It was of some relief when he broke free from the crowd and entered Ezra Whitley’s shop, taking in the air as if it had been preserved over time, untainted by the outside world.
“Ezra?” George called, placing his saddlebags near the front door and looking around.
Long tables—where Ezra’s sons had taken their lessons in the family business before founding their own shops—sat empty. A bookshelf commencing on the far wall wrapped itself around the room, falling just short of a full revolution.
He was about to call out again when a rattle came from the stairs. Ezra, hunched over himself, gingerly made his way down with a sandwich in hand, hailing George as he took a bite.
“Come, come,” he said.
“Well, don’t you come down if I’m going up,” George said.
Ezra by then had reached the foot of the stairs and waved him off.
“The movement is good for my legs. The doctor tells me there’s a pustule buildup behind the knees. At rest, they each take on the look of a ripe cantaloupe.”
“Good Lord. Is there a cure?”
“The doctor said time, so nothing really short of death. But the stairs bring some relief.”
He put a hand on George’s shoulder.
“Now follow along.”
So George followed Ezra, as he had for nearly all his life. No one had been closer to Benjamin, George’s father. Ezra had taken care of the family’s finances since George’s parents had moved from Nantucket down to Georgia in search of the cheap land that would make their fortune. Although Benjamin was keen on purchasing farmland, Ezra suggested his investments should bleed into Old Ox proper, the result being that Benjamin had for a time become the biggest leasing agent in the town altogether. Ever since, Ezra had kept them abreast of opportunity, monitored their ledgers, and shared rumors of the market that most men weren’t so blessed to catch wind of. George, who’d been born on the farm, had barely reached Ezra’s thigh when he first started coming around, and held fond memories of the man visiting their home, a salted caramel always in hand to keep him busy as the men talked business.
With the carefulness of the brittle-boned, they mounted the stairs and reached Ezra’s office, by which time the old man had finished his sandwich. He instructed George to sit down across from him. A bison pelt that Ezra had no interest in lined the wall behind his desk, for as he’d told George once, other men liked such things, and their comfort was paramount to assuring him their business.
“I hope the ride to town was peaceful?” Ezra asked.
“I suppose. For all the talk of hell descending upon us, it feels no different to me than before the occupation.”
“You’d feel differently if you were here every day as am I. Union soldiers patrolling and asking after us as though we might revolt at any moment. Not to speak of the slaves they’ve freed.”
“Is that so.”
“It’s an abomination. There is one of them in want of charity every way you turn. The lot of them congregated in the town square on Sunday for prayer, and the way they were crying and carrying on I wasn’t sure if it was in praise of their freedom or at the plight of what their freedom entails.”
“Their hands were only unbound days ago. You can’t blame them for still feeling the chafe of the chains.”
“Oh, aren’t you the pious one,” Ezra said. “Painting me as cruel as you retire to your home in the country. While I will go across the road here at day’s end and sleep with one eye open.”
George yawned.
“Why are we discussing this? Must we?”
Ezra shrugged, not only with his shoulders, which were perpetually hunched, but in the despondency of his gaze.
“We are friends. Friends speak of things that involve one another. This is called polite conversation.”
“Well, it bores me.”
“Then might I ask why you’re here?”
George fiddled with a button on his shirt, and finally told Ezra why he’d come: he wished to keep his holdings.
“So. Sell nothing, then?”
George had, since the passing of his father, elected to forgo work and simply unload parcels of his land as a means to get by. The freedom this had produced was worth more than the bother of tending to acreage he didn’t wish to farm. Ezra had been an eager buyer, a man as interested in business as George was in idleness. Where many speculators had stopped purchasing during the war, Ezra had remained committed to acquiring the very land he’d helped Benjamin make his own so many years ago.