Excerpt from The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"What'd you go and do to yourself? All that yelling and carrying on."

"If you knew what hell this day has been you might yell yourself."

Prentiss was near him now, so close George could smell the sweat on his shirt. Why was he so still? So suddenly unnerving?

"If you wouldn't mind at least being quiet for me, Mr. Walker," he said. "Please."

George recalled the knife that had been beside the half-wit with such urgency it nearly materialized in the darkness; and he realized then that beyond the confines of a household, lost in the woods, he was simply one man in the presence of two, and that he had been a fool to assume his own safety.

"What is this about? My wife will be calling for help any moment, you do know that, don't you?"

But the two men's frozen, desperate gazes were once again not on him, but beyond him. A whipping sound broke out at George's side, and he turned to find a rope and the counterweight of a large rock beside it: the makings of a fine-tuned snare holding the leg of a jackrabbit writhing a few feet along the way. Landry rose up, faster than George might have thought possible, and gave his attention over to the rabbit. Prentiss took a step back and waved off the moment.

"I didn't mean to worry you," he said. "We just. We ain't had something land in that trap yet…We ain't had a proper meal in some time, is all."

"I see," George said, collecting himself. "Then you've been out here longer than I first thought."

Prentiss explained then that they had departed from Mr. Morton's a week ago; had taken what little they could carry on their backs—a sickle left in the fields, a bit of food, the bedrolls from their pallets; and had not made it any farther than where they stood now.

"He said we could take a few things from the cabins," Prentiss said of Morton's minor generosity. "We ain't steal a thing."

"No one said anything about stealing. Not that I would care, he has more than a simpleton like himself could ever make use of. I just wonder why, really. You could go anywhere."

"We plan to. It's just nice."

"What's that?"

Prentiss looked at George as if the answer was right before him.

"To be left alone for a time."

Landry, ignoring them, had chopped the loose bits of an oak tree limb into feed for a fire.

"Ain't that why you're out here yourself, Mr. Walker?"

George was shivering now. He began to speak of the animal, how it had led him here, but the sound of Landry's chopping interrupted his train of thought, and he found himself, as had been the case since the preceding day, reflecting on his son. When the boy was younger, they had walked these very woods together, chopping wood and making a play of such things as if a hearth, permanently aflame, was not awaiting them at home. With that memory the others streamed forth, the small moments that had bonded the two—putting him to bed; praying with him at the table, empty gestures with winks passed from one to the other like whispered secrets; wishing him off to the front with a handshake that should have been so much more—until they dissolved in the face of the boy's best friend, August, having come to visit him that very morning with news of Caleb's death.

They'd met in George's small study. August looked very much like his father, the same blond hair, the boyish features and the air of vague regality rooted in little but family folklore. August and Caleb had left Old Ox in their clean butternut grays and polished boots, and George expected his son to return a muddied, threadbare savage; foresaw himself and Isabelle as the dutiful parents who would nurse him back to normalcy. In light of this, something felt indecent about August's evening wear: the frocked shirt, the pressed waistcoat with the gold timepiece hanging freely. It appeared as if he'd already discarded his time at war, and this meant Caleb, too, had become part of the past, long before George had even known his son was gone from him forever.

Excerpted from The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris. Copyright © 2021 by Nathan Harris. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.