The Sweetness of Water

by Nathan Harris

  “Prentiss,” Caleb called out in the dark of their room, watching the men go. He was accustomed to receiving no answer in return at this early hour, but he tried again. “Prentiss, they’re out front now.”

  He did not know how long the two of them had been in Convent. Enough time to lose track of it. Four months? Five? The town was the first they came across after they’d stopped fleeing in earnest, the inn the first one that would house them. The woman in charge, with her peculiar hospitality, reminded him of his mother, and her domestic duties seemed one with her insistence on keeping a strictly harmonious home. If the door between the kitchen and the parlor was left ajar, Mrs. Benson would issue no qualms, but one would find it properly shut the next instant. At a loud noise from upstairs she would call up to ask if a guest was in need—a way of asking for quiet. To let the house rest.

  She had stowed them in the cobwebbed attic, two beds alone across the room from each other, and although there were spiders so enormous as to seem more beast than bug, and a dampness that turned the floorboards the color of rotted teeth, Caleb felt blessed to have a space all their own.

  Caleb said Prentiss’s name once more, and the body across the room began to stir. Prentiss had never once risen before Caleb since they’d arrived. Each morning, as though he were pinned to his bed by the cold, it appeared that Prentiss might give up altogether and sleep all the way through the dregs of winter like an animal. But then he would wake suddenly, spurred on not by Caleb (for Caleb recognized that he had little effect on the man, who was mostly silent, a world away), but seemingly by some wellspring of diligence that demanded he put himself to the task and see it through to a completion so devastatingly assured that no employer could ever have even a whisper of grievance. For it was work they were waking to. Work that occupied their days.

  “Let’s get gone, then,” Prentiss said, the sleep still clinging to his voice. Such was his way that he was dressed before Caleb’s eyes had adjusted to see the figure drawing near him in the shadows.

  * * *

  The morning was still cold and the men hugged their coats tight to their bodies. All of them carried burdens. One man spoke often of a wife to whom he sent his earnings, a woman who failed to return his letters and might no longer be his wife at all. But given that he was an escaped convict, the return home that would satisfy him on the status of his marriage would also end with his hanging, and so he’d learned to bear the mystery as it presently stood. The other men were quieter, although in their darting glances, their fear of a spooked horse or a squawking crow, it was clear that some darkness from their past loomed with the ominous power to arrive at any moment and deliver a fate worthy of flight.

  The man with the lantern quit his ringing as they exited town. The ground they trod was swampy marshland, although folks had still managed to build farms here and there along the winding webs of water. Each home had a lantern out front glowing faintly like a minor star in the morning dark. To Caleb the lanterns felt like guideposts urging him on, but to what exactly was unclear, and the gang of men always turned off the road before ever drawing near enough for him to contemplate their meaning further.

  “Mr. Whitney wants his usual lot,” the man with the lantern said.

  There were those landowners who wanted the same men day after day, the ones they were happy with. Caleb and Prentiss had fallen in with Mr. Whitney in their early days in Convent and had never gone elsewhere. They stepped forward with the others, eight in all, and the man with the lantern told them to get on.

  The road led to a sugar mill, a wooden structure with no roof and no walls. Whitney greeted the men with a single piece of fried bread each. Their chewing was so loud it snuffed out the sounds of the river down the way.

  “Five minutes,” Whitney said.

  In the biting cold the men huddled as one, eating like wolves in a pack. The temperature would rise once the kettles got boiling.

  “I been chopping wood all morning,” Whitney said, as if to suggest the morning had passed them by, when it had yet to come at all. “’Spect three of you to take that over. The rest of you man them kettles like yesterday. Caleb, get yourself on them barrels.”

  He knew Caleb by name, for he was the only white man on a crew that otherwise comprised Indians and Negroes, and he was often singled out for the job of least labor. He had once tried to switch roles and hand it off to another man, and it was one of the few times he’d drawn Prentiss’s ire; he’d left his kettle and confronted him with a face covered in sweat.

