When night fell the moon cast an exclamation upon Majesty’s Palace, shafts of lunar light touching its windows and bending to the earth beneath them with such illumination that the house appeared to be alive. Landry could see as much from the hollow window of their cabin, and when he turned and found his mother and Prentiss asleep, he walked himself to the door and opened it.
He did not yet have his fear of rambling, and his feet moved of their own accord. He wore no pants, only his shirt, the night cool upon him. It was just as he imagined once he arrived up the lane: the fountain ran endlessly, as if fueled not by the workings of a man but by some greater power. The water was so white against the glow of the moon that it seemed like streaks of ice spouting into the air. He kept his clothes on. There was no tiptoeing, no slow procession. He leaped into the water as only a child might, a child who had waited a lifetime for this act, plunging belly-first and scraping the fountain’s bottom while the water carried over him, through him, and he gasped at the chill, but then laughed, as he had not known play like this, had not thought such a thing possible.
He splashed about wildly. He ran back and forth, pretending Prentiss was chasing him, then dived back under. Holding his breath, he imagined the water might go down and down forever: after all, it had to go somewhere, and there was no reason he couldn’t follow it for a while, and then return for his mother and brother, and bring them along with him.
He rose up soaking. The next sound was not his own. He looked up and could not say who it was in the distance. The front door to Majesty’s Palace was ajar, and a figure stood in the frame, watching on in silence. Landry tripped over the basin and caught himself, then broke into a sprint, the dirt stamping his feet.
There was a moment, as he paused breathless before the cabins, when he thought it wise to continue on: beyond Majesty’s Palace, beyond Old Ox, to find a place yet unknown where the claimed might be set free, where wrongs might be forgotten. But if he was still a child, he was not dumb—not enough to think such a place existed.
Inside their cabin his mother was silhouetted against the far wall, pacing in her gown. She always slept deeply, soundly, and with a workday ahead he’d had no reason to believe she would flinch from her dreams to notice his absence. Now she surged forward as if to whip his behind. “Boy,” she said, holding the side of his face before retrieving a rag. When she stripped his drenched shirt and washed him down he began to cry silently.
“They gonna come, ain’t they?” he said.
“Who, child?” She spoke softly, trying not to wake Prentiss. “Where in God’s earth did you run off to? You’re soaking wet.”
But that was all he could say: They gonna come.
She did not press him any further. She simply put him to bed and sat beside him, continued drying the tears from his eyes.
“You’ve been asleep all night, child. You’ve been right here in bed. Not a soul knows different.”
He whimpered on for a time, and in an instant a great darkness cratered in on him, and when he woke again, his mother was dressed for the fields, telling him to hurry up—as if it all, in fact, had been a dream.
He did not know how many days passed between that night and the whippings that would follow, the breaking of his jaw, but it was some years, distant enough in time for him to imagine that each lash of the cowhide, each blow to his body, amounted to a day’s passing since his sublime trespass upon the fountain, yet near enough for him to believe that he was hardly a random victim sacrificed for the runaways and was instead guilty of a crime, that of a child wishing to play in a world that did not belong to him. If such were the case, every drop of amusement he had gathered that night in the fountain would be drained from him in the weight of blood.
After each beating, his mother set him out like a fallen tombstone on the cabin floor and plastered his wounds with brine. It wasn’t that he lost the ability to think then, but rather that whenever he went to speak, the words got lodged in his throat. He might manage the M in Mama, but he would seize up in the middle of the word and fail to produce the end. If they asked him what he meant, he might start again, but the words would only swell up further within him. In time, even upon his healing, even when his jaw allowed it, even when the rivers on his back shored up and no longer pulsed alongside the beating of his heart, he could not bring the words forth in whole units and began to wonder why he would wish to do so in the first place, considering how little the act of speaking had ever done for him. In the months to come, his mother would be placed in Majesty’s Palace. In a few more, she would be sold. His brother cried nightly until the seasons changed, but all of Landry’s tears had been used up already. Besides, he thought, there was more freedom in silence.