“ ’Afternoon, Father,” the driver said. “You look set to be trampled by your own flock, don’t you?”
“They shelled Hazel Green Saturday night,” the priest said. “God knows who they were after, but it sent the whole town running. You got ninety for me, right?”
“Eighty-five.”
The priest looked at a manifest attached to a clipboard in his hand. “Says here ninety. I already told them ninety would get to leave.”
“Don’t worry, Father. I bet by now these folks are used to being told all kinds of things that turn out not to be true. Eighty-five, no more.”
The priest rubbed his temple. “Fine, wait, just wait a while. And keep the doors closed; when I tell them they might come for your throat.”
“Whatever you say, Father.”
The priest returned to address part of the crowd in the courtyard, and soon the murmur in the crowd rose, and the priest was shouted down from all directions. Martina listened through a sliver of open window.
“It’s my turn, you said it yesterday,” a woman said. “You swore it.”
“I have no say in the matter,” the priest replied.
“The hell you don’t,” a man leaning on crutches said.
“You know I don’t.”
“Then show us who does have a say. You give us that man to talk to.”
“There is no one man, and you know it,” the priest said. “There’s just the war. The war has say. And the war says five of you have to wait another night.”
The priest huddled with the other volunteers to decide which five would stay. Preemptively, people in the crowd began yelling reasons why they should not be made to wait one more day. They shouted of their ailments, of festering wounds that required urgent care; they shouted the number of their dead and the names of their children. The priest and his advisers looked at the manifest and crossed and uncrossed and crossed the names again.
“Goddamn Anglicans,” the bus driver said. “Never could make up their minds.”
Finally it was agreed that four men and one teenage boy would remain at the church. The other eighty-five refugees, all but two of them women and children, were made to form a line that snaked back and forth from the courtyard to the sidewalk. The bus driver opened the door and, one by one, they boarded.
It was a sullen, dead-eyed procession. The women filled the seats with mechanical indifference, their children ahead of them, their belongings stuffed in backpacks or suitcases or laundry baskets. They wore track pants and T-shirts and tank tops soiled with food stains and emblazoned with the names and logos of restaurants and hotels and companies that no longer existed. More than a few of the women wore the same cheap polyester T-shirts. On the front of these shirts was drawn the undulating flag of the Free Southern State: three hollow black stars, aligned horizontally, upon a white horizontal bar. The white split evenly an otherwise red background. On the back, the shirts were stamped in bold font with the date October 1, 2074—Southern Independence Day.
Martina shifted close to her children, protecting her corner of the bench. Slowly the bus filled to capacity with its human cargo. The bodies brought with them their warmth; the air within the bus began to turn stale and humid with the pickled acidity of sweat and unbathed skin. Three women filled the rest of the available space on the back bench, their children and belongings piled high upon their laps. One woman, who looked to be in her late twenties and dragged behind her a boy not much younger than Simon, approached Martina.
“You’re taking up too much room,” she said, pointing at the Chestnuts’ belongings. “Get rid of all that shit.”
“We’re taking up as much room as anyone else,” Martina replied.
The woman looked with contempt at the statue of the Virgin, which rested on the bench next to Sarat. “They’re keeping my husband another day in that hellhole so you can bring a goddamn statue with you? That ain’t fair.”
“I didn’t know it’d be like this.”
“I don’t give a shit what you know. Throw it out.”
A woman occupying the seat next to the old man from Blind River turned around. “Just sit down, Lara,” she said. “Stop pestering the poor woman.”
“Shut up, Holly. You ain’t in charge of nothing.”
At the front of the bus, the rebel guard stood. “Shut your mouth and sit down,” he said.
“It ain’t fair, it ain’t fair!” Lara replied. “Why’d they get to bring every damn thing they own when my husband doesn’t even get the seat he was promised?”
The guard slung his rifle around his shoulder and walked to the back of the bus.
“All right, all right,” Lara said. “Calm down, hold on a second.” But quickly the fighter grabbed her by the arm and dragged her forward. She cursed him and grasped at the backs of the seats, but was easily dislodged. When he reached the front of the bus, the guard pulled the door lever with his free hand and then shoved the woman outside. She landed unbalanced and fell on the sidewalk. Then he turned to the young boy, who’d been tugging at his shirt screaming for him to let go of his mother, and threw him out too. Before any of the church volunteers had a chance to object, he’d tossed their rucksacks as well. He closed the doors and turned to the passengers.
“Anyone else got something to say?” he asked. The passengers said nothing. The guard turned to the driver.
“Go,” he said. The driver obeyed.
