The Sweetness of Water

by Nathan Harris

  “You think a sheriff’s gonna help.”

  “If he doesn’t then we will find other means of recourse. We will work through this intelligently. Review the particulars. Prepare a timeline of events.”

  Prentiss stood up so quickly that George stopped speaking. They stared at each other. Prentiss’s entire face was swollen with grief. His cheeks had the puff of a newborn. His hair was matted with the filth of his brother’s death.

  “Prentiss, please.”

  Prentiss raised his fist and George cowered from the pending blow, but Prentiss merely splashed a finger across his cheek. A smear of blood. George touched his cheek, instinctively ran the wetness between his fingers and thumb.

  “You got all this,” Prentiss said, waving his hand about.

  “And what is that?”

  Prentiss stepped aside, and George’s gaze fell upon Landry: the bloodied cavity that had once been his cheek, the muddied swamp of blood that held his eyes.

  “How’s that for particulars, George?”

  As much as he wished to speak, George knew his words would offer Prentiss nothing. That to give an apology would be a vulgarity. The only compassionate act was to face the moment with nothing more than a pose of sympathy—to provide his friend the ministry of his company. They stood together for some time, neither uttering a word until Prentiss returned from his depths.

  “Where is your boy?” Prentiss asked George.

  “Inside.”

  “I’d like a word with him.”

  “He did not do it. I’m not sure he could even if he wanted to.”

  “He ain’t do it, that’s true. But I think he knows who did.”

  George could not disagree. “Perhaps it’s best I speak with him first. He’s more likely to tell his father what he knows.”

  Prentiss breathed and let the idea settle.

  “But we need to get”—George paused—“this body to the barn. We can’t wait for the sheriff for that. Like you said. The elements and whatnot.”

  “I can carry him,” Prentiss said. “I’ve carried him my whole life. You deal with your boy.”

  “At least get Ridley and the sleigh. No need to make this harder than it already is.”

  “You just worry about getting some answers. By the end of the day, I’d like to know who I gotta kill.”

  George walked back to the cabin through the peanut fields, still blooming magnificently with their radiant rows of greenery and their yellow flowers. He could only guess at the bounty under the soil. He knew, passing by these plants, that he might never work the field again. But even so their beauty was radiant, peaceful even, and he deemed the months of labor worthwhile, even necessary, if it worked to offset the slightest fragment of horror that had passed in that one single day.

  * * *

  How long had George been gone—almost to town and back, and then out to see Prentiss—and Caleb was still staring listlessly out the window when he came into the cabin. His mother was surveying him closely, taking stock of his every movement. The boy wouldn’t say a word, wouldn’t make eye contact with Isabelle or himself. As a child, George remembered, Caleb had often hid his head inside the folds of her dress when he was distraught, and Isabelle would walk around the house as if she’d sprouted these pale little legs overnight. Now, like George, Caleb had learned to hide within the folds of his own mind.

  His wife and son looked up at him, and he went to Caleb and pulled him up by the shoulder.

  “My study,” George said.

  “Give him some time,” Isabelle said.

  “We don’t have time.”

  Isabelle stood and watched as George took Caleb by the hand and led him upstairs, through the hallway, and into the study.

  “Sit,” George said.

  Caleb obeyed.

  George went to the other side of his desk and sat as well, feeling like the doughy mound of flesh and bones that he was, seemingly on the cusp of coming apart, a culmination of so many years sagging and creaking. The fatigue had come on the second he stepped inside the study. His body was so eager to give up on the day that he had to squint to keep himself alert. He considered calling down to Isabelle for some coffee but thought better of it, assessing that he had just enough energy left for this single conversation before he collapsed.

  “Why were you in the woods, son?”

  Caleb, who had been hanging his head, raised his eyes.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “If you’re wondering. If the thought of my well-being entered your mind.”

  “I see that. I see that you’re healthy, that you’re safe inside your own home, that your mother is waiting on you, hand and foot. Why were you in the woods?”

