He hadn’t found any shame in his desertion—to him it was merely pragmatic, with survival in mind—but he knew how it would be perceived by others. His only regret was that he had abandoned August. There was solace, though, in the fact that August was the only other soldier from back home to witness his cowardice. Again with Mr. Webler to thank, they’d been assigned to a company wholly separate from the one the other boys from Old Ox had ended up in. Where so many were losing life and limb, he and August had been kept to guarding the railways, off in the distance, spending their nights with little worry, wrapped up in childish pranks and games of draughts, such that the whole enterprise had the air of a tour.
Until the company took to the woods and got themselves lost. That had been the irretrievable mistake, a refrain he repeated to his escorts as the days passed. The entire business was terribly wrong, he said, he wasn’t supposed to be there with them at all. But if he imagined they might release him, it was nothing but wishful thinking. His only good fortune was that when they got sick of his complaining, they aimed for his groin and let his face go on healing.
Ridley carried him along now, and the first sight that greeted him in Old Ox was an aging whore revealing herself on the walkway to a gang of horsemen. She slipped on a streak of mud, gathered herself, and returned to the brothel from which she’d come, laughing all the way. The town had grown in his absence and there were few faces out that assured him it was even the same place from the year before. One or two folks took notice of him but their stares quickly went from his face to the ground, and he could not be sure whether it was his battered features or the fact that he had come back from the grave that brought him attention.
The Union soldiers had occupied a number of storefronts, and from their posts out front they eyed him suspiciously, more with weariness than disgust. The schoolhouse near the roundabout appeared to be their headquarters. One woman seemed on the verge of a fistfight with a soldier over rations he did not have, and Caleb could not help wondering which punishment was worse: his own, for having been made a captive after proving himself a coward; or that of these poor souls who were stationed so far from home, surrounded by so many who despised them.
He turned off with Ridley where the traffic began to slow and the lean-tos were replaced by real, sturdy homes—the sort that might survive a rainfall or two—refined dwellings with slanted rooftops and swings hanging from the trees in their yards. The tilted sun cast its favor on two girls beside their home playing battledore and shuttlecock, one hand on their rackets and the other on their bonnets. A smaller boy sat on the lap of his mother near them, struggling against her grip to be let into the game. The other homes were empty, their front doors shut with families going on with their business as if this day were like any other, which for them, Caleb understood, it was.
Where it seemed the town might up and end altogether, the land came into its own and expanded, with great swaths of fresh grass giving way to larger estates tucked in before the start of more woods beyond. Counted together there were no more than ten in all, and the townsfolk called this bundle of homes Mayor’s Row.
The Webler home was the last one—a sloping mansard roof, three stories of living quarters, and tightly groomed shrubs forming a hedge just high enough to allow privacy but not so much to deter a welcome visitor. From the street Caleb peered up at August’s room, wondering if, as had been the case for so many visits that had preceded this one, the boy might be waiting there for him. Back then, after gazing down and waving, August would vanish, only to reappear on the front porch to lead him inside. But the bedroom was dark. He turned, as if what lay behind him might signal some command of what he should do next, but saw only shrubs. Caleb had considered this moment since he’d been released by the Union soldiers and set off for home. Yet here he was stalled on an ass, lacquered in sweat, as frightful as the day of his desertion.
The voice at the front door calling his name was startling enough to bring both him and Ridley to attention. They looked up together, although the donkey returned to grazing while Caleb was forced to think of something to offer in response. Not that this was new. He had always struggled to speak up in the presence of Wade Webler.
“Howdy!” was all he said, to his great dismay.
“Caleb Walker, as I live and breathe. August told me—well hell, he told me you went and got yourself killed. But that don’t look to be the case. You get over here. Looking like you’re halfway to melting and that sun’s giving us a perfectly polite start of an afternoon. You got way too much of your father in you, I swear. Not a Southern bone in your body.”
Caleb tied down Ridley and walked over to the veranda. Mr. Webler had on an assemblage of formal wear—well-cut trousers, a jacket with tail—yet his silk shirt exposed his pigeon chest, with great cumulus puffs of hair poking out. Caleb had never quite seen the man so exposed and was not sure if he should offer his hand for a shake or let him return inside to tidy up.
“What a sight,” Mr. Webler said. “What. A. Sight.”
They shook, and already his body was tensing up so tight with nerves that part of him wished he might trade spots out front with Ridley and spend the rest of the day eating grass in solitude.
“Are you well? Have you seen your parents? They must be ecstatic.”
“They’re quite happy, sir.”
“Well, it’s a shame you made your return only today. You missed my gala last night, a rousing success, if I do say so myself.”
Mr. Webler motioned inside and Caleb followed him to find Negroes on their knees cleaning the floor and little boys and girls on their rear ends reaching behind cabinets and couches with rags where their elders could not; glasses were still being collected onto trays and although he only glimpsed the dining room as the door closed he caught sight of a tablecloth blotted over with wine. After being led into the parlor Caleb was forced to sit beside a grandfather clock that complained at timed intervals he could not make sense of. Mr. Webler held forth, speaking as if Caleb had come here to see him, and Caleb could discern no means of wriggling out of the interaction without appearing rude.
