The Sweetness of Water

by Nathan Harris

  “I think you might have the wrong man,” Caleb said, more weakly than he’d intended to. “Perhaps you’ve misjudged my condition. I don’t have the heart to lead others. Never have.”

  Whitney ran his thick tongue across his gums, what few teeth he had left.

  “That’s a learned skill. And anyway you ain’t leading no one. I’d be out there with my pant legs rolled up just like you, and I’d keep them boys in line. I just need a fellow with some brains at my side.”

  Caleb imagined the life: waking each morning in the cold of the attic, and outside the window that lantern, a floating orb cutting through the fog. Then the muddied shores of the river, reinforcing this levee. Then the heat of the mill when the season returned.

  “I plan to be gone from here,” he said, and the certainty of his voice surprised even him. “I might change my mind tomorrow, as I’m prone to indecision, but that is my want. To find a spot of my own somewhere. I’d like this man behind me to come along, but I can’t say that he will. He seems content these days, and I can’t blame him for wanting a little contentment. If he stays, I’d recommend him for your job. He’s double the worker I am, with double the smarts. I should be getting on for the evening now. Though I thank you for the opportunity.”

  Caleb tipped his head in respect, although Whitney failed to acknowledge it.

  “There be more like you,” he said. “Reckon I’ll manage.”

  “I am sure you will,” Caleb said. When he turned, Prentiss uncrossed his arms and sidled up next to him. They walked together with the whoosh of the river in their ears.

  Prentiss spoke only once they’d gone past the mill and landed on the road.

  “Bet she made that nephew of hers some dessert.”

  “What’d you have in mind?” Caleb asked.

  “Chocolate cake. That’s what I’m seeing.”

  “You can do better than that. I see six layers. Chocolate and vanilla, one on the other.”

  “Got my mouth watering. Think she’ll set aside a slice for us?”

  “Her nephew’s a twig. And he seems like the sort that’s too proud for sweets. Thinks they’re just for children.”

  “We’ll get our fill, then,” Prentiss said.

  “I’ll say,” Caleb told him, rubbing his hands together. “We’ll eat till sunup.”

  “Till our stomachs burst.”

  Caleb’s muscles ached, but the chill of the day was like pinpricks on his skin, distracting him from the pain. They would be back in Convent shortly and would sleep until dinner. Get some tinned meat at the general store, eat in the attic before falling asleep once more. And then, in the predawn, he would be woken by the bell. The lantern outside the window.

  * * *

  The sound of a clanging, an announcement of metal, woke Caleb in the night. Yet it wasn’t the bell he’d expected. Out the window he found only darkness. Beyond him, gripped in layers of shadow, a shirtless Prentiss sat in the lone chair of the attic, leant over, holding his straight razor, with the bowl on the ground beneath him.

  “Prentiss?”

  Prentiss reached down, then stood up, a blanket in hand. He folded it to the size of a cloth and opened the window, the cold flooding in.

  “What are you doing?”

  He unfolded the blanket, giving it a shake, closing the window once more and turning to face Caleb’s bed. Even in the dark he could see the nakedness of his face. Back at the chair—the bowl on the ground.

  “A little late for a shave,” Caleb said.

  Prentiss moved toward him with soft steps, and Caleb sat up. Perched above him, uncharacteristically tall against the arching beams of the low attic ceiling, Prentiss offered a hand.

  “What you say,” he began. “What you say we get gone from here?”

  The sleep drained from him in an instant. He did not need to respond for Prentiss to know his answer. Caleb rose and grabbed for his belongings under the bed. There was little to bundle up. His own razor. The extra shirt he’d bought at the general store and the few other clothes he had. The last jar of his mother’s canned peaches, which he’d kept sealed and uneaten all this time, if only to remember her by.

  “You never liked to walk the woods in the dark,” Caleb said. “We can wait till morning.”

  “I don’t want to hear that bell. Not once more. I want to be gone.”

  Prentiss’s clothes were already laid out on his bed. He’d been ready, Caleb realized. At least for some time that night.

  “No reason to be in the woods anyway,” Prentiss said. “Ain’t nobody after us. We’ll stick to the roads. Be two towns over by sunrise.”

  “Catch a train. North in no time.”

  Under the bed, beside his mother’s peaches, was where Caleb kept the rolled-up piece of parchment that Mrs. Benson had given him. He had meant to use it yet never had, all these months, having convinced himself that his current life—the grinding work, the freezing attic—was not what his mother would hope to hear. But he had kept it beneath his bed all along, knowing the day would come when he would put words to page. The conditions had to be right. Now he knew that full well. He would compose it from a desk, his own desk, in a sunny house that belonged to no stranger. Some place of safety, and beauty, and peace. A place where he would feel himself set free. A place worth writing home from. He would be there soon, he knew, Far from Convent. Far, far from Old Ox.

  CHAPTER 30

  The ground had nearly frosted over and a gloomy mist fell upon Isabelle as she walked down Stage Road. She had given Elliot use of the donkey early that morning. There was little need for her on the farm this deep into winter and she did not feel like helping the others with their land. Not today.

