The Sweetness of Water

by Nathan Harris

  Whether he had only his brother’s interest in mind, Prentiss did not object.

  “If you’d wait here,” George said, “I could prepare them for you.”

  “What about the missus?” Prentiss said.

  “She’s retired for the night. For the foreseeable future.”

  Landry moved past his brother and took root on the porch steps, his back to the house.

  “I guess if them eggs are going to go to waste anyway,” Prentiss said.

  George returned inside. He cooked eagerly, as he always did for guests. He’d always been of the opinion that what he lacked in personality, or charm, was embodied in his dishes, even one as simple as this: in the perfect accent of salt and pepper, the bit of cheese melted upon the scramble in a blanket so threadbare one wondered how it stayed intact. It was his favorite act of goodwill. The brothers seemed surprised when he returned with their plates, followed by the slices of bread, and finally cups of water.

  “Mighty grateful,” Prentiss said, and his brother nodded. “If I had a dollar to my name.”

  George ignored him. They ate slowly, even Landry, both of them savoring each bite. When Landry finished, Prentiss gave him what remained of his eggs, handing over his plate without a second thought. George stood behind them on the porch all the while and said nothing.

  It was Prentiss who spoke first. “The land you wish to clear. Am I looking at it?”

  George stepped forward and pointed at the woods beyond the barn, off to the right of the cabin. He was thinking of clearing that area, he said, farther from the house and down the hill, still in sight but beyond the first line of trees.

  Prentiss took a sip of water.

  “You’ll need all the sunlight you can get, and them trees ain’t going to help your cause.”

  “I don’t know the first thing,” George admitted.

  “We still aim to head north,” Prentiss said. “But we need some funds if we’re going to make it. We can’t be helping you for free, is what I’m saying.”

  A jolt traveled through George at the thought of this prospect renewed. His money was tied up in the land, he said, but he would speak to someone about that. It wouldn’t be a problem to pay them.

  “Will it be fair? You tell me now, ’cause if it ain’t, I’d rather cut this boy at the knees and force him off your land than work a day for so little we won’t ever make it gone from here.”

  “Within reason. The same I’d pay any other man for the same job.”

  “A white man?”

  “I’ve never cheated a man,” George bristled, “color be damned.”

  There was no shake, or any further acknowledgment of the conversation. Prentiss collected both plates, stood, and handed them to George.

  “I’ll take the cost of the eggs out of your first installment,” George said. “Only right, I imagine.” When Prentiss cocked his head, as if these were the words of a different tongue, George reassured him that it was a joke, a little one, something to conclude their bargain.

  Prentiss said nothing and his features did not soften.

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” George tried again.

  “Good night, then,” Prentiss finally said.

  “Boys,” he said.

  He watched them off, Landry’s size shrouding Prentiss as they disappeared into the dark.

  “Now you’re following me, after all that nonsense,” he heard Prentiss say. “Waddling on like an overstuffed hen.”

  It was late for George. The upstairs was unlit, the drapes closed, the house silent. He decided to sleep on the armchair again, knowing that the activity of the night, of the last few days, would keep him wide-awake, and that he’d rise early, ready to act on everything that now occupied his thinking. It seemed only wise to leave Isabelle undisturbed, and with the freedom to roam her portion of the house however she saw fit.

  CHAPTER 7

  George wasn’t the first in the house to rise the following morning—it was Isabelle’s voice that startled him awake. The fire had died. The room was awash in sunshine.

  “George. You have visitors.”

  He followed Isabelle out to the porch. Prentiss and Landry stood before the house, each holding a bundle of their belongings. Until now he had seen them only in the shadows of the trees or the darkness of the night. In the early light there was a magnification of all they’d endured, the hollow of their cheeks, the splintered cracks of their lips, the shirts so thin they might crumble like burnt toast if given a rub.

  “That is the one,” Isabelle said to him, as if they might not hear. “The one I spoke of at the clothesline.”

  “My apologies for my brother,” Prentiss said. “He ain’t never been much of a wanderer but he’s taken an interest in your property. I know he wasn’t meaning to scare you or steal a thing, just got a little curious.”

  Isabelle turned to George. There was a luster still about her from her morning rituals, her hair combed to a full sheen, her cheeks plumped and colored by the application of a hot rag. Still, George recognized her irritation in the prim pursing of her lips, perhaps an impression on her part that on the heels of his withholding the news of Caleb, there was yet another secret he was only now getting around to sharing with her.

  “I can explain this,” he said. “It’s not at all bad. I have a project in mind.”

  “George,” she said flatly.

  She went inside and George motioned for the brothers to wait a moment, then chased after her.

  Coffee was already brewing. He poured himself a cup and joined her at the dining room table.

  “I want to have something, Isabelle. I’ve been made to feel so helpless, at such a loss. I don’t want to lose this land, too. What we’ve been through has changed me. Not all of me, but a part. Just as it’s changed you. And those boys, well, they’re fresh off Mr. Morton’s land, and eager for a change, too. To make a respectable wage doing what they know in the manner of any other men.”

  She sipped her coffee and appeared to be deep in thought as she gazed out the window.

