The Sweetness of Water

by Nathan Harris

  The child was playing on the ground with a music box, a small ballerina twirling endlessly on a wooden platform. The box must’ve been broken, as no song accompanied the twirling, but she seemed unbothered by it.

  Isabelle was encouraged by Clementine’s boldness, her utter transparency, for it represented a detachment that spoke not of love, but a simple fondness, a professional sort no less. Yet it did not dispel all of her concerns—did not explain the foremost question on her mind.

  “I do wonder…” She glanced at Clementine uncertainly. Her voice trembled. She felt like a dog—asking a stranger of the intimacies of her husband, as though she knew him not at all. The embarrassment burned her insides, and she had a craving to get up and go. “Is George…unguarded with you? Is he open in that way?”

  It was the first time Isabelle saw emotion in Clementine’s expression, and it gave her the answer she sought without a single word uttered. Clementine responded almost under her breath, her eyes sympathetic as they met Isabelle’s.

  “It’s what he pays for. It has little to do with me.”

  “What exactly does he do?” Isabelle asked. “Hug you? Does George want a hug?”

  It sounded like a joke, but she could not have been more serious.

  “Sometimes, maybe, yes.”

  “Is it more than that? Does he cry for you?”

  Clementine looked at the ground, her lips tight, eyes veiled.

  “I see.” Isabelle stood up quickly, grabbing the basket of fruit as she readied to leave.

  “It could be any girl,” Clementine said.

  “But he’s chosen you.”

  The room was suffocating in its heat and Isabelle felt desperate to breathe fresh air. She’d reached the door when she felt the hand clasp her wrist and she pulled away with all her might, turning to catch Clementine breathing heavily, with an intensity that rivaled Isabelle’s own state.

  “He hasn’t chosen me,” Clementine said. “He’s chosen you.”

  She spoke as a boss might to an underling, directives that stung Isabelle.

  “He fears you. And he would have nothing if he was to lose your trust in him. So he can’t cry for you. Because he loves you. That’s how he operates—yes, it’s flawed, but it’s George. You can be angry at me if it helps you in some way, but if it’s because you think I’ve taken something from your marriage, you’d be mistaken. For George, at least, I’m helping keep it strong.”

  Isabelle opened the door and stepped out. The heat from inside the home had been so staggering that the sunlight was like a cool breeze. She stood along the railing of the home, peering out toward the street, where a man led a meandering tow horse down the way. By the time they were beyond her, she had calmed, and when she wheeled around, Clementine was leaning against the doorjamb, her head cocked in concern.

  “I have given up so much for that man,” Isabelle said. “Twenty-two years. And I hardly know him.”

  There was nothing for Clementine to say. Isabelle knew this, and was content to receive no response, only a look of understanding—the same, she was sure, that Clementine gave the men who paid her.

  Isabelle faced her fully, pressed out the wrinkles of her dress with her free hand, and stood straight.

  “Thank you for your time,” she said. “You were very accommodating.”

  “If you need anything further,” Clementine said, her concern still apparent, “don’t be afraid to ask. I do feel for you. Being George’s wife—that’s not an easy obligation.”

  She nodded and stepped back into her home.

  Isabelle collected herself and tried to put on a smile for anyone familiar she might meet as she reentered traffic. After only a few paces, her mind ventured off. Not having eaten all day, she was ravenous. She might devour all the fruit in her basket and still have room for more upon returning home. She imagined the juices staining her dress, the sticky remains of the peach crusting her lips. Perhaps she’d return to the cabin like a heathen having fled the wild. The thought nearly made her laugh.

