The Sweetness of Water

by Nathan Harris

  “For someone who lives on my property, who has visited it often—well, I feel that I ought to have been better about making your acquaintance.”

  She wrung her hands and started again.

  “That didn’t sound right. As if I’m owed something, or wish to place some responsibility on you due to your sleeping in the barn. That is not at all what I meant. Only that we spoke that one time, and didn’t speak again, and I want to remove any sense that I might have been disapproving of you, or might still be.”

  He nodded to her and smiled, something he did on only the rarest of occasions, owing to his jaw, and hoped this might be enough to satisfy her. Yet she remained.

  “I know,” she stammered, “I know you don’t speak. I asked your brother about this, but all he would say is that your jaw doesn’t prohibit you. Nor do you have some social deficit, which I gathered on my own. Yet you choose to remain silent. I sometimes feel that way myself. How often I have said the wrong thing or wished to take back my words.”

  He wondered whom she was speaking to. It was not him. The Isabelles of the world might view him, but they did not see him. They certainly did not want to hear his voice. Although he would admit that on occasion, in recent times, he more often had the urge to be heard. But this was not the place for such a thing. Isabelle was more interested in herself. Her own needs.

  “You have helped George immensely,” she went on. “And Caleb, too. I believe he still suffers, at times. He doesn’t know his place in the world. But then neither do I, or even George, maybe. Is it possible to grow more lost as one gets older? I wouldn’t have thought so before the war. Yet here we are. All of us. Which is to say that, well, you and Prentiss have been a calming force…”

  Landry stood up. If once his strength had been a rock whose ridges were too sharp to touch, confessions like these, and the burden they visited upon him, had polished him down to a dull stone. Isabelle peered up at him. Her blouse was the color of flowers he’d seen in the wild, flowers so gorgeous that the names George gave them, as proper as they might be, only reduced their beauty.

  “Oh,” Isabelle said. “You must be returning to work.”

  He wasn’t. Not yet at least. He was simply leaving her to her thoughts and taking his own somewhere to be pondered in private. As he preferred.

  What went unspoken was the burden of freedom. Not that Landry missed Mr. Morton’s ownership—far from it. No, it was rather that he and his brother had been tethered to each other then. The chains that held them down also held them together. In their new life, Prentiss traveled in his own way: his appreciation for trips to town with George to gather supplies; his cheery banter with Caleb, who’d seemed to grow closer to Prentiss since he’d stared working alongside them. The idea of simple chatter, of finding friendship, appealed to his brother in a manner Landry had no interest in. And his own silence, which had once been obscured by the shadows of their bondage, and was a calming peace that gave Prentiss time to think for them both, now laid bare a space that expanded between them. They’d become their own selves.

  Still, Landry knew they would never be separated. That Prentiss would always be there, no matter what, waiting in the barn, or keeping watch over his shoulder as they worked the field. And Landry, for his part, always returned to the barn to show he was not gone for good, always returned his brother’s glances to assure him that he, too, was keeping watch.

  * * *

  The next Sunday he woke early, eager to take to the woods, only to find Prentiss already sitting up. Leftovers from the night before were boiling in the kettle, cabbage stumps and turnip, cotton seeds and some ham George had given them. His brother looked uneasy, playing with a kink in his hair, sucking air through his teeth.

  “Morning,” Prentiss said.

  Landry wiped the sleep from his eyes. The stick of sweat from the previous day was upon him. He would take to the water when the sun rose, he thought. He would bathe beside the fish, hide himself beneath the surface and go unseen.

  “I was wondering,” Prentiss said, as if reading his mind, “if maybe I could come along. I know you like your time alone, but you got me so curious when you’re out I sometimes can’t look at a damned thing but your cot, wondering where you is. I thought I might tag along. Maybe see what you see.”

  Landry had never considered that his brother might have the slightest interest in joining him.

  “You can tell me,” Prentiss said. “If you feel like tryin’, I’ll wait for the words to come.”

