SARAT RETURNED to the center of the camp. She entered the administrative building through the side door that led to Albert Gaines’s office.
On this night she found him leaning over the table, placing delicate spoonfuls of something black and glistening on a plate. He was dressed as she’d always seen him dressed: his single-breasted suit unblemished by wrinkles. He wore a double-Windsored tie of matte gray decorated with a crest of three stars atop an armored knight’s head and a red-striped shield. His hat lay on the table.
“Come in, come in!” he said, smiling. “I have something special for you.”
Sarat inspected the small flat canister on the table. Its tin lid had been pried open and inside lay a clump of small black balls. The writing on the side of the canister was foreign: letters similar to English but oddly misshapen, as though mutated somehow. The logo on the label was of a fish and a king’s crown.
“In Columbus the Northerners pay more than you would ever believe for pale imitations of this,” Gaines said. “Tonight you get the real thing for free.”
Sarat poked it with her pinky finger. The amount on her plate seemed impossibly small for a meal, and she wondered if it wasn’t some kind of vitamin pill, like the ones that came in the aid shipments.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Try it first. I don’t want you to be disgusted beforehand.”
“I won’t be.”
“It’s caviar,” Gaines said. “Fish eggs.”
“Hmm.”
Sarat tasted the caviar. It whispered to her tongue an awful, briny secret. It spoke of something very far away, fruit of alien trees. Instantly she loved it.
“Where did you get this?” she asked.
“The Russian Union,” Gaines said. “The other side of the world. A present from our friend Joe.”
He walked to the office’s small kitchenette. Sarat heard the tick-tick-tick of the toaster oven, and soon he returned with her favorite, honey on toast. He sat beside her and watched her eat. He seemed to have an endless capacity for watching.
“I have a new book for you,” he said. He went to the bookshelves and returned with a hardback. Sarat inspected the book. It was brand new, as though it had been published that day. The book was called A Northern Soldier’s Education in War and Peace. It had a picture of a handsome man on the cover. Most of the books Gaines had given her to read until then had nothing on their covers but the names of the authors and the names of the books. But on this one, the image of the man dominated the cover, as though his face itself were the subject of the book. The portrait of the man was cropped at his chest; Sarat saw the medals and marks of a military uniform on him.
“The man who wrote this book is named Joseph Weiland Jr.,” said Gaines. “He’s the son of the Blues’ most senior general.”
“What do I have to read a Northerner’s book for?” asked Sarat. “It’s all lies, anyway.”
Gaines pointed at the picture on the cover. “This man, quite recently, decided to run for office. And it’s customary that when a man like him runs for office, he puts a whole lot of words on a whole lot of pages and stamps his picture on the cover and sends it out into the world. That way, by the time election day comes around, a very well-manicured version of himself has already been foisted onto the people who do the electing.
“But that’s not why we read it. We read it because he’s our enemy. And half that book that’s supposed to be about him, it’s really about us, because we’re his enemy. We read it to read beneath it, and in doing so, find out what it is about us that scares him.”
Sarat watched Gaines intently. She loved to hear him speak, loved the cadence of his voice and the vast unseen world of which his diatribes so often hinted. Even when she lost track of what he meant, even when she failed entirely to understand him, she smiled and listened and wished only for more.
Gaines rose from the table. “I have one more thing for you,” he said.
He retrieved something from his briefcase. And then he was behind her, his hands and what they held brushing against her neck.
It was a hemp necklace, made of black and white and red threads purled tight. He clasped it around her neck and gave her a small hand mirror. She looked at her reflection; the necklace felt rough and worn against her skin.
“What’s it mean?” she asked.
“It used to belong to my daughter,” Gaines said. “I want you to have it.”
“Thank you.”
The girl looked in the mirror a while and for a moment she no longer saw the necklace, only the old man’s hands on her shoulders: the knuckles weathered and cracked, the fingernails cut down to the nub. His palms seemed to radiate and the heat slowly filled the space between Sarat’s shoulder blades and spilled down her back.
Before he let her leave, Gaines gave Sarat more envelopes to distribute among the refugees. He paid her in advance for the errands. She slipped the crisp Northerners’ currency into her messenger bag and bid her teacher goodbye. At night she made her rounds. By dawn she was back in her tent. There, for the last time in her life, she slept soundly.
