The Sweetness of Water

by Nathan Harris

  “I will give you this one chance to confess to what you did,” George said. “You claim to be an honest man. A good man. Then you will admit to your crime.”

  Ted unbuttoned the top of his shirt and fanned himself with his hat.

  “George, I ain’t got the slightest clue what you’re talking about. But I got half a mind to shove this hoe right up your ass.”

  “Always voicing one threat or another.”

  “I’d be right glad to turn it into a reality for you. I’ll lay you out on my knee and stick the handle of this hoe so far up your behind you’ll be able to turn your soil with a squat and a shuffle.”

  It was an infuriation built up over a lifetime, but still, the sudden rage in George was a surprise to everyone. He rushed Ted with a ferocious howl. Ted’s eyes went bright for a split second. He grabbed George by the shoulder, stepped out of the way, and let the old man’s momentum carry him to the ground.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Ted yelled.

  The plantation was at a standstill. William, the boy, laughed like a yipping dog, and Gail rallied himself next to Ted in some show of solidarity.

  George stood up slowly, minding his hip, and brushed the dirt off his front.

  “Admit what you’ve done,” he said.

  “Admit to what? Goddamn it, George, I’m out here breaking my back for pennies day after day, working like a slave to make a decent wage. Whatever you think I done, unless it involves a hoe or a plow, it just ain’t happened.”

  “You killed him. You killed Landry. And you will confess to it. Before me. Before your God. And before the law.”

  Ted looked at him in confusion. Then, suddenly, recognition broke across his face.

  “You talking about that nigger of mine you stole? He’s dead?”

  George made to rush Ted again.

  “Hold on now,” Ted said. “I told you, I ain’t got no idea what you’re jawing on about. It’s as I said, I been here working, and at night I got my wife screaming my ear off because I don’t even have the time to give her a nod hello. And you think I’m out killing niggers in my spare time? My own niggers at that.” He laughed at this.

  “You did not own him,” George said. “And that’s precisely why you killed him.”

  “When did this happen, might I ask?”

  George was still simmering, but it was the first time he’d been made to consider the sum of the circumstances, and he answered so as to think through the issue himself.

  “I saw him earlier. So it would have been sometime this afternoon.”

  “And I got a good dozen men who can attest to me breaking my back since dawn.”

  George felt his temper dropping. He could still smell the dank soil in his nostrils from his fall, wet clay with a hint of manure.

  “Lord in prayer,” Ted said, “I did not lay a hand on that boy. Not in some years, at least. I mean I nearly skinned him alive, but that was some time ago. Even then I had the smarts not to kill him. And you know, I rather liked his brother, the one who spoke. He had a knack for picking.”

  Gail nodded along in agreement. “Ain’t that the truth.”

  Ted went on. “Now, if you feel the need to get the law out here, and you think you got some case, well, I’ll be happy to have another break in my day to make a fool out of you. But if this is all over, I’d give you the same advice you gave me a while back—get the hell off my property. Pardon me for not having them pretty words to make it sound as nice as you did.”

  It was clear that Ted hadn’t done it. Between him and Gail, the two had barely enough wit to mount a horse without falling off its backside, let alone murder a man, form an alibi, and defend it so vigorously. There was no choice but to apologize, turn from Majesty’s Palace, and walk back to the woods with an anger he could no longer point toward Ted. Or anyone else for that matter. It wasn’t anger anymore. By the time he climbed the rail fence again, it was sadness that injured him—rang through him with the same tone of Prentiss’s cries, shook him like the trembling hands of his son.

  CHAPTER 14

  Prentiss had learned from Landry that the language of grief was often nothing more than silence. He’d felt it himself on occasion, but never with his brother’s fervor. Until now. Until this very moment. There was a strange way of his hurt he could not grasp. For so long Landry had been the focus of his dreams, his world, and Prentiss felt there was a selfishness in his brother’s sudden absence, as though rather than truly dying, Landry had been set free, only to leave Prentiss in the horror of living without the very person who had made doing so worthwhile.

