“I imagine August told you everything there was to share.”
Mr. Webler looked upon him with a stinging sense of either disgust or remorse. His mustache bristled like a tickled caterpillar. He reached to the cellarette at his back and produced a tumbler and an uncorked, half-empty decanter.
“Let me tell you something, son.”
He began to pour himself a drink so carefully that the stream kept up with his story, the smell of the whiskey so potent and the tang of his words so biting that the resultant mixture of the two felt combustible in the air.
“I fought down in Mexico,” he said, “when August was but a babe. There was an expedition in Puebla, before we saw any gunplay. By the time we set foot into the city they were already raising our flag, so I spent the night carousing with the boys, the usual business. But one of those Mexicans stumbles into our camp, starting trouble, probably as drunk as I was, and I see the threat and I know I got to earn my stripes somehow. So I call him out, get him to square up with me, and I have him on the ground before you could say your own name. The boys are hollering and that bug juice has me feeling invincible and I’m not about to let up.”
Mr. Webler leaned back and sighed as if he had just unearthed a new interpretation of the story that had previously eluded him, and Caleb listened to the performance as a spectator grasping for an appropriate reaction—to applaud or laugh or cry—unsure of where the man was taking it but waiting patiently for it to end.
“I get a nice little angle, press my fingers into his eyes, and squeeze to hell and back, and those things leak out so soft and easy you would’ve thought they were two slugs under my thumbs. And when I get up I’m smiling, and I don’t realize in the moment, in all that exercise, that I went and pissed myself. So of course I tell them it was all that effort I put in, fess up just to get on with things. But wouldn’t you know it, before I went to sleep that night I turned over in my tent, had a little cry, and pissed myself again. They never knew about that one, though. That one I kept close to the vest.”
The women and children, all of them mute, were still cleaning around the two men ceaselessly and the place had the feel of a prison, with Caleb being forced, along with the inmates, to endure a speech by a warden displaying his power over those in his charge. He pitied these people who had put up with Mr. Webler for so long, working now for what must be pennies after years of bondage, and wondered, if a domestic uprising were to take place, whether anyone other than the man’s wife and son would bemoan his skull being smashed in.
“I believe I regret that day,” he carried on. “Not the pissing. I wasn’t the first boy in uniform to piss myself. But only that that Mexican did nothing to earn my violence. It’s not as if he deserted his own. He was still in Puebla. Still looking for a fight. There’s honor in that.”
Caleb, for some time, could not conjure a word. The clock sang out once again.
“Sounds like quite the mess, sir,” he finally managed.
Mr. Webler downed his whiskey in one pull and offered Caleb the slightest grin.
“I’m sure you can imagine.”
Just then the light above the staircase was interrupted by the opening of a door that shuttered out the sun. The parlor went so dark, and then so bright as the door closed once more, that even Mr. Webler paused, although the scrubbing of the floor continued unabated.
Caleb could not help standing.
“Ah. There he is,” Mr. Webler said.
As footsteps started down the stairs, Mr. Webler stood and excused himself.
“I suppose I’ll leave both of you to it.”
*
August invited Caleb to ride with him to their favorite hideaway, the place where they’d spent great swaths of their youth. On the way, August apologized for his father’s behavior. （He’d been up, as Caleb had guessed, since the party the night before, and apparently the Union occupation of Old Ox had brought him to seek counsel in drink almost every night.） But neither of the friends seemed willing to speak in anything other than circles of small talk.
Caleb asked August about the rest of his time in the field.
“Boring for long stretches, really. Faced off against a few bluebelly stragglers, got to point my Colt at them.”
“I bet you liked that.”
“For a time.”
Footsteps on grass. That familiar crunch.
“Might I ask what brought you home?” Caleb said.
August was silent, a flicker of a smile forming at the corner of his lips. Near the end, he said, they’d gotten orders to head toward Fort Myers, down in Florida. At last a real battle. Unfortunately, en route, he took a little spill down a hillside while on patrol and nearly broke his leg. He spent a week in the infirmary and was then sent home.