“Caleb?” August said.
Mr. Webler did not give him any time to respond.
“How did you get up here?” He leaned over the desk. “Jeffrey!” he yelled, which triggered a slight coughing fit, leading Mr. Webler to drink a finger of whiskey from the tumbler at his side before resuming his yelling.
Stiff reports echoed from the stairwell, like knocks upon a door, and in a moment the boy arrived in the office, sweating profusely himself.
“I am so sorry, sir,” he said, “but he went and passed me even after I told him not to.”
Shocked by the exhaustion on the boy’s face, Caleb looked down and registered his wooden leg.
“For Christ’s sake, Caleb,” Mr. Webler said. “I know you struggled to follow orders as a subordinate, but is it too much to ask for you to take proper instructions from my secretary?”
For a second Caleb pondered the question quite soberly, and wondered, with a calculated rationale, if he might serve the moment better by excusing himself and jumping out the window.
“What on earth is so important for you to evade a hop-legged man and steal your way up the stairs?”
“I didn’t know he was lame,” Caleb mumbled.
“I should excuse myself,” General Glass said.
“Absolutely not,” Mr. Webler said. “You have an appointment to speak here today. Men with appointments, who obligate themselves to decorum, must not be made to bow to those who are so selfish as to defy procedures of civility. An esteemed soldier such as yourself knows as much.”
“I’ll go,” Caleb said, in the meek voice of a chastised schoolboy, as though he was best put in a corner facing the wall.
“But apparently only after ignoring the pleadings of a young man who is merely working to save for a prosthetic leg? For a soldier who had his face mangled, one would think you’d have understood the plight of a fellow cripple.”
Caleb’s hand spontaneously reached for the scars on his face.
“And then you go and interrupt the right honorable General Glass,” Mr. Webler said. “This man, an army man, who has entered our community to serve even those he fought against, simply wishes to procure a loan for his ailing mother, in need of emergency surgery. Imagine what it must’ve taken for him to humble himself into coming here today. Only for you to interrupt just as he’s making his request.”
The only sound now was the boy, Jeffrey, huffing in fatigue, and Caleb could see General Glass staring upon the ground in some private humiliation and Mr. Webler’s depraved glee. And then there was August. Caleb sought desperately to detect a hint of sympathy in his gaze—the sort he might offer him when they lay beside each other. Or at least, the very least, he hoped to find August looking away, to know his friend shared in his embarrassment.
But Mr. Webler, in his command of the room, would not let them share so much as a glance. He turned to his son and drew his attention at once.
“Would you mind telling your friend to heed his own advice and leave us in peace?”
August put his pen down on the table. There was the start of a long breath, as if he was pained, and that was enough for Caleb. A sign of his anguish. Or perhaps Caleb was so broken that he could interpret his friend taking a breath to mean the world.
“We have a lot of work to do,” August said, businesslike. “It’s best you go.”
Caleb didn’t need to be told twice.
*
He had a recurring dream that took place among Wade Webler’s stables. He knew why it was set there: once Mr. Webler had held a party when Caleb was a child, and he and a group of boys had gone to the stables to play in the hay. He remembered well the heat of the place, warmed only by the bevy of bodies running about, as well as the horses, so many of them, leaning their heads over the gates as if to supervise the boys’ roughhousing. But in the dream, Caleb is grown, and the other boys are grown, and they are watching him from each stall, having replaced the horses altogether.
He is slung sideways over the saddle, stomach first, his body fit smoothly upon the leather, his back arched at its groove. The stirrups are chained to two posts at his rear, his legs in turn tied to the stirrups. He cannot go free. Beside him there is a growing warmth, a crackle, akin to the sound of stepped-upon leaves: a basket of coals in line with his ear. The others have their eyes on him and him alone.
It’s August who appears at his back. Caleb can crook his neck and make out the fall of his blond hair, the slow bounce to his walk. His friend plucks the branding iron from the coals, hoists it for the others to see, then menaces Caleb’s face with it.