“Where is your boy?” Prentiss asked George.
“Inside.”
“I’d like a word with him.”
“He did not do it. I’m not sure he could even if he wanted to.”
“He ain’t do it, that’s true. But I think he knows who did.”
George could not disagree. “Perhaps it’s best I speak with him first. He’s more likely to tell his father what he knows.”
Prentiss breathed and let the idea settle.
“But we need to get”—George paused—“this body to the barn. We can’t wait for the sheriff for that. Like you said. The elements and whatnot.”
“I can carry him,” Prentiss said. “I’ve carried him my whole life. You deal with your boy.”
“At least get Ridley and the sleigh. No need to make this harder than it already is.”
“You just worry about getting some answers. By the end of the day, I’d like to know who I gotta kill.”
George walked back to the cabin through the peanut fields, still blooming magnificently with their radiant rows of greenery and their yellow flowers. He could only guess at the bounty under the soil. He knew, passing by these plants, that he might never work the field again. But even so their beauty was radiant, peaceful even, and he deemed the months of labor worthwhile, even necessary, if it worked to offset the slightest fragment of horror that had passed in that one single day.
*
How long had George been gone—almost to town and back, and then out to see Prentiss—and Caleb was still staring listlessly out the window when he came into the cabin. His mother was surveying him closely, taking stock of his every movement. The boy wouldn’t say a word, wouldn’t make eye contact with Isabelle or himself. As a child, George remembered, Caleb had often hid his head inside the folds of her dress when he was distraught, and Isabelle would walk around the house as if she’d sprouted these pale little legs overnight. Now, like George, Caleb had learned to hide within the folds of his own mind.
His wife and son looked up at him, and he went to Caleb and pulled him up by the shoulder.
“My study,” George said.
“Give him some time,” Isabelle said.
“We don’t have time.”
Isabelle stood and watched as George took Caleb by the hand and led him upstairs, through the hallway, and into the study.
“Sit,” George said.
Caleb obeyed.
George went to the other side of his desk and sat as well, feeling like the doughy mound of flesh and bones that he was, seemingly on the cusp of coming apart, a culmination of so many years sagging and creaking. The fatigue had come on the second he stepped inside the study. His body was so eager to give up on the day that he had to squint to keep himself alert. He considered calling down to Isabelle for some coffee but thought better of it, assessing that he had just enough energy left for this single conversation before he collapsed.
“Why were you in the woods, son?”
Caleb, who had been hanging his head, raised his eyes.
“I’m okay,” he said. “If you’re wondering. If the thought of my well-being entered your mind.”
“I see that. I see that you’re healthy, that you’re safe inside your own home, that your mother is waiting on you, hand and foot. Why were you in the woods?”
“God forbid you might ask how I am. No, that would not do. Because nothing escapes the almighty George. Because you see I am well and it is impossible, simply impossible, that I might feel differently. That it might stand to ask me, instead of telling me, how I feel.”
“Why were you in the woods?”
“I was only ever another project of yours. Like your cabinets. Like your moonshine. Like your garden. Like Prentiss and Landry.”
“Caleb, I will ask you once more.”
“I know I was a lost cause. Just like the others. And I have come to terms with that. But how bitter must you be? To know you’re the one standing behind every single failure that has come through your life, and in the face of so little success.”
The ground was shaking, as if some tremor were claiming the cabin, and it took George a moment of panic, of thinking to rush outside, before he realized the feeling had been born within his chest, some fissure in his heart. He pulled himself out of his chair. The blinds were drawn against the ebbing sun and there was no candlelight. The shadows of the books cast a blackness upon the room. George could not remember hugging his son since he’d returned from the war. He walked around the desk and stood behind him, then leaned down and crossed an arm around Caleb’s chest. The boy began to cry like a child.