“Do you hold something against them?” his father asked. “Some notion from the war?”
“Father, please. It’s nothing like that.”
“Well then, try to be civil. It’s not like you have anyone else to keep you company.”
Caleb made an effort. One Sunday evening before supper he walked to the barn to say hello and found Prentiss alone, washing his pants in a basin of hot water. Only a few weeks earlier he’d informed Caleb and his father that he’d purchased new pants for himself and Landry. The brothers had arrived in the fields with some newfound pride, strutting like the boys who’d paraded through town in their freshly starched grays before the war. Now the trousers were streaked with large smears of color, and the water was doing nothing to clean them.
“What took to them?” Caleb asked in lieu of a hello.
Prentiss seemed surprised to see him. He patted his hands dry on his shirt and looked at the basin in contemplation.
“Some paint is all.”
“I see. Your brother around?”
“He’s off.”
“Where to?”
“That’s his business,” Prentiss said.
He pulled the pants from the basin, set them on the ground, and began scrubbing them with a brush, working at them for some time.
Caleb imagined his father watching from the house. Some period of time should pass—but how long?—before it would be appropriate for him to return inside. He thought he might simply wait it out in silence, for there was no way he could ever express the truth to Prentiss: that he envied him and what he shared with his brother; that he had always desperately wished to have his own; that when he’d lain in bed as a child and felt the rumpled sheets beside him, he’d wished it were another, and that each morning, when he woke, he’d pretended to get dressed alongside this boy who didn’t exist, helping him tie his shoes, comb his hair. He could never describe how distressing it was when his mother arrived at the bedroom door in the morning and the boy disappeared. He would go silent, looking at his mother as if he wished her dead, as if her mere presence had made the boy disappear. Or, even worse, had denied him that brother in reality.
“What you got goin’ on?” Prentiss asked.
“I was just floating about the house mindlessly. I get restless sometimes when it’s just my parents.”
“Well, you’re always welcome here. Hell, it’s your barn, ain’t it?”
Caleb thought he knew much of Prentiss, but sometimes, he realized, it was nothing at all.
He recalled the time he and his father had been discussing which plants might thrive in the fields, and Caleb had mentioned how well cotton grew. Prentiss, who until that point had been silent, said, “I best long be gone if y’all start in on that. I ain’t touching that plant again. I ain’t even standing near enough to see the white of the bolls.” His father didn’t reply and the matter was dropped.
Or there was the night Caleb had tried to help him clean the skillet, only for Prentiss to pull it away as a child might withhold a toy, informing him that there was a technique to cleaning, that you used your palm and the side of your hand to catch the burnt bits in the crevices and on the bottom that wouldn’t otherwise be freed. These could be cooked up for a whole separate meal. He’d be happy to teach him, Prentiss had said, just as his mother had taught him, but he wasn’t about to see the job done poorly.
The hidden fury. The pride, withered and wounded at times, but always there. He had a part of him that Caleb did not have. If they’d been brothers, it would be Prentiss instructing him on how to tie his shoes, Prentiss the one who showed him how the world worked. And perhaps that was why Caleb could barely utter a word to him beyond a simple greeting. To do so would require that he expose his vulnerabilities to another man, and he did not know how to reveal himself in such a way. It was a form of confrontation, the very idea he cowered from. He would never pull the kettle back from a man grabbing for it. He had never been taught such things.
“What were you painting?” Caleb asked, helpless for anything else to say.
Prentiss was still slapping at his pants with the brush.
“I ain’t paint a damn thing. I seen a fella in the camps with some calendars for sale, and I gone that way to pick one up so I could count the days till harvest. I’m minding my business, passing the chapel in town, and a bunch a fools are there painting a fresh coat on it. What would you know, one of ’em drops a bucket of paint right down on me. The whole pack of his boys is laughing, and he’s saying, ‘Whoops,’ like he ain’t mean to do it. They had me seeing red. What’d I do to them…”