WHEN SHE WOKE in the afternoon, Sarat saw her tent was empty, her mother and sister gone. She sat up and reached under her bed for the box of rations. She retrieved the tube of apricot gel from her bedside drawer and squeezed some of the saccharine paste into her mouth. A few minutes later the grogginess disappeared.
She changed into her jeans and an Orascom T-shirt and left the tent. Outside, the refugees were busy fixing their homes, assisted now by a few of the rebels. The smell of mildew hovered in the air but also the smell of steak and the sound of singing and pleasant, drunken conversation. All the acrimony of a day earlier seemed now to have melted away.
Men and women sat on chairs and tables made from sandbags, drinking Joyful and eating meat with their bare hands, the juice running down their chins. Sarat joined them for a few hours, and for a few hours she was well-fed and happy and a little drunk.
In the evening, after the alcohol had worn off, she walked north to check on her pet. When she arrived she saw the same empty tents of northern Alabama, but beyond them something was different.
The massive floodlights of the Blue checkpoint to the north were alight, their beams blanketing a million shadowed outlines in the ground ahead. Sarat hid behind one of the tents and peered out, watching.
She saw the men at the gate. Hundreds, perhaps a thousand, clad in black, their faces covered. They arrived in a sloppy formation of old trucks, carrying rifles and pistols and machetes. In the floodlight the men appeared as shifting inkblots, black limbs on black torsos. In their totality their movement was of a single squirming organism, writhing under and through the gashes in the fence. She saw them and at once she knew.
As the men approached, Sarat sneaked out from behind the tent and sprinted back into the heart of the camp. She ran in the shadow of the tents, faster than she’d ever run before, the air a maelstrom in her lungs. Where she saw men and women she screamed at them to run, to hide. She said the militias were coming, but no one seemed to listen.
As she approached her tent, Sarat heard the first crack of gunfire—not the distant rifle shots she’d become acquainted with over the years, but a close burst, a deafening metal rattle. And then she heard shouting; a high-pitched scream; more shots, this time closer.
Sarat burst through the door to find her sister sitting on the bed, tablet in hand. She was watching footage of a charity concert in Kennesaw to benefit the Mothers of the Southern Republic. The old country star Cherylene Cee sang her hit song. Dana sat on the bed, eating Virginia oranges and singing along.
“You remember how we used to go nuts for her, back when we were little?” Dana said. Then she saw her sister’s face. “What’s wrong?”
“The militias are here,” said Sarat. “They broke through the northern gate.”
“How many?” asked Dana.
“Hundreds. Get up, quickly. Where’s Mama?”
“I don’t know. Playing cards at Erica Yarber’s tent, maybe. Maybe out with Lara. I don’t know, I don’t know.”
Sarat grabbed her sister by the arm and together they ran from the tent. Outside, the sound of gunfire echoed, its source ever closer. Some of the refugees stepped out of their tents and asked about the commotion, but this time Sarat said nothing.
She led her sister to the administrative building’s side door, and unlocked it with Albert Gaines’s key. She locked the door behind them and they ran down the stairs to the office in the basement, turning the hallway lights off as they went.
When they were inside the office, Sarat and Dana pushed one of the large bookshelves against the office’s front door, and then the table against the bookshelf. Sarat turned off the lights in the room. She led her sister to the closet, and then made to leave.
“No, no, you can’t go out there,” Dana said, holding on to her sister’s arm.
“I gotta go find Mama,” Sarat replied. “I’ll nudge the shelf and the table enough to open the door a little, and then you push it closed behind me.”
“Please, please,” Dana begged. “You know you won’t find her before they find you. They’ll kill you out there. I can’t lose my whole family, I can’t lose everyone I love. Please don’t go out there.”
Sarat looked at her sister, astounded not by the black-glistened tears on her face or the panic in her voice, but at the dark calculation she’d already made. Sarat led her sister into the closet; they huddled together on the floor.
The gunfire grew closer, screams drowned in its echo. It came at times in a rapid back-and-forth. Sometimes there were only single shots, or a parade of single shots, short silences between them.
The sounds continued into the night. Then in the earliest morning hours came a brief pause. And in that silence Dana, exhausted and delirious with fear, slept.
