The Sweetness of Water

by Nathan Harris

“I ain’t heard of that house,” Prentiss said.

  “I tell you, he thinks it’s a house.”

  When Prentiss failed to respond, the man slapped his knee, and asked the others, a second time, if they’d heard what the boy had said.

  “Campton, Georgia, son. It’s a town. Ain’t no more than ten miles up the road.”

  The man took pity on them. Explained that the camp was at the crossing of a number of towns. Many freed slaves had already started north with little more than a day’s rations. Some had gone right up the road, where there was a sawmill seeking extra help. Others had gone farther. He mentioned Baltimore, Wilmington, and enough other places that Prentiss couldn’t keep up.

  “I ain’t got no business in Baltimore,” Prentiss said.

  “None of us ain’t got no business nowhere. But that ain’t stop nobody.”

  “Y’all just up and leave?”

  The man nodded.

  “Now it seems I answered your question, and you ain’t answer mine. What you got?”

  He wanted their canteen. Prentiss looked it over in his hand, having never considered it of value. Perhaps he was missing something etched in the tin, something signified in the chipped edge of the cork. In return for it he got three potatoes. The man even handed Landry the remains from the skillet, which he ate with the most speed he’d shown all day.

  “I bet down the road you might find some room,” the man told them.

  The sun was higher now. It was so bright outside the tent, so dark inside, Prentiss could barely see the man who’d been speaking. He turned to his brother.

  “Give the man the pan.”

  Landry handed back the skillet and they returned to the road, the smell of the potatoes lingering long after they’d left. Landry grew calm with a little food in his stomach, walking alone up ahead of Prentiss, leading them back to the woods with a meandering gait.

  “Keep on the path,” Prentiss said.

  He was already thinking about when they would leave, how he would inform his brother when the time came. And alongside this decision there was some forfeiture in the thought he found unsettling: that for every pound of weight they’d carried across their backs, for every drop of sweat that had poured off, no inch of this land was theirs. As long as they stayed, they were no better than the others, kept on the borders of town, hidden among the trees just like their brothers and sisters. And it grew clear that the only path to a life worth living would be found elsewhere, where they might not have more but could not possibly have less.

  There was a hurried movement before him.

  “Landry!” he screamed.

  His brother veered off through the brush at the side of the path, and before Prentiss could grab at him, he was being led through the backwoods, ankle-high mud pulling at his shoes, clots of mosquitoes so loud about him that his head felt abuzz. The reeds were higher here. Nettles punctured his pants and stabbed at his legs. He could not see his brother, and for a moment he did not know where to turn, or which way was straight. He closed his eyes to the wall of grass before him and stampeded forward, and only then did he break free, fresh air overtaking him. He would have fallen into the water if it was not for Landry, who was crouched down at his feet, stopping him from hurtling ahead.

  “What’s gotten into you? Now you answer me—”

  He saw it then—a pond, no more than the span of a few men across. The surface was covered with floating lilies, shoots of cattails like digits reaching out toward the sun. At its center sat a small island of sedges. His brother dipped his hand over and over, and lapped at the water. Prentiss watched his brother’s hand make contact, submerge, and reappear, glimmering ripples that fanned out and grew still in the heat. The sight was seemingly new to Landry each time.

  His enthusiasm brought to mind the cotton fields, where troughs of water were stationed at the end of the rows. The overseers would often let their horses drink as the day wore on, and if a row was picked clean in short order, they’d sometimes let those at work kneel down and drink themselves. Yet the fields were shaped like a horseshoe, and at the end of his row, near the farthest bend, Landry seldom took to the water, but fixed his eyes upon the fountain that lay in front of Majesty’s Palace. Prentiss would tell him to drink, but his brother seemed to find the fountain a better source, as if it fit him to wait out his thirst for what lay ahead, water that would never be his own. Here, in some way, he appeared to have found that fountain’s equal.

  “Feels nice, don’t it,” Prentiss said, relaxing now.

  He sat beside Landry, marveling not at the beauty before him but at the grace of his brother, the hum of curiosity hidden behind his distant stare, the parts of him others failed to notice. His fingers were especially delicate, graceful things, and their mother would often say they were fit for playing an instrument, one of class, an organ being her decided preference. In private, she told Prentiss it was where she looked when they strung Landry up for his whippings. There were parts of you they could touch, she said, and parts they could not, and his hands, even tied to a post, would never lose their beauty even if they broke the rest of him down. If only she knew how strong he’d stand as the days and years wore on, long after she’d been sold, even after the monthly whippings had quit but the threat of the lash was still ever-present.

  It was only a few weeks ago that Mr. Morton had approached the slaves who could still stand a hard day’s work with the wartime rations and doubled quotas, waking a few who had turned in early. He told a select number of the stronger men that he had a generous offer, born of his patriotism at the behest of President Davis: he’d give them their freedom if they would volunteer to fight for the cause.

  “Prentiss,” he said, working down the line. “You were always a reliable hand. They need men like you. What do you say?”

  Prentiss had looked upon Mr. Morton with as earnest a disposition as he could muster.

