Like his father, Caleb could find nothing wrong with his friend’s leg upon examination. He looked no different than he had the day they’d left Old Ox together—if anything he seemed sprier now. Caleb knew, of course, that August would never have seen a battlefield. His father wouldn’t have allowed it. But he wasn’t about to acknowledge this fact.
“Not even a hobble,” he observed.
“No. I’m lucky in that way.”
Rather than lob his own volley of questions, August told Caleb how he’d been working for his father in the weeks since returning home, learning about lumber and construction and the properties they might own and sell. There had always been the sense that his father’s work was not exciting enough for him, but his talk hinted that he might have had his share of adventure, no matter how brief and pampered, and was ready to investigate the doldrums of everyday living.
When the town was at their rear they slowed to a stop and tied off both Ridley and August’s horse to a naked tree. They searched for a large stone they’d marked as children with a white stroke of paint, and did so with such great intensity that it felt like another opportunity to keep away from each other, from even sharing a glance that might shorten the distance between them. The stone appeared smaller than it had when they were children, but Caleb picked out the faded slash mark and they walked beyond it, breaking through the trees and into the high brush. The whip and crackle of the weeds underfoot were the only noises. At last the pond revealed itself, the lilies and the chickweed spread along the borders of the crystalline water.
“No different,” August said.
Time had forgotten the place. They’d never seen another soul here. Once, they’d spotted a solitary duck, drifting in place, but it had never returned, and the memory felt fuzzy to both of them, lost somewhere between the real and the imaginary. Caleb sat before the water and August did the same, and it took only a moment for them to turn and face one another in earnest.
This, Caleb thought. This is what he’d been waiting for. August’s eyes were so boyish, so blue with innocence and charm, that he’d withstood scrutiny from even the cruelest superiors; his pink lips, hardly there, suggested a false shyness that had no bearing on his real feelings at any given moment. The sight of him was greatly relieving, and by the time Caleb had drunk his fill it was too late to consider his own appearance. He glanced away as bashfully as a girl might.
“What’d they do to you?” August asked coldly.
“That bad?”
“It’s not like that.”
Caleb said he’d been clubbed.
August itched his neck and glanced back at him sharply before turning away again.
“Did they break your spirit?”
“I suppose so. But the guilt at leaving you was worse. Or just as bad.”
August said nothing after that, and Caleb’s heartbeat quickened at his friend’s reticence. He had always been more comfortable being given direction, and from the day he and August had met, as boys, Caleb had found in August someone he could follow, someone whose hobbies he could adopt, whose thoughts he could make his own. It was the simplest path to pleasure. But if the arrangement offered him a ready-made structure and purpose, it was also a weakness that, in this instance—when instruction about what he ought to do or think was being withheld—was used against him. August was spooling out their conversation so slowly that Caleb felt it as a great anguish, and also as a fear, for if August never gave him a chance to confront his actions, they might never reconcile, and if they did not reconcile…
“I’m sorry,” Caleb said. “At my deepest core. What I did, I’ve thought about it every day since and will think of it every day that’s to come. I went there to be at your side, and even that I could not see through. I wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep at the thought of another man calling me a traitor, but I cannot bear for you to think such a thing. Forgive me. Please. That’s all I ask.”
He could not cry. Not at this juncture, with everything said. But he could feel the tears—lying in wait.
August had curled his legs up to his chest and his posture reminded Caleb of the old August, the child August; recalled the nights they’d come to this place and lain on their backs and dotted the stars with their fingers, trusting that their gaze had brought them to the same ones. They were moments that felt as timeless as the place itself.
But that was then.
There was a touch on his face, and suddenly a hand gripping his jaw. August brought Caleb so close to him that their noses nearly touched; their eyes were locked as one, and soon they were studying each other’s faces so closely that Caleb felt himself being given over to his friend, as if awaiting a commandment. And then August struck him so hard with an open hand that he lost sight. Bright sparks spotted his vision. After a blink the world returned, the look of August, his lips pursed, his cheeks red with fury.