  Near the square she stopped at Blossom’s Café. She’d never dined there but it felt like a perfectly worthwhile place to sit and ruminate. She leaned against the side of one of the barrels out front, put her basket down, and snatched a peach. She was halfway toward taking a bite when she caught sight of a few men inside the establishment, playing dominoes, sliding the pieces across the table, linking them to others. Her brother had a set as a child. There would be days when their father would be at work, their mother entertaining, and Silas and the other neighbor boys would be occupied by the tiles for hours. They did not play the actual game, but the child’s version—setting the pieces up in a row to fall. Her brother and his friends would line the dominoes up in as exotic a locale as possible: over books, under the bed. She would watch but was not allowed to play herself. Because she had never been included, she was left mostly to think of how little there was for her to do. Now, on this day, she pondered the opposite: not how little there was to do, but how much had been done—a trip to Selby, to Mildred’s, to Clementine’s—with so little accomplished. She was eating a peach. Watching men play dominoes. Thinking about how much life was like her brother’s games, each day a tile falling toward the next, leading to nothing but the end of the line.

  A boy appeared from the shop, youthful, his hair so fair it was clear it would darken as he got older and it drew color from the world. He could’ve been her son. He told her she would need to buy something if she was going sit in front of the store. She was still eating her peach. She took another one from the basket and gave it to the boy without uttering a single word. He didn’t pretend to decline, and instead put it to his mouth immediately.

  “Do you play?” she asked, and pointed at the dominoes inside.

  “No, ma’am,” he said, his mouth full.

  “Smart,” she said, picking up her basket. “That’s smart.”

  She left then but did not go home. Instead, she turned back and found her way, after a moment’s hesitation, to Clementine’s house. This time she knocked rapidly.

  When Clementine came to the door, Isabelle said, “There is something. A favor. I’m not beneath asking it of you.”

  “Well, be quiet about it,” Clementine said. “My girl’s asleep.”

  “You’re better with your words than I am. Far better. And the job I have in mind requires that skill.” Isabelle propped up her basket of fruit.

  Clementine looked back inside, checking on her child.

  “Let’s take a little walk,” she said. “And discuss whatever you’re on about.”

  “It’s a good cause,” Isabelle said. “A worthy one. I promise you that.”

  CHAPTER 20

  The world was visible to Prentiss only as it passed him by. Through the front door down the hall from his cell he caught a glimpse of patches of light, a blurry stream of bodies, the clipped colors of clothes. He heard the booming and fading of voices. But not a single soul stopped in to visit the man who would soon be hanged.

  There were other cells, all of them empty, as they had been since he’d arrived the day before. The only person who paid Prentiss any mind at all was Hackstedde himself, who sat at a desk, alternately throwing darts or rolling cigarettes, whistling and playing with his timepiece. He was, somehow, more restless than Prentiss, and after their first few hours together he could not help making conversation, which for Prentiss was far worse than the pain of silence. The sheriff seemed to believe that Prentiss was interested in his previous work as a patroller. He said he’d earned the nickname Bloodhound, though Prentiss could divine no reason for its bestowal, since not a single story ended with Hackstedde finding the slave he sought.

  “There was that boy on Aldridge’s land,” Hackstedde said. “We had him cornered in the woods when I got myself stung by a whole swarm of bees. Now, listen—I was so swollen from head to toe that I had to leave the Negro behind and get the rest of the gang to carry me back to town. I was on bed rest for a month of Sundays.”<
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  There was a waste bucket in the cell, half-filled by the last prisoner. No bed. Just an empty space. A pen hardly fit for a pig.

  “Another time,” Hackstedde said, “they sent me over to Pawnee, and I get to the front door of the plantation house and who owns the place but a Negro. Yeah, you heard me right, they had in there a Negro who went on and bought himself some other Negroes. I could hardly figure such an arrangement. And this Negro tries to tell me it’s not so uncommon. That might be the case in Pawnee, I tell him, but it’s not exactly a natural occurrence up in Old Ox. But anyway, his property was long gone, we didn’t even get a sniff of the boy. Probably in Canada by now.”

  Prentiss never responded, and eventually Hackstedde took offense, pausing to cast a wandering glance over the empty jail cells and tempting Prentiss to fill the silent lull. When he didn’t, the sheriff scowled at him.

  “Ain’t too long now,” he said balefully. “Tim should be back with that judge by dawn. Good Southern gentleman. He’ll take Webler’s word on things, sure enough. Promise you that much.”