  “Well, me and Landry here move as one.” He then turned to his brother. “Landry, how you feel about fighting for the cause?”

  Mr. Morton sat forward on his horse, eager for an answer, but Landry’s mouth stayed shut, his head moving with neither a nod nor a shake.

  “Don’t sound like a yes to me, master,” Prentiss told him. “But he don’t say much at all. I wouldn’t take it as a show of disrespect.”

  And then the slightest uptick at the corner of Landry’s mouth, the start of a smile, too faint for Mr. Morton to catch, but so clear to Prentiss that he could hardly keep from grinning himself.

  Their lives had changed so drastically since then that the moment struck him as though it was from the distant past. He wished to feel the joy he’d felt then, but it was gone to him. Nowadays the only memories that got his blood rushing were the ones he so badly wished to be rid of. Perhaps his great fear was that this would always be the case—that the long shadow of the cattails at his rear would always cause him to swallow at the arrival of the overseer’s mare; that the shiver of the water’s surface would forever take on the spasm of his brother’s backside on impact with the master’s whip.

  He put a hand on his brother’s shoulder, slow enough not to startle him.

  “That’s enough for a day, don’t you think?”

  And when he stood up to leave, Landry did so too.

  CHAPTER 4

  Old Ox had burnt down twice in the last fifty years, and both times it licked its wounds and roared back to life as if it fed on the very flames that had turned it to ash. The place made little sense—you could buy yourself a better haircut at Mr. Rainey’s Meats than at the barbershop, and better cuts of meat from a Chickasaw who came through town once a week in a covered wagon than at Mr. Rainey’s—but its resilience could not be called into question, for each passing resurrection gave it more life than its past selves could ever claim to have.

  It had grown to be a loose grid of connected buildings and homes that George could scarcely make heads or tails of, and he was suspicious of the newer establishments in recognition of
the chances that they might not be there the next time he laid eyes on them—if not for a fire then an unpaid debt, if not an unpaid debt then a move to the next opportunity down the road in Selby or Chambersville or Campton. That was why he paid mind to none but the places he frequented, coming in on Saturday mornings for supplies or business only when necessary.

  Venturing there from home took him half an hour on the back of his donkey, and he always tied Ridley up to the slumped hitching rail in front of Ray Bittle’s home on the farthest edge of town. Ray slept on his porch with a lust for dreaming that George admired, yet the old man often managed a twitch of his hat in acknowledgment whenever passersby stopped before his home. It was the only correspondence George had shared with him in years.

  “I won’t be long,” George said, more to the donkey than to Bittle, then grabbed his saddlebags and made his way to the main thoroughfare.

  The walkways of the town were composed of wooden planks, most of them as thin and uneven as coffin lids; it took only the slightest hint of rain for them to overrun, fits of water creeping through the slits like cooked juices seeping from a roast. The main road headed off into alleys that led to new constructions and finally the oldest part of town, the original row of homes that found ways to survive when others languished. The landscape felt expansive, yet the flow of people was suffocating and the surplus unraveled what little thread of decency there’d once been in the place. The walls of Vessey Mercantile were smeared with so much waste, human and otherwise, that the resulting splatters resembled the markings of a child who had put all the colors on his palette into one muddied shade. Between Blossom’s Café and the general store were nooks and crannies no wider than a dog’s cage, and nearly all of them housed the clustered tents of the homeless—some whites returned from the war still in tattered uniforms, others freedmen, the contrast fit for the pen of an ironist with a low sense of humor.

  It was of some relief when he broke free from the crowd and entered Ezra Whitley’s shop, taking in the air as if it had been preserved over time, untainted by the outside world.

  “Ezra?” George called, placing his saddlebags near the front door and looking around.

  Long tables—where Ezra’s sons had taken their lessons in the family business before founding their own shops—sat empty. A bookshelf commencing on the far wall wrapped itself around the room, falling just short of a full revolution.

  He was about to call out again when a rattle came from the stairs. Ezra, hunched over himself, gingerly made his way down with a sandwich in hand, hailing George as he took a bite.

  “Come, come,” he said.

  “Well, don’t you come down if I’m going up,” George said.

  Ezra by then had reached the foot of the stairs and waved him off.

  “The movement is good for my legs. The doctor tells me there’s a pustule buildup behind the knees. At rest, they each take on the look of a ripe cantaloupe.”

  “Good Lord. Is there a cure?”

  “The doctor said time, so nothing really short of death. But the stairs bring some relief.”

  He put a hand on George’s shoulder.

  “Now follow along.”

  So George followed Ezra, as he had for nearly all his life. No one had been closer to Benjamin, George’s father. Ezra had taken care of the family’s finances since George’s parents had moved from Nantucket down to Georgia in search of the cheap land that would make their fortune. Although Benjamin was keen on purchasing farmland, Ezra suggested his investments should bleed into Old Ox proper, the result being that Benjamin had for a time become the biggest leasing agent in the town altogether. Ever since, Ezra had kept them abreast of opportunity, monitored their ledgers, and shared rumors of the market that most men weren’t so blessed to catch wind of. George, who’d been born on the farm, had barely reached Ezra’s thigh when he first started coming around, and held fond memories of the man visiting their home, a salted caramel always in hand to keep him busy as the men talked business.

