“I ain’t got no business in Baltimore,” Prentiss said.
“None of us ain’t got no business nowhere. But that ain’t stop nobody.”
“Y’all just up and leave?”
The man nodded.
“Now it seems I answered your question, and you ain’t answer mine. What you got?”
He wanted their canteen. Prentiss looked it over in his hand, having never considered it of value. Perhaps he was missing something etched in the tin, something signified in the chipped edge of the cork. In return for it he got three potatoes. The man even handed Landry the remains from the skillet, which he ate with the most speed he’d shown all day.
“I bet down the road you might find some room,” the man told them.
The sun was higher now. It was so bright outside the tent, so dark inside, Prentiss could barely see the man who’d been speaking. He turned to his brother.
“Give the man the pan.”
Landry handed back the skillet and they returned to the road, the smell of the potatoes lingering long after they’d left. Landry grew calm with a little food in his stomach, walking alone up ahead of Prentiss, leading them back to the woods with a meandering gait.
“Keep on the path,” Prentiss said.
He was already thinking about when they would leave, how he would inform his brother when the time came. And alongside this decision there was some forfeiture in the thought he found unsettling: that for every pound of weight they’d carried across their backs, for every drop of sweat that had poured off, no inch of this land was theirs. As long as they stayed, they were no better than the others, kept on the borders of town, hidden among the trees just like their brothers and sisters. And it grew clear that the only path to a life worth living would be found elsewhere, where they might not have more but could not possibly have less.
There was a hurried movement before him.
“Landry!” he screamed.
His brother veered off through the brush at the side of the path, and before Prentiss could grab at him, he was being led through the backwoods, ankle-high mud pulling at his shoes, clots of mosquitoes so loud about him that his head felt abuzz. The reeds were higher here. Nettles punctured his pants and stabbed at his legs. He could not see his brother, and for a moment he did not know where to turn, or which way was straight. He closed his eyes to the wall of grass before him and stampeded forward, and only then did he break free, fresh air overtaking him. He would have fallen into the water if it was not for Landry, who was crouched down at his feet, stopping him from hurtling ahead.
“What’s gotten into you? Now you answer me—”
He saw it then—a pond, no more than the span of a few men across. The surface was covered with floating lilies, shoots of cattails like digits reaching out toward the sun. At its center sat a small island of sedges. His brother dipped his hand over and over, and lapped at the water. Prentiss watched his brother’s hand make contact, submerge, and reappear, glimmering ripples that fanned out and grew still in the heat. The sight was seemingly new to Landry each time.
His enthusiasm brought to mind the cotton fields, where troughs of water were stationed at the end of the rows. The overseers would often let their horses drink as the day wore on, and if a row was picked clean in short order, they’d sometimes let those at work kneel down and drink themselves. Yet the fields were shaped like a horseshoe, and at the end of his row, near the farthest bend, Landry seldom took to the water, but fixed his eyes upon the fountain that lay in front of Majesty’s Palace. Prentiss would tell him to drink, but his brother seemed to find the fountain a better source, as if it fit him to wait out his thirst for what lay ahead, water that would never be his own. Here, in some way, he appeared to have found that fountain’s equal.
“Feels nice, don’t it,” Prentiss said, relaxing now.
He sat beside Landry, marveling not at the beauty before him but at the grace of his brother, the hum of curiosity hidden behind his distant stare, the parts of him others failed to notice. His fingers were especially delicate, graceful things, and their mother would often say they were fit for playing an instrument, one of class, an organ being her decided preference. In private, she told Prentiss it was where she looked when they strung Landry up for his whippings. There were parts of you they could touch, she said, and parts they could not, and his hands, even tied to a post, would never lose their beauty even if they broke the rest of him down. If only she knew how strong he’d stand as the days and years wore on, long after she’d been sold, even after the monthly whippings had quit but the threat of the lash was still ever-present.