The Sweetness of Water

by Nathan Harris

  Ignoring George, Prentiss put a hand beneath his arm and lifted him in one swoop, before the pain could set in.

  “Just like that,” Prentiss said. “Slow-like.”

  They walked as one through the trees with Landry trailing them. Though George needed the stars for guidance, it was all he could do to keep his sight straight ahead to stop himself from falling over, from giving in to the pain. He placed his head in the nook where Prentiss’s chest met his shoulder and allowed the man to balance him.

  After some time had passed, he asked if Prentiss knew where they were.

  “If this is your land as you say it is, then I’ve seen your home,” Prentiss said. “It’s a beautiful place, isn’t it? Not far from here. Not far at all.”

  George realized as they reached the clearing how absolutely exhausted he was. At once, the entire night, which had been suspended in time, unspooled itself before him, and reality presented itself in the form of his log cabin, standing before him and the black outline of what could only be Isabelle carved in shadow against the front window.

  “Can you make it?” Prentiss asked. “Best you go it alone from here.”

  “Might we wait a few moments longer?” George asked.

  “You need to rest, Mr. Walker,” Prentiss pleaded. “There’s nothing for you out here.”

  “True, but.” How unlike him. It must have been the dehydration. Yes, he was disoriented, a bit confused, and the tears were merely a symptom of his predicament. It was only a few of them at that. “I’m not myself. Excuse me.”

  Prentiss held him. He did not let go.

  “I don’t—I haven’t told her, is all,” George said. “I could not bear it.”

  “Told her what, now?”

  And George thought of the image August had left him with that morning of his boy abandoning the trenches he’d helped dig, so gripped with fear as to soil himself, to cower and run toward the Union line as though they might pity his screams of terror, might see him through the glut of smoke and grant his surrender and not shoot him down with the rest. It occurred to him that Caleb might have inherited some flawed trait from his father. For who was the bigger coward, the boy for dying without courage, or George for not being able to tell the boy’s own mother that she would never see her son again?

  “Nothing,” George said. “I’ve been alone for such long periods, sometimes I speak to myself.”

  Prentiss nodded, as if some reasoning might be found in his words.

  “That animal you spoke of. Mr. Morton taught me some tricks through the years. Tomorrow, perhaps, I can help you track it.”

  There was pity in his words, and George, sensing the irony of a man living with so little offering him charity, straightened himself up and harnessed what little energy he still possessed to regain his composure.

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  He looked Prentiss over once, considering that this might be the last time they ever laid eyes on each other.

  “I do appreciate your assistance, Prentiss. You’re a good man. Good night, now.”

  “G’night, Mr. Walker.”

  George hobbled to the front steps, the cold already slipping away from his bones before the front door had opened and the heat of the fire found him. For the slightest moment, before going inside, he peered back at the forest, silent and void of life in the darkness. Like there was nothing there at all.

  CHAPTER 2

  George’s love of cooking was just one of his many eccentricities. Isabelle had tried early in the marriage to take the role of house cook, but her husband’s opinions on the preparation of a ham hock were no different from his thoughts on the hunting of a mushroom, the building of a tree swing: refined, specific, and executed with concision time and time again. Sitting at the table for breakfast, she would watch his routines with a mix of fascination and delight. These were habits he had perfected over time as a bachelor—the cracking of an egg was a one-handed affair, a smooth motion of the thumb, a rather feminine swoop that broke the shell in two; the buttering of a hot pan involved a quarter-inch slab, greased in semicircular motions until it hissed across the surface and disappeared.

  He was more satisfied during the cooking than the eating, the latter of which seemed merely a slog to get through. They spoke few words at the table. Yet this morning was different. He’d somehow risen before her, an accomplishment in and of itself, considering how late he’d been out. And when she came downstairs, she found him at the table, staring at a spot on the wall, like the splintered wood might get up and carry on with its day.

  “How about some breakfast?” she asked.

  His face was expressionless. He’d never been handsome, for the balancing involved in the physiognomy of beauty had escaped him. His nose was large, his eyes small, and his hair fell in a ring like a well-placed laurel wreath; his belly had the taut rotundity of a pregnant woman and was always safely stowed away in the midsection between his suspenders.

  “I could go for some hotcakes,” she said.

  He finally made notice of her.

  “If it’s not a bother, sure.”

  Standing in front of the stove, preparing the batter, she felt she’d forgotten the procedure altogether. She created it from memory, not from her own cooking, of course, but from watching her husband over almost a quarter century now. The cabin was modest—two stories—and stairs cut across the center of the home. From the kitchen, she could make out George sitting in the dining room, but whenever he shifted he disappeared behind the stairwell, only to reappear again.

  “Perhaps a bigger stack than usual?” she called over. “You must have built up quite an appetite last night.”

  This would be her only attempt to draw forth an explanation. It wasn’t that he did not tolerate questioning (he was rather indifferent), but that greater investigation rarely led to greater discovery. She had learned to save her words.

  “Did you find it?” she asked in conclusion. “The creature. I imagine you were after it again.”