  “I want to use this land for what it’s intended for,” he said. “I want to plant, and toil. Do something tangible, something…real. I want this land to be my legacy, just like it was for my father. Tell me that is okay. If you could say that little bit, it would mean everything.”

  Only at that moment did she deign to look in his direction.

  “How is this different from anything else? You’ll do as you will, and I will do as I will, and we will tolerate whatever comes of it.”

  He had, a moment ago, felt himself grow tall as he’d shared his feelings, but a part of him was punctured under the weight of her coldness, and he immediately resumed his usual mode of being—one of slouched withdrawal.

  “Will you still find a moment to send the telegram?” she asked.

  “Oh. Yes.”

  “You said first thing this morning.”

  “Then I should get going.”

  He stood and collected some cups from the cabinet and poured some coffee he thought the brothers might enjoy. He stopped himself before stepping back outside.

  “Isabelle. Are you feeling better today?”

  She took a deep inhale through her nose, sipped her coffee, and finally gave George a rather friendly shrug of the shoulders.

  “It is a nice morning.”

  * * *

  George got them started in the storage shed before he went to town. When he returned they held two axes they’d fished from the deep maws of the place, in a corner littered with mouse droppings. It had taken them longer to locate a sharpening stone, but they’d managed this as well and had brought both axes to a point that George found almost intimidating to behold.

  Prentiss, who had already surveyed the land they wished to clear, explained to George the dimensions they might accomplish as a unit of three, an estimate figured by mapping out over time the toil of three men on Morton’s plantation.

  “Well, there is no rush,” George said. “E
fficiency is important, but we don’t want to exhaust ourselves.”

  Prentiss stared at him blankly—a look that was becoming a regular occurrence—ready to carry on with his plan.

  There was no mention of George’s trip to town. He’d gotten the telegram off to Silas’s home. The man himself was on the way back from yet another venture to sell goods for high premiums in locales others wished not to sojourn, most recently positioned outside a surrendered Confederate fort in the Everglades, where George imagined him lazily sipping whiskey before a swamp in the same fashion he lazily sipped whiskey at his farm back in Chambersville.

  He had kept the telegram brief and to the point: Caleb killed in action. Few details. Your sister grieves. For a moment he’d considered the wording, as to whether his own grieving was notable (We grieve; or, We mourn his loss), but it was none of Silas’s business how George felt, and he’d left it written as it was.

  He had then walked across the street and spent ten minutes with Ezra, interrupting a meeting with his request for a small loan, which Ezra gave him with little curiosity and without requesting any papers be signed. The only confusion to Ezra was George’s wish to be given the amount half in coins and half in small notes—Ezra muttered that he wasn’t a bank, then obliged. And George was home with almost a full day of sunlight to spare, yet he did not wish to begin working, although both Prentiss and Landry—for what little Landry betrayed, standing stoically against the barn—were more than willing to start the job.

  Prentiss trained an appraising eye upon him now.

  “I seen you struggle with that leg. Got yourself a hard enough time just getting off that donkey.”

  But this was one point on which George would not budge. The job, if done by others, would not permit him the purpose, the distraction, of the whole campaign. He did not wish to admit how little he wanted to be in his own home, and how little else there was in the world that interested him. He simply insisted it was vital he join them, side by side, so that when they left, he would know how to continue on his own.

  “You claim you itching to get started, Mr. Walker, but from what I seen I’d hazard you ain’t worked a day in your life.”

  “As I’ve said, George is fine. I’m not my father. And until now I always considered a successful day to be defined by a lack of work, so I cannot say you’re far off with that estimation.”

  Prentiss stood at attention. “Well, you about to make up for lost time, I’ma see to that.”

  “Who is in charge here, exactly?” George said.

  Prentiss smiled then, knowing, perhaps, what was to come in a manner that George himself did not.

  * * *

  That day was the first of many together. The three men would take turns with the axes, George chopping meekly when he could manage, passing it off and wiping the sweat from his brow when he could not. Each tree’s fall was startling, the later ones no less than the first. The very act had a meaning that fueled him, the bark splintering on contact, the groan of the tree and the felling and the strike of the impact cascading through the forest like a whoosh of wind, sudden and ominous and wholly arresting.

  George was far from capable of the effort the brothers expended. When the day grew long, and he took one swing too many—his hip burning, his arms sore—Landry would lean forward and put a hand on his shoulder, as if to tell him he’d done enough, and wrest the ax from his hands. George exclaimed that he was only getting started, yet Landry, ignoring him, assumed his place, slashing at the tree with guttural thuds so violent they quieted George.

  He was dutiful in paying them—a dollar a day each—enough that in time they would be able to save an amount sufficient to afford not only railroad tickets but also extra clothes and some lodging and meals until they landed on their feet. For lunch George usually fetched a bit of salted pork from the storeroom, some hard bread from the previous night’s leftovers, and cobbled together two meals apiece to get them through the day.

  On occasion there were the afternoons when they left the work behind and simply walked, or rested, though George noticed this seemed to make Prentiss antsy. Nevertheless he would listen attentively to George’s stories, tales of an old man’s past. George understood that, as with his own lackluster participation in cutting down the trees, this listening of Prentiss’s was nothing but a courtesy paid to him. He relished it all the same.

