived on a Saturday afternoon in mid-November, all he’d found was a clapboard clubhouse; a Sears, Roebuck kit cabin where the men would bunk for the night; two old colored guides; and a cook in the form of an old colored woman who spoke Gullah and looked upon the newly arrived men as if they were idiots.
For a reason none of them could remember, perhaps both to keep up appearances and to keep their wives from worrying, it had always been tradition to invite one of the men’s ministers to accompany the group on a hunting trip. They were all conservative Protestants, but when it came to the invited clergy the men tended to lean Episcopalian, since Episcopal clergymen seemed the most willing to have a drink and the least likely to look down on those who had more than one. On the year they included Guyon, someone in the group suggested they invite one of the priests from the monastery at Belmont Abbey. The men had heard that Guyon was Catholic, and it seemed an act of goodwill. They were all surprised, which is to say uncomfortable, when an older, white-headed man in a cassock joined the caravan. Father Gregory rode in the backseat of a car with Guyon. The two men barely spoke during the trip. They were strangers to one another just as they were strangers to everyone else.
Richard remembered it as a bizarre week of drinking whiskey and firing rifles. He was just back from the war and found that he had little use for either. He spent most of his time sitting on the porch of the clubhouse, staring out at the six-foot alligator a couple of the men had caught in the swamp on the first day and tethered to a palm tree in the center of camp. At night, after dinner, he’d watch the same group of daredevils drink whiskey and stumble out to the flagpole, where they’d place chicken livers in their palms and tempt the gator to eat from their hands. They’d eventually lose interest and toss the livers onto the sand. In the morning the livers would still be there, dry and shriveled, inches from the alligator’s snout.
Guyon had been quiet and friendly during the trip, somewhat deferential to the men who’d all known each other for years. But after a few days, it appeared to Richard that Guyon had integrated himself better than Richard ever had, despite the fact that Richard had grown up with most of these men. Their fathers’ and grandfathers’ relationships had been marked by rivalries and partnerships in the same ways rivalry and partnership marked their own relationships now.
On the first night of the trip, after they’d settled into their bunks, the men presented Guyon with a “welcome” gift: a Springfield .30-06. It was a better gun than half the rifles the men had brought with them, far better than Richard’s .22, which he hadn’t cleaned or fired since before the war. They’d even pooled their funds to get Father Gregory a rifle, a Winchester 270. The old man opened the box and stared at it as if it were some kind of relic whose usefulness would have to be divined after careful consultation with specialists. The entire week, no one ever saw Father Gregory load the rifle, much less fire it, but he carried it with him whenever he left his private room for a meal or drinks in the evening.
Guyon quickly joined in on the lies and teasing that took place during what came to be known as alibi hour, when the men sat around the bunkhouse before bed and ribbed one another about bad marksmanship and the inability to hold one’s liquor. Three cut shirttails had been left pinned to the wall beside the door, each representing a man’s bad aim or a missed opportunity to bring down a deer during the trip.
At night, the conversations inevitably turned to life in the mills back home. Several of the men refused to hide their pride that Gastonia had come to be known as the “City of Spindles” and would soon be the nation’s combed-yarn capital. A man named Cloninger, whose grandfather had built Highland Shoals Mill on the Catawba River just in time to die in the Civil War, took particular pride in the idea that the South would soon outpace the North in textiles.
“That’s what we’re doing,” Cloninger said. He looked at Guyon and smiled. “Luring folks like you across the Mason-Dixon just like the good man down in Atlanta suggested we do.” He turned from Guyon and roundly toasted the group with a metal shot glass filled with whiskey. “Out-Yankeeing the Yankee, by God. It’s just like the war never happened.”
The men had all laughed at the joke, even Guyon, and they’d passed around a jug and refilled their cups. Guyon cleared his throat.
“It’s true,” Guyon said. “We were lured across the Mason-Dixon. It’s like Bull Run all over again.” The men laughed. “But I can tell you it’s going to be pretty damn hard for you sons of bitches to out-Yankee the Yankee when you’re trying to do it with the Yankee’s dollar.” He shot a look at Cloninger and then raised his glass. The room was silent for a moment, and then a fat man named Duke Jeffords, who’d been drunk for three days and who’d never liked Cloninger anyway, burst into laughter. The room erupted right along with him.
By Tuesday evening, the men had all turned their taunts toward Richard, who was the only man aside from Father Gregory who had yet to squeeze off a shot. He didn’t have the heart or the will or the patience to explain that he’d done enough shooting and killing in Europe to spend the rest of his life not wanting to do either, and so the next day he separated himself from his party and blasted two rounds into the woods about a mile from camp. That night, Cloninger used a Case knife to cut Richard’s shirttail before pinning it to the wall, where it remained until they caught the ferry back to Savannah on Saturday morning.
Standing on the bottom deck of the Clivedon where it had docked at the Jenkins Island Landing, Richard fished the cut shirt from his bag and looked inside its collar, where Katherine had asked her seamstress to sew a silken tag with his name embroidered on it in fancy cursive letters. He knew she would discover that the shirt had been damaged, and he knew she would ask why. It would be easier just to tell her that he’d left it behind by accident. He tossed it into the black water and watched it sink. He’d left the shirt buttoned, and as it filled with water it took on the shape of a man, its body expanding as if a rib cage bloomed beneath the fabric, its arms reaching up toward the surface like it was afraid of disappearing.
The club’s front door opened behind him, and Richard turned and saw Katherine crane her long, elegant neck onto the porch. Her eyes found his. She smiled, but Richard knew it to be a smile that showed just how weary she’d grown of him.
“There you are,” she said.
“Yes,” Richard said. He dropped his cigarette and stubbed it out with the toe of his shoe. “Here I am.”
“They’re looking for you,” Katherine said.
“Who?”