Prentiss knew not to touch the boy. Knew, with what had already taken place, with his position in this circumstance, how even the slightest mistake would mean more ruin. But he blocked Caleb’s way with a menacing stance, his shoulders wide, mouth curled, emanating every ounce of anger he had in the hope of keeping the boy in place. Caleb cowered once more to the ground and covered his face with his hands. No blood on those hands, Prentiss noticed. Just more mud.
The boy was blabbering now, muttering about a twitch, a movement of the body, a chance to bring Landry back to life. Prentiss, fighting back the tears that threatened to overwhelm his anger, told him not to speak again. Not a word.
The forest was still, the only sound that of Caleb’s foot jerking in place, the mud beneath his shoe squelching in rhythm, as if the ground itself wanted to bear witness but couldn’t get out the words.
“We gonna figure this out,” Prentiss said. “And we gonna need your help. Can you pull yourself together and be of some use? Can you do that for me?”
It was as though Caleb reverted entirely to a child, his words coming in between sobs.
“Mother!” he yelled. “I need to speak with my mother. Let me go. She’ll know what to do. She can help get me balanced, and then I can speak on this, all of this, but I’m begging you to let me be gone from here.”
Prentiss went numb, and once more he felt the consuming silence that had stifled his brother for so many years, as though Landry’s pain had left his body upon his death, entered the air in that awful smell （of iron, of blood, of a body opened and laid bare）， and entered Prentiss’s own soul. For the first time he felt a pang of sympathy for the boy before him. Because Prentiss desperately longed for his own mother. He could not blame Caleb for calling for his; for wishing he could hear her say his name and give him the measure of comfort he wanted more than anything else in the world.
And the boy’s father was always one remove away. Even now George was already out seeking answers, already finding ways to rectify his son’s wrongs. What Prentiss wouldn’t give for his own saviors. His mother, beneath the courage, beneath the firm hand she used to keep him and Landry in line, had been as scared as they were. It went unspoken but he could sense it hidden behind the false smiles she gave Mr. Morton at every opportunity, desperate to keep her children from harm; the grimaces she displayed when her sons acted out, knowing they could spell their own end with the slightest wrong move. For hadn’t she already seen the result of Landry simply reaching out to touch a fly in the air? A mother’s love didn’t seem quite so full when she couldn’t offer even a glimmer of security that the following day would bring the contentment that they sought. That they deserved.
Even still, he wished to call her name, to sit beside Caleb and wallow in the mud. To feel anything but the pain. To hope, to pray, that someone might come and make things better. He’d even prayed for a father back then, during the time it felt all right believing the man was somewhere nearby, just waiting to make himself known, to come inside their cabin and hold their mother with one hand and Prentiss in the other （for his arms were wide, all-encompassing, of this Prentiss was certain）。 Soon he would hold Landry as well, all of them together, and inform his family, finally, that he had made a life for himself beyond Old Ox, and they were now fit to join him. It had even been a game, of sorts. To work hard enough in the fields, to complain so little, that Papa would return and make things right.
He’d let the notion slip once to another boy around his age as they were cleaning the grime off their feet on a Saturday afternoon. The water from the well was so cold that they’d run to the cabin porch to dry their feet in the sun, and as they’d recounted the morning’s work, Prentiss had said his own father might just be so proud he would come right back home to swoop him away. Wouldn’t that be something? he asked. Maybe, he said to the boy, his papa would have room for him, too. The boy didn’t even blink before relating what his own mother had told him on the matter. That Landry and Prentiss’s father had dropped dead when the sun was going low after a day in the field. He’d been working hard to maybe earn a little extra ration for Prentiss’s mother and had started yelling out about a dizzy spell, screaming for some water, but no one answered. They said his heart gave out so fast nobody saw the body drop. He was found in the row, the cotton from his open bag covering his face like fresh linens blowing in the wind. Even the boy, hearing himself tell the last part, grew quiet at the eeriness brought to life. It didn’t take him long to recognize that Prentiss hadn’t ever heard a word of what he’d just shared. Later Prentiss would realize his mother had to have been carrying Landry at the time. That of the two brothers only Prentiss had been alive, a baby seen and felt by his father, before the man passed on and became something imaginary.