  One day, when they’d finished early and were sitting on a felled tree soon to be chopped into smaller logs that they would stack on the sled for Ridley to haul, George told them again of the beast. Prentiss entertained the idea, seeming to recognize the manifestation of such things being birthed in the dark—creatures that existed on the border of reality and legend.

  George told them, too, of a mental exercise his father had hatched: that each day of each year, a man might imagine a tree in his mind. The tree, upon doing good in the world, could grow strong and thick, but with every poor decision, rot would start to sprout—gnarled roots at its base, limp branches that snapped with the lightest touch. At the end of any given period—a month, a year—it was wise to consider the growth of one’s tree, and the decisions you had made that led it there. It was yours to let grow or die.

  “I rather like that,” Prentiss said.

  “Count yourself as one of the few to lend it credence,” George said. “I take little heed of it. My father himself failed to follow the instruction and he invented the whole damn thing. Hell, my own son scoffed at it when he was half your age. But it sounds nice, doesn’t it?”

  Prentiss looked at him and it took George a moment to realize that he’d invoked Caleb—whom he’d studiously avoided mentioning in the brothers’ presence—for perhaps the first time since the night he’d met them. Prentiss asked him, directly but with a note of tenderness, what had become of his son.

  George thought for a moment to deflect but then he told him.

  “That’s a shame,” said Prentiss, who seemed inclined to add something more but stopped there.

  “It’s indescribable,” George said. “I wouldn’t wish it on my own enemy. I hope you never experience such a thing.”

  Landry, who until now had sat motionlessly beside them holding an ax beneath its blade as if it were a child’s plaything, picked up a loose branch and began sharpening it to a point with the ax.

  “I lost my oldest cousin to a sale when I was thirteen,” Prentiss said. “That was after the crop caught ablaze. Mr. Morton sold our mama a couple years later. Had her inside the house weaving on the loom when she stopped picking her share, but her hands took to shaking so he got rid of her. My father died when my mama was pregnant with Landry. I wasn’t old enough to know him.”

  George squinted under the gaze of the sun. He did not know what to say for quite a long time and came to wish he had trusted his instinct and refrained from speaking about Caleb.

  “I suppose no one owns a claim on suffering,” he said at last.

  “S’pose not.”

  They returned to the cabin as the day cooled. He had been allowing Prentiss and Landry to stay in the barn as a way to escape the woods. Isabelle was on the porch, as she had been since that morning when he left, and they quieted when they saw her. She had taken visitors once or twice since Mildred Foster had been to the house but still said very little to George, all in all. On this day, Mildred was to have paid her another visit, but George—to his great relief—had been in the woods long enough to miss the occasion. He imagined that he and the brothers appeared as a group of schoolboys, sweating and talking loudly and suddenly hushing in her presence. Landry, fidgeting awkwardly with his shirt, stepped behind his brother, though the move to obscure himself was all but pointless, given his size.

  George asked after her day.

  “Fine. Mildred says hello.”

  “Oh, well, that’s nice of her.”

  “She’s a strong woman. Helpful in times like these.”

  He had hoped that Mildred might lift his wife’s spirits, but she was clearly mor
ose. She stood and disappeared inside, then reappeared bearing a pitcher of lemonade and a ring of cups, her index finger threaded through each of their handles. She came down the stairs and handed each of them a cup and poured. Her gaze was fixed on the ground, as if she’d been commanded to perform an action that rankled her. Prentiss thanked her, more than once, and George, though lost in his confusion, finally managed to utter a thanks himself as she retreated to the porch, where she poured her own cup. Up to this very moment she had ignored the brothers, so that the act seemed to indicate some kind of truce, not with them but with George, and with the circumstances surrounding their employ.

  “We should leave her alone,” he said quietly.

  “She seems fine there,” Prentiss said, sipping the lemonade. “I don’t think she minds us much.”

  But they walked to the barn in silence, as a unit, their feet crunching the grass.

  “You think she’s done with you,” Prentiss said.

  “I did not say that,” George said.

  “You act like it.”

  This felt like an opening, an invitation, but George, recalling the conversation in the woods about Caleb, elected not to take it.

  “Let me see what we decide to eat and I will bring what I can,” he said.

  Landry went inside the barn. He took off his shirt. There was a basin no bigger than a sink but they could fill it and wash there. George left them to it.

  He would wash up himself, and to do this he would have to retrieve a fresh pair of clothes from the bedroom. The night was looming, the house was quiet, his least favorite moment of every day. His study was the first room up the stairs, their bedroom the last, and Caleb’s sat between the two, where the narrowness of the hallway became most apparent. The door to Caleb’s room, slightly ajar, teased George, beckoning him, but he could not bear the temptation. Even the simplest glance could uncork an endless stream of memories: the sight of the boy sneaking into his study as if George didn’t see him there, or, worse yet, the image of young Caleb reading at the lip of his bed, facing the window, and turning to see his father as he passed, with a smile so broad it took over the width of his boyish face.