“And don’t even get me started on your parents. Your mother’s outrageous behavior at the Beddenfelds’， acting like some sort of lunatic—”
“She was offended; she was only protecting her family.”
“—or your father with his Negroes. The gall to let them live in his home—”
“They don’t live in our home. It’s a silly rumor that will not cease.” Caleb stopped himself. “And what if they did?”
“Caleb,” August said. “You know there’s no one I would rather spend time with than you, but it can’t be.”
“Yet you said nothing would change. Your exact words.”
“You changed. All of you Walkers changed.”
“We lost, August. The world has changed. Can’t you see that? Or are you as dim as your father?”
“Keep it down,” August hissed. He looked around, but the road was empty and even Ray Bittle had yet to stir.
Caleb shook his head and finally yanked the reins so hard they slid through August’s grip. He mounted Ridley and addressed his friend once more:
“I recently overheard Prentiss, one of those Negroes your father hates so dearly, tell my father how he’d seen a fellow he knew as a boy, another slave, begging in the camps outside town. Prentiss didn’t spare him a cent. Was that a crime? he wanted to know. To be so cold to someone he’d grown up beside? What if this distance happened between him and his own brother? He seemed to have a fear somewhere in him that they were growing apart. My father told him not to be silly. That two people so close would never let such a thing happen. What bound them was too strong. I thought my father had provided him sage advice. I wonder now if he misspoke.”
August’s jaw was locked tight in rage. There was no remedy for this occasion, and Caleb knew how this had to have jolted him—what it meant to lose control of the relationship August had steered with such command that Caleb’s obedience had never been questioned. And now, it seemed, their old ways were over.
“Take care, August. Give Natasha my kindest regards. Also, you can let your father know I consider him an insufferable prick.”
He took Ridley off at a saunter, and by the time he was home, he had made his own decision to leave Old Ox, for once and ever. It was only a matter of where to go. Somewhere more temperate, maybe—certainly someplace no one would know him, a town, or even a city, where a man with a curious face and a quiet disposition might go unnoticed in a crowd.
These thoughts occupied him until late the following morning, when he was washing up at the water pump beside the fields during a break in his work and his mother appeared with a paper in hand.
“A message from town.”
“From who?” he said, drying his hands on his pants.
“He didn’t care to say.”
There were only two words, written in pencil: Pond. Sunday.
*
He knew by the lumbering gait, the colossus of the shoulders, the sheer immensity of the man, that it could be no one but Landry fleeing them through the woods, as there was no one like him in all of Old Ox. It seemed at first that because Landry was of one world and August the other, some force, some greater balance of things, would keep them separate. The belief persisted in Caleb even when August grabbed a solid castoff branch, thick as an arm, and carried it upon his shoulder like a carbine rifle; even when they emerged from the end of the woods to the beginnings of his father’s farm, the distant cabin in sight, and found Landry fallen in the dirt, clutching an ankle.
August stood before him, and Caleb, at last understanding the moment, cried out for him to stop. He had never before heard Landry make any sound at all, but now Prentiss’s brother issued dreadful moans, so pitiful and high-pitched as to bring to mind a wounded child.
Yet August appeared oblivious to everything but the source of darkness within him that had brought him so much pleasure in the war. He asked Caleb why he was protesting, for this was simply a nigger, one that didn’t know its place. Caleb explained their relation and August smiled. He told Caleb he was doing him a favor. That this would be good for his family.
Landry attempted to stand but August put his boot against his chest and that was all it took to hold him still. Where was Landry’s strength? Caleb wondered. He’d never seen a man more vicious with an ax, yet Landry now whimpered under the sole of a boot. His eyes searched around in fright, and his jaw, that loose appendage, trembled under the weight of his own cries.
Caleb was on the ground. He had no idea how he’d gotten there, sitting in mud and slick leaves, with his hands covering his eyes. If he could only rise up he could stop August himself. He could right things. But he was so terrified he could not bear the sight, let alone think of moving. He watched through his fingers as August coolly took the branch from his shoulders with both hands. Then, at what seemed the last moment, Caleb shouted to August that Landry could not speak. The man had no words in him at all. He would never tell a soul what he had seen.