It was Isabelle, moaning and overtaken by the occasion. He could hardly believe what he saw next: the long blanket of blond hair, snapping in the wind like a flag before his son’s face. Caleb tried to turn, but his mother held him so tightly that his features stayed hidden. When George drew close enough for their eyes to meet, they were strangers to each other. Isabelle released Caleb for a moment, but both father and son stood frozen, some distance apart, as if in need of an introduction.
“Well then,” was all George could say. “Well.”
His voice caught, and he struggled to subdue the swelling wave that had been stored away for so long. He could not run to meet him, his legs would not move, but there was time now. At last he approached, cautiously, and could finally make out the markers of his face, the same ones he saw in his mind’s eye, night after night, when he pictured the boy reading on the lip of his bed, beckoning to him. As with any moment of unbridled emotion, he did not know how to react, or what he was expected to say, and could only think of how he was supposed to appear, how another man, a better man, might act in his position.
He put a hand on Caleb’s cheek to make sure it was real.
“I heard your mother, but never did I think.” Then he slid both hands into his pockets. “Why don’t we go inside.”
CHAPTER 8
Caleb had not quite managed to kill his father, but he had certainly aged him. The old man looked pained when he walked, and the lines of his face appeared as cracks upon glass that had flourished with time. His mother, at first glance, was more of a comfort. He’d missed her as the other soldiers missed their mothers, knowing that his home was not so much the cabin but the place where she existed, waiting for him to return, waiting to embrace him. When they hugged, when he held the shape of her against him, he felt like a boy again, and wished he could draw upon that feeling on command for the rest of his time alive.
Now, at the dining room table, she caressed his face and ran her hand along the scar of his cheek, the new shape of his nose, and demanded to know whether his health was intact.
“Shall we call a doctor?” she said. “I think we should. It’s decided, then.”
“I’m all healed,” he said. “It’s done. It’s all over.”
After his long absence the house presented itself as a dreamscape, and he was inclined to inspect every room, to confirm the particularities of each in relation to the whole. And there were simpler urges: to see Ridley, whom, in an unforeseen turn, he had missed deeply; to bathe; to sleep in his own bed.
His mother set him up with a plate of white cheese and bread and promised him an apple pie—her one true specialty—once she’d procured the necessary ingredients. She spoke of the pie at length, overwhelmed at the excitement of his arrival to such an extent that her mind had narrowed to this single track of thought—the coring of fruit and the retrieval of some cider to spruce up the innards and the readying of the flour for the crust and so on.
“If you carry on like this,” his father said, “I fear what we’ll have to endure when you get to talking of dinner.”
He was in the big room, seated in his old beaten-down chair. Caleb could not hold back a bit of laughter.
“Don’t set her off,” he said.
“It’s too late for that, clearly,” his father said.
His mother, ignoring their banter, took a breath and grabbed Caleb’s forearm, rubbing it with enough vigor to kindle a fire.
“A mother has a right to be worked up. My child is back! Now tell us what came of you. August was here. He gave us the gravest news. That, well…”
“That you’d been killed,” his father said.
Not quite, Caleb said. He’d been made prisoner. Exchanged. Then paroled. As had so many others. Given a parchment describing how he was to yield to the law of the Union and return home. This condensation of the events felt like the first step in letting them slip away into the past. Unlikely, but he had to make a go of it.
“So August is home,” he said, betraying no feeling.
“He suffered an injury himself,” his father said, “although I could not make sight of it at all. A bad fall, apparently.”
Caleb shifted and dried mud sloughed off his pants and landed beneath his chair. His mother, for all her excitement, could not refrain from looking at the carpet as if an animal had just released its droppings.
His father asked him how far he’d come.
“The Carolinas.”
“You walked all that way?”