The Sweetness of Water

by Nathan Harris

  It’s August who appears at his back. Caleb can crook his neck and make out the fall of his blond hair, the slow bounce to his walk. His friend plucks the branding iron from the coals, hoists it for the others to see, then menaces Caleb’s face with it.

  “A T, fit for a traitor,” August says, and the other boys howl.

  The iron glows so hot that he can sense it over his entire body. Not a searing pain, but like a drop of wax, slowly spread wide by a single finger until it covers him whole. Caleb feels August pull his shirt up, his hands brushing against his back, and he can only grit his teeth as the iron descends upon him, and it is then, right then, he wakes up, so bothered, so perversely excited, that he has no option but to evacuate the energy within him in the most repugnant of manners, the remnants of the dream sloughed away as they’re drained from his being. He must go and retrieve a rag from downstairs. Clean himself of his embarrassment. Which was how he felt now, as he walked back toward Ray Bittle’s: repulsed by his own actions, by ever thinking it had been a good idea to come find August, or to come home from the war in the first place, for that matter. Perhaps Prentiss and Landry had the proper idea. Go north. Escape Old Ox for good. Ridley was in sight now, and he had half a mind to ride away on him and leave town forever.

  A familiar voice called out his name. He carried on toward Ridley as if he’d heard nothing but the cawing crows settled on Ray Bittle’s home. But he couldn’t ignore the pull on his shoulder, the fingernails digging into his shirt.

  Caleb recoiled at the touch. He spun around and caught August off guard.

  “Don’t,” Caleb said. “Leave it alone.”

  He had reached the donkey and began to untie the reins but August would not budge from beside him.

  “He ribs you seeking this very reaction,” August said.

  “Well, he should consider himself successful. You can write that down on your little notepad and report back to him.”

  August stretched out his hand and grabbed the reins from Caleb.

  “Do you think I enjoy such things?” August said. “To see you suffer like that?”

  “Considering I haven’t heard a word from you in weeks, I’d imagine you’re indifferent to how I feel.”

  “You cannot seriously be this sensitive. This has little to do with you. It’s that the wedding is next Tuesday and the planning of it goes on from the moment I’m relieved of work until the sun goes down.”

  “Please. As if anything ever stopped you before. We both know your father is behind this. Just as he was no doubt behind the decision to uninvite me and my family from the wedding.”

  And wasn’t it so much like the Weblers to plan a wedding for a Tuesday, to rob the town of a good day’s work and force them to come and pay their respects to the prince and his new princess bride?

  Their backs were to town, with Ridley shielding them from the main thoroughfare, and before them sat Ray Bittle, still fast asleep on his porch. They were very much alone. It was difficult to bear August’s gaze, for the blue of his eyes was as piercing and as suddenly felt as the center of a lit match before one’s face.

  “You have no idea,” August said. “I must live with him, Caleb. Endure him. At least until I get my own home, which I don’t look forward to. My God, the prospect of living with Natasha. When I see her it’s with the same boredom I feel when I read the reports on my desk every morning. It is a troublesome affair, weddings and women and work, and I had far more clarity in the war than I do here. I mean that, too. I’d much rather dig graves in the most hardened ground than marry Natasha and work for my father and listen to a Union general debase himself for a few dollars.”

  “You think I don’t feel that way? I work in the field all day, playing with soil, and at night my father has me reading books on agriculture. As if I have the slightest interest in knowing whether grass clippings or straw work better than mulch. The only reprieve would be our times together, which you’ve denied us for no reason I can tell.”

  “Must I make it plain to you?” said August, struggling to keep his voice down. “Because I will. If that’s what you need.”

  Caleb shrugged with deliberate nonchalance, yet his heart beat so rapidly that he felt it reverberating beneath his feet like a ground tremor.

  “He knows,” August said. “He has always known. How we feel for one another. He makes it his goal to ridicule. He calls you the little girl, and any mention I make of you is met with derision at your being a coward. Even at socials he cites you as an example of everything wrong with the Southern cause, the lack of spirit that allowed us to lose so much.”

