The Sweetness of Water

by Nathan Harris

  If he did not open the door it felt as if Caleb was still there, reading indefinitely, and the realization that he could not face the truth, and would rather heed some childish sense of denial, pained him as much as the boy’s death. He might not have been a man of strength, or great resolve, but he had always thought he could look within himself with an honesty few others could lay claim to. Except here. Except before his son’s door.

  He retrieved a shirt from the bedroom and hurried back downstairs.

  * * *

  For the first time since he had delivered the fatal news, Isabelle ate beside him that night. And in the days ahead, she began to return to active life, though as this new variation of herself—transformed into a cold fixture on the porch who was willing to take care of the home, to cook and garden, to entertain visitors for an afternoon, but without any of the cheer that had once rounded out her demeanor.

  Still they slept apart. Each day George woke in his armchair with a doubt that the brothers would appear again. He had a strong belief that they might take what little money he’d given them thus far and disappear. But each morning they emerged from the barn and approached the steps of the house, and George, seated on the porch, itched his backside and rose gratefully to greet them. They would lean against the barn drinking coffee, discussing what was to come in the day, and then act upon it, finishing in the calm glow of the approaching evening in a race to clear the trees in time to begin tilling the ground in preparation for the eventual seeding.

  Although he spoke freely with them, he kept to himself the single lie he’d told, which was that his father’s allegory bore no importance for him. In fact, in his mind’s eye he conjured his life as a languishing oak, throttled by the elements, with branches so tortured that they sprouted at impossible angles, its bark flecked with yellow fungus and its leaves burnt through by the sun. The decline only furthered as the years passed, but George felt the tree had been born rotten, as if he knew he had begun on poor ground, with an unsteady and shifting sense of morality, and that there would be no improvement.

  On a morning that was awfully windy and, for the early spring, uncommonly cold, they came upon a dying tree that was an uncanny replica of the one in his mind. George demanded he cut this one on his own, and although it took nearly an hour, he exulted in the labor. It was as if, in excising from the property this tree—so puny compared with the rest—he might somehow also cut the disappointing past from his very being. And so he swung the ax with abandon, with a childlike belief in reversing years of inaction, of squandered land and squandered relationships. He felt a great release, the opening of a space within him that might allow for something new to sprout—something good, something worth living for.

  The meager tree made little sound when it fell, which meant that the noise finding his ears had to have been borne from somewhere else. Long howls like those of a child reached him, and together with Prentiss and Landry, George followed the sound, at first plodding, then jogging toward the cabin with a great apprehension filling his chest. When they emerged into the clearing, his worst fears were realized, and then dropped immediately away.

  It was Isabelle, moaning and overtaken by the occasion. He could hardly believe what he saw next: the long blanket of blond hair, snapping in the wind like a flag before his son’s face. Caleb tried to turn, but his mother held him so tightly that his features stayed hidden. When George drew close enough for their eyes to meet, they were strangers to each other. Isabelle released Caleb for a moment, but both father and son stood frozen, some distance apart, as if in need of an introduction.

  “Well then,” was all George could say. “Well.”

  His voice caught, and he struggled to subdue the swelling wave that had been stored away for so long. He could not run to meet him, his legs would not move, but there was time now. At last he approached, cautiously, and could finally make out the markers of his face, the same ones he saw in his mind’s eye, night after night, when he pictured the boy reading on the lip of his bed, beckoning to him. As with any moment of unbridled emotion, he did not know how to react, or what he was expected to say, and could only think of how he was supposed to appear, how another man, a better man, might act in his position.

  He put a hand on Caleb’s cheek to make sure it was real.

  “I heard your mother, but never did I think.” Then he slid both hands into his pockets. “Why don’t we go inside.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Caleb had not quite managed to kill his father, but he had certainly aged him. The old man looked pained when he walked, and the lines of his face appeared as cracks upon glass that had flourished with time. His mother, at first glance, was more of a comfort. He’d missed her as the other soldiers missed their mothers, knowing that his home was not so much the cabin but the place where she existed, waiting for him to return, waiting to embrace him. When they hugged, when he held the shape of her against him, he felt like a boy again, and wished he could draw upon that feeling on command for the rest of his time alive.

  Now, at the dining room table, she caressed his face and ran her hand along the scar of his cheek, the new shape of his nose, and demanded to know whether his health was intact.

  “Shall we call a doctor?” she said. “I think we should. It’s decided, then.”

  “I’m all healed,” he said. “It’s done. It’s all over.”

  After his long absence the house presented itself as a dreamscape, and he was inclined to inspect every room, to confirm the particularities of each in relation to the whole. And there were simpler urges: to see Ridley, whom, in an unforeseen turn, he had missed deeply; to bathe; to sleep in his own bed.

  His mother set him up with a plate of white cheese and bread and promised him an apple pie—her one true specialty—once she’d procured the necessary ingredients. She spoke of the pie at length, overwhelmed at the excitement of his arrival to such an extent that her mind had narrowed to this single track of thought—the coring of fruit and the retrieval of some cider to spruce up the innards and the readying of the flour for the crust and so on.