  Prentiss retreated into himself. He knew how to live in his head. He’d made a similar journey every day in the fields, wandering in his mind’s eye to a place he’d never been, a place that was equal parts destination and idea. Elsewhere was the only name it carried. The barn beside George’s cabin was elsewhere; a patch of free ground up north was elsewhere; his mother was elsewhere; salvation was elsewhere; all those lives that passed outside the jail existed elsewhere (praise be to their good fortune); and a fate, any fate, other than the one that lay before him would be a perfectly fine road to elsewhere. The map, with all its many variations, was in his head, yet he knew quite well he would never make the journey.

  “Tim gets a bad reputation,” Hackstedde said, reclaiming his good cheer. “He is stupid, that I grant you, but the boy is a veteran, fought that first year before he was gutshot, and if you show your mettle on the battlefield, who am I to say you can’t be a county deputy? The least I can do is give him some time to show his grit. Besides, I spoke to the doctor, who said the boy is ‘battle weary.’ That’s what they’re calling it. He can hear a footstep and think he’s got his flank compromised, eyes all big, sweating and carrying on. Doc says he’ll get better, though. A matter of time.”

  For no other reason than boredom, Prentiss had begun to tabulate the many symptoms that Hackstedde’s girth inspired. The man’s mouth closed only when he needed to swallow; he was unsteady in his chair, prone to falling over but never quite doing Prentiss the favor; his skin was blotchy; and when he breathed, especially after one of his monologues, it sounded like the airy whine of a child nearing the end of a tantrum, so labored that the flame of the candle atop his desk would often flicker.

  His daughter, a young woman, had brought him lunch wrapped in paper—from the tavern next door, Prentiss guessed. It had been too hot to eat, but after a few minutes Hackstedde stuck his finger in the mashed potatoes, judged the temperature, and commenced. In contrast to what one might expect, given his slovenly appearance, he ate daintily, quietly, and with a solemn devotion to the task, as if it were an act of prayer.

  The silence didn’t last.

  “You know,” Hackstedde said, working through a chicken thigh, “you had yourself a visitor this morning while you were napping.”

  Prentiss propped himself up against the wall.

  Hackstedde waved the bone at his face.

  “That got your attention, didn’t it?” He laughed and clanged the chicken bone down. “Mrs. Walker came by. Drove that donkey all the way over here to make sure you’d made it in one piece. Tried to bribe me with a basket of fruit to see you. I told her, ‘Now, Mrs. Walker, do I look like someone who gets stirred up by the sight of a peach?’”

  “You ain’t let her in?”

  “I did you a service, boy. You needed that rest.”

  Prentiss could still feel the chafing imprint of the irons upon his wrists, though that wasn’t the worst of the punishments he’d faced on the journey to Selby: when they’d reached Stage Road, Hackstedde had shortened the leash, and Prentiss was bound so close to the horse that he could not avoid its droppings when they fell at his feet. The smell, ripe and putrid, was still on him. He couldn’t help thinking, much as it pained him, that it was better Isabelle had stayed outside.

  The sheriff took up the drumstick once more.

  “Don’t think I’m all bad because I showed her out. It’s just the rules: family only. And even that’s a privilege.”

  He stood and continued eating. The rest of the mashed potatoes, seasoned generously and dolloped with butter, disappeared in a few bites.

  “You know, the whole patrolling business, I didn’t have a passion for it. But you needed patrollers just like you need boys putting down railroad track, driving drays, tending bar—you get the idea.” He walked over to Prentiss’s cell, sniffed with displeasure, then snorted and spat toward the bucket of piss on the other side of the bars. “Same with sheriffing. See, you smell like a horse’s behind but I’m still over here feeding you like any other prisoner. It’s a job. I don’t play favorites.”

  “Maybe ’cause there ain’t no one else to pick out,” Prentiss muttered under his breath.

  Hackstedde leaned down, eyes glued on Prentiss, and slid the plate sideways between the bars. Chicken bones fell onto the floor of the cell.

  “Those are good leftovers,” he said, and returned to his chair. “You let that food go cold, it’s on you.”

