The Sweetness of Water

by Nathan Harris

“I wish there was more I could do. I feel like a terrible friend.”

  “You’re always looking to help but sometimes there’s nothing to be done. Not here, at least. Perhaps in town. Bring me back another story. A bit of gossip. That will be sufficient.”

  “The boys are helping out in the square. I plan to help myself, however I can.”

  “Do that,” Isabelle said. “They need individuals like you. People who know how to manage things.”

  “I’ll come back more often. We’ll clear those fields together, return them to life. Whatever needs to be done will be done. You won’t be left alone out here.”

  Isabelle couldn’t muster the energy to protest. The morning in her friend’s company was the only respite she’d had from her own thoughts since George and Caleb’s departure, and there was nothing more she might want than for her to return, whether she brought another story or not.

  Mildred stood and put on her gloves, while Isabelle remained seated.

  “Might you do me a small favor?” Isabelle asked. “I would be so grateful if you could send a telegram to my brother. Telling him I’m okay. That he might perhaps come visit.” The younger sister in her recoiled at the weakness of needing Silas, but it didn’t diminish her desire to see him.

  “I’m not sure you understand,” Mildred told her. “The post office is an ash heap.”

  “Right. Of course.” Isabelle thought for a moment. “Then do me this much. See if Clementine and her daughter fared all right? That they are well.”

  Her friend evinced an air of suspicion about whatever this connection to Clementine might mean, but Isabelle knew she would not be denied the request in the present circumstances.

  “As you wish,” Mildred said.

  Isabelle thanked her, shading her eyes as the door opened to dusty sunlight that swallowed Mildred on her way out.

  * * *

  The body grew accustomed to touch, used to conversation, and when it was gone the loss manifested itself in what Isabelle could only register as a mounting pressure, an itching wound, located in no one location but rather across her entire person. Mildred’s presence had helped, but the effects wore off like weak medication. Soon she returned to the same routines of isolation, knitting with no result in mind, taking stock of the cellar knowing it didn’t matter what she found there. Sometimes she busied herself to the point of delirium, snapping out of it only to realize ten minutes had passed, or an hour. Other times she would sit still, an image in her mind of an infant reaching out from the cradle, a single plump hand searching for its creator, seeking comfort, and how different really was she from that child?

  She napped, having been up all night for the second night in a row, and woke to find daylight still burdening the blinds. There was a knock on the door. She realized it was the sound that had woken her. How had she not heard someone coming up the lane? How could she have allowed herself to fall asleep? She sprang up and straightened her dress before approaching the door. There was no time to grow worried or frightened. When she opened the door, the air, thick with the accumulated heat of the day, hit her like an open palm.

  “Isabelle…” Wade Webler had his hat in hand.

  She’d never known him to fail in meeting someone else’s gaze but he couldn’t even put eyes on her. So few things could bring a man like him to look down at a woman’s feet.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  He hesitated further.

  “I don’t know what got into him. He just pulled that pistol out…”

  She put her hand to her mouth, then to her chest, as if unsure which part of her might break first and need tending to.

  Wade was clearly broken, too. Hackstedde, whom she had until now barely registered, moseyed up to his side, taking his time. He managed to tell her what had happened, with a measured steadiness she both resented and appreciated.

  “He’s not dead,” Hackstedde reassured her, “although he seemed to think the end was inevitable. Can’t blame him. It bled hard, but it was just a shot to the thigh. Made sure to get him back before things got too dire.”

  A surge of relief washed over her. She was looking at the man who’d shot her husband, and yet she had the urge to thank the sheriff for saving the very life he’d put in danger.

  “We got him down there with Doctor Dover. You can see him when you please.”

  She was holding her breath now. “And the boys. What of the boys?”

  “Right,” Hackstedde said casually. “Those boys whose whereabouts you had no idea of. Well, a few of us turned back with Wade to get George home. The others who kept on ran into a man hunting hog. Told them Old Ox was on fire. They caught back up with us with the news and they were a bit more eager to see to their homes than to the fugitives. So we let that go.”

  He shrugged, and never had an act so minor meant so much.

  “All I can tell you is that they’re not in my possession. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I best go see to the town’s safety. People to protect and whatnot.”

  She watched him turn and go off, racked by the news, her body nothing more than a trembling collection of parts. Wade was still silent before her. His face was shaded by his hat, which he’d replaced on his head during Hackstedde’s monologue, and eyed her from under its brim with great remorse.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I suppose I haven’t said that. The situation seemed to escape my control. Lost a handle on things.”

  He looked out at the charred land then. The sky was a shade of mud and the ground beneath it burnt to a black crisp.

  “And not only for George,” he said. “I fear that everything is gone.”

  The smell of days of riding clung to the man, and the need to retch overwhelmed her. Her body was constricting under the challenge of tolerating his presence any longer—her fingers clenched, her throat latching shut against her will. A moment passed where she focused all her energy on calming herself, and then she managed to address him one last time.

  “Go see to your family,” she said. “And don’t hide this pain, either. I want you to carry what you’ve done. But as far as I’m concerned, we’re never to speak again.” He made to utter another word, another sentence, but she wouldn’t have it. “I told you to leave, Wade.”