  “If you carry on like this,” his father said, “I fear what we’ll have to endure when you get to talking of dinner.”

  He was in the big room, seated in his old beaten-down chair. Caleb could not hold back a bit of laughter.

  “Don’t set her off,” he said.

  “It’s too late for that, clearly,” his father said.

  His mother, ignoring their banter, took a breath and grabbed Caleb’s forearm, rubbing it with enough vigor to kindle a fire.

  “A mother has a right to be worked up. My child is back! Now tell us what came of you. August was here. He gave us the gravest news. That, well…”

  “That you’d been killed,” his father said.

  Not quite, Caleb said. He’d been made prisoner. Exchanged. Then paroled. As had so many others. Given a parchment describing how he was to yield to the law of the Union and return home. This condensation of the events felt like the first step in letting them slip away into the past. Unlikely, but he had to make a go of it.

  “So August is home,” he said, betraying no feeling.

  “He suffered an injury himself,” his father said, “although I could not make sight of it at all. A bad fall, apparently.”

  Caleb shifted and dried mud sloughed off his pants and landed beneath his chair. His mother, for all her excitement, could not refrain from looking at the carpet as if an animal had just released its droppings.

  His father asked him how far he’d come.

  “The Carolinas.”

  “You walked all that way?”

  There had been a few ambulances with room for him, and the occasional farmer with space in his wagon had shown sympathy, but before he could explain as much, his mother interrupted.

  “What did they do to your face? How bad was it? You must tell us everything and leave out nothing.”

  “I’m afraid there’s not much of a story. Happened before I was captured. Just t
he boys fooling around. A late night and we’d had a few too many. Nothing exciting.”

  He bit into the bread and after a second finished off the cheese. His parents seemed to be waiting for him to speak, and the expectation that he might somehow lead the interrogation they’d started was worse than their prodding.

  “Has all been well here?” he asked.

  His mother again looked at the floor near his chair.

  “Other than my untimely death,” he said, in an effort to lighten things.

  “These are difficult times for everyone,” his father said. “I think your mother would agree.”

  It was then that he noticed the vastness of the space between his parents: the way they had yet to make eye contact, or draw near each other, or even exchange words. He had come so far to return to what little he knew, and all at once it appeared that it might no longer exist. While his parents had been waiting, interminably, for him to find his way home, they had changed, and now all three of them were altered but in the same place they’d occupied for so many years.

  He was having trouble sitting still, his knee bouncing and his foot chattering against the floorboard.

  “Perhaps we could continue this later on,” he said. “If I could just get a little rest I think it might do wonders.”

  His mother stood up.

  “Of course. Your bed is made. Everything is tidied up. Fresh towels on your dresser.”

  She squeezed him so hard it robbed him of breath. Then her hand slipped to his side and alighted on the leather of his holster. They’d been made to turn their guns over to the Union, yet he’d managed to hide the sidearm, knowing what might befall him on the journey home, the dangers that found men alone on the open road. His mother pulled back and stared at the weapon.

  His father stood, too, and eyed the pistol with caution.

  “No need for that anymore,” he said. “I’ll put it with your grandfather’s rifles in the cellar.”

  It was best to oblige them, Caleb knew—to return, as thoroughly as possible, to the edition of himself they’d once known: a boy who would never lay a hand on something so vulgar. He unholstered the pistol and passed it to his father.

  Upstairs, his room, as clean as his mother had described, exuded an element of the macabre—the miniature walking sticks of his youth, leaning against the wall, had been dusted and polished; his hats, stacked in a column, were spotless, unmarred by so much as a speck of dust. How long would she have kept this up? Months? Years? His death something best laundered away on a washboard, swept up with a broom.

  He removed his boots and then his trousers and fell onto his bed in a heap. He slept peacefully but was greatly confused upon waking, not knowing where he was or how he’d gotten there, as had been the case for so many days preceding this one. The difference this time was that, reaching to the side of the bed, he could not find his trousers. A bleary glance out the window revealed his mother dipping his pants into the boiling water of the copper washing kettle. She slapped at them with the dipping spoon, hard enough to get a life’s worth of grime from the rags. He thought he would have to go pant-less about his home, until he remembered the drawer full of clothes across the room, a bounty to a man who had held on so dearly, to so little, for so long.

  * * *

  His father had killed a hen for supper the night before but Caleb hadn’t woken up to eat it. In the morning he tore at it, and his mother, seated with him at the table, watched him as if it was a performance, an animal picking at scraps. When he finished he informed her he wished to head into town, and her disappointment was almost enough to make him change his mind.

  “You act like I’m a prisoner here, too,” he said.

  “Don’t say that, don’t ever say that. I just wish to spend time with you.”

  “We’ll have a world’s worth of time. Won’t be a thing to do but sit around here together. No reason to rush it.” He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead and pushed his chair back. “Where’s the old man?”

  His mother nodded to the barn, from which his father was now returning. Caleb went onto the porch and his father gingerly made his way over to him and asked how he was feeling.

  “Top-grade,” Caleb said.