  “You gonna fill those hogsheads,” Prentiss told him. “Heed that man’s words now. Acting up ’cause you got it easy. Too much of your father in you.” That was that. Caleb never made the same mistake.

  The routine rarely wavered, and this day was like the others. The men not chopping wood lit the flames beneath their kettles. There were four in all, lined up in a train. When the water boiled off from the first, the syrup was ladled to the next, and the process of refinement finished with Caleb, who stood by the hogsheads, watching the syrup flow in, and when a barrel was full he’d install the lid, store it in the corner as it cooled, and bring the next one out to fill.

  The heat built upon itself unabated, and their coughing was incessant, long barks that began to carry the signature of each man’s toil. At day’s end they’d rush down to the freezing water, jumping in like animals, shedding the grime of the day and floating still-like so their limbs might have a moment’s reprieve from the endless stirring, the endless standing.

  Caleb recalled his first week of work, when a young man, no older than himself, had dropped his ladle. The syrup oozed like lava, and they watched the man’s silent calamity, his eyes overtaking his face, his hands crinkling together into balls of pain. It was a fascinating interaction, so much so that no one moved for a moment: the syrup seeping through the man’s boot, the grim realization, when pulling it from his foot, that the leather had latched itself to his skin. He later described the pain of the doctor finally removing the boot: like his tongue being ripped from his mouth. Caleb hadn’t forgotten that. He doubted any of them had.

  He did his job carefully, and often watched Prentiss from the nearest kettle; Prentiss had a beard now, having grown it out of some fear that he and Caleb might be sought out early on, that he might need some disguise. He had never cut it, and while in the intervening months he had managed only a small clump at the chin and a middling mustache, he looked older these days, though Caleb knew the younger version was still in there somewhere, waiting for the proper time to return. At least that was his hope.

  Mr. Whitney was seventy and nearly toothless. He walked among them with one hand in his pants and the other holding his chronograph. The sugar boiled off at precise intervals, and it was strange that he kept the time at all, considering how regularly he spoke of his instinct for knowing when to end the process based on sight alone. Over time, his actions—the fondling of his groin, the incessant clicking of his watch—began to seem less involved with their work and more a symptom of his mania, a means to calm his nerves.

  It was midday before Whitney called for a break. The men walked out in single file. A bucket of water sat beneath a tree beside the mill, and they each took a swig, sitting among themselves, their bodies beaded with sweat in the cold, all of them silent. Whitney took a moment to expound, once more, on his intent to purchase an evaporator, which would make them all expendable, for the boiling would be exact to the machine’s standards, but the talk had been repeated so many times that no one paid him any mind.

  Prentiss stood away by himself, his shirt tied off at his waist, rubbing a leaf against his forehead, staring into the woods.

  “Where are you today?” Caleb asked, joining him.

  “Nowhere but here,” Prentiss told him.

  No one flogged himself with work quite like Prentiss: no one consumed less water, complained so little, sweat so much. Punishment, Caleb knew. For wrongs he had not done. For losses that would never be recouped. And despite
his profession early on that Convent wasn’t far enough away from Old Ox for him ever to call it home, it was Prentiss who wished to stay. Although they’d spent some money, they had enough to be gone, but the work was good, and Prentiss was content in a place where he wasn’t known and wasn’t asked questions. A place where he could distract himself with his ceaseless stirring of the kettle, his eyes full of some torment that doubled as pleasure, the heat expunging the demons that plagued him.

  “Mrs. Benson said we can have some of those rabbit leftovers for supper,” Caleb said.

  “Think she’s got more of that milk?” Prentiss asked.

  “That goat’s milk?”

  “It’s like sipping on butter. Cows don’t compare.”

  “If she doesn’t, we can go back there and milk one ourselves, I imagine.”

  “I ain’t touching a goat’s teat. That’s where I draw the line.”

