The Sweetness of Water

by Nathan Harris

  “He’s very busy today,” she said. “Why don’t I let him know you came by?”

  “Oh, I know he’s busy. I can show myself the way.”

  “Ted.”

  Ted put his horse to a slow trot and Gail trailed him out beyond the cabin. Isabelle followed, trying without success to persuade them to turn around. When they arrived at the field, all four men were shirtless, even George, who was rotund in the innocent manner of a child, his gut bouncing about with each thwack of his hoe. He seemed as confused by the sight of Isabelle as he was by Ted and Gail. He stopped working as they dismounted, and Caleb and the brothers did the same.

  “George!” Ted proclaimed. “I believe you have some explaining to do.”

  He looked at Prentiss and Landry, then back at George.

  “What is this about?” George said.

  “You ain’t earned the right to play dumb, George.”

  There was another stroke of silence and this was to be the last indignity Ted could weather.

  “You quit it now. We both know these boys are my property!”

  The proclamation was loud enough to cause a scurrying in the woods at the edge of the field.

  “Deceiving me right under my nose. Not more than a few miles from my own home, from where I raised these boys from the cradle. We might not get along but you’re better than this. My God, do you know these two stole from me? Not just these two, all of them. The kettles and linens and every other damn thing I provided them. Whole stock rooms gone overnight.”

  The brothers averted their eyes and George stepped forward.

  “Settle down, Ted.”

  “I won’t!”

  He was red from his outburst and huffing as though he’d been struck and was trying to hold back tears.

  “Your charity ain’t no different from mine. I treated them best I knew how. You could talk your way up the Mississippi with that tongue of yours but that don’t make you better than the rest of us. What little I have I made on my own, and you swoop in and take what’s mine just like your pa swooped in and took whatever he liked around this whole damn town. This is my livelihood we’re talking about. I might not be up to your standard, but I’m good people. So’s Gail.”

  George, leaning his belly against the handle of his hoe, looked worn under the gaze of the sun, but still tranquil.

  “These are men, not boys. And they are their own men. If you were to ask them to come back, I would not stand in their way.”

  Ted wiped the spittle from his mouth. He appeared pained to face Prentiss and Landry, and at first could only point a finger in their direction. Finally he turned and met their eyes with his own.

  “I put a roof over y’all heads. Fed you, clothed you. It’s just shameful, how you done carried on.”

  Landry, shoulders above the others, yawned, unmoved.

  The field was silent.

  “Bones,” Prentiss said. “You fed us bones. And the roof leaked every rain. We might as well have slept outside. And ain’t a soul on that land raised in a cradle, except your kin. My mama raised me in her hands. Same as Landry.”

  Ted looked at George, then Caleb, as if expecting them to punish Prentiss for this outburst, this insolence. There was something unbound in him, Isabelle thought, the anguish of someone spurned.

  “Why don’t we save it for another day?” Gail said. “They ain’t going nowhere.”

  “Yes, listen to Mr. Cooley,” Isabelle said with a careful tenderness, thinking, perhaps, that a woman’s softness, however false, could stamp out his anger. “This is nothing that can’t be dealt with in the future. No one needs to be hurt today. You wouldn’t want me to witness something like that, would you?”

  Ted’s nostrils flared like a spent animal’s might. He whirled and mounted his horse. Gail did likewise.

  “Since we’re being honest,” Ted said to George, “you should know this is all wrong. I ain’t a peanut farmer but even I know you want to plant in a bed raised at least double what you got here, not down near the furrow. If I was to take a guess, your seed won’t make a thing.”

  George poked at the ground with his foot.

  “Well, that’s appreciated. But Ted, and don’t take this the wrong way, I’d appreciate it even more if you did not return unannounced like this. It’s not neighborly.”

  There was a thundering taking place in Ted, and Isabelle was surprised he did not break into pieces right before their eyes. He managed to steady himself.