  Finally, with this, he obeyed.

  She stood stiffly on the porch, and when things settled, her eyes landed on Ridley, left in their wake without even a mention. The donkey was so bonded with her husband that her chest seized at the sight of the creature. She walked to greet him, grabbed him by the reins, and guided him to his stable.

  “We’ll go get him once I’m dressed,” she said. “No need to worry. You just eat a bit.”

  She put a hand on his flank, and there in the privacy of the stable, in the confidence of only the donkey, she collapsed under the weight of her relief, which mingled with her sorrow to wreck her completely, until she sat in the hay with her head against her knees, soaking her dress with her tears. The donkey seemed not to notice and there was a comfort in his indifference, the way he carried on eating as though the world had not changed on them forever. She would get it out now. All of it. And then she would retrieve her husband.

  * * *

  The leg was already gone when she arrived. He lay asleep before her, shapeless under the bedsheets. She sat beside him and took his hand and turned to ask Doctor Dover when George would wake.

  “I’d give it an hour,” the doctor said. He informed her that he’d finished up the amputation that morning. The leg had gotten infected in the woods, he told her. It could’ve killed him. Still might.

  In sleep George’s face lost its hardness and grew round, almost cherubic, and it seemed wrong somehow for this unguarded innocence to be on display in front of a doctor neither of them knew beyond his name.

  “He fought with me,” Dover said. “Said he’d rather die than lose it. Nothing I haven’t heard from the soldiers, though, bless their hearts.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That li
fe carries on.” The doctor was young, slim, his sleeves rolled to the elbow. “We’ll have him on crutches shortly. We can get him fitted for a prosthetic. They send pamphlets all the time. Good models.”

  George was in private quarters now. At first he’d been placed in the general infirmary among the other sick, and Isabelle had decided to pay for this room. The privilege afforded them some peace and quiet, but only marginally. Even the hallways were full of bodies, those who’d been burnt the day before slumped against the walls and still awaiting treatment, pleading for the attention of harried nurses. Hearing their moans, Isabelle hoped it wasn’t the money she’d paid that allowed the doctor to focus on George first, but she put the concern out of mind in the belief that the others would be attended to in due time.

  “Well, I’ll leave you two,” the doctor said. “It’s been a busy day. Call on me if he wakes.”

  She ran her hand through George’s hair, watched his stomach rise as he breathed in and listened to him exhale, no differently from when he slept at home. Given all that had happened, that bit—that familiarity—troubled her as much as it soothed her. “We’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ll let you know if anything changes.”

  * * *

  He came to in fits. It took two days in all. He was not himself and lashed out at the strangeness of the hospital, at the foreign bed, the foreign doctor, the nurse who dared to see him unclothed as she changed his bandages.

  When he was at last truly lucid, Isabelle sat up in her chair, impassioned by his waking, and looked upon him ardently. Yet there was only fear in his eyes, which searched the room for something unseen.

  “Take me home,” he said. “Please.”

  But the doctor was still concerned about the infection and wouldn’t hear of it. So George stayed through the night, with Isabelle at his bedside, lending an ear to his moans of agony, though she could aid him with nothing more than words of comfort. At some late hour, when even the noisiest patients were asleep, she woke to the sound of his crying, and held his hand with such intensity that the firmness seemed to provide him the courage to quiet down.

  A faucet, rusted crimson, was perched above them, extending down from the ceiling, dripping in rhythm with the passing seconds. The whitewashed walls carried a tint of yellow, which led Isabelle to believe that something noxious pervaded the building and took residence around them. Although the night had been difficult, she felt like it had forged her place as George’s ward, his protector. Yet he wailed and beat the bed like a child when they wished to bathe him, demanding that Isabelle leave the room.

  “George, how many times have I seen you bathe?”

  “Get her out!” he commanded the attendant. “She won’t see me like this!”

  And so she stepped out of the room. When she returned, it was to more pleading that she take him home.

  “I have asked so little of you,” he said, which was of course untrue, but who was she to protest under the circumstances? “All I desire is my cabin. My own bed.”

  What he wanted was dignity, and she could not deliver it. As far as George was concerned, no one should see him compromised like this. Ezra had come to visit but George had refused him, same with Mildred.

  The food was the final embarrassment. When he refused to eat, they tried to spoon-feed him porridge under the pretense that his stomach was sensitive, and yet after acceding to a bite, he spit it out upon his chin, oats sputtering onto the blankets. The attendant flinched and pulled back from the bed and Isabelle reached over to clean him.

  “And now they feed me gruel! I won’t stand for it.”

  “George, please.”

  “No more. I would rather die here and now than submit to this torture. I will end things myself.”

  She couldn’t believe he had so much anger stored away. He was no longer her husband but a man possessed, and when he pointed at the attendant—demanding that she taste the food herself, humiliating her for not knowing the proper application of salt—Isabelle could stand no more.

  “Please leave us,” she said to the attendant. She was a young girl in training, who didn’t deserve such treatment, and she happily excused herself, shutting the door as she left.