  “God forbid you might ask how I am. No, that would not do. Because nothing escapes the almighty George. Because you see I am well and it is impossible, simply impossible, that I might feel differently. That it might stand to ask me, instead of telling me, how I feel.”

  “Why were you in the woods?”

  “I was only ever another project of yours. Like your cabinets. Like your moonshine. Like your garden. Like Prentiss and Landry.”

  “Caleb, I will ask you once more.”

  “I know I was a lost cause. Just like the others. And I have come to terms with that. But how bitter must you be? To know you’re the one standing behind every single failure that has come through your life, and in the face of so little success.”

  The ground was shaking, as if some tremor were claiming the cabin, and it took George a moment of panic, of thinking to rush outside, before he realized the feeling had been born within his chest, some fissure in his heart. He pulled himself out of his chair. The blinds were drawn against the ebbing sun and there was no candlelight. The shadows of the books cast a blackness upon the room. George could not remember hugging his son since he’d returned from the war. He walked around the desk and stood behind him, then leaned down and crossed an arm around Caleb’s chest. The boy began to cry like a child.

  George asked the question once more. At last Caleb told him what August had done.

  CHAPTER 16

  As night fell, George heated water for a bath. He asked Isabelle to let him know if Prentiss left the barn, if Caleb emerged from his room (where he had been since their conversation concluded), or if the sheriff arrived. She sat in the dining room, following his wishes. She knew Caleb would not come downstairs, seeing as he had refused to open his door for over an hour. It was deathly quiet. Every creak of the house or whine of the wind brought her to attention, but not a soul appeared. She was growing restless when George called out her name from the bathroom.

  “Yes?” she said, walking over.

  “Could you come closer to the door, so we might speak?”

  She retrieved a chair from the kitchen table and put it beside the door.

  “Are you there?” he asked.

  “I’m here. But I cannot see outside from my seat, George.”

  He let it pass unremarked.

  “I suppose everyone is asleep,” she said. “It’s quite late.”

  There was no light except the candle on the windowsill. She found the shadows of the house, each specific slant of darkness, intensely familiar: they fell upon the living room like patterned echoes of the furniture, as if the night, in conversation with her designs, was offering its own interpretation.

  “We will need a coffin,” George said.

  She opened the door slightly. A candle was lit there, too, yet the room was still lost to the steam of the bath. She could make out only the sodden strands of George’s hair and the slope of his shoulders before his body merged with the lip of the tub.

  “It should be sweet birch,” she said. “It has a hint of wintergreen but…stronger notes. Bolder. I think of peppermint.”

  “Peppermint?” George said.

  She turned away from him, back toward the shadows.

  “I know it sounds silly. But my uncle was buried in a birch casket. They delivered it while he was still alive
. Seems odd, doesn’t it? But my aunt was nothing if not prepared. She had it stored in the cellar while he was expiring upstairs. Silas and I went down there to see it, and it had the most delightful smell. Bear in mind the cellar was perhaps the most odious place on their entire property. I recall having Silas take the top off so I could lie in it. It was roomy, all in all. He objected to putting the top on while I was still inside, but eventually he did, and I lay there in silence, alone with myself. It was peculiar. The inside smelled like nothing. As if they had somehow managed to keep the scent on the outside of the coffin. Which I don’t find possible.”

  “You were grieving,” George said after a time. “Perhaps there was no smell at all. Inside or out.”

  His voice was muffled by the door and so she entered the bathroom. The room swirled with the steam of the bath, great clouds of heat. She placed her chair a few feet behind him and then came forward, grabbed George’s towel, and dabbed her face before dropping it back on the stool at his side. After a pause she grabbed it once more, refolded it properly, and placed it there again.

  “Will you tell Prentiss?” she asked.

