The Sweetness of Water

by Nathan Harris

  * * *

  For weeks before seeing August he’d spent his days working the fields, awaiting the blooms on the peanut plants. He did not care for his father’s new hobby, or for farming in general, really. He found the work tedious but drifted to it every morning for lack of a greater purpose, and also to satisfy his mother’s wish that he stay close to his father. And they were close. He would pull the same stunts he had as a boy, threatening to slap Ridley’s behind and send him galloping as his father rode atop the donkey and protested wildly, “Don’t you dare, don’t you dare.” And when his father swung his hoe down with such force that he pitched forward, face-first into the dirt, so that Caleb had to race alongside the brothers to help him up as tears of amusement ran down their faces, the incident fueled dinner conversations for many nights to come. He and his father touched on matters more serious, too: a plan to use new ground for the next planting cycle, perhaps even seed another crop by fall. Cucumbers grew fast enough in the heat that they could mature before the first frost, and while it was a bit late for rice, there might even be time for that if they hurried, though the irrigation work necessary might prohibit it this year.

  When discussions fell on business, they were often in the field, and they talked like men talk. Standing and spitting, filling the silence with grunts. Caleb wondered if these were the only two modes they might exist in: either conversing on practical matters or evoking their shared history, overlaying the present moment with the nostalgia of times long gone to them. It wasn’t vexing, exactly—just an awareness that his father had his limits, and that there were hallways of thought, of emotion, which would always remain behind closed doors.

  What they shared was nothing like what Caleb shared with August. Yet it was a great source of misery that his friend hadn’t called on him since their day at the pond, now many weeks ago. On the two occasions Caleb had gone to his home, August’s mother had told him—in an icy tone, barely meeting his gaze—that her son was at work. It did not take much to gather the reason for this snubbing. If his father’s farm had directed the ire of every man in Old Ox against his family, then his mother’s outburst at the Beddenfelds’ had done the same with the women. On the orders of her husband, Mrs. Webler informed him, neither he nor August was to be disturbed. When Caleb asked, on the second visit, when August might be free, she said she was far too busy arranging her son’s wedding to be of further use.

  Going into Old Ox proper was an equally cold proposition. Wade Webler, or someone he was involved with, had spread word of his cowardice, and his welcome among the townsfolk had become even chillier than the one Mrs. Webler had given him. The saloon bartender had a way of looking him off when he raised his hand for a beer. When he sought the services of Jan and Albert Stoutly, who had started fitting harnesses and carts (the sort that might ease Ridley’s load a bit), they told him new orders would be fulfilled by the following year, yet the man outside the store was delighted with how fast they’d produced his and apparently promising him more for the rest of his stable in the coming weeks. Even something as simple as buying feed had grown troublesome with all the stares. The prospect of a haircut was out of the question; he’d sat in the waiting chair at the barber’s for so long that he’d heard the same stories repeated to three different customers, all of whom had come in after him.

  So he passed his time at home. The days were infuriatingly slow, and the distraction of August in town followed him about like the shadow of the sun creeping over the fields. He would often go off to a patch of dirt alone and turn the soil mindlessly, hating the effort of his longing, the pathetic nature of his being. His father, battling his own unknown demons, paid his aloofness no mind, but Caleb was surprised to hear from him one night that Prentiss and Landry thought they had caused some offense and were shunning him.

  “Do you hold something against them?” his father asked. “Some notion from the war?”

  “Father, please. It’s nothing like that.”

  “Well then, try to be civil. It’s not like you have anyone else to keep you company.”

  Caleb made an effort. One Sunday evening before supper he walked to the barn to say hello and found Prentiss alone, washing his pants in a basin of hot water. Only a few weeks earlier he’d informed Caleb and his father that he’d purchased new pants for himself and Landry. The brothers had arrived in the fields with some newfound pride, strutting like the boys who’d paraded through town in their freshly starched grays before the war. Now the trousers were streaked with large smears of color, and the water was doing nothing to clean them.

  “What took to them?” Caleb asked in lieu of a hello.

  Prentiss seemed surprised to see him. He patted his hands dry on his shirt and looked at the basin in contemplation.

  “Some paint is all.”

  “I see. Your brother around?”

  “He’s off.”

  “Where to?”

  “That’s his business,” Prentiss said.

  He pulled the pants from the basin, set them on the ground, and began scrubbing them with a brush, working at them for some time.

  Caleb imagined his father watching from the house. Some period of time should pass—but how long?—before it would be appropriate for him to return inside. He thought he might simply wait it out in silence, for there was no way he could ever express the truth to Prentiss: that he envied him and what he shared with his brother; that he had always desperately wished to have his own; that when he’d lain in bed as a child and felt the rumpled sheets beside him, he’d wished it were another, and that each morning, when he woke, he’d pretended to get dressed alongside this boy who didn’t exist, helping him tie his shoes, comb his hair. He could never describe how distressing it was when his mother arrived at the bedroom door in the morning and the boy disappeared. He would go silent, looking at his mother as if he wished her dead, as if her mere presence had made the boy disappear. Or, even worse, had denied him that brother in reality.

