“Nothing that big,” Prentiss said. “I’d have woken you.”
The forest was calm, silent save for the occasional dispatch from the dark: a trampled branch, the pitched squeal of a possum.
George pondered the comment for a moment. “That big…Wait, you don’t mean the beast?”
“It could venture this far out,” Prentiss said.
“You know, I haven’t thought of it in days. Not once this trip.”
Prentiss eyed him curiously.
“I must not have told you,” George went on. “I saw Ezra last week.”
With George there to share sentry duty, Prentiss finally relaxed, slumping against the closest tree.
“You know what he said?” George went on. “That I’m too curious. That I never should’ve been poking around in the woods in the first place the day I found you and Landry. To the contrary, I told him, it must’ve been some form of destiny, as I venture through those woods all the time and there’s nothing to be found but all manners of solitude. Not that I believe in a higher being or what have you, but to come upon two fellows felt like a fitting meeting, bound up in something real, which is quite a foreign concept to me. So here is where we circle back, as I told Ezra then that the only other time I had that feeling was whenever I saw that beast from my bedroom window. I’m not one to share that story—least of all with Ezra—as it leads to a natural skepticism, but I was caught in the throes of sentiment, and it simply poured out of me.”
Disregarding his embarrassment, George pressed on with the rest of the story for Prentiss. Ezra had stood before him, he said, listening intently as George related how the beast was exactly the way his father had described it: brooding, sturdy on two legs, ominous but graceful in its movement. Once he’d finished, Ezra had laughed uproariously, doubled over behind his desk, waving George off in seeming derision. Well, George told him, he wasn’t the first to disbelieve him.
“It’s not that,” Ezra said between fits of laughter. And he explained to George, then. How George’s father, Benjamin, would wait until night, dress himself up in layers, and put on a show for his son, a practice that he gleefully reported to Ezra, detailing George’s reactions come morning, how shocked he appeared at the breakfast table, barely willing to eat.
“It was all in good fun,” Ezra said. “He even had that colored girl dress up. I forget her name. The help. But she was nearly as tall as your father and he’d have her go out there when he wasn’t up to it. Heavens. Benjamin could be a real comedian. I didn’t know you still”—and here, George said, Ezra had to wipe away a tear of laughter—“still believed it.”
George couldn’t imagine his father having done such a thing to him. And to think that Taffy, his only friend, had been complicit made it that much worse. For her to have kept this conspiracy with his father felt like the ultimate betrayal. It wasn’t funny at all. Just cruel.
Prentiss seemed embarrassed by the story himself, looking at George with pity, as if Prentiss, too, had been in on the joke all along. But his words indicated otherwise.
“There was a time,” he said, “after my mama was gone, when I would sleep on the porch of our cabin waiting for her to come home. When the weather turned and I still wouldn’t come in, Landry got so worried, so worked up, he’d try to pick me up and carry me inside. Had to kick and scream to keep him off. Sounds fool-headed, I know—I just couldn’t give up hope. I knew her walk, knew her shape, knew the noise of her footsteps. Sometimes I could swear I felt her fingers grabbing my ear from behind, the way she used to when it was too late to be on the porch and I wouldn’t listen.”
He fidgeted and stared off into the woods.
“I s’pose I’m still looking for her. That’s part of why I’m out here running, right? Even if it’s a slim chance. I’m still looking, and I’ma keep looking. ’Cause if I ain’t got that belief that she’s out there somewhere, what’s left?”
When George couldn’t muster a response, Prentiss filled the silence for him.
“What I’m saying is I believed you all along. Even now. Ain’t nobody got a right to say what lives in these woods—or anywhere else, far as that goes. We might not get a say in much, but we got a say in our faith.”
“I still believe,” George said in a low voice, grateful for the goodwill.
“That’s two of us, then.”
A thrashing wind swooped upon them and George began to shiver even as it calmed.