  There was no word for what lay before him. He could not say body. Could not say corpse. It was a desecration. Something unholy. The feet leading to the legs, the legs to the torso, the torso to…

  When he’d gathered himself, he stood and refused to look back down. His eyes landed on Caleb, the boy so pathetic, so loaded up with his own fright, that it took every fiber of Prentiss’s being not to put his hands on him right then and there. Caleb rose, his eyes bulging, animal-like, staring about as if lost in his own delirium.

  “Sit back down,” he said.

  “I need to go to the house,” Caleb said. “I need to clean this grime off of me. Need to get away from this.”

  Prentiss told him he wasn’t going anywhere. Neither of them were.

  “I can barely breathe. My heart, I can’t stay here.”

  Prentiss knew not to touch the boy. Knew, with what had already taken place, with his position in this circumstance, how even the slightest mistake would mean more ruin. But he blocked Caleb’s way with a menacing stance, his shoulders wide, mouth curled, emanating every ounce of anger he had in the hope of keeping the boy in place. Caleb cowered once more to the ground and covered his face with his hands. No blood on those hands, Prentiss noticed. Just more mud.

  The boy was blabbering now, muttering about a twitch, a movement of the body, a chance to bring Landry back to life. Prentiss, fighting back the tears that threatened to overwhelm his anger, told him not to speak again. Not a word.

  The forest was still, the only sound that of Caleb’s foot jerking in place, the mud beneath his shoe squelching in rhythm, as if the ground itself wanted to bear witness but couldn’t get out the words.

  “We gonna figure this out,” Prentiss said. “And we gonna need your help. Can you pull yourself together and be of some use? Can you do that for me?”

  It was as though Caleb reverted entirely to a child, his words coming in between sobs.

  “Mother!” he yelled. “I need to speak with my mother. Let me go. She’ll know what to do. She can help get me balanced, and then I can speak on this, all of this, but I’m begging you to let me be gone from here.”

  Prentiss went numb, and once more he felt the consuming silence that had stifled his brother for so many years, as though Landry’s pain had left his body upon his death, entered the air in that awful smell (of iron, of blood, of a body opened and laid bare), and entered Prentiss’s own soul. For the first time he felt a pang of sympathy for the boy before him. Because Prentiss desperately longed for his own mother. He could not blame Caleb for calling for his; for wishing he could hear her say his name and give him the measure of comfort he wanted more than anything else in the world.

  And the boy’s father was always one remove away. Even now George was already out seeking answers, already finding ways to rectify his son’s wrongs. What Prentiss wouldn’t give for his own saviors. His mother, beneath the courage, beneath the firm hand she used to keep him and Landry in line, had been as scared as they were. It went unspoken but he could sense it hidden behind the false smiles she gave Mr. Morton at every opportunity, desperate to keep her children from harm; the grimaces she displayed when her sons acted out, knowing they could spell their own end with the slightest wrong move. For hadn’t she already seen the result of Landry simply reaching out to touch a fly in the air? A mother’s love didn’t seem quite so full when she couldn’t offer even a glimmer of
security that the following day would bring the contentment that they sought. That they deserved.

  Even still, he wished to call her name, to sit beside Caleb and wallow in the mud. To feel anything but the pain. To hope, to pray, that someone might come and make things better. He’d even prayed for a father back then, during the time it felt all right believing the man was somewhere nearby, just waiting to make himself known, to come inside their cabin and hold their mother with one hand and Prentiss in the other (for his arms were wide, all-encompassing, of this Prentiss was certain). Soon he would hold Landry as well, all of them together, and inform his family, finally, that he had made a life for himself beyond Old Ox, and they were now fit to join him. It had even been a game, of sorts. To work hard enough in the fields, to complain so little, that Papa would return and make things right.