  Wisps of steam rose off his father’s cup of coffee, and it brought to mind the last march under the colors of the enemy, when the flatlands had yielded to a punishing cold front. The boys put in charge of him were his age, rowdy and prone to thieving from farmers and townsfolk when they could get away with it. They’d stolen overcoats to fend off the weather, but when the sun reemerged one day, they chose to cast them aside, yet saw no reason to leave them in the woods where they’d be of no use. A skinny lieutenant mentioned how often Caleb had whined of being too far from the fire, and the rest decided he would be the best choice to inherit the excess coats, which they packed onto his shoulders until the weight buckled his knees. The heat was so great as the day wore on that the sweat collected in small puddles at the cuffs of his sleeves and pants.

  He grew damp behind the ears just thinking about it and was happy when the memory passed. It was then he saw the two men leaving the barn. One was remarkably large, with an unmistakable current of muscle at his shoulders, his body broad enough to dwarf the other man.

  “Are you going to explain that?” he asked his father.

  The two were brothers, he said, giving him some assistance with a peanut farm he was setting up down below the hill. “If you want I can show you the progress.”

  “A peanut farm. You?”

  “Is that so difficult to believe?”

  “You could barely be made to help Mother with the roses she put in. Said she only had them because Mrs. Foster did and there was no pride in spending your life matching wits with others lost in vapid hobbies. If I recall correctly.”

  “You do,” his father said, taking a sip of his coffee. “But this is different.”

  “Always different when you do it, isn’t it?” Caleb said, thinking of how his father’s short-lived foray into making moonshine was deemed to be unrivaled compared with other enthusiasts, as his eye for quality whiskey was unmatched; or then there was his spontaneous wish to construct a cabinet, a process he thought valid only until he realized he hadn’t the slightest skills, at which point the entire field of cabinetmaking suddenly became trivial, so unworthy of time that he shook his head when passing the woodworkers in town for years after.

  Caleb spat over the railing and commented that the men had been with his father the day before, when he arrived.

  Yes, his father said, their names were Prentiss and Landry, and he explained how they’d come to the woods. They were staying in the barn for now.

  “You have Mr. Morton’s Negroes in your keep, then.”

  “I wouldn’t call that a fair interpretation. They’ve elected to stay here.”

  “Yes, well, I suppose having Negroes is different when you do it, too.”

  His father sipped his coffee, swallowed hard.

  “I feel that you’re being stubborn for no reason at all. And it’s a bit much this early in the morning.”

  It wasn’t the first time his father had made a claim about his stubbornness, and such words had lost their power over time. In this instance, with his mood lightened by his return home, he chose to ignore them. The birdsong was picking up a rhythm, and he recognized the same tunes he’d heard since childhood.

  “I told them they could do what they wished today,” his father said, “as I aimed to spend some time with you.”

  “Actually, I was meaning to ask if I might borrow Ridley. I’m thinking of heading to town.”

  “Already bored with us, then.”

  “Now you sound like Mother. There’s just other folks to see. I’ll be back before nightfall. We can finish off that hen together.”

  “You’re grown now,” George said. “You’ll do as you will.”

  Caleb stood before him, motionless.

  “You don’t need my permission to ride Ridle
y. If you want the saddle it should be beside the feed bag.”

  Caleb left his father at the porch and retrieved Ridley from the stable. So little had changed with the donkey—the twitching rabbit’s ears, the mane spiked like a jagged mountain range which took to his hand but still shivered at the touch—that the reunion felt diminished by the animal’s familiarity. To the donkey, it seemed, Caleb had not been gone at all. There was little ceremony to the brushing and haltering, and afterward he led Ridley out of the stable and past the house, waving goodbye to his mother and catching another glimpse of his father as he finished his coffee on the porch.

  “Tell August I say hello,” his father called. “And when you get back I’d like to hear what really happened to that face of yours. About that horseplay.”

  Caleb said nothing and continued down the lane, the sound of the birds still mingling in the melody of the air, the naked spring sun just bright enough to cast a golden glow onto the lane like some premonition of encouragement from above, as if to suggest that the day ahead of him might just go his way.

  * * *

  They had opened his face with the butt of a rifle. He’d cupped his face with both hands, but no amount of dabbing at the wound could prevent the blood from slipping through his fingers and wetting the ground. That night he’d cried, not from the pain but from the fear of deformity, the image of himself as another mangled relic of the war, a curiosity for children, fit for a circus. Later, as if it might cheer him up, they said the blow was more for the desertion than for anything else—even if it wasn’t from their side, the action itself was worthy of punishment, regardless of the colors of his uniform.

  He had simply been relieved they hadn’t shot him the second he jutted his head out from the trenches where he and the others had taken cover. The pull of August’s father was strong enough to keep them from the front lines—or danger in general, really—and until they came upon that string of muzzles bursting so hot the smoke assumed the look of a forest fire, he’d yet to see a bullet fly. He was certain they’d encountered a full-scale attack, the sort that would make for lore when they were back home, the stuff to tell one’s grandchildren. But later the blue-clads would slap his face playfully, laughing as they polished their rifles with ash from the fire and stuffed tobacco into the bow of their lips. “That,” they told him, “is what we call a skirmish.”