  “Y’all be well,” he said.

  They shot off at a gallop and left great clods of soil upturned in their wake. A dust cloud gathered and slowly settled back to the ground.

  When they were gone, George turned to Prentiss, his tone light.

  “Is that true? I never would’ve thought of such a thing. To raise the beds.”

  Prentiss was still watching the men off. He could not muster a response.

  “They’ll come back,” Caleb said.

  “We cannot mind Ted,” George said dismissively. “I’ve long speculated he suffers from some aberration of the brain and this only proves the point. Waving his arms about like he’s leading an orchestra. It really does not suit him to get so riled up.”

  “He will,” Caleb said. “You watch.”

  Ignoring his son, George turned to Isabelle.

  “I hope they did not alarm you, too.”

  “No. Not me.”

  “Good, good. What do you think of the farm?”

  “I don’t know, George,” she said. “It’s impressive.”

  Satisfied with this, he thanked her and raised his hoe, brought it down again.

  “For what it’s worth, I believe Ted is wrong. You show these plants some love, feed them properly, they will grow in just fine.”

  He did not seem to notice he was the only one working. The rest of them stood quietly in place, as though frozen by what had transpired.

  * * *

  Was it bravery George had shown? Or just his typical naïveté? Isabelle did not have the answer, which in itself provided yet another glimpse at one of the greater questions of her life: whether she knew the workings of her husband at all. Consciously or not, in front of his family he had stood up to those men without even the slightest show of fear or hesitation, his voice as confident as when he described a recipe to her, or shared one of his favorite jokes. He had not been impassioned, but it was the closest she’d seen him approach the concept, and it fascinated her.

  She twiddled a gilt button on her dress. She was wearing her Sunday best, although it was Wednesday, and had recruited Caleb to escort her to the Beddenfelds’ home by carriage. Mildred had passed along an invitation to an evening gathering, a celebration of Sarah’s daughter Natasha, who was to be wed to August Webler. This would be her first social occasion since before she and George had thought Caleb dead, the first appearance in town where she would have to pretend at cheerfulness and play nice.

  It was not by chance the invitation had reached her. Back during the height of the war, the Beddenfelds had housed a Confederate general, one of Sarah’s relatives, and his presence at their dinner table demanded some show of luxury. The Beddenfelds, it turned out, had sold their finest silverware, the price of maintaining appearances otherwise. And who better than Isabelle—off in the woods, removed from polite society, a woman of little gossip and littler interest in spreading it—to borrow china from? She had obliged the Beddenfelds, and since then, as though in some effort at a fair transaction, Sarah wished to include Isabelle in every event that took place at her home, including this one.

  “You look nervous,” Caleb said.

  He was holding the reins, his gaze trained not on her but on the road. They’d been together much less since he’d joined his father in the field, and she cherished their moments together all the more. She still often remembered the letters he would send her during his time in the war. Small notes, really. I am well—Caleb. Or, Still at it—your son. This was like him, to perform his duties as her child but
with minimum effort. She had relished the letters, though, kept them in her dresser and read them whenever the pang of his absence struck. Now, with him back, each conversation felt like one of those cards, to be cherished and stored away within her. Even their most trivial exchange brought her happiness.

  “Hardly,” she told him. “It’s all old hat by now.”

  “The clucking hens,” he said. This was her term for the pedigreed women in town, and he’d adopted it as well from an early age.

  “Yes, squawking about in the henhouse, pecking at one another.”

  He smiled and continued to look ahead rather than at her.

  “Father speaks of you often, you know. When we’re in the field.”

  “I get on just fine, as you’ve seen.”

  “It’s the same as with the books he reads—he overthinks every last word with you, finding symbols where there are none.”

  “As is his nature.”

  “Precisely. He thought you were disturbed by Ted.”

  “Ted still holds your father to task for not being his friend. The man would bow at his feet if he would only give him the slightest show of respect. He should be more worried for Prentiss. He looked ready to flee.”