“I thought it wise to put on something of a fundraiser for the cause. We collected an amount I’m quite proud of that will go toward doing some fine work for this great county. The people here, even in times of emergency, are still as Christian as they come, and you could station all of Grant’s army in this town and we would still preserve our values, our heritage…”
They called the man the freight train, for when the words gained steam he kept his engine stoked with so much liquor and tobacco he could entertain late into the night without a stop to rest. He had never run for office, but often spoke like a pol, and lorded over the town as if he were the mayor. There was talk of a seafood stew, of women dancing as their husbands fell asleep. Indeed, the whole affair harked back to a time when the world was right, and made them wonder if Old Ox might yet escape from the Union’s embrace altogether.
“It’s sounds like quite the ball, sir.”
“Not a ball, Caleb. A gala.”
“I’m not sure I know the difference.”
Mr. Webler grunted and Caleb realized, for the first time, that he was still drunk from the night before. He paused to collect himself, enough to pretend at some greater interest in Caleb.
“Put it aside,” he said. “I’d rather hear of your time. I only know that you got separated from August. Beyond that things are…unclear.”
This was exactly the kind of statement for which Caleb should’ve been prepared. On his way home, after he’d been released by the Union, whenever he was asked by strangers about his service—the battles seen, the toils endured—Caleb had often delivered a line of grand vagueness that tended to silence whoever had posed the question: I don’t wish to brag of the triggers I’ve pulled or the places in which I did so. (Which omitted the fact that he had not pulled any triggers at all.) Yet Mr. Webler would so easily parry his routine that he knew it was wise to avoid it from the start.
“I imagine August told you everything there was to share.”
Mr. Webler looked upon him with a stinging sense of either disgust or remorse. His mustache bristled like a tickled caterpillar. He reached to the cellarette at his back and produced a tumbler and an uncorked, half-empty decanter.
“Let me tell you something, son.”
He began to pour himself a drink so carefully that the stream kept up with his story, the smell of the whiskey so potent and the tang of his words so biting that the resultant mixture of the two felt combustible in the air.
“I fought down in Mexico,” he said, “when August was but a babe. There was an expedition in Puebla, before we saw any gunplay. By the time we set foot into the city they were already raising our flag, so I spent the night carousing with the boys, the usual business. But one of those Mexicans stumbles into our camp, starting trouble, probably as drunk as I was, and I see the threat and I know I got to earn my stripes somehow. So I call him out, get him to square up with me, and I have him on the ground before you could say your own name. The boys are hollering and that bug juice has me feeling invincible and I’m not about to let up.”
Mr. Webler leaned back and sighed as if he had just unearthed a new interpretation of the story that had previously eluded him, and Caleb listened to the performance as a spectator grasping for an appropriate reaction—to applaud or laugh or cry—unsure of where the man was taking it but waiting patiently for it to end.
“I get a nice little angle, press my fingers into his eyes, and squeeze to hell and back, and those things leak out so soft and easy you would’ve thought they were two slugs under my thumbs. And when I get up I’m smiling, and I don’t realize in the moment, in all that exercise, that I went and pissed myself. So of course I tell them it was all that effort I put in, fess up just to get on with things. But wouldn’t you know it, before I went to sleep that night I turned over in my tent, had a little cry, and pissed myself again. They never knew about that one, though. That one I kept close to the vest.”
The women and children, all of them mute, were still cleaning around the two men ceaselessly and the place had the feel of a prison, with Caleb being forced, along with the inmates, to endure a speech by a warden displaying his power over those in his charge. He pitied these people who had put up with Mr. Webler for so long, working now for what must be pennies after years of bondage, and wondered, if a domestic uprising were to take place, whether anyone other than the man’s wife and son would bemoan his skull being smashed in.
“I believe I regret that day,” he carried on. “Not the pissing. I wasn’t the first boy in uniform to piss myself. But only that that Mexican did nothing to earn my violence. It’s not as if he deserted his own. He was still in Puebla. Still looking for a fight. There’s honor in that.”
Caleb, for some time, could not conjure a word. The clock sang out once again.
“Sounds like quite the mess, sir,” he finally managed.
Mr. Webler downed his whiskey in one pull and offered Caleb the slightest grin.
“I’m sure you can imagine.”
Just then the light above the staircase was interrupted by the opening of a door that shuttered out the sun. The parlor went so dark, and then so bright as the door closed once more, that even Mr. Webler paused, although the scrubbing of the floor continued unabated.
Caleb could not help standing.
“Ah. There he is,” Mr. Webler said.
As footsteps started down the stairs, Mr. Webler stood and excused himself.
“I suppose I’ll leave both of you to it.”