  All these months later the trees were still bare from the fire and for some distance there was startling clarity, the grandeur and mystery of the forest having been betrayed by this newfound nakedness. Not so much as a rabbit or a fox could be spotted. Just unending stillness. Which would be the better part of the country for some time, she thought, with no means to change it but to wait for another season.

  Ted Morton’s land had fared no better, and she hesitated at the gate to his property. The fountain was where it had always sat, right before the road. It was no longer running, the lower basin lined with rust. The cherubs on the second tier continued to pose, shooting their arrows and pointing at one another with mawkish looks of adoration. At its top stood a goddess, slender yet muscled, holding a vase from which the water would typically flow, staring upward with astonishment; now she was left to look only at the sky, and it took on a sorrier note, as though the goddess were praying, desperately, for the stream to return to her.

  Morton’s land had been so disfigured by the fire that there was still hardly a shrub to speak of. The mansion had been scorched to a skeleton of its former self. Even the stone pillars failed to hold—the heat cracked them and when one fell, the second-story veranda followed, collapsing such that a heap of stone and rubble covered the front entrance. The family somehow managed to survive, although all of their furniture, not to mention their land, was consumed by the fire. All that had been left of the manse was the foundation—an absence so odd it had given Isabelle the shivers when she’d first laid eyes upon it some months ago. A raft of Negroes now worked about the place and the first floor had been built back with an eye toward mimicking its original design. Wooden beams lay in enormous stacks and a few men passed her by with wheelbarrows of stone. A gang of mired, barefoot women carried small bundles of bricks to a pile before the home.

  Isabelle finally spotted Ted beside the trail to the back of his property, standing idly with his young son, looking over some papers and smoking a pipe. As she approached, the sheaf of papers slowly descended from his eyes, and once she was upon him, he handed it to his son.

  “Go find Gail and tell him what we’ve discussed,” Ted said. “If he must go to the mill once more, so be it.”

  Seemingly content with his errand, the boy ran off. Ted regarded her su
spiciously, sucking on his pipe until his cheeks caved, smoke trailing out the side of his mouth. His suspenders hung limply at his side. Dust had collected in all the fissures of his face—the pocket of his chin, the lines of his brow—as though an ancient rug, long stowed away, had been unfurled right before his face.

  “Hello, Ted,” she said.

  “I see you found your way onto my property,” Ted said.

  “I don’t wish to be a bother.”

  “Once you let me know why you’re standing here, I’ll make a judgment on that myself.”

  There was a crease upon the thigh of Ted’s pants, a small fold, where his child had clutched at him. She watched the boy running off, looked back toward Ted.

  “I bear no ill intent,” she said. “Just a proposal. I wonder if you would indulge me in a short walk? It will not take long.”

  “I don’t know how my wife would feel about me going on a walk with another woman.”

  “Is she here?” Isabelle looked about. “Or do you fear her oversight from afar?”

  The mouth of Ted’s pipe was a fine goose quill, and smoke funneled through it and entered his mouth as he considered her words. He exhaled once more, and said, “Way I feel about you Walkers, I doubt she’d have much concern.”

  “All the better.”

  Isabelle began to walk back down the trail toward Stage Road and Ted stalked a few feet behind her.

  “She is well, I trust?”

  “Staying with my sister over in Savannah while we get this house redone.”

  “That must be difficult.”

  “She ain’t the sort to complain. Besides, quite a few folks headed that way after the fire. They got themselves a little society, keep each other company. You know, Webler’s boy got some properties over there. Hear he’s been loaning them out to the others for a fair price.”

  Isabelle decided that silence was the best response.

  “Sound of it,” Ted continued, “he’s something of a recluse these days. Just keeps his head down, collects those checks, and stays to himself. Hardly utters a peep. I estimate he was one of the most popular young fellows in town. Wasn’t a bad word said against his name. To have his wife meet an end like that. And after all your boy put him through. Well, I hope God grants him some peace.”

  Such comments had once harmed her grievously, yet she’d developed a resistance to such attacks; from the stares in town and the words uttered behind her back. A hollow pit, somewhere within her, where she stored such viciousness away, let it die, then released it to the air to float off forever. She sensed it, somewhere beside her heart, a compartment at her core—her hand felt the spot, let it rest for a moment, before her anger settled and she closed the door to the cruelty of his words.

  “I wouldn’t have taken you for a gossip, Ted. That’s best saved for the social butterflies nattering on in their parlors, don’t you think? Let’s stick to matters of importance.”

  Ted raised an eyebrow and let her admonition go unremarked.

  “And what important matter have you brought me?”

  They had reached the fountain and she stopped and placed a hand on the basin.

  “Your fountain,” she said. “I’d like to purchase it from you.”

  He did not take it as an odd request, but demurred.

  “I got that made for my wife.”

  “I’m sure the money might be of use in hard times such as these.”

  “It quit some time ago.”

  “Well, when it is mine it will be none of your concern.”

  “Why would you want the damn thing in the first place?” He threw his hands up in exasperation, the straps of his overalls jangling as he gesticulated. “Folks tell me you’ve gone crazier than George since that fire, and my God, this fits in line with that. Coming all this way about a busted fountain. It ain’t for sale. If it was, you ain’t who I’d turn to.”

