Hackstedde was perhaps a decade George’s junior, a robust man with a cluster of hairy moles adorning his chin like a pile of raccoon droppings in miniature. He had a manner of clenching and unclenching his jaw, and filled the room with a general air of anxiety.
Everything was already quite against the plan George had envisioned: Osborne would arrive. They would go meet Prentiss and then examine the body. Caleb—currently locked in his room upstairs—would give his testimony （or George would offer it in his absence, if he refused to appear）。 Osborne would take this information and make the appropriate decisions.
But Hackstedde was no Osborne Clay. As known to everyone in Old Ox, the man had made his name as a slave patroller—a rather inept one—and to conceive of him as anything but an inept sheriff, in turn, was an impossibility. An even greater impossibility was that he might care whatsoever about a dead freedman. Hackstedde would not leave now that a murder was reported, but there would be no justice for Landry if it was up to this man. Not if Caleb’s story were true. The town was already hostile toward George. Without the aid of the sheriff, and with an accusation so galling directed at the likes of August Webler, he was sure he hadn’t seen even an inkling of the backlash that would strike their farm if the case was pursued.
“How about we see this body,” said Hackstedde, who had begun to roll a cigarette upon the kitchen table. “I’ll have you show the way.”
*
Prentiss was waiting in the barn. He sat on his pallet beside Landry’s body, which they’d wrapped in cloth so tightly, so many times around, that its shape was barely discernible. George had offered to put the body in the stable, perhaps on ice, but Prentiss had refused him—he wished to wake up to his brother at his side. Who was George to tell him no?
Hackstedde put a handkerchief to his nose against the noticeable odor and pointed at Prentiss. “This would be?”
“He is in my employ,” George said.
“Right,” Hackstedde said. “Suppose I’ve heard talk of this arrangement.”
“He’s my brother,” Prentiss said. “He’s been killed. Ain’t no two ways about it.”
“We don’t know that, exactly,” George said, his eyes so wide he might as well have been waving his arms at Prentiss.
“How are you so sure?” Hackstedde asked Prentiss.
“Ask me that after you’ve seen his face,” Prentiss said.
“Tim,” Hackstedde said. He made a twirling motion with his finger, and his deputy came forward and crouched down by the body.
“I wouldn’t wish for Prentiss to relive the sight,” George said to Hackstedde. “The two of them being brothers and all.”
Hackstedde did not demur as George put a hand on Prentiss’s shoulder and led him outside the barn. His words were hurried, and he whispered to Prentiss under the thrum of the squawking chickens and the weather vane on the roof creaking like a rusty door hinge.
“That man was once a patroller,” George said. “I swear we will give Landry the burial he deserves. He will rest at peace. But we cannot say another word to this man. It will only cause trouble. I’m sure of it.”
Prentiss showed no expression at all. There was a shadow cast over him, and George saw the darkness as such resignation, as such total defeat, that no further words were needed. He did not have to tell Prentiss to surrender to these men. He already had.
“When they’re gone,” George said, “we must speak again about your leaving here. I think we can both see by now it’s what’s best.”
Their time together appeared to expire in that moment outside the barn. The silence between them was something vast, and both seemed to be wading through it for an answer, a means to explain this sudden rift that now felt permanent. George knew the feeling well. How often in his youth he had tried to forge a friendship, only to see it rupture when he voiced an unwanted opinion or behaved in some manner the other party found strange but seemed perfectly normal to George. There would be no contempt in this instance, no anger. Too much had transpired between him and Prentiss in the months since their meeting. There was no fault on either side, but all of it was irrevocable.
“You will keep those peanuts alive, won’t you?” Prentiss said.
“What? We don’t need to worry about that.”
“George, you listen. I’ll leave from here. I promise I will. S’pose…s’pose I’ll go look for my mama somewhere. Lord knows that’s just my dream, to find her somewhere safe and see her again. And if it ain’t come true, I could at least do with the hope that you gonna tend to these here plants. Doing right by them is doing right by me and Landry. I ain’t wanna see ’em die, George.”