Another night he wandered so great a distance that he was buried deep in the woods with little means of finding his way home save intuition. It was dark enough that the forest merged with the blackness of the sky and the world had no beginning or end, as if he might sleep upon the ground and wake up staring down from the stars. But then somewhere in the distant tree line a corona of light flared. He tracked after it, and just as it disappeared it was followed by another.
It was two men, he saw now, as he drew closer to the flame. One of the men extinguished his torch as the pair began to climb a tree together in silence. Then, moments later, one of them sparked his torch anew and the groggy birds lining the limb sat startled in the great blast of light, too stunned to take flight. The other man clubbed them mercilessly and they dropped to the forest floor. The flame died, and Landry could only hear their rustlings as they climbed back down. The crinkle of leaves upon the ground was displaced by more silence.
He could feel eyes on him but could not see them in the total blackness. He figured they were part of the forest in a manner he was not—had learned to live in the darkness so well, to exist in the farthest folds of the wild so long, that they could vanish in the shadows of the night yet still see everything around them. Suddenly his hand was wet. Something had been placed there: a pigeon, its feathers blood-slick, its body limp. There was a small crepitation of leaves again, and the footsteps receded, although the sound of their going rang in his ears all the way home.
He had the bird in hand when he made it back to the barn. He placed it on the small table between the pallets. Prentiss, not yet asleep, stood in the back of the barn, a swirl of moths flickering about his head. The cornmeal Landry had left for him that morning was untouched.
Prentiss walked over to Landry, inspected him, and eyed the pigeon.
“How’d you go and do that?”
Landry made no gesture to reply and Prentiss sat on his pallet.
“George came by,” he said. “Tells me he’s given it a lot of thought and talked to other folk. Thinks it’s best we find our way now.”
Landry looked over at Prentiss, and his brother stood up again restlessly and began to pace around the barn.
“You know what I said back? I said, ‘George, how you gonna tell me what’s right for me without even knowing how I think on it? Spend your days toiling next to me, talking my ear off, but you got the nerve to say you’ve talked to everyone about me but me? That all y’all know what’s best, but then what do I know? I ain’t ever got a clue, except when it comes to those peanuts? Is that what you sayin’？’”
Prentiss stopped himself for a moment.
“I said us, you know. I told him he can’t speak for us.”
He carried on pacing.
“I showed him what we’ve saved, pulled out the rag and fanned out those dollars, and I asked after that railcar. I told him at the camps they say there’s a car that takes you on the rail up and around to wherever you wish. Just say the word. But we aim to make enough to last us once we’re there, too, that we fixin’ to be here into the fall, to see the end of peanut season, and if he has a problem with that then he can see us off but we ain’t doing it by choice, don’t care how many people he talk to. And then he said he won’t stand in no man’s way to do as he pleases, that we’re welcome here. But he still got that look on his face. I ain’t ever seen George worried that way.”
Landry stopped listening. There was no child in Prentiss anymore. He was no different from their mother now—all his energy devoted to making sure they had full plates at every meal, enough spare clothes for the journey north, enough money saved to last a while when they got there. An unremitting focus on survival at the loss of all else. But it was also that Prentiss looked so much like their mother. Those brows that arched so delicately around soft eyes were hers. The worry in the purse of the lips. The worry of a mother. He could see her standing against the far wall of their cabin, her shoulders fixed up, the hem of her sleeping gown brushing the floor.
The particular memory his mind had drawn upon, replacing the image of Prentiss with his mother, was one he often wished to forget. He was still a boy then, unwounded by anything but the blisters born of the field, and the searing band of pain brought on by the endless picking. It was not long after he’d first seen the fountain of Majesty’s Palace from his row, glistening there in the summer heat, each jet of water cresting and falling, gushing with such beauty that Landry thought the water must hold some special property. He requested the furrows nearest the fountain to pick, just so he might glance upon it. Once, Master Morton’s wife even took their infant boy there. She dipped him into the water, laughing all along, the sounds carrying down the furrow like a stream of water, although if they were real or something of his own mind, he could not say.