  She looked at Ted, then beyond him. She wondered how Landry had spotted the fountain from the fields. She knew where the house lay—knew where the cotton rows he’d picked were stationed. Yet she could not determine how one could catch sight of the fountain from such a distance, for even those rows that hugged the sides of Majesty’s Palace were some distance away, the ones at its rear even farther. And even if he had, perhaps the fountain he imagined, the fountain that preoccupied him, was one he drew himself on those long days at work, stored in his mind, a possession all his own. Yes, perhaps Ted’s was only a surrogate. A gaudy, cheap one at that.

  “Might I ask who constructed it?” Isabelle said.

  Ted’s anger lifted.

  “Oh!” he said. “Now that’s a yarn. Had a nigger I sent to town to learn how to work stones, and what’d he do but pick up and leave when he got the first chance. And now I hired myself a mason back in town who ain’t worth half as much as that boy but wants double a normal man’s wage while doing a quarter the work. Ain’t that somethin’? I know I shouldn’t be talking business with no woman but I can’t believe the way that boy—”

  “That’s very good, Ted.”

  The embers had died in the bowl of Ted’s pipe. He turned it upside down and tipped the tobacco out, then gave the backside another thump of his hand. He was pondering something. It took him a moment to gather the words.

  “You know,” he said quietly, “I ain’t have nothing to do with that fire. Gail neither. Wade put out that call but we ain’t answered it. No, we ain’t.”

  She’d lived through that night once. No part of her wished to do so again.

  “It’s over and done with, I suppose.”

  “I s’pose. I just knew it wouldn’t change nothin’. Thought it silly, really. Things’ll carry on. Them Yankees with their little uniforms and swords won’t be here forever. They’ll go back where they belong. Them Negroes will keep working as we see fit. And whatever that hubbub you got goin’ on back at your property, well, folks’ll see to ending that, too. Just like it’s always been done before. We got ways about us. Ways that don’t need no fixing.”

  She looked upon his face once more, drubbed by time, scored and pitted by the elements.

  “Ted,” she said, picking a bit of dirt from her nail. “Let’s end this here.”

  He snorted back phlegm and nodded his head, though it was more of a craning—a thorough investigation of just what it was that stood before him. This being. This woman.

  “I’ll get on,” he said.

  “And I will do the same. Send my regards to your wife.”

  * * *

  The road was empty once more as she returned home. She thought of Ezra, of all people, and the last time she’d seen him before he went off to visit his sons. A squandering. Total dissipation. That was how he’d referred to her plan: the farming, the cause, as she considered it to be, and she could only face him then and confess that this was possibly true, but if her life was to stagnate, or begin its descent toward the inevitable final act, she would take pride in knowing that George’s land, her land now, would continue to prosper after she was gone. Others would carry on in her stead. And she felt quite certain that, for all his talk, no one as foolish as Ted Morton was going to do anything to stop it.

  When she walked up the lane, the cabin was cloaked in the shadowy mist of the winter afternoon; the upturned V of the roof was like a flag announcing her safe passage. Mildred’s carriage sat in the roundabout. Smoke from the chimney relinquished itself to the mist, disappearing as it emerged. A stooped man was leaving the stables, his hat crooked atop his head, his boots soft against the ground—Elliot returning Ridley. Perhaps he had knocked and Mildred had told him she was out, or perhaps he’d thought he would be a bother. His body rocked as he took each step, and Isabelle imagined how much like George he was, joint grinding against bone, bone against joint, a solemn dignity in the way he hid his weariness. Someone like Elliot had taken thousands more steps in his life than she ever might. If there was a set allotment for each person before surrendering to time, he would run out of them far quicke
r than she ever could. There was nothing right about it. It just was. Before long he had vanished into the mist, like the smoke, rejoining his family, his crop, his day.

  She thought of Caleb—the cruelty of his absence. How on days like this in his boyhood, rife with silence, they had once huddled together on the couch, suspending all else in store for the day in favor of each other’s company. Before long coffee would be brewed, and the house would find heat as though created purely by the words they shared, the laughter between them, and the day would draw to a close without either noticing. The fact that her only son was somewhere unknown in the world, somewhere lost to her, felt like the ultimate defeat. A defeat no mother could ever conquer. No matter how much purpose, how much meaning, the world might offer her otherwise.

  Perhaps the only saving grace was his letter, which had finally arrived. It was months late, by her estimation, and of course far shorter than she would have liked, but he had kept his word. He had sat down to write his mother and in doing so had delivered to her the greatest gift she could possibly have asked for. She had read the note so often, inspected it so closely, that she worried the parchment might crumble to bits. Still, even with the closest reading of each sentence, each word, it never revealed the information she wished for most. They had arrived in a Northern city, but he would not reveal its name, lest the authorities catch wind of where he and Prentiss were located (and how like Caleb, to imagine the sheriff still waiting eagerly to intercept his mail, to punish him for a crime forgotten and put to rest). There was no note of his feelings, no note even of whether he was happy. But there was routine to his day, he had written, a feeling of gratification. They had money to feed themselves, to dress themselves.