  “It escaped me,” he said. “Very unfortunate.”

  The cakes sizzled—bubbles opening and closing again like a fish struggling for air above the water’s surface. George would turn them now. For the sake of experiment, she let them be.

  She brought two plates to the table, returned moments later with two cups of coffee. There was a rhythm to their eating. One would take a bite, and then the other, and it was in these slight recognitions—no different from the way they exchanged deep breaths while falling asleep—that the brushstrokes of their marriage coalesced day after day, night after night, the resulting portrait rewarding but infuriatingly difficult to interpret.

  When George had returned home the night before, his face was so flush, his shivering so severe, she did not know whether to wash him down with a rag or slip him under the covers. Under the pain of his hip, he wavered with every step, agonizing his way up the stairs and refusing assistance. He could barely get a sentence out, let alone an explanation for his absence, and he fell asleep so quickly she wondered if he’d already been in a dream state, his body leading him back to where he’d belonged the entire night. She realized that other than the mention of passing interest in tracking a beast of some mystery—the same one he’d sought with his father years ago, an adventure they’d shared in, the same beast she’d never seen with her own two eyes—the man was intent on keeping the secrets of his nights to himself. Which would have been more irritating had she not had a secret of her own.

  Not that she wished to. She could scarcely recall keeping anything from George, and the burden of her silence was a weight so heavy it sometimes felt difficult to breathe.

  “How was the social?” George asked, his eyes never leaving his plate.

  “As tedious as they’ve all been of late. Katrina left after tea and I joined her. They talk only of who’s returned, or rumors of who might return, and I simply can’t bear it. They treat their boys being paroled with the self-satisfaction of a victory in hearts. Which
was why I stopped playing that game completely. Their winning is fine and all, but it’s the possibility that I might lose…”

  “One must lose with grace, Isabelle,” George said between bites.

  “Not in this instance.”

  On this, his eyebrows rose. “I don’t see hearts differently from any other competition.”

  “Perhaps I’m not speaking of hearts.”

  He shrugged the comment away as if he hadn’t understood a word she’d uttered. Sensing that he was lost in his own mind, she turned to the window, took in the lane leading to the main road toward town. She had no green thumb, but that hadn’t stopped her from planting the squat and unpretty shrubs that paved the trail. To the side of it stood the old barn, still housing the farming tools that George’s father had stored away which George himself had little interest in. And by its rear, masked from the public eye, stretched the clothesline, naked in this instant, a simple white etching outlined in the morning dew. It was this very place her secret had been born, and just the thought of it brought color to her cheeks.

  She dropped her fork onto her plate.

  “I don’t like this, George,” she said. “I don’t. How do I say this…I don’t believe we’ve been honest with one another. For you to disappear at odd hours as you have. To let me burn the hotcakes and say nothing.”

  He looked up from his food, placing his own fork onto his plate.

  “Well. It goes without saying you turned them too late.”

  She shook her head in defiance.

  “It’s a matter of taste, which is entirely beside the point. Whether you wish to tell me why you’ve been off late at night, I can’t go on any longer without sharing the thoughts that fill my mind.”

  He was about to speak, but she cleared her throat and went on with a declaration that came out so quietly it was nearly a whisper.

  “I put our clothes on the line the morning after the rainfall, and that very same night, a man tried to steal your socks.”

  “Did you say my socks?”

  “I did. The gray ones I knit for you.”

  Finally, she had her husband’s full attention: “Who would do such a thing?”

  She explained some of it then. Going out to fetch the clothes before sundown; the feeling of being in the company of someone else; thinking it was George, smelling him when she was really smelling only the scent of his clothes.

  “I nearly screamed, but when I saw him, his fear so far outweighed my own, I felt something else. Sympathy, I suppose.”

  “And this was yesterday?”

  “There were two occasions,” she said, and now it was Isabelle staring at her plate, unable to meet George’s gaze. “I should have told you right away. The man had been hiding behind the barn. When he stepped forward, to flee, our eyes met. He was tall. A Negro—”

  She looked up then, and George was returning her glance with nothing but a look of mild curiosity. Behind his unruffled exterior was a man who had always appreciated the odd bit of gossip, the scandalous and bizarre, and she felt almost dismayed that he wasn’t more caught up in her story.

  “—And he seemed utterly lost. Not only in the physical sense. It’s not something one can describe, exactly. I could tell he wished to be there, in my presence, far less than I might wish to have him, and as quickly as he was there, he was gone.”

  There were emotions she was withholding. Chiefly, the pure rush of the man’s presence upon that first encounter. She could nearly count the number of times that the chance of excitement had entered her life in adulthood, and this was surely the most urgent of them. In that moment she had felt nothing but fear, yet it came upon her like an unexpected gift rather than a threat. The night it first occurred, she thought about it in bed beside George, and it was still on her mind come morning. The image of the man: his lower jaw unhinged like the bottom drawer of a dresser left open, the awkward hunch of his broad-framed shoulders.