  “George,” Isabelle said.

  He turned to her, his eyes frantic.

  “I must return home.”

  “George.”

  “I can’t stand these people, the smell of the alcohol and the cries of the children. I’m so tired, Isabelle…”

  “It’s only a hospital. We can manage this.”

  “It’s hell. I will crawl if I must. I need only arms for that.”

  She was utterly exhausted, pained from sitting for so long, and she had hardly eaten in days. She took his hands. Now that he’d been bathed, the softness had returned, and it brought her great comfort, even as he conducted himself so terribly, to hold them in her own.

  “You’ll let them care for you?” she said. “If I was to bring in a nurse?”

  “For what? You have done fine all these years on your own.”

  “And if I have to change you, George? And give you medicine, and turn you in bed?”

  He stared ahead defiantly.

  “I will have my own food,” he said. “And my bed. When I am propped up I will see the walnut trees out the window, and at night you will fetch my books from the shelf. Won’t you?”

  She put her head on his chest, knowing, now, that what he truly sought were the comforts of home, during what might prove to be his last days.

  “I will,” she said. “If that’s what you desire.”

  “It is,” he pleaded. “It’s all I want.”

  She told him she would return the next day, and promised to bring him home then.

  CHAPTER 25

  Ezra’s shop had not survived the fire, but Isabelle found him at his home. He and his wife still lived in the same two-story cottage they had raised their boys in, although they were alone there, now. They met the standards of the neighborhood but there was no grandiosity to the place, and in choosing its dully brown exterior, the simplistic walkway with no place for a carriage, they had always seemed more determined to blend in than stand out.

  She knocked and Ezra’s wife, Alice, answered the door. They had spoken perhaps twice in Isabelle’s whole life, yet she appeared not only to know Isabelle but to be expecting her.

  “Come, come. Out of the smoke.” She waved Isabelle in and offered her tea, which Isabelle declined. “A biscuit, then?”

  Isabelle was ready to refuse this as well, but her hunger got the best of her and she accepted.

  “He’s in his study,” Alice said, wandering toward the kitchen.

  “Is he holding up?”

  “We’ve been through many trials. A fire? Nothing. Nothing.”

  She returned with the tea that Isabelle had not wanted along with a biscuit besides and gestured for her to sit on the couch. The parlor was unlike her own, the cleanliness born not of upkeep but of a seeming lack of use. The cushion beneath her barely moved under her weight, and the fruit on the table looked so perfectly ripe it was fit to be painted in a still life.

  “And you?” Alice asked. “I cannot imagine your pain.”

  Alice had the most durable features Isabelle had ever laid eyes on. There was a rustic element to them, skin like leather, a cauldron of energy underneath, hidden but ever present.

  “It’s difficult to discuss,” Isabelle said.

  “No need to confide in me. Why don’t I let Ezra know you’ve finally arrived?”

  “Finally? Was he expecting me?”

  But Alice was already off toward the hallway, her dress trailing her. She returned promptly.

  “He’ll see you,” she said.

  Ezra’s study was smaller than George’s and less busy. There was no wallpaper, and the only print on the wall was a nautical map of some ancient city—something, Isabelle guessed, that had no connection to Ezra himself. An assistant was stacking documents into boxes and checking items off a list. E
zra, seated beside the window, was watching the boy with a focused intensity, and when Isabelle entered, he told the assistant to take a break and return later.

  “Sit,” he told Isabelle.

  It had been only a day since she was at George’s bedside, and thinking of those hours spent beside him, his constant pleading and endless anger, nearly made her shudder.

  “I’ve been sitting so long,” she said, “I believe I’d rather stand.”

  “Then stand. Whatever pleases you.”

  The room smelled of sweet perfume, and Ezra must have seen her nose pinch at the cloying aroma.

  “It is my wife’s fragrance,” he said. “I could not stand the pungency of the smoke outside so I cloaked the place in other smells—though I have some regrets now, as it does linger.”

  She registered the lavender now. Probably a fine mix, if applied in small doses.

  “Well, if your study smelled at all like George’s, no doubt such a cleansing might improve things.”

  “Perhaps that will be the result. I will let you know when I return.”

  “And where are you off to, if it’s not impertinent to ask?”

  She glanced at the half-filled boxes, then back at Ezra.

  He would be going on a bit of a tour, he said. Not an easy feat for a man of his age, but he needed to check in on his sons’ shops to ensure they were maintaining his standards. With his own being rebuilt, there was no better time for it. Besides, they needed to make duplicate copies of their ledgers.

  “If there’s one thing the fire has reminded us of,” he said, “it’s how quickly records might be lost. How quickly everything might be lost.”

  They plunged into silence for a moment. Isabelle noticed upon Ezra’s desk, almost hidden, a framed daguerreotype: his family, none of them happy, the boys stone-faced and their mother even more so.

  “But you know that better than I do,” Ezra said. “How is he?”

  “They keep him plied with morphine and vapors. At night he cries. There’s little for me to do but listen and hold his hand.”

  Ezra winced, then pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and rubbed his forehead dry.