  George sank lower into the tub. He’d told her what Caleb had confessed. There were so many horrific elements to the tale that she had trouble separating her emotions: those toward her son, and those toward Prentiss for what had befallen Landry. Not to mention her hatred of the Weblers, long suppressed but now overpowering.

  “What do you think?” George asked. “What should we do?”

  She could not recall a time in recent memory when he had asked her opinion on anything of such significance. The shallowest part of her took it as a weakness—as if her husband, in his increasing frailty, now had to look to his wife for help in ways he never had before. Yet the truest part of her relished his need for her.

  “You must tell him,” she said. “Any omission of truth would only injure him further.”

  “Yet if he was to seek revenge…”

  “We must do our best to deter him from any such inclination. Perhaps you wait a time to tell him. Let the anger subside.”

  “No more than a day.”

  “Any longer would be wrong,” she agreed. “And what of the sheriff?”

  George said he believed that Osborne, who had a spine, unlike most everyone else in the county, was levelheaded enough to take this seriously. He wanted to do all he could to avoid involving the army, given that the town hated them enough already without them proclaiming their allegiance to the other side once and for all.

  He relaxed a bit farther into the tub. The last thing she wished to do was burden him, but a final, awkward question pressed on her mind.

  “George, what was our son doing out there with August? What is between them?”

  He took a long breath.

  “What is between anyone?” George asked her. “I couldn’t say. Trust. Suffering. Some element of love, to be sure. How often did we see Caleb come home in tears, cursing his friend, only to keep his eye on the window all throughout supper, hoping he might appear once more? They had a bond. Why inspect it any closer?”

  “Perhaps it’s easier for you,” she said. “I just don’t know anymore. This business with August—it was a relief, I believe. The idea that someone else might carry the responsibility for how he’s turned out. But I go back and look at Caleb’s letters, searching for some semblance of the boy we raised, yet they’re so empty. So hollow. I fear it was always in him. That blank space. And we missed it.”

  George appeared to be at a loss for words, but when he finally spoke it was with a confident tone of finality.

  “Every time he fell, we were there. That is all that could be asked of either of us.”

  He looked so helpless, so at rest. She moved her chair closer to the tub, so close she might see the grime of the water, the ripples of George’s belly descending into the depths of the bath.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello,” she said. She put out a hand and stroked his cheek, rolled her finger down the length of his chin.

  “If Prentiss agrees,” he said, “I think sweet birch will do.”

  Isabelle made a small noise of agreement. “It’s the finest option,” she said. “Appropriate for the occasion.”

  And with this, exhausted, she stood up to leave. It was time she got some rest.

  * * *

  When she rose in the morning George was fast asleep. Once dressed, she thought to knock on Caleb’s door, but figured him to be asleep as well, and went downstairs instead. Outside, in the early-morning dim, the grass was tinged with dew. She started out the back door to feed the chickens, and in doing so glimpsed the outline of Prentiss, with only the clothes on his back and a bucket in hand, walking off toward the fields. A part of her wished not to intrude upon his morning, yet another part felt deeply that in times of grieving the hospitality of others was paramount to overcoming loss. When her friends had brought flowers upon learning what had turned out to be the rumor of Caleb’s death, it had been a source of comfort. No one, she knew, would be bringing Prentiss anything at all. She slipped on George’s boots, as they were the only ones sitting out back, and made her way after him.

  The farm was still edged in dark, the plants dappled in the morning shadows. For a moment she simply watched Prentiss. He was hand-weeding one of the furrows—pulling ryegrass out by the root and dropping it into the bucket, carefully working around each plant.

  As she drew closer she called his name and waved. He offered her a glance before continuing. She was beside him now but might as well have been invisible.

  “Should you be working?” she asked. “I’m certain George is not expecting you to. Not with all that’s happened.”

  “I don’t mind,” he said.

  “Is there any way I get you to quit?

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I was about to make myself some toast. I could brew some coffee as well. Why don’t you join me inside?”

  He shook his head resolutely.

