It had been the winter, in the midst of Caleb’s deployment, since he’d last seen Clementine, and he told her everything now, as he was apt to do: spoke first of Caleb’s supposed death and then his shocking return, of Isabelle, and of the brothers, whom she was well aware of, for she knew of most happenings in Old Ox. She did not look at George while he regaled her with the details of his life. Instead she spent the time cleaning the space of her vanity desk, prepping her gown for the evening, dressing her hair. Yet each time they were disturbed by a knock on the door, which was often, she made it clear to the house attendant that she was busy, and encouraged him to carry on.
“You say you’re struggling.”
He could hear the sounds of other men in other rooms—a rocking against the wall—along with the goading moans of women that went unstifled. The smell of the liquor whose stains here and there had rotted the wood of the floor outstripped even the aroma of perfume.
“In a manner of speaking,” he said.
“You have more words in your head than I’ve heard in my whole life, George. Say more about it so I know what you mean.”
She said he should relax and take his time, although he knew she had none to spare. He could see, in his mind’s eye, the regulars in the parlor, their steady glances at the stairwell, waiting impatiently for her to appear. They would have to wait, for it was his turn to have the room, to occupy her bed.
He used her. This did not escape him. How he laid her bare, opened her up bit by bit, filling her with his old memories, or the great worries that plagued him （his wife’s chilliness, his son’s shame）; how he asked her—as if she could possibly know, as if she were more than a scarred vessel forced to sit there beside him and brave the winds of his words—to whom the cries he heard at night belonged, for they were not his, but perhaps they came from the barn, from the brothers, or from his wife, yes, was it Isabelle, who had lost him and whom he had lost, or maybe that beast in the forest, waiting for him to find it, just as his father had, or perhaps the cries carried all the way from town, the men and women and children alongside the creek in their mud-spattered tents, searching for new land at home and finding there was none, that this was it, that for so many life went no farther than Old Ox.
Clementine was standing beside him, the room dark, a tallow candle flickering beside them like the wings of a bird. She lifted her soft hand, which had been resting on his shoulder, and felt his cheek, filling it with her warmth. This was the only touch he asked of her—that of a caregiver, as if she were a mother tending to a sick child.
“Tell me what more I can do,” she said.
“This is it. No more.”
The usual shame washed over him, for revealing himself, for expressing such darkness, and there was still more yet. One last admission he could not let pass. The real truth was selfish, he told her. For while his wife and son were tethered to him and must endure him, Prentiss and Landry were not. What had he used them for but entertainment? What had he paid them for but to keep him company? To keep some facet of himself alive? Look at him—a man so afraid of the unknown that he’d never even been out of the county. His land was his only escape, the only place a man with such a narrowed existence might find a sense of adventure. So he kept the brothers around to keep that part of him alive. Yet where would he stand on the night when the men in town carried torches to his property and demanded payment on the misshapen justice they sought? He would not pay with his life. He couldn’t say the same for Prentiss and Landry.
“I fear I would no sooner walk down the road with your hand in mine,” he told her, “than I would stand beside those two in the face of this town’s need for revenge. And this is the truth that breaks my heart, perhaps more than any other.”
He began to suspect, without any evidence, that the grime on the floor was not spilt liquor, but the sweat of others that had gone uncleaned; he heard the sound of water sloshing onto the ground in another room, the moan of a man, and knew he was not lost in any act except the one of entering a bath. Curious, George thought, how different it sounded from that of those in congress down the hall—less pernicious, wholesome in its way.
“I should go,” he said. “Let the others have their time.”
“There are no others. I told you we have as long as you wish.”
“Is that what you say? Do men believe that?”
He put money down on the vanity table. It was the rest of what he’d brought to town with him. She had remained sitting on the bed all the while, legs crossed, alert. He’d watched her make a bun of her hair, strike a feather down its core to keep it in place as an arrow might pierce a heart.