Soon the bus was back on the highway, headed west, back in the direction of Mississippi. A mile after the highway crossed the wash of Little Yellow Creek, the driver turned northward, navigating by memory a labyrinth of one-lane country roads. The roads meandered around dry beds that once bore the offshoots of the Tennessee River.
Holly turned once more to Martina.
“Don’t worry ’bout Lara,” she said. “She ain’t been the same since she lost her youngest boy to the Birds last winter.”
“I didn’t know,” Martina said. “I didn’t know about any of this.”
Holly raised her hand over the back of her seat and introduced herself and shook Martina’s hand. “Where you from, anyway?” she asked.
“St. James.”
“Never heard of it.”
“South of Baton Rouge, on the Mississippi.”
Holly’s brows furrowed. “That’s Blue country,” she said. “Purple, anyway. What did you do to end up here?”
“The fighting moved east from Texas.”
“Sweetheart, you think the Texas fighting is bad? You ain’t seen the border towns round here. You should have gone up north when you had the chance. They got an office in Baton Rouge where you can get yourself a work permit.”
Martina looked over at her children to see if they’d been following the conversation. They appeared otherwise occupied—Dana asleep, Sarat entranced by the strange new country, Simon talking to Holly’s boy, who shared with him a plastic toy alligator he’d brought with him.
“Anyway—what am I saying?—you’ll be just fine,” Holly continued. “They got good people running Patience. The Red Crescent. That’s the best one of those aid groups, you know, the one they send to all the biggest wars. Don’t get me wrong, it ain’t no hotel, but at least it’s big enough that the Blues got no excuse to fire on it by accident the way they sometimes do. And anyway, President Kershaw’s people in Atlanta say we’ll have peace by Christmas and everybody will get on back to their homes, or what’s left of them. He says they might even make the Blues pay to rebuild the border towns, but I’ll believe that when I see it.”
Martina looked out the window. She saw four old fossil trucks parked by the side of the road. A group of about ten Free Southern State soldiers were standing near the trucks. One of them waved the bus down.
“What do they want now?” Martina said.
“Ain’t nothing,” Holly replied. “They just can’t have armed rebels bringing folks in. It makes the Red Crescent people nervous.”
The bus stopped. The rebel fighter traded places with one of the soldiers. The soldier wore the same red uniform as the guards who manned the Louisiana border crossing, his cap folded and pinned under his shoulder mark.
“Mornin’, ” he said to the passengers. A few nodded and returned the greeting.
“Real upbeat crowd you got here,” the soldier said to the driver. “Go on, get us to the gate.”
The driver pulled forward. A couple of miles up the road, in a burn-cleared woodland not far from where three states met in the Tennessee River, the bus passed a set of speed bumps. A billboard bore the same crescent illustration that had marked the vests of the church volunteers in Huntsville. The sign said: “Camp Patience Refugee Facility—Neutral Ground.”
THE REFUGEES SHUFFLED OUT into the Mississippi dusk. The Chestnuts, their legs numb from the daylong drive, were the last to exit. They had barely a moment to regard their new surroundings—an endless expanse of thick canvas tents, teeming with displaced life—before they were ushered by a camp worker into the administrative building.
There they waited in a large intake room, seated on plastic schoolroom chairs. Others, tired of sitting, took blankets from their sacks and spread them on the ground and lay on them and closed their eyes. In parts of the room large standing fans whirred. Many of the incoming refugees congregated near these fans. A couple of aid workers walked around the room, handing out bottled water from a cooler.
“Where are we, Mama?” Sarat asked.
“It’s just a place to spend the night, baby,” her mother replied.
“It smells funny.”
“I know, baby. Just wait a little while longer.”
A half-hour after she entered the intake room, Martina heard her name called out by one of the aid workers. She and her children once again picked up their belongings and followed the worker to an office where a man sat behind a cluttered schoolteacher’s desk, a pile of intake forms before him.
“Chestnut?” he said.
“That’s us,” Martina replied.
“Four?”
“Yes.”
The man looked over the forms on the desk in front of him a while longer. His thin eyes were circled with the dark shadows of insufficient sleep.
“You’re not from the Free Southern State territories,” he said.
Martina did not respond. The man flipped through the intake form again.
“Do you have…any authorization documents from the FSS consulate…” the man started, then paused. “Did anyone give you papers? This is a camp for internally displaced persons of the Free Southern State, yes? You understand what I’m saying?”
“I got no papers,” Martina said.
The man set the intake forms down on the desk and scratched his scalp. He sighed and retrieved from another drawer a pink form. He began filling it, asking Martina questions without looking up.