  He wasn’t unwilling to stammer in front of Prentiss. He’d done so before, although only rarely, for even Prentiss grew impatient with the excruciating unfurling of each word, until he began guessing at the end of a sentence that Landry had worked so hard to unspool. But even if he wished to convey his feelings on it, there was something inexpressible about his time away. He shared a life with his brother, the barn they occupied, all the worldly goods between them, but these mornings were his. To put it into words would not make his brother impatient. But he feared they might hurt him.

  Landry approached his brother, who watched him warily, as if Landry might spring upon him as he had when they were children, forcing him into a scrap. But he only put a hand upon Prentiss’s head, held him to his chest.

  “What’s this?” Prentiss said.

  Landry hoped this would be enough, this touch. Perhaps his brother might even come to relish it more than a Sunday walk. Then Landry turned and started for the door.

  “That’s it?” Prentiss said. “Just gon’ up and leave? I’m up early getting this food ready and you ain’t even gonna eat? You ain’t right sometimes, you know that? Probably out there spying on folks from the trees and making a fool of yourself. I ain’t even wanna go, so how’s that?”

  But by now Landry was beyond the barn door, and if Prentiss said anything further it didn’t reach him. Though the days had all been hot, this morning was cool. As he walked, his brother’s playful words, the bark in his voice, echoed in Landry’s mind, pleasing him. Of course Prentiss wasn’t really upset. He knew Landry too well—respected his idle Sunday mornings, had come to understand them in the same way he understood everything about his brother. They were always only a few paces apart. Prentiss had probably returned to his pallet to sleep away the morning, and Landry was even now keeping him company in his dreams.

  * * *

  That first hour, he did not go far. George had once shown him a spot of copper bunchgrass that claimed a slice of the forest; they had been seeking a certain plant that, according to George, was an exceptional addition to a particular stew. But sometime later Landry spotted the little outpost of seclusion on his own, and it had become a favorite of his haunts.

  His things were hidden there, beneath the bed of greenery, and he sought them by running his hand upon the soil until it brushed against the cold of the knitting needles, the doughy embrace of the yarn. He’d bought them from an aged woman at the tent camps whose legs were entangled in a crush of children vying for her attention. She would feed them for a day or two with the money. In return, he rediscovered a lost pastime.

  It was true that their mother had been moved into Majesty’s Palace, working the loom and going over designs with Mr. Morton’s wife, but she wasn’t selected by chance, as Prentiss thought. His brother, Landry figured, had forgotten how skilled she was with her hands. After the whippings, when Landry remained in the cabin, recovering, afraid to go back outside and risk the chance of further punishment, their mother would stay with him, and he would watch her as she worked, her fingers guiding the knitting needles as if playing a fine-tuned violin, knuckles pointed and taut, knots of yarn forming and collecting upon one another in careful bunches.

  “Come, child,” she said once, and when he pulled up alongside her, there was a set of needles for him to work as well. He hadn’t known that his hands were allowed to be delicate like hers—hadn’t known they were capable of such creation.

  The knitting ended when the picking snatched awa
y the magic of her fingers, and by the time she was brought to Majesty’s Palace, she could not live up to her reputation. That was the last they saw of her. Her vanishing happened that fast. Their cabin was quiet then, and they spent many sleepless nights staring at her empty bed until the dawn edged in, hoping she might appear.

  He never stitched in all the years of her absence, not until he found freedom. The first item he made was a shawl, which was of no quality, and he hid it in the barn so as to not let it be found. The second, a pair of gloves that appeared to be made for someone with three fingers, achieved the same result. Yet there in the bunchgrass he was regaining his loss at the third attempt, a pair of socks, working at them tirelessly, ignoring the saliva that escaped his mouth, the numbness that colonized his legs—crossed upon the grass—as he toiled. Not until this very day had he felt satisfied with the final product. Now he put his tools beneath a cloudy bed of chickweed blossoms and, for only a moment, returned home.