  “I, for one, am not above milking a goat’s teat,” Caleb said. “It’d be an honor, really. I’m sure there are some men in the world who don’t consider a day complete until they’ve milked a goat’s teat.”

  He picked up a leaf himself, dabbed his forehead, and let it fall to the ground. He didn’t look over, for if he caught Prentiss in a smile, he would only try to hide it, and so they simply waited there together for the rest of the break, chilled by their drying sweat.

  There would be no rabbit that night. No milk. When the boiling was done, Whitney set them to fashioning staves for the hogsheads that would be filled the following day, and by the time they made it home, Mrs. Benson had retired, the house so dark they had to feel their way upstairs. They had an apple each, and Caleb feared that the sound of their eating might wake the old woman. A little ham they’d bought the previous day was dessert. Some evenings, with a free hour, Prentiss would swipe at a piece of wood with a razor, making something, or nothing, for Caleb couldn’t tell and didn’t wish to interrupt him. But this night Prentiss turned in quickly, and Caleb was left to his own restlessness, which found him every night: thoughts of his mother, his father, his old bedroom. That donkey, Ridley. Images that cycled through his mind, feeding on the guilt he kept stored up, the filial duties he had failed to uphold, until the thoughts and scenes became a story, a dream, such that his sleeping world was populated by the very people and circumstances he had tried so hard to flee.

  Some hours later, then, awaking from just such a nightmare, he felt as though he’d hallucinated into being the discernible figure from his past looming outside the window, as though that man had been waiting for him to take note of his presence all along. The man lingered ominously beside a hitched horse, inspecting the home, and removed his gloves with a quick stroke.

  Caleb lunged out of bed. It was not yet morning, and perhaps owing to the creaking, so odd at the hour, Prentiss poked his head up from his pillow to seek out the noise.

  “What you doin’?” he muttered.

  “It’s him,” Caleb said. His head throbbed, as though the nightmare had manifested a physical affliction. He reached under the bed—the wooden floorboards cold against his hand—his razor blade revealing itself against one of the legs.

  “What you mean him?” Prentiss said, propped up on his elbows now.

  “You know who. And I’m going to kill him.” Caleb flicked the blade open and clattered down the stairs two at a time.

  “Caleb!” Prentiss called out.

  By the time he was out the door there was nothing between Caleb and August but the cold of the night, the leaden silence of the sleeping town. If August spoke even a word, if that familiar voice reached him, Caleb knew he would falter—that his old friend’s hold upon him was simply too strong to resist. So he wouldn’t give him the chance. He stalked forward with the blade ready, and for a moment, a slip of time that fell away as he drew near, it seemed that his nightmares had intertwined with reality—that to end his friend’s life might abolish the pain of the past and afford his mind the freedom to wander the landscape of his dreams in peace. Such was the temptation of his revenge that it felt like a single night of true rest would make every day spent languishing in a prison cell—or even a walk to the gallows—more than worth the crime.

  But when the man lit a cigar, Caleb wavered and the blade fell from his grip, striking the ground with a ring that echoed in the quiet street.

  “Good evening,” the man called out, more in threat than in greeting. He was tall and lanky with auburn hair—not blond, as Caleb had seen it from the window. His two front teeth burst from his mouth. It was a wonder he could close the thing at all.

  “I’m sorry—” Caleb was stuck in place. “I mistook you for someone else. An intruder.”

  “An intruder!” the man said, chewing his cigar like a teething infant takes to a toy. “I nearly drew my pistol, but I don’t draw unless I’m shooting, and I don’t shoot unless I’m killing, and so you might glean your luck in this instance.”

  Caleb’s teeth began to chatter, the frozen air cutting through the vacant part of him that had, just a moment ago, been overcome by anger—by the swelling need for retribution.

  “Might I ask who you are?” the man said.

  Caleb gave his name and said that he was lodging at the inn.

