“What is it?” Caleb asked.
Nothing, Prentiss told him. He had no interest in alarming the boy, who worried enough as it was about what had happened to his father. The trek alone had provided ample concern. He didn’t need to add to Caleb wondering, every night, if some distant rattle was George coming to reunite with them. Having returned from the war in one piece, Caleb apparently didn’t realize how these situations so often ended. No reunion. No resolution. Instead, the spark of life that connects you to the other you cherish simply dims and then goes black entirely. The present thunders on while the past is a wound untended, unstitched, felt but never healed.
“I think we should both stay awhile in town,” Prentiss said. “Get up to something. Work a little. It’s possible, I think—to just live normal—even if it ain’t for long.”
Time, he’d found, was different in the woods. Without a man like Gail—or George, in his milder way—keeping him attuned to its passing, he had learned to tell it by bearing witness to the emotions of the sun: its fury showing orange in the afternoon; its loss of interest in pockets of time, when it let the wind take flight and cool things down; its violet at sundown like a wink, a flourish, before turning in altogether, teasing the world with what it might have in store come morning. It might bring out your passions one minute but it could lull you in the next, and he was not surprised to find Caleb in a trance. He pondered how long he’d been standing there in silence; how far down the road the man with his chin to his chest had ridden since he’d last put eyes on him.
What he would give to be so careless! To not look over his shoulder. To miss a signpost and find himself two towns over, drinking ale on a stranger’s porch and speaking with him of the last stranger who had made the same mistake. He wished to do wrong, too. That was what George, what Caleb, what no one quite got. They underestimated his passion for living. The freedom to steal a glance at a taken woman, one who reminded him of Delpha, or Clementine, and sneak in a word one day when her man was off at work—who she belonged to be damned, for every woman was her own woman, and he was his own man.
Or what of the freedom to learn? There were so many things that Prentiss yearned to know, subjects he wished to be educated on in the coming years. Not all of it was pure speculation. They’d had so much free time that Caleb had begun to teach him letters, even. Caleb would often test him with words all morning, each more advanced than the last, and he’d begun to crave the smile that crossed the boy’s face whenever he meant to trip Prentiss up and failed.
His success seemed to energize Caleb as well. He would tell Prentiss how he never wished to work with crops again, that there was so much else to do in a world so vast. A printing press would be pleasant work, he said, and although Prentiss knew little of it, the thought sounded just as fine to him, too. He’d need to know numbers, perhaps, know how to make a transaction with a customer, or calculate stock on hand, but Caleb assured him that this could be learned in due time. Up north there were teachers, eager to work with freedmen just like him. If this was true, the borders of the possible and impossible were not entirely clear. A job like that, with a bit of education—Prentiss saw himself becoming no different than any white man. He’d walk through a city with the sort of pride that fuels a whole brigade of soldiers on their way to battle.
This was when his mind would return to Clementine. To his mother, even. If he could spell their names, and pay the cost to the right man, the imaginary was suddenly true. Of course they could be found. How ignorant to have thought otherwise, to have shrugged off the potential, the great rewards, that might come in the cultured life which could follow this one. He could see himself already, leaving work early to get home, his mother playing with Elsy, and Clementine in the kitchen, pregnant, cooking up a meal from a recipe that his mother had passed on to her new daughter.
Good money. A family. A house of his own. It wasn’t just that he could be free, he realized. He could be happy.
CHAPTER 27
One hand. That was all she’d felt of George’s body after he passed. His wrist was smooth as hardened wax—so cold, so foreign, that she convinced herself it wasn’t her husband at all. They buried him the morning after he’d passed （a walnut coffin, identical to Landry’s）， Isabelle and Silas alone, for she did not wish to see anyone else on the occasion. His death was hers—she claimed it, and the others could mourn on their own time if they pleased.
When the burial was over, Silas told her she should come with him. There was room at the homestead in Chambersville. She could be closer to her nephews.