  He’d let the notion slip once to another boy around his age as they were cleaning the grime off their feet on a Saturday afternoon. The water from the well was so cold that they’d run to the cabin porch to dry their feet in the sun, and as they’d recounted the morning’s work, Prentiss had said his own father might just be so proud he would come right back home to swoop him away. Wouldn’t that be something? he asked. Maybe, he said to the boy, his papa would have room for him, too. The boy didn’t even blink before relating what his own mother had told him on the matter. That Landry and Prentiss’s father had dropped dead when the sun was going low after a day in the field. He’d been working hard to maybe earn a little extra ration for Prentiss’s mother and had started yelling out about a dizzy spell, screaming for some water, but no one answered. They said his heart gave out so fast nobody saw the body drop. He was found in the row, the cotton from his open bag covering his face like fresh linens blowing in the wind. Even the boy, hearing himself tell the last part, grew quiet at the eeriness brought to life. It didn’t take him long to recognize that Prentiss hadn’t ever heard a word of what he’d just shared. Later Prentiss would realize his mother had to have been carrying Landry at the time. That of the two brothers only Prentiss had been alive, a baby seen and felt by his father, before the man passed on and became something imaginary.

  The boy left then, and Prentiss, marooned on the porch, had been stricken with the same numbness that Landry’s death now occasioned in him. Back then, evading the pain wrought by the image of a man he’d thought of as invincible alone in the fields, hand on his chest, cotton flittering into his mouth before the wind shooed it off, Prentiss’s mind had focused only on the positive: that his father had really been there, working the same rows his son would come to work himself. If he blocked the hurt, there was a thrill to that single fact. In the days to come, he would wonder what other similarities might exist between his father and him and Landry. He knew it irked his mother, knew she had no interest in revisiting the past, but Prentiss couldn’t help peppering her with questions. Was their father ungainly and careful, like Landry? Or did he run with the speed that made all the other children envious of Prentiss? Which of them had their father’s smile? His eyes?

  He no longer remembered her answers to those questions. Not a one. Rather he recalled her row with the mother of the boy who’d shared the truth of his father’s death. She reprimanded the woman for putting into her son’s head awful things he didn’t need to know, much less tell her boys about. Prentiss watched her from the side of the cabin, her voice booming with fury. It was her secret to tell when she saw fit, his mother shrieked. Her husband’s death, her hurt to share with the man’s boys.

  At the time Prentiss couldn’t imagine what she found so terrible that she’d made the entire plantation swear an oath to keep the information guarded for so many years. But turning back to face what was left of his brother, he perceived what must have come to her mind anytime he mentioned his father at all: that body in the field, the torture of the loss. And he realized what image would come to his own mind, from that point on, whenever his brother was brought up. The horror was so unimaginable that he wanted to collapse, but when Caleb moved again to try to leave the site for home, Prentiss once more stood tall, stood strong.

  “I can make this right,” Caleb said. “I just need—”

  Prentiss put a hand on Caleb’s shoulder. Did not grip it. Just a touch. And then whispered into his ear, “There ain’t gonna be no going back, Caleb. You can’t make none of this right. We gonna wait right here. Just like I said.”

  Out of the corner of his eye he recognized, wrongly, the shadow that he had come to intuit as his brother, forever one step to the side, out of sight but always present. Rather it was George, holding his hip and hobbling toward them, covered in mud. George would speak now and take control and that was all right. For however long Prentiss had sought to steer his own way in the world, this was one occasion where he wished to relinquish that drive and to live without feeling, without thinking, to sit in the dark and consider nothing but the blackness of the inside of his eyelids, or the darkness of the world itself, as he had on so many sleepless nights in his youth, after his mother was sold away.

  “Thank God!” Caleb said, enlivened by the sight of his father, his protector. “Now we’ll really fix this, Prentiss. I vow to you.”

