“I didn’t mean to worry you,” he said. “We just. We ain’t had something land in that trap yet…We ain’t had a proper meal in some time, is all.”
“I see,” George said, collecting himself. “Then you’ve been out here longer than I first thought.”
Prentiss explained then that they had departed from Mr. Morton’s a week ago; had taken what little they could carry on their backs—a sickle left in the fields, a bit of food, the bedrolls from their pallets; and had not made it any farther than where they stood now.
“He said we could take a few things from the cabins,” Prentiss said of Morton’s minor generosity. “We ain’t steal a thing.”
“No one said anything about stealing. Not that I would care, he has more than a simpleton like himself could ever make use of. I just wonder why, really. You could go anywhere.”
“We plan to. It’s just nice.”
“What’s that?”
Prentis looked at George as if the answer was right before him.
“To be left alone for a time.”
Landry, ignoring them, had chopped the loose bits of an oak tree limb into feed for a fire.
“Ain’t that why you’re out here yourself, Mr. Walker?”
George was shivering now. He began to speak of the animal, how it had led him here, but the sound of Landry’s chopping interrupted his train of thought, and he found himself, as had been the case since the preceding day, reflecting on his son. When the boy was younger, they had walked these very woods together, chopping wood and making a play of such things as if a hearth, permanently aflame, was not awaiting them at home. With that memory the others streamed forth, the small moments that had bonded the two—putting him to bed; praying with him at the table, empty gestures with winks passed from one to the other like whispered secrets; wishing him off to the front with a handshake that should have been so much more—until they dissolved in the face of the boy’s best friend, August, having come to visit him that very morning with news of Caleb’s death.
They’d met in George’s small study. August looked very much like his father, the same blond hair, the boyish features and the air of vague regality rooted in little but family folklore. August and Caleb had left Old Ox in their clean butternut grays and polished boots, and George expected his son to return a muddied, threadbare savage; foresaw himself and Isabelle as the dutiful parents who would nurse him back to normalcy. In light of this, something felt indecent about August’s evening wear: the frocked shirt, the pressed waistcoat with the gold timepiece hanging freely. It appeared as if he’d already discarded his time at war, and this meant Caleb, too, had become part of the past, long before George had even known his son was gone from him forever.
While August sat across from George’s desk, George himself could only bear to stand at the window. August informed him that he’d been injured, a bad tumble on patrol that had led to his discharge only a week earlier, the first day of March. He looked perfectly healthy to George, who figured the boy’s father had paid to see him to safety as the war in its last throes grew more dangerous. But his suspicions weighed nothing against what it was that had brought them to this moment. To this room. And so August began to speak, and even with his first utterance, George grasped the hollowness of the boy’s words, the theatrics of his delivery; could picture him in his runabout, coming to his property, going over each sentence, each syllable, for the greatest possible effect.
He told George that Caleb had served honorably and had welcomed death with honor and courage; that God had willed him a peaceful passing. Caleb had been going off with this boy since they were both so young that neither reached George’s midsection. He recalled a time they’d run into the woods to play, only to return with Caleb so mortified, August so filled with glee, that George took the contrast as the result of some competition, an occasion that might lend itself to a moral lesson. Take your losses like a man, now, George had said. But later, when Caleb would not sit for dinner, winced even in consideration of doing so, George pulled the boy’s trousers down. Slash marks, some still flush with blood, the others bruised to a deep purple, covered his backside. He told George of the game August had hatched, Master and the Slave, and that they had only been assuming their proper roles for the afternoon. The pain was not from the marks, Caleb went on, but from the fact that he could not conceal them and that George might tell August’s father. He had to swear to the boy that he would keep it secret.