Caleb let his hands fall to his side, and for a moment August wavered. Landry stared up at this assailant so intensely, so resolute in his gaze, that Caleb thought he might have found some source of strength. And he had. Only in a way Caleb could not have foreseen.
“I c-c-c,” Landry stammered endlessly, refusing to let rest whatever statement he was forming, insistent that his voice be heard. It brought him to a sweat. Every ounce of his being was poured into creating the words. “I c-c-c can speak. Ain’t no different from you.”
August turned to Caleb with a knowing grin, and he knew then that his friend was gone to him.
The first blow landed upon Landry’s head. The man’s cries stopped immediately, and the forest went so quiet that the second blow echoed with a sickening crack, like a tree split by lightning. A trickle of blood ran from his head where a seam had opened. His head lolled forward, backward, then fell with the torpor of a bird shot from the sky.
Caleb squeezed his eyes shut and covered his ears from the sound of vicious thuds. He could not move. His throat was too dry to emit noise. He sat clutching himself, waiting hopelessly for the barbarity to end.
He might have lain there until nightfall had he not felt the hand on his head, the familiarity of the fingers rubbing his scalp to comfort him. August told him it was off-putting for him to act so sensitive. Caleb could not help now but to glance at Landry, to take in the mangled face, the eye sockets pooled with blood. He wondered if his friend would do the same to him. The branch was still in August’s hand, like a child’s toy, and anything felt possible. It was just then that two figures appeared in sun haze at the far side of the field.
“Find yourself an excuse,” August told him. “I was not here.”
The long shadow that had fallen over him lifted away. August was gone.
CHAPTER 13
George had risen early and brewed a strong cup of coffee. The first sip alone was so gratifying that he might as well have been a dog loosed from a kennel and given over to the smell of a fresh-cut lawn, such was the rush he felt. He let it sink into him and thought of nothing else for a time, but soon took to the front porch, where he sat alone in his wife’s rocking chair with no greater goal than observing the sunrise that began to grace the bottom of the valley. Sundays were the lone day of rest that he and Caleb and the brothers permitted themselves. Last night he had gone to speak with Clementine again, to hear of her daughter and to inform her of his life since his previous visit. The walk back had been miserable on his bones, and although Isabelle made no mention of his absence, she was quick to comment on how lame he had looked in the past few days. His only response was to ask her, good-naturedly, to stop drawing attention to his decrepitude. Many a thinker had devoted himself to questions of aging and death, yet the thinkers died at the same rate as the idiots, and so George had grown quite content with the idea of ignoring the process altogether. Still, after these recent months on the farm—first clearing the trees and then working the peanut field—he was swelled with pain by the end of each afternoon, and in the morning his joints were rigid, as if needing to thaw. The hot cup of coffee coating his insides was the only fit remedy he’d found.
As the morning progressed, its only peculiarity was that Isabelle went to church, taking the carriage. This was odd, seeing as neither of them had attended in some time, but he did not question her reasons. Landry disappeared into the woods, as was his usual inclination. Prentiss did not appear from the barn. And Caleb was asleep. That was what would afflict George when he considered that day long after it was done: how there had been no rupture in its usual chronology, nothing to suggest the horrors that lay in store. He’d even observed Landry later that morning, sitting in a clearing in the woods, his back to him, wholly relaxed. And so it was all the more shocking to discover his bludgeoned body hours later—his legs bent at the joints, curled in response to the blows; his face so mangled as to be indistinct. No life left in him at all.
George had been having a conversation with Prentiss on the nature of livestock, the productivity of a slaughtered cow in its weight of meat versus a coop of chickens liable to lay eggs indefinitely, when the cries ripped through the forest.
His first glimpse of the body was from enough distance that he did not recognize what lay before him. He thought it was the beast of the forest, caught and killed, and the idea （although vindicating） was anathema to his wish to see it alive, the majesty of it wandering the woods. But Prentiss rushed to the body so quickly that George’s mind rearranged its thinking and he knew then. He felt the urge to vomit. He stood there blankly, his hand over his mouth, until he saw the cowed creature sitting in the mud at the edge of the woods, and hurried to meet his son.