“What is your date of birth?”
“March 21, 2036.”
“The boy’s name and date of birth?”
“Simon Chestnut. January 1, 2066.”
“The girls’…”
“Sara Chestnut, December 30, 2068. Dana Chestnut. Same.”
“Are they immunized?”
“What?”
“Do they have their shots? Measles, mumps rubella, you understand?”
“No.”
“Are they sick? Do they have any communicable diseases? Coughing, fever, anything like that?”
“No.”
The man shook his head and struck out several lines on the form. He read over the rest of the sheet and then scratched the bottom half of the page out entirely. He stamped the sheet with the Red Crescent seal and placed it together with the other intake forms in a folder.
“You came here on the bus with the Hazel Green refugees, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“Then, for administrative purposes, that is where we will say you are from. If anyone asks you—and sometimes we have members of the media in these facilities—this is where you will say you are from. It’s very important, you understand?”
“Sure.”
The man called in his assistant, who led the Chestnuts out of the administrative building.
“We’re filled up in the Alabama slice right now, so you’re going to Mississippi. Row thirty-six, tent fourteen,” the assistant said. “Remember that—it’s your address now.”
In the purple light of dusk, the Chestnuts walked into the huge tent favela that would, until the night of the great massacre, serve as their city of refuge.
Excerpted from: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE SECOND AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: VOLUME II, 2074–2080
Q: How many men were on your side?
A: About five hundred where I was, north of Kilgore. Maybe three times that number in the places between Longview and Gladewater, and up to East Mountain. There were fighters all over that side of Texas back then. This was right around the time the Southern State declared independence, and everybody was still excited for a fight.
Q: Can you describe some of the men in your regiment at Kilgore? Their background, where they came from.
A: There was no regiment, just a bunch of men with guns who didn’t know they were being led to slaughter. They were Texans, most of them. Or at least, they had ancestry in Texas, family from back when it was a real state. Some of them had experience as soldiers in the National Guard or the Blue military back before Southern independence. You could tell from the beginning they looked down on the rest of us. They had themselves real uniforms, fresh from Austin, and new guns same as the Blues had. The rest of us carried Type-95s from the boats, or old hunting rifles or even handguns and such. A couple of boys from Mississippi came lugging these old rusted broadswords, like it was King Arthur’s Court or something. Could barely lift them off the ground.
Q: What motivated the men from outside Texas to come to the oil fields?
A: The ones who came from the purple states—Arkansas, Kansas, Tennessee—they were either broke or jobless or on the lam back home, so they were looking for three squares a day and any kind of soldier’s wages, or they were genuinely angry that their home states went along with Columbus and the fuel prohibition, so they were looking for a fight.
The ones from the Mag were for the most part members of the rebel groups—the Palmetto Guns, the New Zouaves, the Mississippi Sovereigns, and about a dozen smaller ones with maybe ten members each, maybe even less. Those ones, any chance they got, they’d talk your ear off about the righteousness of the Southern cause. I think some of them really believed they were doing the Lord’s work out there in East Texas.
Then you had the South Carolina men, and they were a different bag altogether. This was before Columbus put that whole state to sleep, but even then the Carolina fighters were the meanest sons of bitches on the front. I’ve been to that state in peacetime, and didn’t meet a single inhospitable soul. But from the first day of the war they didn’t talk to no one, didn’t smile or shake hands or none of that. You got the sense from being around them that no war in the history of South Carolina had ever ended, that they were still fighting all of them at once.
Then there were some men just sort of showed up—no affiliation, no nothing. Hell, I’d bet some of them were Blues by birth, never left New York state till the week before. I guess they just wanted some excitement, to see the fighting up close, to taste rebellion. Most of the Texans and the rebels hated that kind, called them tourists or spies. But once you got over that sort of thing, there was something comforting about having Northerners wanting to fight on your side. It made you feel your cause was just in an absolute kind of way.
Q: Can you describe what you saw when you first reached the front?
A: When we got to the place, it looked just like farmland you’d see anywhere else, but no crops were growing. They had us set up in and around five abandoned farmhouses. There was one, maybe two miles of space between each house, and that land was overgrown with this sharp brown grass. I don’t know what it was, but it itched like hell to walk through it, and no matter what you did to it it wouldn’t die. I saw a guy out there with a machete trying to clear a path from one of the houses to a shotgun shack not a hundred feet away. He slashed for the better part of an hour and didn’t make a dent in it. When he came back he looked like he’d gone swimming in a jellyfish pond.