  “I’m Arthur Benson. My aunt owns this place. I had no idea she was taking guests these days. Is he with you?” And Arthur pointed at the house.

  Caleb turned to find Prentiss hugging himself in the cold. “It’s the two of us,” he said.

  “I see,” Arthur said, and though he had only just begun smoking the cigar, he reached down and put it out against the side of his boot, then brushed the ash away.

  “I’m sorry about the fright,” Caleb said. “I was acting out of sorts.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t frightened in the slightest. Auntie, Auntie.”

  Mrs. Benson, disappearing inside an enormous frock coat pulled on over her night dress, pushed Prentiss aside at the front door. “I received your telegram just yesterday,” she called out, “but I expected you at a more regular hour. Do come in.”

  Caleb had never seen her move so quick, and he retreated backward as she hugged the man. Was his presence an intrusion now, or would it be rude to leave at such a moment?

  “You have guests,” Arthur said.

  “They’re paid up until the end of the month,” she said. “But there is always room for you, Arthur. Always room for family.”

  * * *

  An hour later they were back in the attic, both silent, but neither sleeping. Caleb could hear the quickness of Prentiss’s breathing, the way he shifted restlessly.

  “I was certain it was him,” Caleb whispered. “You must believe me.”

  “Get some rest.”

  “You think I’m crazy.”

  “Didn’t say that. Said to get some rest.”

  “I know. But I—”

  “Caleb.”

  “You must listen—”

  “What, you think I ain’t see ’em like you do?”

  Caleb felt a jolt, as though a snake had hissed at him from the foot of his bed.

  “What you think I be looking out at all day? In the woods. I see my brother every which way I turn, beaten and bruised, blood running down his face. I been seeing my mama ever since she been sold. I see Mrs. Etty standing right beside me like we back in those fields, like she ain’t never run off. Half the time you wake me up I think it’s Gail rousing me for lazying up a proper workday. I s’pose that boy August gon’ be outside your window for the rest of your days. That’s how them demons work. How them ghosts follow you around. Be proud you gone out and faced him straight on. Ain’t everyone brave enough for that. But you should know it ain’t gonna change nothing. You still gotta get up each morning. Still gotta settle down each night. So if you ain’t gonna get some rest for yourself, at least let me get mine.”

  There was a rustling downstairs, born of who knew what, the quiet of the home acknowledging the noise.

  “I’m sorry, Prentiss.”
/>   “Don’t be sorry. Just sleep.”

  * * *

  From a distance, the men at the kettles appeared to be warlocks stirring cauldrons, sorcerers conducting rituals in a forgotten remove of the forest where no man was meant to wander. Caleb was relieving himself on a tree beyond the mill, looking back at them. The day was almost over. The boys cutting wood slowed at the height of each swing of the ax, and each man at the kettles had found a calm rhythm to his stirring. The final hour passed quickly and the men were standing out in the cold for a rest when Mr. Whitney motioned for Caleb to come with him. Caleb tapped Prentiss on the shoulder, and the three of them walked to a clearing that opened onto Whitney’s house and the farmland behind it that bore his crop.

  The river ran between the two at a steady clip and Whitney pointed at it, telling Caleb that the water was seeping into his home. He had dug a levee a good ten years back but now he needed to reinforce it. It had to be deeper, with some ditches so it would drain right. It would be a few months of work, once the sugar was sold off. “I could use the help of a boy like you,” he said. “I gather you’re learned. Know numbers and whatnot. You’d be a mighty help.”

  Caleb put his hands in his pockets, spied the land suspiciously, wondering what trouble, or fortune, lay in the proposal: the choice between the ease of acquiescing to another man’s desires over his own and the difficulty of chasing something beyond the horizon, the cradle of the unknown and the intangible, the possibility that he might follow his own path, as he had done when he rescued Prentiss, with a result, whether right or wrong, never to be undone. When he looked back at Prentiss for guidance, he was scratching the scruff of his beard, staring at the ground, abstaining from the decision.