It was only a few weeks ago that Mr. Morton had approached the slaves who could still stand a hard day’s work with the wartime rations and doubled quotas, waking a few who had turned in early. He told a select number of the stronger men that he had a generous offer, born of his patriotism at the behest of President Davis: he’d give them their freedom if they would volunteer to fight for the cause.
“Prentiss,” he said, working down the line. “You were always a reliable hand. They need men like you. What do you say?”
Prentiss had looked upon Mr. Morton with as earnest a disposition as he could muster.
“Well, me and Landry here move as one.” He then turned to his brother. “Landry, how you feel about fighting for the cause?”
Mr. Morton sat forward on his horse, eager for an answer, but Landry’s mouth stayed shut, his head moving with neither a nod nor a shake.
“Don’t sound like a yes to me, master,” Prentiss told him. “But he don’t say much at all. I wouldn’t take it as a show of disrespect.”
And then the slightest uptick at the corner of Landry’s mouth, the start of a smile, too faint for Mr. Morton to catch, but so clear to Prentiss that he could hardly keep from grinning himself.
Their lives had changed so drastically since then that the moment struck him as though it was from the distant past. He wished to feel the joy he’d felt then, but it was gone to him. Nowadays the only memories that got his blood rushing were the ones he so badly wished to be rid of. Perhaps his great fear was that this would always be the case—that the long shadow of the cattails at his rear would always cause him to swallow at the arrival of the overseer’s mare; that the shiver of the water’s surface would forever take on the spasm of his brother’s backside on impact with the master’s whip.
He put a hand on his brother’s shoulder, slow enough not to startle him.
“That’s enough for a day, don’t you think?”
And when he stood up to leave, Landry did so too.
CHAPTER 4
Old Ox had burnt down twice in the last fifty years, and both times it licked its wounds and roared back to life as if it fed on the very flames that had turned it to ash. The place made little sense—you could buy yourself a better haircut at Mr. Rainey’s Meats than at the barbershop, and better cuts of meat from a Chickasaw who came through town once a week in a covered wagon than at Mr. Rainey’s—but its resilience could not be called into question, for each passing resurrection gave it more life than its past selves could ever claim to have.
It had grown to be a loose grid of connected buildings and homes that George could scarcely make heads or tails of, and he was suspicious of the newer establishments in recognition of the chances that they might not be there the next time he laid eyes on them—if not for a fire then an unpaid debt, if not an unpaid debt then a move to the next opportunity down the road in Selby or Chambersville or Campton. That was why he paid mind to none but the places he frequented, coming in on Saturday mornings for supplies or business only when necessary.
Venturing there from home took him half an hour on the back of his donkey, and he always tied Ridley up to the slumped hitching rail in front of Ray Bittle’s home on the farthest edge of town. Ray slept on his porch with a lust for dreaming that George admired, yet the old man often managed a twitch of his hat in acknowledgment whenever passersby stopped before his home. It was the only correspondence George had shared with him in years.
“I won’t be long,” George said, more to the donkey than to Bittle, then grabbed his saddlebags and made his way to the main thoroughfare.
The walkways of the town were composed of wooden planks, most of them as thin and uneven as coffin lids; it took only the slightest hint of rain for them to overrun, fits of water creeping through the slits like cooked juices seeping from a roast. The main road headed off into alleys that led to new constructions and finally the oldest part of town, the original row of homes that found ways to survive when others languished. The landscape felt expansive, yet the flow of people was suffocating and the surplus unraveled what little thread of decency there’d once been in the place. The walls of Vessey Mercantile were smeared with so much waste, human and otherwise, that the resulting splatters resembled the markings of a child who had put all the colors on his palette into one muddied shade. Between Blossom’s Café and the general store were nooks and crannies no wider than a dog’s cage, and nearly all of them housed the clustered tents of the homeless—some whites returned from the war still in tattered uniforms, others freedmen, the contrast fit for the pen of an ironist with a low sense of humor.