  “I worry he had reason to. I’ve never seen that sort of anger crop up in Ted.”

  “There was something desperate about him,” Isabelle agreed.

  They were approaching Old Ox. She stiffened, preparing herself for what lay in wait at the party. Lee had surrendered only a week earlier, and the timing could not have been worse for a celebration; and yet if the hens were skilled at anything it was turning a blind eye to reality, existing in a collective reverie where weddings and romance were the only things worthy of discussion. Virginia was a world away, and why should General Lee’s decision hold up Natasha’s special day?

  Caleb leaned back into his seat.

  “To be quite honest, I’m not sure why Father has made such a strong stand. His loyalty to those two. They’re perfectly fine help, but I’m not sure it’s worth the grief. No other man in the county is willing to pay the wages he does, and some don’t pay at all. It’s becoming the talk of the town. Folks say cruel things behind his back.”

  Her dress felt tight, the stitching coarse at her backside. She’d been gone no more than half an hour and already missed her rocking chair on the front porch and the solitude of the cabin, the distance from the world, that space all her own. In this, along with so much else, she and George were alike, even if they weren’t always willing to recognize it in each other.

  “It’s rare for your father to find fellow travelers. Those two boys are outsiders. They understand him. And he them.”

  “I’m not sure understanding means much,” Caleb said.

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “You understand Father like no one else might. Yet you two speak less than bickering schoolchildren. It’s vexing.”

  “Yes. Well…”

  She closed her eyes, ignored the whine of a caged hog, the ring of hammer meeting anvil. Sounds of excess, vice not of the religious order but of the human order, the noises of society fending off despair with routine.

  “Consider that it’s not as simple as you might have it. Your father and I—we made sacrifices, not for each other, but for the kind of life we sought. In the face of the alternative. What’s all around us.”

  The dappled shadows of the town blighted her eyelids until the noise ceased and they’d gone beyond it all. Time unspooled in lockstep with the patter of Ridley’s footsteps, and neither disturbed the spell cast by their silence. When at last they arrived at the Beddenfelds’, she let herself out of the carriage with only a brief goodbye.

  * * *

  The flowers around the home appeared to have been placed indiscriminately, their presence explained not by any sense of taste but by a general preference for extravagance. Gaudy carpet stamped with designs like illegible handwriting snaked through the entrance hall. The women, six in all, were seated in the parlor. At least Mildred was among them. They stood at her arrival, mothers every one, dragging the length of their dresses as they came to say hello, each of them other than Mildred fawning over her as if she were a puppy brought in from the cold.

  “Oh, I thought you would never show!” Sarah Beddenfeld said.

  “You look simply stunning,” Margaret Webler said, stroking Isabelle’s dress, the same model she’d most likely discarded years ago. The skin at her cheeks looked thinned by years of grinning, and her eyebrows, the same crimson hue of her hair, had been drawn on so recently that Isabelle suspected they would smear at the touch.

  “My apologies if I’m late,” Isabelle said. “The ride took longer than I’d expected.”

  This was a lie, the first of many to come. They sat at the dining table of polished wood, a lace runner spilling from either end, with a bowl at its center so overflowing with fruit that the table seemed to have been set for a Roman feast, or a still life. Isabelle lied about the beauty of the décor, and then about the salad in which flaccid lettuce had been drowned in a surplus of vinegar.

  “You are the envy of the town,” Martha Bloom said to Sarah, seated at the head of the table. “Who with a daughter would not wish for such a betrothal? August Webler is destined for great things, just like his father. That I’m sure of. Quite sure.”

  “Have you noticed,” Katrina said in a hush, “how sometimes even the gentlemen in town grow quiet when he appears?”

