One morning they stood idle, cloaked in the shadows of the trees, looking out upon the road that led into that town. Convent, Caleb had told him upon his first trip there. The place was called Convent. Prentiss had yet to utter the word. Didn’t feel right to tempt fate, to speak of it as an actuality, as the next step in his plan, only for it to be robbed from him when Hackstedde eased up to their camp, rope in hand, ready to shatter the very dreams of freedom Prentiss guarded in his mind’s eye so zealously. But it was nigh on a month now, and Hackstedde was nowhere to be found. Seemed more and more likely it might remain that way.
“I bet they got beds in Convent,” Prentiss said. “I can’t be the only one of us who’d enjoy the feel of a real pillow under his head. No more bug bites, either. We ain’t gotta be itching each other’s backs all day. Imagine that.”
Caleb offered him a noncommittal look and said nothing.
His unease made Prentiss try another tack. Hit the matter head-on. “I’d rather risk it than keep this up. Can’t quite see the point of chasing freedom if you ain’t gonna take it up once it’s sitting right in front of you.”
“I like it out here,” Caleb said, his voice low and tinged with embarrassment. “I wish I could say why. I can’t quite put my finger on it.”
But it wasn’t hard for Prentiss to understand. Out here, living with his guilt, the boy didn’t have to worry about disappointing anyone. There was no one to see through his false confidence and call him out as so many others appeared to have done in the past, at least according to the stories he’d told Prentiss—about boys who were predators, boys who haunted his dreams. Prentiss saw some of himself in Caleb, for he and Landry had hidden on George’s land in this same fashion. The reassurance, the blessedness, of being left alone was worth more than a thousand bug bites.
From their spot on the road, Prentiss could spy the start of the buildings at the edge of town, peeking out from chimney smoke and the occasional cloud. Already his imagination had mapped out the place—the cozy nook of the general store where Caleb had ventured for their food, the looming spire of the church where everyone gathered on Sundays. He even knew the homes of all the townsfolk—families he’d invented, going so far as to assign them hobbies and jobs, passions and secrets.
But Convent was not the place he wished to land for good. There was nowhere within journeying distance of Old Ox that he would ever call home. The very mention of it could make his mouth quiver. His feet go numb. And those old images of Majesty’s Palace, of Landry’s face as a boy, the brightness of his mother’s smile （only on good days, when they had a rabbit roasting, when the night’s work was done early and his mother tousled Landry’s hair and his giggles bounced against the walls of their cabin）， would penetrate him like a knife, only to be replaced by the emptiness of their cabin after his mother was sold, by the mangled gape of his brother’s face in his coffin. Maybe with time there were parts of the past that could be forgotten, their sway over him toppled, but there would always be certain memories that survived the fall and stood amid the rubble. Monuments of loss.
“I’m not stopping you,” Caleb said. “If you wish to go.” He was tossing the last jar of his mother’s canned fruit between his hands. He refused to eat it. That last connection with the woman he adored so much. It seemed he might well be content to stick right here in these woods for the rest of his life, holed away from society while the world carried on.
The wind was so violent it felt as though it might cut through flesh like a whip. It quit for a spell before it kicked up one last time and took off in the direction of town. Prentiss squinted again into the distance at the rooftops, shards of brick and wood, seducing him with the power of the unknown.
Yet for all his desire to take his chances in town, it was he whose heart began to gallop when a horse-drawn cart appeared on the road bearing a man who looked to be asleep, chin against chest. He shielded himself behind a tree, while Caleb, unconcerned, only gazed in the other direction, still playing with that jar. Prentiss scolded himself silently, brushing bark off his shirt, which only brought him to think of how badly he longed to bathe. But it wasn’t just the man in his cart—something in the daylight menaced him: a steady drum, growing louder, the sound of a threat creeping near, the same sound that followed Gail’s horse in the fields of Majesty’s Palace, or Hackstedde’s horse in the forest, and although the noise was not as real as Caleb made it out to be, it did not make it less persistent, less tangible in the sight of every stranger that came down the road before them. To his great shame, he was scared.