Sarat remained by her sister’s side. In the blackness the twins were only the hushed sigh of their breathing, the rise and fall of their chests. Outside, the sound of gunfire had faded but there were still other sounds.
Sarat listened: boots against dirt; a militiaman asking something unintelligible and his superior responding: you know exactly what to do; the sounds of pleading, of cursing; a line of feet shuffling in unison, drawn closer, closer, ordered to kneel; more pleading, a man saying: I’m not with them, I swear, I swear. His voice coming through the walls of the building in which Sarat hid, clear as though he were pressed against it. Then nothing. Then a line of single gunshots, one after the other. Then nothing.
The shots were closer than any that had come before, and for a moment Sarat believed the men had entered the building.
If it’s going to happen, then let it happen, she thought, but I won’t die crouching.
She eased quietly away from her sleeping sister. She pulled her folding knife from her pocket and stood up. She eased the office door open just enough to slide through, then she closed it behind her.
The corridor that led from the office to the stairs was dark and the walk seemed endless. As she approached the door, she tried to imagine what the killers looked like. She pictured them as the Northerners she’d seen on television, who always appeared tall and muscular, their complexions ghostly. In her mind they were of a different breed, a different species.
She climbed the stairs to the building’s side door and she put her ear to the door and listened. There was no sound. She opened the door and peered outside.
For a moment she believed she’d mistimed the day. She had thought it was two or three in the morning, the slaughter closing in on its twenty-fourth hour. But the sky above was midday bright.
Then the light began to fade, quickly, giving way to a black sky. It stayed dark until, from somewhere far to the north, she heard the whistling arc of another flare, and soon the fraudulent daytime illuminated the camp once more.
Sarat walked slowly, keeping near the wall. There were sounds of men cursing in the distance to the southeast and southwest, in Georgia and South Carolina. There were sounds of chaos too: of tents being torn apart, of women muffled mid-scream. Sounds of gunfire, but not as rapid or sustained as it was a day earlier.
A great fire burned in the gut of the Alabama slice. The flames curled around plumes of black smoke. There were men in the distance, burning bodies. They brought kindling in the form of tent covers and clothes and mattresses. The fire skipped and cracked and traced higher and higher into the sky.
Sarat turned the corner to find a line of bound corpses near the wall. They were men, young and old. They’d been lined up against the wall on their knees, and where the bullets had gone through them there were splatters of dull red on the wall.
Sarat stood frozen. She looked at the bodies. Most lay flat on their fronts or on their sides facing away from her, but those she could see had grotesque, unrecognizable faces, cracked open at the forehead, contorted in silent agony.
The bodies made damp pools in the dusty ground. There was a heat to them. Sarat felt it against her skin, damp and real as steam from a boiling pot. She knew what it was. It was the heat of life extinguished. The heat of something leaving.
In the mass of crumpled bodies she saw a face she recognized. It was Eli, the Virginia Cavalier she’d seen when she went to talk to her brother. Quickly, the faces surrounding him began to register in her memory: they were rebels from her brother’s clan.
Suddenly all her courage disappeared. She stood paralyzed with terror, incapable of unseeing the pile of corpses at her feet, among whom she was now certain her dead brother lay. The sounds of burning and of screaming and of killing continued relentless around her, the sky overhead beating dark and light like God’s great heart itself.
The sound of men approaching from behind the far corner of the wall shook her from her paralysis. She knew from the soft thud of their boots and from their voices that they were militiamen. She heard one of them say: “They said there’s no rules before sunrise. It’s all ours till then.”
She knew that when they turned the corner they’d see her. Without thinking, she fell to the ground. She wriggled into the mass of dead men, camouflaged herself within it. The heat that had touched her body now wrapped itself around her, sunk into her pores. She lay among the blood and sweat and shit and piss of the murdered. She thought nothing of the fluid that seeped into her clothes, or of the odor or of anything except her small desperate prayer: Please God, don’t let them see me. Don’t let them kill me.
She held her breath. The boot steps grew nearer.
She waited, unmoving as the dead that surrounded her. The men passed.
In the stillness that followed she heard another sound, close by in the tents across the road. It was the sound of guttural heaving, the crack of bone on bone. When that sound subsided there was another scream cut in half.
