*
Early June and the peanuts were flowering. Even with their tiny, scattered yellow blooms, they were not as pretty as cotton, those long stretches of purity out of which Mr. Morton made poetics, but in these fields lay the sense of imperfection, the swelling ground cover of green bunches protruding at their leisure. The randomness felt unbridled, more in line with a world that seemed to go on with no rhyme or reason.
There was little work to be done now. The crop needed time before harvest. Still, George had them split up, each of the four starting at a corner of the field and examining the health of the plants. Landry inspected a few, all of which looked hardy, then sat beneath the shade of a walnut tree. He put his hat upon his head and readied himself to doze. He often stole such moments, relishing the desultory enjoyment of napping when more was expected of him. But he was interrupted by a voice greeting him with a hello.
He lifted his hat off his head, peeking out from the shadows at Isabelle, who stood in the sun, beyond the penumbra of shade, her hands clasped at her waist.
“I was hoping we might speak,” she said.
He still remembered their encounter at the clothesline, the moment she materialized and made herself known; those socks she wished to give him, her confusion, that glimpse of hurt when he walked off. She was an uneasy person, but an observer of things, and in this he knew they shared common ground. She had likely played through their meeting many times in her mind. It was no surprise, then, that she wished to speak with him again, however unwelcome it was in this instance.
“For someone who lives on my property, who has visited it often—well, I feel that I ought to have been better about making your acquaintance.”
She wrung her hands and started again.
“That didn’t sound right. As if I’m owed something, or wish to place some responsibility on you due to your sleeping in the barn. That is not at all what I meant. Only that we spoke that one time, and didn’t speak again, and I want to remove any sense that I might have been disapproving of you, or might still be.”
He nodded to her and smiled, something he did on only the rarest of occasions, owing to his jaw, and hoped this might be enough to satisfy her. Yet she remained.
“I know,” she stammered, “I know you don’t speak. I asked your brother about this, but all he would say is that your jaw doesn’t prohibit you. Nor do you have some social deficit, which I gathered on my own. Yet you choose to remain silent. I sometimes feel that way myself. How often I have said the wrong thing or wished to take back my words.”
He wondered whom she was speaking to. It was not him. The Isabelles of the world might view him, but they did not see him. They certainly did not want to hear his voice. Although he would admit that on occasion, in recent times, he more often had the urge to be heard. But this was not the place for such a thing. Isabelle was more interested in herself. Her own needs.
“You have helped George immensely,” she went on. “And Caleb, too. I believe he still suffers, at times. He doesn’t know his place in the world. But then neither do I, or even George, maybe. Is it possible to grow more lost as one gets older? I wouldn’t have thought so before the war. Yet here we are. All of us. Which is to say that, well, you and Prentiss have been a calming force…”
Landry stood up. If once his strength had been a rock whose ridges were too sharp to touch, confessions like these, and the burden they visited upon him, had polished him down to a dull stone. Isabelle peered up at him. Her blouse was the color of flowers he’d seen in the wild, flowers so gorgeous that the names George gave them, as proper as they might be, only reduced their beauty.
“Oh,” Isabelle said. “You must be returning to work.”
He wasn’t. Not yet at least. He was simply leaving her to her thoughts and taking his own somewhere to be pondered in private. As he preferred.
What went unspoken was the burden of freedom. Not that Landry missed Mr. Morton’s ownership—far from it. No, it was rather that he and his brother had been tethered to each other then. The chains that held them down also held them together. In their new life, Prentiss traveled in his own way: his appreciation for trips to town with George to gather supplies; his cheery banter with Caleb, who’d seemed to grow closer to Prentiss since he’d stared working alongside them. The idea of simple chatter, of finding friendship, appealed to his brother in a manner Landry had no interest in. And his own silence, which had once been obscured by the shadows of their bondage, and was a calming peace that gave Prentiss time to think for them both, now laid bare a space that expanded between them. They’d become their own selves.