Good thing about the grass, though, was it was high. You dropped to your knees in that brush and you became invisible. So the Texans stationed most of us in the fields. We wrapped old towels around our faces to keep from itching.
Q: Can you talk about the night of the attack?
A: In our part of the field they had us lined up every hundred feet or so, two men to a spot. My partner was a guy from Montgomery named…hell, I can’t remember anymore. The whole night we whispered back and forth—You see anything? No, you? Nothing.
At around three in the morning I heard something like a—like when you turn the numbers on those old combination locks that suitcases used to have. Just a click-click-click. It wasn’t too loud but it was out of place. I remember one of the old Texas army veterans once said nature doesn’t do straight lines or straight sounds. This was a straight sound. But before I had a chance to say anything, the ranch house down the way had been blown to bits. It was a bright orange burst and this sound like a metal balloon popping, and then there was nothing left but a lick of fire and a big cloud of black smoke.
That’s when all hell broke loose. You could hear men in the fields cursing and giving out commands to fire, but none of them knew what they were firing at. A couple of the fighters had these night vision rigs with them, and everyone around them kept asking what they saw, but they didn’t see nothing either. Then there was another click-click-click, and everyone knew now to duck and cover their ears like we’d been taught, and then the ranch house to our left was gone.
I felt the blast like a punch in the gut. When I got the air back in my lungs I called out to my partner to see if he was all right, but he didn’t answer. It wasn’t till morning that I saw how he was killed. Those bombs they dropped on us had all these tiny darts in them, and his entire left side was torn to shreds. If it’d been me to his left instead of him to mine, he’d have lived and I’d have died. But it didn’t happen that way.
When they were done with the houses they bombed the fields. After a while I just lay facedown in the dirt and I said a prayer and I waited.
After the bombs stopped I heard the sound of helicopters overhead. There were still a few men who’d survived the shelling and now they were being mowed down from the air. By then everything sounded distant. I had this awful ringing in my ears. But I could feel the earth shaking all around me.
Then the helicopters flew low, and after a few passes some of them landed. I could feel the soldiers near me but I couldn’t see or hear them. They walked in lines up and down the fields. I lay as still as if I was dead. Once they came as close to me as I am to you right now. I don’t know if they took me for dead already or if they didn’t care or if they wanted me to live and tell, but they just kept walking. An hour later they were gone, but I didn’t move till the sun came up.
Q: What did you see in the morning?
A: I saw the dead in the fields, and the houses turned to dust.
Q: Did you see any federal troops, or the bodies of any federal troops?
A: It was like they were never there.
Q: Were you injured?
A: I didn’t feel a thing.
Q: What did you do then?
A: First I thought I’d go south back to Kilgore. I thought that’s where the others would have gone. I didn’t know then that there were no others. Then I thought better of it. I figured next thing the Blues would do is go into Kilgore and all the nearby towns and kill all the enemy that didn’t fight.
Q: There were fighters who deserted?
A: No.
Q: They just didn’t go in the first place?
A: No, they were never fighters in the first place, but they were the enemy to the Blues. More of an enemy than any of us who had guns.
I don’t expect you to understand it. Your side fought the war, but the war never happened to you. In the Red country the war happened.
If you lived in the South during that war, maybe you were never forced from your home at gunpoint, but you knew someone who was. Maybe you didn’t lose a loved one when the Birds came and rained down death with no rhyme or reason, but you knew someone who had.
Now for most of people, just knowing wasn’t enough to make them take up arms—not everyone can face the thought of getting shot or torn to bits by shrapnel or, even worse, getting captured and sent to rot in Sugarloaf or some other detention camp. But damned if it didn’t make you want to do something.
So you gave alms to certain churches, knowing where that money would end up. Or when the Blues raided your town looking for those insurrectionists they were always talking about, even if you knew exactly where they was hiding, you kept your mouth shut and let the Marines tear your home apart until they got frustrated and left. And whenever news came of some—What do you call it up there? Incendiary homicide attack?—that left a few dead anywhere north of the Tennessee line, you didn’t say nothing, but inside you were pleased. You were pleased because they up there got a little taste of what it’s like for us down here. It didn’t even the score, not by a long shot, but it gave them a little taste.
That’s what you Northerners will never understand. The real insurrectionists never fired a single shot.
Q: Did you fight any other battles during the course of the war?
A: No. I hiked east two days, hitched a ride near Cross Lake and ended up back in my hometown in southern Alabama. Waited out the rest of the war there, and the plague that followed. By the time it was all done, most everyone I’d ever known was dead.
Q: Do you feel any lasting resentment, bitterness, or ill will toward the Union or the Northern states?
A: [Laughter].