“We should leave her alone,” he said quietly.
“She seems fine there,” Prentiss said, sipping the lemonade. “I don’t think she minds us much.”
But they walked to the barn in silence, as a unit, their feet crunching the grass.
“You think she’s done with you,” Prentiss said.
“I did not say that,” George said.
“You act like it.”
This felt like an opening, an invitation, but George, recalling the conversation in the woods about Caleb, elected not to take it.
“Let me see what we decide to eat and I will bring what I can,” he said.
Landry went inside the barn. He took off his shirt. There was a basin no bigger than a sink but they could fill it and wash there. George left them to it.
He would wash up himself, and to do this he would have to retrieve a fresh pair of clothes from the bedroom. The night was looming, the house was quiet, his least favorite moment of every day. His study was the first room up the stairs, their bedroom the last, and Caleb’s sat between the two, where the narrowness of the hallway became most apparent. The door to Caleb’s room, slightly ajar, teased George, beckoning him, but he could not bear the temptation. Even the simplest glance could uncork an endless stream of memories: the sight of the boy sneaking into his study as if George didn’t see him there, or, worse yet, the image of young Caleb reading at the lip of his bed, facing the window, and turning to see his father as he passed, with a smile so broad it took over the width of his boyish face.
If he did not open the door it felt as if Caleb was still there, reading indefinitely, and the realization that he could not face the truth, and would rather heed some childish sense of denial, pained him as much as the boy’s death. He might not have been a man of strength, or great resolve, but he had always thought he could look within himself with an honesty few others could lay claim to. Except here. Except before his son’s door.
He retrieved a shirt from the bedroom and hurried back downstairs.
*
For the first time since he had delivered the fatal news, Isabelle ate beside him that night. And in the days ahead, she began to return to active life, though as this new variation of herself—transformed into a cold fixture on the porch who was willing to take care of the home, to cook and garden, to entertain visitors for an afternoon, but without any of the cheer that had once rounded out her demeanor.
Still they slept apart. Each day George woke in his armchair with a doubt that the brothers would appear again. He had a strong belief that they might take what little money he’d given them thus far and disappear. But each morning they emerged from the barn and approached the steps of the house, and George, seated on the porch, itched his backside and rose gratefully to greet them. They would lean against the barn drinking coffee, discussing what was to come in the day, and then act upon it, finishing in the calm glow of the approaching evening in a race to clear the trees in time to begin tilling the ground in preparation for the eventual seeding.
Although he spoke freely with them, he kept to himself the single lie he’d told, which was that his father’s allegory bore no importance for him. In fact, in his mind’s eye he conjured his life as a languishing oak, throttled by the elements, with branches so tortured that they sprouted at impossible angles, its bark flecked with yellow fungus and its leaves burnt through by the sun. The decline only furthered as the years passed, but George felt the tree had been born rotten, as if he knew he had begun on poor ground, with an unsteady and shifting sense of morality, and that there would be no improvement.
On a morning that was awfully windy and, for the early spring, uncommonly cold, they came upon a dying tree that was an uncanny replica of the one in his mind. George demanded he cut this one on his own, and although it took nearly an hour, he exulted in the labor. It was as if, in excising from the property this tree—so puny compared with the rest—he might somehow also cut the disappointing past from his very being. And so he swung the ax with abandon, with a childlike belief in reversing years of inaction, of squandered land and squandered relationships. He felt a great release, the opening of a space within him that might allow for something new to sprout—something good, something worth living for.
The meager tree made little sound when it fell, which meant that the noise finding his ears had to have been borne from somewhere else. Long howls like those of a child reached him, and together with Prentiss and Landry, George followed the sound, at first plodding, then jogging toward the cabin with a great apprehension filling his chest. When they emerged into the clearing, his worst fears were realized, and then dropped immediately away.