  “What you got goin’ on?” Prentiss asked.

  “I was just floating about the house mindlessly. I get restless sometimes when it’s just my parents.”

  “Well, you’re always welcome here. Hell, it’s your barn, ain’t it?”

  Caleb thought he knew much of Prentiss, but sometimes, he realized, it was nothing at all.

  He recalled the time he and his father had been discussing which plants might thrive in the fields, and Caleb had mentioned how well cotton grew. Prentiss, who until that point had been silent, said, “I best long be gone if y’all start in on that. I ain’t touching that plant again. I ain’t even standing near enough to see the white of the bolls.” His father didn’t reply and the matter was dropped.

  Or there was the night Caleb had tried to help him clean the skillet, only for Prentiss to pull it away as a child might withhold a toy, informing him that there was a technique to cleaning, that you used your palm and the side of your hand to catch the burnt bits in the crevices and on the bottom that wouldn’t otherwise be freed. These could be cooked up for a whole separate meal. He’d be happy to teach him, Prentiss had said, just as his mother had taught him, but he wasn’t about to see the job done poorly.

  The hidden fury. The pride, withered and wounded at times, but always there. He had a part of him that Caleb did not have. If they’d been brothers, it would be Prentiss instructing him on how to tie his shoes, Prentiss the one who showed him how the world worked. And perhaps that was why Caleb could barely utter a word to him beyond a simple greeting. To do so would require that he expose his vulnerabilities to another man, and he did not know how to reveal himself in such a way. It was a form of confrontation, the very idea he cowered from. He would never pull the kettle back from a man grabbing for it. He had never been taught such things.

  “What were you painting?” Caleb asked, helpless for anything else to say.

  Prentiss was still slapping at his pants with the brush.

  “I ain’t paint a damn thing. I seen a fella in the ca
mps with some calendars for sale, and I gone that way to pick one up so I could count the days till harvest. I’m minding my business, passing the chapel in town, and a bunch a fools are there painting a fresh coat on it. What would you know, one of ’em drops a bucket of paint right down on me. The whole pack of his boys is laughing, and he’s saying, ‘Whoops,’ like he ain’t mean to do it. They had me seeing red. What’d I do to them…”

  He waited a moment, then shook his head, dismissing the comment.

  “Not that I’d do nothing, really. I just mean he had me roiled up inside a bit. Nothing time won’t mend.”

  Prentiss didn’t trust him, Caleb thought. If only he knew those same boys would most likely flip that bucket of paint onto Caleb’s head, too, if given the chance. He let the story pass unremarked and asked instead whether Prentiss had gotten his calendar.

  “They say the man with the calendars went north,” Prentiss said. “I missed him by a day.”

  Caleb sneezed, and he realized there was something that collected in the barn, some manner of dust. It struck him as odd, for the first time, that someone would live here, among strewn-about farming equipment, skittering mice, and owls that hooted throughout the night and released droppings upon the floor to be stepped in later. How had it not crossed his mind before? he wondered. Of course there would be a man with calendars. Anyone who lived in such conditions would count the days in anticipation, marking off the time until that moment in the future when they could move on. For the man with the calendars, that day had come.

  * * *

  He braved town late one weekday afternoon, determined not to be turned back this time. Darkness was still hours distant, but many were already inside for the evening. He tied Ridley off before Ray Bittle’s house. The old man’s hat was very low on his forehead, his face hidden, his body so sunken in his rocking chair that he seemed melded to the wood. The image was troubling. Perhaps his sleep might be read in the manner one studies a palm: that in the peculiarity of such tremendous slouching, in the purposeful concealment of his features, he was passing on some message of a buried truth he could not bear to face in his waking life. Caleb was taken by the sight, but not enough to linger. He had only so long before August returned home, and he meant to catch him at work, as far away from Mrs. Webler as possible.

  August and his father worked out of an astonishingly modest building, a little redbrick house of two stories; few passersby ever acknowledged its presence, innocent of the fact that whatever other building they were going to, or coming from, was probably leased by the men inside this one. To its left sat a hotel, and to its right a furniture depot, both of which received far more traffic. Caleb dawdled on the walkway, then took one measured breath and walked to the front door, banishing from his mind any further hesitation.

  He found a clerk sitting behind a counter, looking at papers. Caleb had imagined the foyer would be empty and he would charge upstairs and interrupt a meeting, or storm the library at the building’s rear, where clients were being entertained, yet whatever storming was to take place was promptly dashed by the presence of the boy who was now staring at him quizzically.

  “Can I help you?” he said. He was no more than a reed, a string of a body, a feather that might get carried off in the wind.

  “I’m looking for August Webler.”

  “Mr. Webler is in a meeting.”

  Mr. Webler. Was that what August was now? So be it: Caleb would not be made to wait to see even a Mr. Webler.

  “It will only take a moment,” he said.