  Caleb tried to reclaim the reins from his friend’s hands, but August would not relinquish them—would not stop talking.

  “And don’t even get me started on your parents. Your mother’s outrageous behavior at the Beddenfelds’, acting like some sort of lunatic—”

  “She was offended; she was only protecting her family.”

  “—or your father with his Negroes. The gall to let them live in his home—”

  “They don’t live in our home. It’s a silly rumor that will not cease.” Caleb stopped himself. “And what if they did?”

  “Caleb,” August said. “You know there’s no one I would rather spend time with than you, but it can’t be.”

  “Yet you said nothing would change. Your exact words.”

  “You changed. All of you Walkers changed.”

  “We lost, August. The world has changed. Can’t you see that? Or are you as dim as your father?”

  “Keep it down,” August hissed. He looked around, but the road was empty and even Ray Bittle had yet to stir.

  Caleb shook his head and finally yanked the reins so hard they slid through August’s grip. He mounted Ridley and addressed his friend once more:

  “I recently overheard Prentiss, one of those Negroes your father hates so dearly, tell my father how he’d seen a fellow he knew as a boy, another slave, begging in the camps outside town. Prentiss didn’t spare him a cent. Was that a crime? he wanted to know. To be so cold to someone he’d grown up beside? What if this distance happened between him and his own brother? He seemed to have a fear somewhere in him that they were growing apart. My father told him not to be silly. That two people so close would never let such a thing happen. What bound them was too strong. I thought my father had provided him sage advice. I wonder now if he misspoke.”

  August’s jaw was locked tight in rage. There was no remedy for this occasion, and Caleb knew how this had to have jolted him—what it meant to lose control of the relationship August had steered with such command that Caleb’s obedience had never been questioned. And now, it seemed, their old ways were over.

  “Take care, August. Give Natasha my kindest regards. Also, you can let your father know I consider him an insufferable prick.”

  He took Ridley off at a saunter, and by the time he was home, he had made his own decision to leave Old Ox, for once and ever. It was only a matter of where to go. Somewhere more temperate, maybe—certainly someplace no one would know him, a town, or even a city, where a man with a curious face and a quiet disposition might go unnoticed in a crowd.

  These thoughts occupied him until late the following morning, when he was washing up at the water pump beside the fields during a break in his work and his mother appeared with a paper in hand.

  “A message from town.”

  “From who?” he said, drying his hands on his pants.

  “He didn’t care to say.”

  There were only two words, written in pencil: Pond. Sunday.

  * * *

  He knew by the lumbering gait, the colossus of the shoulders, the sheer immensity of the man, that it could be no one but Landry fleeing them through the woods, as there was no one like him in all of Old Ox. It seemed at first that because Landry was of one world and August the other, some force, some greater balance of things, would keep them separate. The belief persisted in Caleb even when August grabbed a solid castoff branch, thick as
an arm, and carried it upon his shoulder like a carbine rifle; even when they emerged from the end of the woods to the beginnings of his father’s farm, the distant cabin in sight, and found Landry fallen in the dirt, clutching an ankle.

  August stood before him, and Caleb, at last understanding the moment, cried out for him to stop. He had never before heard Landry make any sound at all, but now Prentiss’s brother issued dreadful moans, so pitiful and high-pitched as to bring to mind a wounded child.

  Yet August appeared oblivious to everything but the source of darkness within him that had brought him so much pleasure in the war. He asked Caleb why he was protesting, for this was simply a nigger, one that didn’t know its place. Caleb explained their relation and August smiled. He told Caleb he was doing him a favor. That this would be good for his family.

  Landry attempted to stand but August put his boot against his chest and that was all it took to hold him still. Where was Landry’s strength? Caleb wondered. He’d never seen a man more vicious with an ax, yet Landry now whimpered under the sole of a boot. His eyes searched around in fright, and his jaw, that loose appendage, trembled under the weight of his own cries.