  It was garbage, but Prentiss was so ravenous he couldn’t take his eyes off it. A remnant streak of the potatoes, snow white, had skittered across the floor of the cell a few inches beyond the plate; the remains of the chicken still gave off a drift of steam that tempted him. Hackstedde spectated with a single-minded intensity. Prentiss felt his eyes on him, could sense, deep within the man, a dire urge to see his prisoner capitulate.

  Prentiss put his nose up, assuming an air of disappointment.

  “Went and dropped your trash, sheriff. Best get a broom and clean it up.”

  “I’d say it’s up to you to keep your own cell in order, son.”

  “I’m fixin’ to die,” Prentiss said. “You can’t make me do a damn thing. So you can pick up that trash yourself. Or if you feelin’ lazy, which you seem prone to, you could wait for that deputy of yours to do it. I hear he’ll be back soon enough.”

  The sheriff’s face flashed a brilliant shade of red; his mouth flicked downward, and his double chin began to quiver. Then, like a river undammed, he burst forth, not in anger but in laughter, his whole upper half roiling in delight until he wobbled the legs of his chair. He slammed the table in relief, lit himself a cigarette with a last giggle, and shook his head in satisfaction.

  “You are delightfully mouthy,” he said. “There’s nothing quite like a nigger clever with his words.” He took a long drag. “Right and ready for the noose. Yes you are.”

  Prentiss sank against the back of his cell. It was darker there and he turned himself so that his face was to the wall and shut his eyes once more.

  “There was a fellow who worked alongside me when I was a boy,” Hackstedde said. “He was just like you. His name was Goodwin.”

  “I wouldn’t mind some quiet,” Prentiss said. “If you’d do me that much. And it really ain’t much, sheriff.”

  “No, now, this is a good tale. I thought ol’ Goodwin was the funniest fellow I’d ever met, black or white, red or yellow. Hell, the boy was so fair-skinned he was almost light as I am. Always had this grin painted on his face. God bless him, he could find the sunny side of a shadow…”

  If he focused, Prentiss could hear his brother’s footsteps. A soft patter behind him, like fat raindrops falling slowly from the leaves of a tree. That was all the noise he needed in a day. Not the utterance of a single word. Just the assurance that those footsteps were following his own. He tried to stay with them, but each moment they grew more distant, and he worried what would fill the void
when they were gone for good.

  “…You can imagine my shock when they told us that fool had run off. ‘We got a deserter’—those were the boss’s words. You could say that was the first time I ever hunted another man. The boss had me tag along with the dogs, and it took all night. I for one was certain he was long gone, was about to tell them as much, but then, in the light of the lantern, you see the folds over those dogs’ eyes lift for a moment, see their eyes spark, and suddenly they’re all barking at the same tree…”

  “Sheriff, if I clean up that food will you give me some peace?”

  “…Now I’m the only nimble one in the group, still a boy at the time, and seeing as I’d climbed my fair share of trees, they send me shimmying up myself. When I get to the first branch, and they give me a little light, I see Goodwin crouched there, naked as the day. Nearly wet my pants. He smelled so foul I almost vomit. His face was beaming, teeth white as ivory, and I noticed something off. Took me a minute to see it. But around his lips, and on his forehead, and all across his body, he’d gone and smeared himself with shit. Whether it was human or animal shit, I couldn’t tell, but it was smooth, like he’d taken his time, with a butter knife, maybe. Just about the color of the bark, too, so he almost disappeared into the tree…”

  Prentiss tried to listen past Hackstedde, to listen for his brother’s footsteps, but the sheriff had roped him in. He could think only of the rituals. Not his own people’s, but those he’d heard of on other plantations. Men and women gathering when certain stars aligned and heating clay, smearing themselves whole, dancing naked, first in unison but then alone, twirling endlessly, as though if they twirled fast enough they might spin themselves right into the ground and return to the earth.

  “…And right then he puts his finger up to his mouth, with the widest grin I ever seen him give, like we’re in on a joke together. Only when I look close, his eyes are gone red, and there’s a steady little trickle of tears coming down his face.”