From a sliver of sight between the limbs of the dead, Sarat saw a man leave the tent across the road. He wore black jeans and a black shirt untucked. His balaclava hung limp from his pants pocket.
She saw his face. He looked no different than the men who lived in the camp. He looked no different than anyone Sarat had ever seen. He was of the same species, the same breed.
She lay frozen in place and watched the man walk in the direction of Georgia, where there was now another pyre aflame. When he was gone and she heard no more boot steps, Sarat rose and ran in the direction of the tent from which the man had just emerged.
Inside she saw a woman named Sabrina, a refugee from Mississippi, a survivor of the firebombing of Hopewell. She recognized her despite the bloody, swollen pulp of her face. The woman’s jaw had been shifted violently to the right, the skin around her eyes made puffy and purple. She lay on the floor of her tent with her skirt hiked high and her stomach butterflied open. Her chest moved.
When the woman caught sight of Sarat she raised her hand and beckoned her to come close. Sarat took the woman’s hand and sat beside her. The canvas beneath her was soaked. The woman moaned and said a word Sarat could not understand. She took it as a pleading for comfort and, not knowing what else to do, Sarat reached for a nearby charity blanket and covered the woman’s gaping stomach. The woman muttered the same word a few more times and then fell silent.
Sarat remained inside the tent. She held the woman’s hand but the hand was now simply weight. She listened as the men returned north toward the gate from which they’d first entered. They passed close to her tent. It seemed an endless procession, thousands strong. She imagined them not as men, not even as human, but as a dark, daylong season: a primal winter.
When the boot steps had passed and there was only the distant crackling of fires, Sarat peered out the tent’s front door. She saw the wall where the pile of bodies lay.
Then came a straggler, a young militiaman with his rifle slung loose over his shoulder. As he passed the dead men he stopped and faced the wall and unzipped his pants and began to urinate.
Sarat watched. She pulled her knife from her pocket and unfolded it. She walked outside, toward the man, who had his back to her. She was no longer afraid. She moved as a wraith, a cold conflagration in the skin of a girl. She approached the man and when she was upon him she reached around his neck and slashed open his throat.
The man reached for her arm and caught it. She pushed him against the wall. They both fell, she on top of him, he on top of the corpses. A cascade of blood erupted from where she’d cut him open. She pinned him down and kept slashing, the neck slippery now with blood. Soon the man stopped fighting, but she kept moving the knife back and forth, back and forth, until she hit something deep within the body she could not sever. She screamed. She stabbed at the back of his head and when the knife hit the hard bone of the skull it held. Sarat’s left hand slipped from the bloody handle and slid down the blade, cutting a deep gash across her palm. The pain was anesthetic. The heat of life left the man but this time Sarat did not feel it.
THE FREE SOUTHERNERS ARRIVED at dawn: a convoy of soldiers dispatched from Atlanta. They rumbled through the gates and into the camp. Behind them came trucks and aid buses bearing the symbol of the Red Crescent, and behind those came a couple of journalists.
The soldiers disembarked from their trucks. They were boys and young men, many of them having never seen a day of fighting. They walked among the corpses and the pyres, dumbfounded, their weapons drawn at phantoms. Quietly, the foreign observers and the journalists began to count and document the dead.
The sun rose over Patience. The survivors, some mutilated, others dumb with shock, crawled from their hiding places and the places where they’d been discarded. The staff who’d hidden in the administrative building emerged holding the flag of the Red Crescent above them, screaming their affiliation.
Sarat walked around the building and when the Reds saw her they raised their weapons and told her not to move. One of the soldiers ordered her to get down on her knees. Sarat stood, soaked in blood.
When one of the camp’s staff saw her she told the soldiers to lower their weapons.
“She’s one of the refugees, she’s one of the refugees,” the woman said, rushing toward the girl.
“Sarat, honey, put that knife down,” the woman said. “It’s done. It’s over.”
Sarat turned her gaze from the boys and their guns to the woman. She pushed the woman aside and walked into the administrative building. She descended the stairs and walked to the office where her sister hid. She knocked on the door three times, then twice, then once—a secret knock they’d shared for years. Slowly there came a shuffling sound from the other side of the door.
“It’s me,” Sarat said. “They’re gone.”