  She told herself he might be dangerous, that her preoccupation with his possible return was only reasonable considering the prospect of what he might do in the future. So when George was napping on the back porch, or off in the woods, there was nothing odd about the attention she paid to the clothesline. Yet the absence of the trespasser’s shadow at night was disappointing instead of comforting. Which only led her to keep watch about the property more closely, awaiting his reappearance as if the mystery surrounding him might reveal some hidden part of her, too. If only he would come back to divulge it.

  His return two days later, as if her desire had summoned him, was a shock, something she thought would only ever take place in the workings of her imagination. She saw him before he saw her, as he was lost in his own shadow, his movements so deliberate they seemed like those of a toddler. She observed him from the safety of the house, knowing she could call George any moment from upstairs in his study, and he could come down to deal with the matter. But soon she was nearing the back door, and with the turn of the knob she was on the back porch, watching as the man once again inspected the clothes on the line.

  There was little that frightened her. Once, as a child, her brother, Silas, had attempted to scare her with ghost stories, the moonlight drifting into their bedroom, the tendrils of its soft glow cutting through the darkness. These were the stories their father had told him not to share with her, meant only for the men in the family, to be passed on to Silas’s own boys in the future. By the midpoint of his tale of gore and death she had reacted so coolly, with such piercing skepticism couched in her silence, that Silas had stuttered and quit the story outright. He was not the last boy to test her courage, and she would not be cowed by this man by the barn who had somehow managed to unnerve her once before.

  She held her dress up from the reeds of oat grass and made her way over to him so quickly that he had little time to react. The first thing she could make out, standing there next to him, were the blackened tips of his fingernails lodged with dirt. He reached forward to the clothesline and took one of George’s socks, then the other, and turned to face her. Isabelle did not know what to say. He did not run. Did not even move. His eyes expressed little and he clenched the socks as if they were the one possession he owned, already his to keep forever.

  “May I ask what you’re doing?”

  He said nothing.

  “Where do you come from?”

  There was something frustrating about the condition of his mouth, perpetually open but vacant of any words.

  “Say something,” she pleaded. “You must.”

  But if the reason for his first appearance was unclear, his current errand was so obvious it needed no explanation. His clothes were still wet from the downpour the night before, his leather shoes so dark with moisture and so shabby they looked like they’d been put through a kiln and had their charred remains refashioned into the shambles they were now. Surely there was nothing more enticing for a man in such condition than a dry pair of socks.

  She let the hem of her dress fall to the grass.

  “I see. You must have been caught in the storm.”

  The simplicity of the fact fell upon her with a wave of embarrassment and now she wondered how she had happened into a position so undignified as to be alone in this man’s presence. She could recall a time when her life had the stitching of a well-bound corset—her husband and her son the interwoven laces that held together the ribs of an active social life, the relationships she had cultivated since marrying her husband and moving to Old Ox. Yet in the past year, since Caleb joined the war, it had all come undone, and she felt naked before this stranger, disappointed not by his silence, but by the idiotic expectations she had assigned to him.

  “Please,” she said. “Just go on your way. You may take them. I don’t mind.”

  He blinked once, peered at the socks, and proceeded to put them back on the line where he’d found them, as if, upon further scrutiny, they had not met his standards.

  “Do you not hear me?” she said. “I said to take them.”
/>   He stood still, looking at the job he’d done with some satisfaction, and casually turned to walk toward the woods without even glancing in her direction.

  “Now where are you going?” she said to his back, voice rising. “It may rain again. Come back, now. You will catch something. Why don’t you listen?”

  He lumbered on, his shoulders swaying with each step until he had slipped back into the darkness, lost to the trees. Unheard and unseen, Isabelle lingered for a few minutes, stirred only by the wind that crept under her dress. The clothesline bobbed at her side. She was still choking back shame when she returned to the cabin.

  Now, at breakfast beside George, the only thing she shared of the entire exchange was the man’s actions, his silence, and his sudden departure. “I shooed him off,” she said in summary, collecting the plates on the table. “He was gone in an instant. I can’t say he won’t return. I didn’t want to worry you, but I thought it best to share.” She hurried to the kitchen, wanting him to say something, anything, that might allow her to move on from the memory.

  “I believe I’ve met the man,” George said, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “You say he didn’t speak.”

  “Not a word.”

  “Then yes. And from what I gather he’s perfectly harmless. You need not worry about him.”

  “Well. Then I won’t.”

  There were questions. There always were questions. But she did not care if George had actually met the man, or how, for his nonchalance acted as an immediate balm. How easily he left the past behind, made light of the worries that plagued her. If ever he lacked warmth—which he often did—his unflagging ability to bring her back to port when she strayed into choppy waters was an asset that made up for it many times over. No one was more reliable, and if that was not the ultimate act of compassion, she did not know what was.

  “I’m glad I brought it up,” she said, “just so I can let it go now.”

  Her husband looked unchanged, though, as if he’d taken on her guilt. It was in the stoop of his shoulders, the hollowness of his cheeks. Only then, in that very second, did she see the pain he carried. When he turned to speak to her, it was with a gaze so haunted, so debilitating, it might have paralyzed a lesser man.