  He avoided the barn. Prentiss was either still at rest or off with George, lending his ear. The cabin appeared unoccupied, but he watched for a time to make sure of it. When there was no movement in the kitchen, no shadows on the second floor, he stole to the backyard. On that first encounter with Isabelle, he had come only to see the socks on the clothesline—to ascertain a job well done, a model that might guide him—and he had found, in addition, a woman begging to be heard, a woman who herself had gone unseen. He knew this pain. He was not one to let it go unacknowledged. A gesture—the socks—might do. There were no clothes on the line. It hung limp in the summer heat. The socks were a bit bigger than the size of a child’s foot, which he hoped would be proper for a woman. He looked at them in appreciation of his own craft. Took a clothespin and hung them proudly.

  * * *

  Another sweat was coming on. He slipped off into the woods and followed alongside the road to town, veering off toward the meadowland when it suited him. There was a lightness to his step, and he made quick time. The pond was just as he’d left it—the lilies upon the water unified like a carefully drawn illustration; the water reflecting his image, made beautiful if only by the beauty that surrounded him. He loved the silence, so totally encompassing that his thoughts arrived as if he were speaking, the sentences full and alive, the sort a preacher might thunder to an audience who would respond with whoops and wild amens. Here, things were different. For the sliver of time he was allowed, the pond was his.

  He removed his clothes and waded into the water slowly. Each step was a clap of cold and he let it spread until he felt himself dissolving, his whole body going numb. When his senses returned it was like he’d pieced himself back together part by part, everything broken and then mended. The pond always filled him with whimsical thoughts. He wasn’t sure who owned it, but perhaps, he imagined, a home could be perched beside it. Why not? Perhaps George would enjoy a new project. Perhaps Prentiss would let go of his determination to leave Old Ox if only he dipped a toe into the water that Landry now floated in, if only he could accept the comfort, the belief that this was where they belonged. That finally a place might be theirs. Landry had even brought it up to him. Would do so again in due time.

  But he knew the prospect of staying beyond the peanut harvest was unlikely. Prentiss spoke of leaving once they had sufficient savings. Landry himself was content here, with a pallet all his own and so much open land outside the door that it seemed like all the freedom a man might need in one life. But Prentiss would keep them up at night with talks of far-off locales. Maybe they’d hop from town to town, city to city, until they found the one that fit them just right, a place with more work than you could ever hope for, a place where men spent dollars like pennies and thought nothing of it. Or they’d ride on the railcar, not even asking where it might lead to, and disembark wherever the scenery called out to them, find a little bit of land where the weather was cool and no one knew their names, where they could sip lemonade on their own front porch and never be bothered again.

  But though these fantasies involved just the two of them, their mother was always present in the back of their minds. Prentiss would ask him what means he thought they might employ to find her when the time came. Landry would get that sinking feeling in his gut, try to think himself away from the barn like he used to think himself away from the plantation, like he used to think himself away from his own body when the whip was meeting his back. His brother talked of going door to door, through the whole state of Georgia, inquiring of their mother’s whereabouts. Went so far as to consider asking Mr. Morton, knowing full well he would never tell them, for they’d tried that before, only to be mocked by his laughter, to be told that she wasn’t even worth recording in his ledger of transactions. A lie, yes, but as hurtful as anything anyone had ever uttered to them. Best for Landry, then, to take leave of such thoughts, to disappear from those conversations altogether and leave them for his brother to spin around in his own mind.

  The slime at the bottom of the pond grazed his toes now when he let it. Small guppies flitted before him, darting about like children at play. He took a deep breath and dunked his head. Silence consumed him. He was entombed in tranquility, in the boundlessness of his floating, his weightlessness. How to capture this feeling. How to make it last forever.

  He heard them only as he rose up for air. He kept his body hidden beneath the water, and the marshy mound of plants at the center of the pond concealed him from the other side. But he could glimpse them. Caleb was beneath the other one, the bigger one. Both of them were faced away from him. Landry had never seen a white man naked, so pale beneath the sun. In the fields, Caleb was a man in his own right, or at least on the cusp of being one, but he appeared now as a boy, emitting childish moans as the other boy choked him, took hold of his hair, and delivered heavy blows to his backside.