  “Sir—”

  Caleb made for the stairs and did not slow down as the boy called out to him. There was an undeniable rush to the way he climbed to the second floor. He had no idea what he might find there, but knew that August, if he still had any care for him at all, would welcome the imposition. How else might he respond to someone so willing to fight for a friendship, someone who might put all social boundaries aside to risk the chance to say hello?

  The main room upstairs was empty. Two offices flanking it both bore the nameplate MR. WEBLER. Caleb had no idea which one might be August’s. The last thing he wished to do was barge in on Wade Webler, but seeing as he had forced his way this far, a precautionary knock felt incongruous with the spirit of his endeavor.

  A spasm of panic rippled through him. The day’s heat, having collected on the second floor, fell upon him like a heavy quilt. Finally, he heard murmurs seeping from beneath the door on the right. He followed the sound, and despite his resolution of a moment ago, he knocked. The gruff voice of Wade Webler, without asking who it was, called for him to enter. Only by his initial struggle to grip the doorknob did Caleb realize just how much he was sweating. With effort he managed to turn the knob and show himself in.

  “What is this?” Wade Webler was seated behind his large oak desk, leaning back in his chair with an expression of bewilderment.

  Beside him, August sat with a pad of paper, a pencil in hand. Caleb knew the man across the desk from the flyers posted around town. This was Brigadier General Glass, standing so upright that he appeared to be in the midst of a presentation.

  “Caleb?” August said.

  Mr. Webler did not give him any time to respond.

  “How did you get up here?” He leaned over the desk. “Jeffrey!” he yelled, which triggered a slight coughing fit, leading Mr. Webler to drink a finger of whiskey from the tumbler at his side before resuming his yelling.

  Stiff reports echoed from the stairwell, like knocks upon a door, and in a moment the boy arrived in the office, sweating profusely himself.

  “I am so sorry, sir,” he said, “but he went and passed me even after I told him not to.”

  Shocked by the exhaustion on the boy’s face, Caleb looked down and registered his wooden leg.

  “For Christ’s sake, Caleb,” Mr. Webler said. “I know you struggled to follow orders as a subordinate, but is it too much to ask for you to take proper instructions from my secretary?”

  For a second Caleb pondered the question quite soberly, and wondered, with a calculated rationale, if he might serve the moment better by excusing himself and jumping out the window.

  “What on earth is so important for you to evade a hop-legged man and steal your way up the stairs?”

  “I didn’t know he was lame,” Caleb mumbled.

  “I should excuse myself,” General Glass said.

  “Absolutely not,” Mr. Webler said. “You have an appointment to speak here today. Men with appointments, who obligate themselves to decorum, must not be made to bow to those who are so selfish as to defy procedures of civility. An esteemed soldier such as yourself knows as much.”

  “I’ll go,” Caleb said, in the meek voice of a chastised schoolboy, as though he was best put in a corner facing the wall.

  “But apparently only after ignoring the pleadings of a young man who is merely working to save for a prosthetic leg? For a soldier who had his face mangled, one would think you’d have understood the plight of a fellow cripple.”

  Caleb’s hand spontaneously reached for the scars on his face.

  “And then you go and interrupt the right honorable General Glass,” Mr. Webler said. “This man, an army man, who has entered our community to serve even those he fought against, simply wishes to procure a loan for his ailing mother, in need of emergency surgery. Imagine what it must’ve taken for him to humble himself into coming here today. Only for you to interrupt just as he’s making his request.”

  The only sound now was the boy, Jeffrey, huffing in fatigue, and Caleb could see General Glass staring upon the ground in some private humiliation and Mr. Webler’s depraved glee. And then there was August. Caleb sought desperately to detect a hint of sympathy in his gaze—the sort he might offer him when they lay beside each other. Or at least, the very least, he hoped to find August looking away, to know his friend shared in his embarrassment.

  But Mr. Webler, in his command of the room, would not let them share so much as a glance. He tu
rned to his son and drew his attention at once.

  “Would you mind telling your friend to heed his own advice and leave us in peace?”

  August put his pen down on the table. There was the start of a long breath, as if he was pained, and that was enough for Caleb. A sign of his anguish. Or perhaps Caleb was so broken that he could interpret his friend taking a breath to mean the world.

  “We have a lot of work to do,” August said, businesslike. “It’s best you go.”

  Caleb didn’t need to be told twice.

  * * *

  He had a recurring dream that took place among Wade Webler’s stables. He knew why it was set there: once Mr. Webler had held a party when Caleb was a child, and he and a group of boys had gone to the stables to play in the hay. He remembered well the heat of the place, warmed only by the bevy of bodies running about, as well as the horses, so many of them, leaning their heads over the gates as if to supervise the boys’ roughhousing. But in the dream, Caleb is grown, and the other boys are grown, and they are watching him from each stall, having replaced the horses altogether.

  He is slung sideways over the saddle, stomach first, his body fit smoothly upon the leather, his back arched at its groove. The stirrups are chained to two posts at his rear, his legs in turn tied to the stirrups. He cannot go free. Beside him there is a growing warmth, a crackle, akin to the sound of stepped-upon leaves: a basket of coals in line with his ear. The others have their eyes on him and him alone.