“I’m glad I brought it up,” she said, “just so I can let it go now.”
Her husband looked unchanged, though, as if he’d taken on her guilt. It was in the stoop of his shoulders, the hollowness of his cheeks. Only then, in that very second, did she see the pain he carried. When he turned to speak to her, it was with a gaze so haunted, so debilitating, it might have paralyzed a lesser man.
“There is something I need to bring up with you, too. And I want to apologize for not saying something yesterday, but I did not know how to say it then. I still don’t. Isabelle…” But he faltered.
That tone. She wasn’t sure when she’d last heard it. Maybe in the almost tragic shyness with which he’d sought her father’s blessing for her hand in marriage, ignorant that she was sitting in the carriage right before them; or perhaps years later, when he peeked his head into their bedroom to ask the midwife whether Caleb had finally been born, as if his cries weren’t evidence enough. She realized it was not his distance she had sensed that morning, only his nervousness. And before he uttered another word, she knew she would not forgive him for whatever he’d kept from her. She felt the urge to run, but her legs were stuck in place. By the time he shut his mouth, the plate in her hand had dried itself in the morning air—she managed to put it down, as if her tears were better falling to the floor than sullying something she’d just made clean.
CHAPTER 3
Prentiss held his brother’s feet in his lap. He kneaded each of Landry’s toes, then the sole, then the heel, digging his thumbs so deep into his left foot that he could see it drained white before the blood brought back its color. Landry lay on the bed of the forest, his head upon a log. He stared up against the skyline.
“You always tryin’ to sneak one by me, ain’t you,” Prentiss said.
Landry groaned, although it sounded more born of joy than anything.
“Ate up the last of that rabbit like it was ’bout to take off. Like I’m too stupid to notice.” He hit the groove of his brother’s foot, and Landry looked down, as if to take in his brother’s technique, before casting his gaze back toward the still-rising sun. “Well, we ain’t got no other food, and you might’ve stole a few scraps but we’re not making it past the afternoon without putting something down.”
Landry stayed silent, an act for the man that had nothing to do with speaking, and more with his senses, the way he existed. He always took to foot rubs in such a way. Prentiss would sense his brother’s body slow to a state of near-sleep, his breathing stalled, his shoulders limp—and it was a model of how to take on pleasure, to lose yourself in feeling.
It was a tradition derived from the cabins, when they were children, back when Landry was whole. They would sit on their pallets across from one another, and long after the tallow candle had been snuffed by their mother, one would still be working the other’s feet, preparing for the day ahead in the field. Prentiss could recall Mr. Morton once leading them on with the promise of a pair of gloves to the best producer, a gesture they knew to be empty, but still representative of how little he understood of them—the hands hardened quickly under the pain of picking, while feet, no matter how protected, would always find ways to ache from the hours spent holding up a broken body.
They’d worked Mr. Morton’s land together; they’d left behind the only life they’d ever known; and they often thought in unison, as one. So when Prentiss stood up, it was of little surprise his brother was already standing too, even though neither had said a word in doing so.
Landry reached for the rope they’d used to catch the rabbit, but Prentiss placed a hand on his shoulder.
“No more of that. ’Bout time we head to the camps, see our people.”
His brother’s eyes glanced slowly around their makeshift home.
“It ain’t forever,” Prentiss reassured him. “We’ll get us some food and be back before sundown.”
There were places and sounds that brought Landry comfort, and all that fell outside this sphere of the known was met with resistance. Until a week earlier, that had been true of these very woods. Standing before them, the cabins that had always been their home to their rear, the unknown to their front, the few possessions in their name tethered to their back, the brothers faced a quiet, brooding mystery. A single step forward for Landry became an impossibility. His feet were planted, his head shaking no, until finally, after what seemed an entire hour of pleading from Prentiss, he strode ahead on his own command, as though the act of pushing on had taken a precise amount of courage culled only in that very moment.