  It was knee-jerk for Prentiss, thinking that the boy was trying to run off again. To step to him once more. This time Caleb did not startle, but stood there eyeing Prentiss, for Prentiss had no power now that they were not alone. He and Landry had played a game like this as boys. One would move forward, like a taunt, a threat, testing whether the other would flinch. Then Landry would give chase, his eyes wide, the two of them running in circles until Landry caught his older brother and slung him over his shoulder, then tossed him into a pile of leaves, or hay in the horses’ stable, with a flick of his arms.

  There would be no chasing here. Prentiss retreated, turned away from George’s approach, and glanced again at Landry’s corpse (for that’s what it was, he’d settled on it, and the word must be said). The eyes that had once been as wide as could be were now shielded in blood and would see Prentiss no more. The sight brought him to his knees. Brought him, for one last time, to grab hold of the brother he’d lost.

  CHAPTER 15

  Prentiss refused to move from his brother’s side. George left him there and deposited Caleb at the cabin with his mother, who had returned home from church. She had no idea what had taken place but already sat beside him on the couch. He would not let her touch him, but only shifted back in his seat whenever she drew too close. He brushed away her hand. Looked beyond her when she sought out his gaze.

  “There’s been a murder,” George said. “Landry.”

  “A murder. What on earth?”

  She had as many questions as George, and he could only tell her it was not Ted, whom he’d already accosted, and that Prentiss was still in the woods.

  “I need to get word to the sheriff,” he said. “You keep him calm.”

  She was trembling now. “And Caleb? What’s happened to Caleb?”

  “You know as well as I do.”

  “Heavens,” she said. “Oh, good God. Go.”

  George fetched Ridley from his stable. He rode to the house of Henry Pershing, his nearest neighbor toward town, yet even though he could hear voices inside, not a soul came to greet him.

  “Henry! Show yourself!” George shouted. “Your horses are stabled, I know you’re home.”

  No answer arrived. The same was the case with Robert Cord. Blair Duncan peeked out the door but had no interest in his cause, owing to the conflict with the Beddenfelds’ supper party, and soon, to George’s dismay, it was apparent there was no one who would lift a finger in any pursuit he had authored, and that once-helpful neighbors—peers from grade school, neighbors his entire life—saw him as unworthy of so much as a favor.

  He was nearly to town when he came upon a barefoot man who, upon closer inspection, was nothing more than a tall boy. He looked a bit like Landry, in fact. It was the first moment George felt overcome by the recent loss, and he
could not muster any words.

  The boy stared back in confusion.

  “Sir?” he said, after an uncomfortable moment. “Can I help you?

  George collected himself. He pulled a dollar from his pocket.

  “I need a job done. I don’t care how long it takes, long as you see it through.”

  Whether his plan would accomplish anything was uncertain, but the authorities must be summoned—that much was sure. The sheriff for the county, one Osborne Clay, was a rare sight. When he was around it was often to investigate the brothel in town—operations that lasted long into the night. But other than his nocturnal proclivities, he was known to be a decent man, and if there was any chance to discover more information about Landry’s death, they would have to hope that Osborne might live up to his reputation.

  George hurried back to the farm but did not return to the cabin. He let Ridley carry him straight through the fields, to the edge of the forest.

  Prentiss was no longer crying. He lay facing upward, with the back of his head on his brother’s chest, gazing at the sky, his eyes so red with grief that he looked possessed. His hands were interlocked upon his own chest.

  George gingerly dismounted and rubbed his hip, clearing a clot of pain. He walked to Prentiss and told him he’d called for the sheriff: “I don’t know him well, but he is a good man, I’m told. He can help make this right.”

  A small theater of flies circled the air above the brothers’ heads. Prentiss sniffed loudly and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand.

  “Imagine the maggots will show up soon,” he said. “How long we got, you figure? Few hours?”

  George thought it best to remain silent.

  “Why ain’t you talking?” Prentiss said. “Of all the times for your mouth to run dry it’s gonna be right now?”

  George conceded that he didn’t know what to say. His hope was that the sheriff might show and they could begin to piece the crime together.