  Caleb was on the ground. He had no idea how he’d gotten there, sitting in mud and slick leaves, with his hands covering his eyes. If he could only rise up he could stop August himself. He could right things. But he was so terrified he could not bear the sight, let alone think of moving. He watched through his fingers as August coolly took the branch from his shoulders with both hands. Then, at what seemed the last moment, Caleb shouted to August that Landry could not speak. The man had no words in him at all. He would never tell a soul what he had seen.

  Caleb let his hands fall to his side, and for a moment August wavered. Landry stared up at this assailant so intensely, so resolute in his gaze, that Caleb thought he might have found some source of strength. And he had. Only in a way Caleb could not have foreseen.

  “I c-c-c,” Landry stammered endlessly, refusing to let rest whatever statement he was forming, insistent that his voice be heard. It brought him to a sweat. Every ounce of his being was poured into creating the words. “I c-c-c can speak. Ain’t no different from you.”

  August turned to Caleb with a knowing grin, and he knew then that his friend was gone to him.

  The first blow landed upon Landry’s head. The man’s cries stopped immediately, and the forest went so quiet that the second blow echoed with a sickening crack, like a tree split by lightning. A trickle of blood ran from his head where a seam had opened. His head lolled forward, backward, then fell with the torpor of a bird shot from the sky.

  Caleb squeezed his eyes shut and covered his ears from the sound of vicious thuds. He could not move. His throat was too dry to emit noise. He sat clutching himself, waiting hopelessly for the barbarity to end.

  He might have lain there until nightfall had he not felt the hand on his head, the familiarity of the fingers rubbing his scalp to comfort him. August told him it was off-putting for him to act so sensitive. Caleb could not help now but to glance at Landry, to take in the mangled face, the eye sockets pooled with blood. He wondered if his friend would do the same to him. The branch was still in August’s hand, like a child’s toy, and anything felt possible. It was just then that two figures appeared in sun haze at the far side of the field.

  “Find yourself an excuse,” August told him. “I was not here.”

  The long shadow that had fallen over him lifted away. August was gone.

  CHAPTER 13

  George had risen early and brewed a strong cup of coffee. The first sip alone was so gratifying that he might as well have been a dog loosed from a kennel and given over to the smell of a fresh-cut lawn, such was the rush he felt. He let it sink into him and thought of nothing else for a time, but soon took to the front porch, where he sat alone in his wife’s rocking chair with no greater goal than observing the sunrise that began to grace the bottom of the valley. Sundays were the lone day of rest that he and Caleb and the brothers permitted themselves. Last night he had gone to speak with Clementine again, to hear of her daughter and to inform her of his life since his previous visit. The walk back had been miserable on his bones, and although Isabelle made no mention of his absence, she was quick to comment on how lame he had looked in the past few days. His only response was to ask her, good-naturedly, to stop drawing attention to his decrepitude. Many a thinker had devoted himself to questions of aging and death, yet the thinkers died at the same rate as the idiots, and so George had grown quite content with the idea of ignoring the process altogether. Still, after these recent months on the farm—first clearing the trees and then working the peanut field—he was swelled with pain by the end of each afternoon, and in the morning his joints were rigid, as if needing to thaw. The hot cup of coffee coating his insides was the only fit remedy he’d found.

  As the morning progressed, its only peculiarity was that Isabelle went to church, taking the carriage. This was odd, seeing as neither of them had attended in some time, but he did not question her reasons. Landry disappeared into the woods, as was his usual inclination. Prentiss did not appear from the barn. And Caleb was asleep. That was what would afflict George when he considered that day long after it was done: how there had been no rupture in its usual chronology, nothing to suggest the horrors that lay in store. He’d even observed Landry later that morning, sitting in a clearing in the woods, his back to him, wholly relaxed. And so it was all the more shocking to discover his bludgeoned body hours later—his legs bent at the joints, curled in response to the blows; his face so mangled as to be indistinct. No life left in him at all.