  Natasha’s sister, Anne, who’d failed to touch her plate, nodded along vigorously. The nodding, Isabelle ventured, was a symptom of being the youngest present, the sign of a need for approval from her elders, but the frequency of the nods had increased to the point that she had developed a dew of sweat at the hollow of her neck, and it remained to be seen whether she would last the evening without her head lolling over at the strain and falling face-first into her plate.

  “The poor girl needs to relax before she faints.”

  It was Mildred speaking into Isabelle’s ear. Thank heavens her friend had been seated immediately to her right.

  “Yes!” Isabelle said, at a lower register, grateful to have her darker observations shared. “They’ll need to bring the wine early just to ease her nerves.”

  “Oh, did you not have some yourself before arriving? It’s etiquette to steady yourself with a glass—or two—before any appearance in such company.”

  Isabelle laughed heartily and the rest of the women at the table turned their expectant gazes upon her. It was a regrettable outburst. She dabbed her mouth with her napkin and took up the mantle of conversation that had been placed before her.

  “Well, Natasha is certainly lucky to have August’s hand,” she said, “but let’s not forget the qualities of Natasha herself. Caleb would be lucky to find a young woman so delightful.”

  “You flatter!” Sarah said. “She can be charming, but we know how fortunate she is and couldn’t be more excited. Caleb is friends with August, no?”

  “The best of friends, I’d say,” Mildred added.

  Isabelle said it was true, and was backed up by August’s mother, who was quick to confirm the strength of their bond.

  “Well then, I would not be surprised if he has a role as groomsman,” Sarah said. “How marvelous that would be.”

  “It would be an honor for him, I’m sure,” Isabelle said.

  “I can promise that you will not be far from the ceremony,” Sarah said. “So you can see your son up close as he stands beside August.”

  “I’m quite sure I will be pleased wherever you seat me.”

  From the corner of her eye, Isabelle caught the slightest gleam in Mildred’s expression, as if her friend recognized the act, the false notes that rang true to all but her. But this ability to reach inward and extract the spare bits of her old self that had yet to be disassembled was more dispiriting to Isabelle now than it had been in the past. Perhaps these women had the same feelings she did but were stronger at heart, able to store away
the thoughts that were useless and continue on as if they did not exist. Or perhaps they were simply as hollow as they appeared to be.

  An onion soup was served, a film of broth bubbling along the surface. She recognized her china immediately: the flowing willow pattern, the swirls of blue continuing onto the brim of the bowls and spilling their way onto the saucers beneath.

  “And I will hope George makes an appearance as well,” Sarah said. “He is a pleasure of a…unique sort.”

  Isabelle caught every glance exchanged across the table.

  “For such an occasion,” she said, “I’m sure he’d put aside the time.”

  “You must tell us,” Sarah said casually, “if what people say is true. Has George really started some sort of plantation of his own out there? Some means of circumvention in keeping slaves? He has always gone against the tide, it would be so like him.”

  “That’s not what I’ve heard at all,” Margaret said. “Although what I’ve heard bears no repeating.”

  Martha, from the corner, lost in her ignorance, seemed flummoxed.

  “This is news to me. Slaves? I’m certainly no authority to speak on commodities, but such property in this climate…well, it does seem like a poor investment.”

  It played as a joke, to Martha’s own confusion, and a round of giggles sounded off around the table.

  Isabelle opened her mouth but her voice caught. She turned to Mildred, seeking assistance, yet her ally was busy looking out the window in a show of neutrality. Katrina would be of no help. Although they were friendly, they were not friends.

  “He’s simply started farming,” Isabelle said at last.

  “Is that all?” Sarah said. “I don’t see how the rumors began, then. With so much news being bandied about, I swear the oddest speculation has cropped up in this town. Most of it false. Let’s say no more of it.”

  Isabelle reeled—then sat up squarely. So this was it. An unexpected reckoning. For in the passing words there had been a declaration, however fleeting, against George’s name—against her household. No matter what she thought of George, of his decisions, she would not cower before them as her husband’s character went judged.