  At first it didn’t enter Landry’s mind to leave the water, to hide himself. The pond, as he thought of it, was rightfully his. So far and free did his imagination roam here that he thought he might somehow have conjured the scene, for unknown reasons. But the possibility evaporated as the boy’s moans grew louder. Yes, that was surely Caleb, George’s son, Isabelle’s treasure, and no matter how many times Landry had come to this place, no matter how he thought of it, the presence of these two meant that it was theirs entirely—it was he who was trespassing. Perhaps he could dive down, suspend himself in silence, wait for them to depart, and find himself a new refuge. He and Prentiss could leave for the railcar. They could search for another place like this one.

  Their bodies were contorted, with Caleb on his stomach and the other boy mounted upon him. Landry drifted backward, water dripping from his chest and hair as he emerged from the pond, shivering despite the heat. They did not turn as he collected his pants, his shirt and boots. Nor as he slipped them on. He could disappear. Yet he knew this would be his last glimpse of the pond, the last time he would ever have this image so clear in his mind. He breathed it in and let it go.

  It was then that the other boy whipped about. Landry did not freeze out of fear. More so at the oddness of it all: that after so many years unseen, he would be taken notice of by a boy such as this, and from a great distance. He started back to the barn. First at a walk. Faster when he heard the footsteps upon him.

  CHAPTER 12

  The world pressed upon their secret. Caleb could feel as much, deeper than the heat of August’s breath upon his neck, the cutting strokes of each blade of grass against his naked body, which was pinned to the ground. But prudence meant nothing. His worries were carried off in the slickness of his sweat, in the curling of his toes and the clenching of his teeth as waves of joy coursed through him. It was as if a bell beneath his ribcage had lain at rest since the last time his friend had claimed him, at this very pond, a year ago, and now August penetrated him so deeply, with such force, that the pealing of that bell shook his entire being, great jolts of delight quaking through him, one after the other. They were so intense that he craved a moment of reprieve, all w
hile fearing the bliss of the afternoon might end, might never return to him, if his wish were granted.

  It was August who stopped. He pulled off Caleb, his body running with sweat, and turned, war-ready.

  “Someone’s there,” he said.

  But Caleb had no words to respond. He was spent, and even though he knew the fear and threat that August’s words should inspire in him, he could not summon the power to care.

  “Get up,” August said.

  Caleb’s body was red with the exquisite torment of the afternoon, his every muscle cramped, the soreness hitting him as he came to. He’d never seduced another person—August had been the aggressor both times—and on each occasion of being taken he was shocked at how lost he’d become in his emotions, the violent whirlwind of his submission: one moment you are lucid, lost in the quotidian, and the next you are transported to another world altogether, with your pants at your ankles and mulch slathered up your damp thighs.

  Aside from their lone previous tryst, in this same spot, back before the war, their behavior together had always been tamer. (Caleb was fine with only the friction of August’s body against his own, or a kiss that kept his mind in a tizzy for the rest of the day.) But he didn’t harbor the slightest regret. Nor was he upset at being seen. Let the truth of their bond be set free upon Old Ox, upon the world entire. But he knew that for August, the chosen one, this trespass upon them was a threat, and would only confirm that Caleb was a problem, best kept at arm’s length, if not forgotten altogether. Perhaps it was this realization that finally sobered him. He pulled his pants up and listened to his friend.

  “Collect your things before he gets away,” August said, already moving toward the woods.

  There was nothing to do but obey, and as they strode, soon picking up speed to a frantic crash through the trees, he tried to lock in his mind the particulars of this fine afternoon: the ringing of each thrust still rolling through his ears; the place at the edge of the pond where his body had made an imprint in the grass; the matching depressions in the mud where August had placed his knees and mounted him. Even if the world learned their secret, and even if the punishment was severe, he would always have access to these memories. They were his alone to be hoarded—protected from the outside world in even the darkest of times.