He was dutiful in paying them—a dollar a day each—enough that in time they would be able to save an amount sufficient to afford not only railroad tickets but also extra clothes and some lodging and meals until they landed on their feet. For lunch George usually fetched a bit of salted pork from the storeroom, some hard bread from the previous night’s leftovers, and cobbled together two meals apiece to get them through the day.
On occasion there were the afternoons when they left the work behind and simply walked, or rested, though George noticed this seemed to make Prentiss antsy. Nevertheless he would listen attentively to George’s stories, tales of an old man’s past. George understood that, as with his own lackluster participation in cutting down the trees, this listening of Prentiss’s was nothing but a courtesy paid to him. He relished it all the same.
One day, when they’d finished early and were sitting on a felled tree soon to be chopped into smaller logs that they would stack on the sled for Ridley to haul, George told them again of the beast. Prentiss entertained the idea, seeming to recognize the manifestation of such things being birthed in the dark—creatures that existed on the border of reality and legend.
George told them, too, of a mental exercise his father had hatched: that each day of each year, a man might imagine a tree in his mind. The tree, upon doing good in the world, could grow strong and thick, but with every poor decision, rot would start to sprout—gnarled roots at its base, limp branches that snapped with the lightest touch. At the end of any given period—a month, a year—it was wise to consider the growth of one’s tree, and the decisions you had made that led it there. It was yours to let grow or die.
“I rather like that,” Prentiss said.
“Count yourself as one of the few to lend it credence,” George said. “I take little heed of it. My father himself failed to follow the instruction and he invented the whole damn thing. Hell, my own son scoffed at it when he was half your age. But it sounds nice, doesn’t it?”
Prentiss looked at him and it took George a moment to realize that he’d invoked Caleb—whom he’d studiously avoided mentioning in the brothers’ presence—for perhaps the first time since the night he’d met them. Prentiss asked him, directly but with a note of tenderness, what had become of his son.
George thought for a moment to deflect but then he told him.
“That’s a shame,” said Prentiss, who seemed inclined to add something more but stopped there.
“It’s indescribable,” George said. “I wouldn’t wish it on my own enemy. I hope you never experience such a thing.”
Landry, who until now had sat motionlessly beside them holding an ax beneath its blade as if it were a child’s plaything, picked up a loose branch and began sharpening it to a point with the ax.
“I lost my oldest cousin to a sale when I was thirteen,” Prentiss said. “That was after the crop caught ablaze. Mr. Morton sold our mama a couple years later. Had her inside the house weaving on the loom when she stopped picking her share, but her hands took to shaking so he got rid of her. My father died when my mama was pregnant with Landry. I wasn’t old enough to know him.”
George squinted under the gaze of the sun. He did not know what to say for quite a long time and came to wish he had trusted his instinct and refrained from speaking about Caleb.
“I suppose no one owns a claim on suffering,” he said at last.
“S’pose not.”
They returned to the cabin as the day cooled. He had been allowing Prentiss and Landry to stay in the barn as a way to escape the woods. Isabelle was on the porch, as she had been since that morning when he left, and they quieted when they saw her. She had taken visitors once or twice since Mildred Foster had been to the house but still said very little to George, all in all. On this day, Mildred was to have paid her another visit, but George—to his great relief—had been in the woods long enough to miss the occasion. He imagined that he and the brothers appeared as a group of schoolboys, sweating and talking loudly and suddenly hushing in her presence. Landry, fidgeting awkwardly with his shirt, stepped behind his brother, though the move to obscure himself was all but pointless, given his size.
George asked after her day.
“Fine. Mildred says hello.”
“Oh, well, that’s nice of her.”
“She’s a strong woman. Helpful in times like these.”
He had hoped that Mildred might lift his wife’s spirits, but she was clearly morose. She stood and disappeared inside, then reappeared bearing a pitcher of lemonade and a ring of cups, her index finger threaded through each of their handles. She came down the stairs and handed each of them a cup and poured. Her gaze was fixed on the ground, as if she’d been commanded to perform an action that rankled her. Prentiss thanked her, more than once, and George, though lost in his confusion, finally managed to utter a thanks himself as she retreated to the porch, where she poured her own cup. Up to this very moment she had ignored the brothers, so that the act seemed to indicate some kind of truce, not with them but with George, and with the circumstances surrounding their employ.