“Have you lost your mind?” Ted yelled.
The plantation was at a standstill. William, the boy, laughed like a yipping dog, and Gail rallied himself next to Ted in some show of solidarity.
George stood up slowly, minding his hip, and brushed the dirt off his front.
“Admit what you’ve done,” he said.
“Admit to what? Goddamn it, George, I’m out here breaking my back for pennies day after day, working like a slave to make a decent wage. Whatever you think I done, unless it involves a hoe or a plow, it just ain’t happened.”
“You killed him. You killed Landry. And you will confess to it. Before me. Before your God. And before the law.”
Ted looked at him in confusion. Then, suddenly, recognition broke across his face.
“You talking about that nigger of mine you stole? He’s dead?”
George made to rush Ted again.
“Hold on now,” Ted said. “I told you, I ain’t got no idea what you’re jawing on about. It’s as I said, I been here working, and at night I got my wife screaming my ear off because I don’t even have the time to give her a nod hello. And you think I’m out killing niggers in my spare time? My own niggers at that.” He laughed at this.
“You did not own him,” George said. “And that’s precisely why you killed him.”
“When did this happen, might I ask?”
George was still simmering, but it was the first time he’d been made to consider the sum of the circumstances, and he answered so as to think through the issue himself.
“I saw him earlier. So it would have been sometime this afternoon.”
“And I got a good dozen men who can attest to me breaking my back since dawn.”
George felt his temper dropping. He could still smell the dank soil in his nostrils from his fall, wet clay with a hint of manure.
“Lord in prayer,” Ted said, “I did not lay a hand on that boy. Not in some years, at least. I mean I nearly skinned him alive, but that was some time ago. Even then I had the smarts not to kill him. And you know, I rather liked his brother, the one who spoke. He had a knack for picking.”
Gail nodded along in agreement. “Ain’t that the truth.”
Ted went on. “Now, if you feel the need to get the law out here, and you think you got some case, well, I’ll be happy to have another break in my day to make a fool out of you. But if this is all over, I’d give you the same advice you gave me a while back—get the hell off my property. Pardon me for not having them pretty words to make it sound as nice as you did.”
It was clear that Ted hadn’t done it. Between him and Gail, the two had barely enough wit to mount a horse without falling off its backside, let alone murder a man, form an alibi, and defend it so vigorously. There was no choice but to apologize, turn from Majesty’s Palace, and walk back to the woods with an anger he could no longer point toward Ted. Or anyone else for that matter. It wasn’t anger anymore. By the time he climbed the rail fence again, it was sadness that injured him—rang through him with the same tone of Prentiss’s cries, shook him like the trembling hands of his son.
CHAPTER 14
Prentiss had learned from Landry that the language of grief was often nothing more than silence. He’d felt it himself on occasion, but never with his brother’s fervor. Until now. Until this very moment. There was a strange way of his hurt he could not grasp. For so long Landry had been the focus of his dreams, his world, and Prentiss felt there was a selfishness in his brother’s sudden absence, as though rather than truly dying, Landry had been set free, only to leave Prentiss in the horror of living without the very person who had made doing so worthwhile.
There was no word for what lay before him. He could not say body. Could not say corpse. It was a desecration. Something unholy. The feet leading to the legs, the legs to the torso, the torso to…
When he’d gathered himself, he stood and refused to look back down. His eyes landed on Caleb, the boy so pathetic, so loaded up with his own fright, that it took every fiber of Prentiss’s being not to put his hands on him right then and there. Caleb rose, his eyes bulging, animal-like, staring about as if lost in his own delirium.
“Sit back down,” he said.
“I need to go to the house,” Caleb said. “I need to clean this grime off of me. Need to get away from this.”
Prentiss told him he wasn’t going anywhere. Neither of them were.
“I can barely breathe. My heart, I can’t stay here.”