  “Ain’t nothing for me in that house.”

  “Coffee does not interest you, then.”

  “Ain’t what I mean.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The bucket hung limp in his hand. He stared at her, his eyes sparked with anger.

  “I mean what I said. This ain’t complicated, Mrs. Walker. I’m right where I want to be. With these plants. See ’em? They thriving. I made ’em that way. Me and my brother. And I’ma keep ’em thriving, keep ’em strong, ’cause there ain’t nothing else I—”

  He could not finish. He rubbed his hand from his forehead to his mouth, then from cheek to cheek, as if doing so might scour his pain.

  Though hers had abated with Caleb’s miraculous return, Isabelle knew the feeling: the utter helplessness, the all-consuming pain. She could only say what was on her mind. What came to her naturally.

  “He left me a pair of socks. It could not have been anyone else. Right on the clothesline, the same place where I first met him. They’re the color of the sky, soft blue, and they fit so snugly you would have thought he’d taken the measurements of my foot. It was perhaps the nicest gesture I’ve known. We hardly shared a word, but his kindness was unrivaled. There was a purity to him I can’t even begin to express. I’m not sure I understand it myself.”

  Prentiss stared at her vacantly.

  “You can have the socks if you wish,” she said. “A way to remember him.”

  He shook his head.

  “If he went and knitted you some socks, then they belong to you.”

  He reached down to retrieve the bucket and continued weeding.

  Isabelle stood for a time, wondering if they might continue talking, until she realized the moment was gone.

  “Perhaps it’s best I go back inside. Feel free to join us if you wish. Our home is open to you.”

  “He told me once about a field,” Prentiss said, stopping her. “It took him just about a whole morning to get the words out his mouth, but he told me. S
aid he went out in the woods and found a field of dandelions, so many together that the ground was white as snow, and he sat there for a time thinking, and in the time it takes your heart to beat, a gust of wind poured through that field and every single seed shot up into the air, ain’t a single one left on the ground, and the whole sky was bright with their travels, and then they were gone.”

  Isabelle stood there frozen, contemplating the image.

  “My brother seen more in the past few weeks in them woods than a common man might see in a lifetime.”

  His eyes sought her own and he looked at her with a curiosity she’d never seen in him before.

  “Do you know it?” he asked. “That’s where I’d like to have him rest. I think he’d like that.”

  She didn’t know it, she said, but she would ask George. A plaintive smile flickered on Prentiss’s face and disappeared, and he turned his attention back to his weeding There was nothing further she could do, or say, to comfort him. What had passed was all there was.

  She walked back to the house, which was still at peace, and sat alone in the parlor with her knitting. It was a pleasant surprise when George appeared and asked what she’d like for breakfast, a mild shock that was exceeded when she heard galloping upon the lane. She opened the door to a halo of dust rolling toward them. The sheriff’s horse burst through it with his deputy in tow.

  George had her brew some more coffee as he went to get dressed, and both were prepared when the knock sounded upon the door and the two men came inside. Although her husband was familiar with Osborne Clay, she had seen him only once, from a distance in town, walking off-duty with a gang of other men. For this reason, it took her a moment to realize how large he had become, and still she gleaned nothing more from his appearance than the star on his chest before she retrieved his coffee from the kitchen. Only when George followed her over and whispered into her ear did she learn that Osborne Clay hadn’t gotten any larger. No. The man before them wasn’t Osborne Clay at all.

  CHAPTER 17

  The news regarding Sheriff Clay was unexpected. He’d come home one night after a meeting with one of his consorts, a woman of uncertain reputation, only to find his wife with a pistol in hand. She shot straight through his gut and watched him bleed out until his screams and profanations turned to apologies—at which point she called for a doctor. Clay managed to hang on for several days, but his body gave in by the end. His handpicked successor, Lamar Hackstedde, now sat at the kitchen table, sipping coffee and regaling George and Isabelle with the story.