The Sweetness of Water
Nathan Harris
CHAPTER 1
An entire day had passed since George Walker had spoken to his wife. He’d taken to the woods that very morning, tracking an animal that had eluded him since his childhood, and now night was falling. He’d seen the animal in his mind’s eye upon waking, and tracking it carried a sense of adventure so satisfying that all day he could not bear the thought of returning home. This had been the first of such excursions all spring, and tramping through splintered pine needles and mushrooms swollen from the morning rain, he’d come upon a patch of land he’d yet to explore in full. The animal, he was sure, was always one step away from falling into his line of sight.
The land his father had passed down to him was over two hundred acres. The large red oaks and walnut trees that surrounded his home could dim the sun into nothing more than a soft flicker in the sky passing between their branches. Many of them as familiar as signposts, long studied over many years from childhood on.
The brush George encountered was waist-high and coated with burrs that clung to his trousers. He’d developed a hitch over the last few years, had pinned it on a misplaced step as he descended from his cabin to the forest floor, but he knew this was a lie: it had appeared with the persistence and steady progress of old age itself—as natural as the lines on his face, the white in his hair. It slowed him, and by the time he caught his breath and took a moment to assess his surroundings, he realized that silence had overtaken the woods. The sun, above his head only moments before, had faded into nothingness over the far corner of the valley, nearly out of sight.
“I’ll be.”
He had no idea where he was. His hip ached as though something was nestled there and attempting to escape. Soon the need for water overtook him, the roof of his mouth so dry his tongue clung to it. He took a seat on a small log and waited for total darkness. If the clouds gave out, the stars would appear, which was all he needed to map his way back home. His worst miscalculation would still guide him to Old Ox, and although he loathed the idea of seeing any of those sorry desperate sorts in town, at the very least one of them would offer a horse to return him to his cabin.
For a moment the thought of his wife came to him. By now he was typically arriving home, the candle Isabelle had left on the windowsill guiding his final few steps. She would often forgive these absences of his only after a long, silent hug, the black ink from the trees leaving faint handprints on her dress, irritating her all over again.
The log beneath him yawned and George’s rear end sank into the waterlogged mess. Only as he moved to stand, to pat himself dry, did he see them sitting before him. Two Negroes, similar in dress: white cotton shirts unbuttoned, britches as ragged as if they’d fitted their legs into intertwined gunnysacks. They stood stock-still, and if the blanket before them had not swayed in the wind like some flag to signal their presence, they might have disappeared in the foreground entirely.
The closer one spoke up.
“We got lost, sir. Don’t mind us. We’ll be moving on.”
They came into clearer focus, and it was not the words that struck George, but that the young man was precisely the age of his Caleb. That he and his companion were trespassing was beside the point entirely. In the nervous chatter of his voice, the eyes that darted like those of an animal hiding from prey, the young man gained George’s sympathy, perhaps the only morsel of it left in an otherwise broken heart.
“Where is it you two come from?”
“We’re Mr. Morton’s. Well, was.”
Ted Morton was a dimwit, a man who, if offered a fiddle, would be as liable to smash it against his own head to hear the noise as put a bow to its strings. His parcel of land bordered George’s, and when an issue arose—a runaway most often—the ensuing spectacle, rife with armed overseers and large-snouted dogs, lanterns of such illumination that they kept the entire household awake, was so unpleasant that George often deferred all communications with the family to Isabelle just to avoid the ordeal. But to find Morton’s former property on his land now carried with it a welcome irony: Emancipation had made the buffoon helpless to their wanderings, and for all his great shows of might, these two men were now free to be as lost as George was in this very instance.
“Our apologies,” said the man in front.
They began to bundle up their blanket, collecting a small knife, a bit of stripped beef, pieces of bread, but stopped once George started in again. His eyes wandered the ground in front of him, as if searching for something lost.