Morton’s land together they’d left behind the only life they’d ever known and they often thought in unison, as one. 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 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. It was a tradition derived from the cabins, when they were children, back when Landry was whole. 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. He always took to foot rubs in such a way. Landry stayed silent, an act for the man that had nothing to do with speaking, and more with his senses, the way he existed. “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.”

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. “Ate up the last of that rabbit like it was ’bout to take off. Landry groaned, although it sounded more born of joy than anything. “You always tryin’ to sneak one by me, ain’t you,” Prentiss said. Landry lay on the bed of the forest, his head upon a log. 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. Prentiss held his brother’s feet in his lap. The beatings Landry suffered so traumatized him that he no longer speaks, but the pair get a second chance, as described in the third chapter of The Sweetness of Water. Prentiss and Landry are brothers who grew up on a plantation and watched as their mother got sold off to another 'owner' while they remained. Plantation owners have been forced to free the enslaved people who have been working their land, tending their homes, minding their children-and frequently enduring violent abuse.

Like so many other parts of the country, Old Ox has been torn apart by the Civil War, which is winding down as the novel opens. Old Ox, Georgia, is the fictional town in which debut novelist Nathan Harris has set The Sweetness of Water.

The sweetness of water