  George had been having a conversation with Prentiss on the nature of livestock, the productivity of a slaughtered cow in its weight of meat versus a coop of chickens liable to lay eggs indefinitely, when the cries ripped through the forest.

  His first glimpse of the body was from enough distance that he did not recognize what lay before him. He thought it was the beast of the forest, caught and killed, and the idea (although vindicating) was anathema to his wish to see it alive, the majesty of it wandering the woods. But Prentiss rushed to the body so quickly that George’s mind rearranged its thinking and he knew then. He felt the urge to vomit. He stood there blankly, his hand over his mouth, until he saw the cowed creature sitting in the mud at the edge of the woods, and hurried to meet his son.

  Caleb’s face was so red as to appear burnt, and when he tried to speak, strings of saliva formed at the corners of his mouth. He couldn’t manage a single word.

  “You must tell us what happened,” George said.

  Prentiss had his head above the mess of blood and grime on his brother’s chest, pleading maniacally with the lifeless body.

  “Now we got plans, Landry, we got good plans, solid plans, so you get yourself up now. You ain’t the lazy one, I’m the lazy one, you get yourself up.”

  He moaned, and grabbed at Landry’s chest like an infant might grab at a mother’s breast.

  “Look at your new pants,” he said. “How you gonna dirty your pants right after you got on me about mine? Where do you get off?” he asked, and kept on asking. “Where do you get off?”

  Soon his anger was such that he was slamming his brother’s chest and demanding he respond, his pain so outsize that it seemed it might expand to take up the entire forest, the entire world.

  All the while, Caleb would not answer George, would only stare ahead as if whatever had happened had rendered him mute. George shook him repeatedly and said he knew he was not capable of this, begging that he acknowledge having no part, until finally Caleb wagged his head back and forth, an agreement that he hadn’t done it.

  “Then who?” George demanded, overcome. “Who would possibly do this?”

  Caleb still would not speak. He looked through the forest, as if beyond the trees, and there was only one place that rested there. George had no idea why his son had been in the woods—that part he would get to later—but he knew where his s
on’s eyes were leading him: directly toward the lone man who might have motivation to commit an act so heinous, for he had caused so much grief in Landry’s life before.

  He left Caleb and Prentiss behind with Landry’s body and set off for Ted Morton’s property at a pace he had seldom known. He did not go around Morton’s rail fence, but climbed it, miserably, and slid down the other side, giving himself a moment to recover from the effort. He was exhausted by the time he’d walked through the cotton fields, but his blood still flowed with rage no matter where it led him. If it was necessary, if it was just, he would bring Ted Morton to the same end that had befallen Landry.

  The stalks were a foot high around him and a scattering of men and women scraped at the topsoil, perhaps for the last time before bloom. They looked up at him with some confusion before returning to work, a few giving him nods—smiles even—which he did not return, considering the nature of his visit. He was before the old slave cabins when Gail Cooley appeared, almost unrecognizable with the flecks of mud on his face, his pants rolled up to his shanks, and the wide-brimmed hat shading his eyes.

  It was odd to see him without Ted Morton leading him this way and that upon a horse, and it appeared to give Gail great consternation to start the discussion on his own.

  “Mr. Walker,” he said. “I seen you walking through the fields.”

  “Where is Ted?”

  “In the fields himself.”

  “On a Sunday?”

  “We don’t got the hands to take many days off. He says next Sunday, maybe, if we get all that cotton scraped.”

  “Take me to him.”

  Gail balled up his face, seeming to negotiate whether to accept direction from George. But he acquiesced and told George to follow him. They came upon Ted in one of the furrows, cutting grass on the topsoil alongside his son, William. Ted was as battered as Gail appeared. The work seemed to have shrunk him, yet he still was huffing out orders as if he owned the workers before him. When he made out George, he stopped for a moment, and the people around him did the same. He and George sized each other up.