* * *
August invited Caleb to ride with him to their favorite hideaway, the place where they’d spent great swaths of their youth. On the way, August apologized for his father’s behavior. (He’d been up, as Caleb had guessed, since the party the night before, and apparently the Union occupation of Old Ox had brought him to seek counsel in drink almost every night.) But neither of the friends seemed willing to speak in anything other than circles of small talk.
Caleb asked August about the rest of his time in the field.
“Boring for long stretches, really. Faced off against a few bluebelly stragglers, got to point my Colt at them.”
“I bet you liked that.”
“For a time.”
Footsteps on grass. That familiar crunch.
“Might I ask what brought you home?” Caleb said.
August was silent, a flicker of a smile forming at the corner of his lips. Near the end, he said, they’d gotten orders to head toward Fort Myers, down in Florida. At last a real battle. Unfortunately, en route, he took a little spill down a hillside while on patrol and nearly broke his leg. He spent a week in the infirmary and was then sent home.
Like his father, Caleb could find nothing wrong with his friend’s leg upon examination. He looked no different than he had the day they’d left Old Ox together—if anything he seemed sprier now. Caleb knew, of course, that August would never have seen a battlefield. His father wouldn’t have allowed it. But he wasn’t about to acknowledge this fact.
“Not even a hobble,” he observed.
“No. I’m lucky in that way.”
Rather than lob his own volley of questions, August told Caleb how he’d been working for his father in the weeks since returning home, learning about lumber and construction and the properties they might own and sell. There had always been the sense that his father’s work was not exciting enough for him, but his talk hinted that he might have had his share of adventure, no matter how brief and pampered, and was ready to investigate the doldrums of everyday living.
When the town was at their rear they slowed to a stop and tied off both Ridley and August’s horse to a naked tree. They searched for a large stone they’d marked as children with a white stroke of paint, and did so with such great intensity that it felt like another opportunity to keep away from each other, from even sharing a glance that might shorten the distance between them. The stone appeared smaller than it had when they were children, but Caleb picked out the faded slash mark and they walked beyond it, breaking through the trees and into the high brush. The whip and crackle of the weeds underfoot were the only noises. At last the pond revealed itself, the lilies and the chickweed spread along the borders of the crystalline water.
“No different,” August said.
Time had forgotten the place. They’d never seen another soul here. Once, they’d spotted a solitary duck, drifting in place, but it had never returned, and the memory felt fuzzy to both of them, lost somewhere between the real and the imaginary. Caleb sat before the water and August did the same, and it took only a moment for them to turn and face one another in earnest.
This, Caleb thought. This is what he’d been waiting for. August’s eyes were so boyish, so blue with innocence and charm, that he’d withstood scrutiny from even the cruelest superiors; his pink lips, hardly there, suggested a false shyness that had no bearing on his real feelings at any given moment. The sight of him was greatly relieving, and by the time Caleb had drunk his fill it was too late to consider his own appearance. He glanced away as bashfully as a girl might.
“What’d they do to you?” August asked coldly.
“That bad?”
“It’s not like that.”
Caleb said he’d been clubbed.
August itched his neck and glanced back at him sharply before turning away again.
“Did they break your spirit?”
“I suppose so. But the guilt at leaving you was worse. Or just as bad.”
August said nothing after that, and Caleb’s heartbeat quickened at his friend’s reticence. He had always been more comfortable being given direction, and from the day he and August had met, as boys, Caleb had found in August someone he could follow, someone whose hobbies he could adopt, whose thoughts he could make his own. It was the simplest path to pleasure. But if the arrangement offered him a ready-made structure and purpose, it was also a weakness that, in this i
nstance—when instruction about what he ought to do or think was being withheld—was used against him. August was spooling out their conversation so slowly that Caleb felt it as a great anguish, and also as a fear, for if August never gave him a chance to confront his actions, they might never reconcile, and if they did not reconcile…
“I’m sorry,” Caleb said. “At my deepest core. What I did, I’ve thought about it every day since and will think of it every day that’s to come. I went there to be at your side, and even that I could not see through. I wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep at the thought of another man calling me a traitor, but I cannot bear for you to think such a thing. Forgive me. Please. That’s all I ask.”
He could not cry. Not at this juncture, with everything said. But he could feel the tears—lying in wait.
August had curled his legs up to his chest and his posture reminded Caleb of the old August, the child August; recalled the nights they’d come to this place and lain on their backs and dotted the stars with their fingers, trusting that their gaze had brought them to the same ones. They were moments that felt as timeless as the place itself.
But that was then.
There was a touch on his face, and suddenly a hand gripping his jaw. August brought Caleb so close to him that their noses nearly touched; their eyes were locked as one, and soon they were studying each other’s faces so closely that Caleb felt himself being given over to his friend, as if awaiting a commandment. And then August struck him so hard with an open hand that he lost sight. Bright sparks spotted his vision. After a blink the world returned, the look of August, his lips pursed, his cheeks red with fury.
The Sweetness of Water Page 9