  With the carefulness of the brittle-boned, they mounted the stairs and reached Ezra’s office, by which time the old man had finished his sandwich. He instructed George to sit down across from him. A bison pelt that Ezra had no interest in lined the wall behind his desk, for as he’d told George once, other men liked such things, and their comfort was paramount to assuring him their business.

  “I hope the ride to town was peaceful?” Ezra asked.

  “I suppose. For all the talk of hell descending upon us, it feels no different to me than before the occupation.”

  “You’d feel differently if you were here every day as am I. Union soldiers patrolling and asking after us as though we might revolt at any moment. Not to speak of the slaves they’ve freed.”

  “Is that so.”

  “It’s an abomination. There is one of them in want of charity every way you turn. The lot of them congregated in the town square on Sunday for prayer, and the way they were crying and carrying on I wasn’t sure if it was in praise of their freedom or at the plight of what their freedom entails.”

  “Their hands were only unbound days ago. You can’t blame them for still feeling the chafe of the chains.”

  “Oh, aren’t you the pious one,” Ezra said. “Painting me as cruel as you retire to your home in the country. While I will go across the road here at day’s end and sleep with one eye open.”

  George yawned.

  “Why are we discussing this? Must we?”

  Ezra shrugged, not only with his shoulders, which were perpetually hunched, but in the despondency of his gaze.

  “We are friends. Friends speak of things that involve one another. This is called polite conversation.”

  “Well, it bores me.”

  “Then might I ask why you’re here?”

  George fiddled with a button on his shirt, and finally told Ezra why he’d come: he wished to keep his holdings.

  “So. Sell nothing, then?”

  George had, since the passing of his father, elected to forgo work and simply unload parcels of his land as a means to get by. The freedom this had produced was worth more than the bother of tending to acreage he didn’t wish to farm. Ezra had been an eager buyer, a man as interested in business as George was in idleness. Where many speculators had stopped purchasing during the war, Ezra had remained committed to acquiring the very land he’d helped Benjamin make his own so many years ago.

  Ezra shook his head.

  “This doesn’t sound like you. Too sudden.”

  “Men change.”

  “I’d believe a skunk’s scent had come to smell like flowers before I believed you’d changed, George. I know you don’t take pride in much, but you don’t lose sight of yourself for any man.”

  “Think as you wish.”

  “Surely, there must be some reason—”

  “My son is dead.” He said it very plainly, as though he were reading off the last item from the back page of a newspaper.

  Ezra stiffened. He stood up and walked around his desk. George thought he might move to console him somehow, which would make for the first physical contact between them since his father’s death, when he was still but a boy. Yet Ezra merely winced, his eye twitching, as if in display of a care more genuine than any words might carry.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “So, so sorry.”

  George told him of August’s visit, of his wife having gone silent from the moment he told her the news until he’d left that same morning to come to town.

  “Isabelle will pull through,” Ezra said. “Give her time. That is the only remedy.”

  George stood up, brushing off his shirt like the stains of dirt there had suddenly, after many years, come to bother him.

  “I cannot control how she takes such things. But I can control what’s mine. That land…I suppose I just wish to hold on to what I have left. Do something with it. Something worthwhile.”

  Ezra said nothing.

  “I should go,” George said.

&n
bsp; And Ezra, it seemed, used this turn to regain his footing.

  “Yes, absolutely! This is no time to discuss business. Go see your wife. Even if she refuses you. Even if she spits at your feet.”

  “Let us hope she stops short of that.”

  George could see the seams of age that met at the corner of Ezra’s eyes; his day-old whiskers looked like a young boy’s.

  “You feel free to call upon me if you need anything at all,” Ezra said.

  “Thank you,” George said. “Until then.”

  It was only once he was out the door, saddlebags in hand, stepping from the shadows of the shop into the sagging sun, that he realized his old friend’s sleight of hand—shelving George’s decision to keep his land as if it was merely clouded by his emotions, so that a deal might be struck another day. Part of him was amused by Ezra’s deceit, for in it he saw the glimmer of respect that had been at the root of their entire relationship. The old man would not change his ways on account of his client’s grieving, and George would never have wanted him to.

  The town square was actually a traffic circle, and at its center sat the always-blooming flowers tended to by the gardening society. A Union soldier stood idle there now with his rifle at his side, rolling a cigarette, licking the paper as a dog might lick a wound. George put his head down and walked briskly, taking to the road before entering the general store. The door was already open.

  Rawlings, the storekeeper, greeted George with little more than a glance and asked what brought him in.

  “Just the essentials,” George said.

  Rawlings rose from the wooden crate where he took his rest and began collecting the few necessities George requested every week: sugar, coffee, bread. In the back, near the equipment, sat Little Rawlings, rag in hand, polishing a scythe so sharp it looked liable to cut right through his hand. It seemed a skill, one learned with little room for error.

  “Have your eye on something?” Rawlings asked. “We got new merchandise coming in all the time. Might not know you want it till you see it.”

  George reflexively shook his head, then reconsidered.