“Will you still find a moment to send the telegram?” she asked.
“Oh. Yes.”
“You said first thing this morning.”
“Then I should get going.”
He stood and collected some cups from the cabinet and poured some coffee he thought the brothers might enjoy. He stopped himself before stepping back outside.
“Isabelle. Are you feeling better today?”
She took a deep inhale through her nose, sipped her coffee, and finally gave George a rather friendly shrug of the shoulders.
“It is a nice morning.”
*
George got them started in the storage shed before he went to town. When he returned they held two axes they’d fished from the deep maws of the place, in a corner littered with mouse droppings. It had taken them longer to locate a sharpening stone, but they’d managed this as well and had brought both axes to a point that George found almost intimidating to behold.
Prentiss, who had already surveyed the land they wished to clear, explained to George the dimensions they might accomplish as a unit of three, an estimate figured by mapping out over time the toil of three men on Morton’s plantation.
“Well, there is no rush,” George said. “Efficiency is important, but we don’t want to exhaust ourselves.”
Prentiss stared at him blankly—a look that was becoming a regular occurrence—ready to carry on with his plan.
There was no mention of George’s trip to town. He’d gotten the telegram off to Silas’s home. The man himself was on the way back from yet another venture to sell goods for high premiums in locales others wished not to sojourn, most recently positioned outside a surrendered Confederate fort in the Everglades, where George imagined him lazily sipping whiskey before a swamp in the same fashion he lazily sipped whiskey at his farm back in Chambersville.
He had kept the telegram brief and to the point: Caleb killed in action. Few details. Your sister grieves. For a moment he’d considered the wording, as to whether his own grieving was notable （We grieve; or, We mourn his loss）， but it was none of Silas’s business how George felt, and he’d left it written as it was.
He had then walked across the street and spent ten minutes with Ezra, interrupting a meeting with his request for a small loan, which Ezra gave him with little curiosity and without requesting any papers be signed. The only confusion to Ezra was George’s wish to be given the amount half in coins and half in small notes—Ezra muttered that he wasn’t a bank, then obliged. And George was home with almost a full day of sunlight to spare, yet he did not wish to begin working, although both Prentiss and Landry—for what little Landry betrayed, standing stoically against the barn—were more than willing to start the job.
Prentiss trained an appraising eye upon him now.
“I seen you struggle with that leg. Got yourself a hard enough time just getting off that donkey.”
But this was one point on which George would not budge. The job, if done by others, would not permit him the purpose, the distraction, of the whole campaign. He did not wish to admit how little he wanted to be in his own home, and how little else there was in the world that interested him. He simply insisted it was vital he join them, side by side, so that when they left, he would know how to continue on his own.
“You claim you itching to get started, Mr. Walker, but from what I seen I’d hazard you ain’t worked a day in your life.”
“As I’ve said, George is fine. I’m not my father. And until now I always considered a successful day to be defined by a lack of work, so I cannot say you’re far off with that estimation.”
Prentiss stood at attention. “Well, you about to make up for lost time, I’ma see to that.”
“Who is in charge here, exactly?” George said.
Prentiss smiled then, knowing, perhaps, what was to come in a manner that George himself did not.
*
That day was the first of many together. The three men would take turns with the axes, George chopping meekly when he could manage, passing it off and wiping the sweat from his brow when he could not. Each tree’s fall was startling, the later ones no less than the first. The very act had a meaning that fueled him, the bark splintering on contact, the groan of the tree and the felling and the strike of the impact cascading through the forest like a whoosh of wind, sudden and ominous and wholly arresting.
George was far from capable of the effort the brothers expended. When the day grew long, and he took one swing too many—his hip burning, his arms sore—Landry would lean forward and put a hand on his shoulder, as if to tell him he’d done enough, and wrest the ax from his hands. George exclaimed that he was only getting started, yet Landry, ignoring him, assumed his place, slashing at the tree with guttural thuds so violent they quieted George.