Dana opened the door slowly. She saw her sister.
“Oh God,” she said. “What did they do to you?”
“Let’s go,” Sarat replied.
She led her sister out of the building. The Southern soldiers were in the courtyard, putting out the fires and searching the tents.
The soldiers covered the bodies and what was left of them with white cloth and then placed them on stretchers and carried those stretchers to the beds of the waiting trucks. Men with masks over their mouths and noses kept a tally on clipboards. The journalists took pictures of the dead and asked questions of the survivors, who looked straight through them with flint-lacquered eyes. The handful of unharmed survivors were ushered quickly onto waiting buses.
When she saw the carnage, Dana screamed. Sarat took her in her arms and buried her head against her chest.
“They killed them, didn’t they?” Dana cried. “Mama and Simon. They killed them.”
Sarat guided her sister in the direction of one of the buses, where a handful of survivors sat in silence.
“Go with them,” Sarat said. “If Mama and Simon are alive, I’ll find them. If they’re dead, I’ll find them.”
One of the surviving camp workers came to where the twins stood. “You can’t stay, Sarat,” she said.
“I’m gonna bury my people,” Sarat replied.
“The soldiers are taking care of them. They’ll be treated with respect. But you have to leave here, Sarat. It’s not safe—they might come back.”
“I’m staying. If you don’t like it, have them shoot me.”
Sarat turned to her sister. “We’ll be together again soon, I promise.”
Dana retrieved a handkerchief from her pocket and tied it around the wound on Sarat’s left palm. She hugged her sister.
“Beautiful girl,” she said.
Dana boarded the bus. Sarat walked to Mississippi, toward the smoldering remains of a fire. She walked past the tents, many of them slashed open, their doors broken down. She choked on the smell of burning.
She reached her own tent. The door had been kicked open and the Chestnuts’ belongings lay strewn on the beds and on the floor. But there was nobody inside.
Sarat crossed the dirt footpath to another tent down the way, the place where she believed her mother might have gone the night before to see her friends. Here too the door had been broken open.
Sarat paused at the threshold. She tried to steel herself for what she might find inside, tried to preemptively imagine her mother’s body, the life gone from it. But she was incapable of making herself imagine it. Instead, her mind recoiled and offered only a feeble, child’s defense: My mother cannot be dead because she is my mother. Everyone else can die but not my mother.
Sarat stepped inside the tent. There was blood on the floor and blood on the walls, but there were no bodies.
Outside, by the tent’s broken door, she saw lines in the dirt. Wide swaths, like the beginnings of infant canals. Without following the trails, she knew where they would lead. In the distance, not far away, smoldered the blackened remains of a large and dying fire.
THE SOLDIERS WORKED QUIETLY. She worked alongside them, numb to the world around her. She helped cover the dead in white cloth and carry them to the waiting trucks. The bodies were placed atop the beds and when the beds were full the trucks were dispatched south and new ones came to take their place. By nightfall the murdered had been cleared and the fires quenched and the survivors dispatched to some far-off hospital.
Most of the soldiers were ordered back to Atlanta but some were left to stand guard over Patience. The ones who were ordered to remain cursed their luck for having to spend the night in the camp. The dead were gone but the smell of them lingered. The echoes of them lingered.
Sarat walked north. In Alabama there were also soldiers stationed at the now gutted fence but one was asleep in his chair and the other was watching a movie on his tablet and neither noticed her presence. The soldiers seemed certain the men who’d done the killing would not return. In the distance behind them the floodlights of the Blues, so bright one night ago, were dark.
Sarat entered the tent in which she and Marcus had kept their pets. She saw that the mouse had fled, but Cherylene the turtle remained in her pen.
She picked the animal up, but it did not retreat. She walked with it back to the center of the camp and placed it on the seat of the last remaining bus. There were only a few people left in the camp now: men and women with gloves and face masks who continued to document the killings. They took pictures of bullet holes in the sides of the buildings, of dried stains in the dirt.
Sarat returned to Albert Gaines’s office. She closed the door behind her. In the camp the smell was of fire smoke but in this room it was of other things: fine wood and old ink on paper and patent shoes and well-ironed suits.
Sarat closed the door behind her. She tore the maps from the walls. She flipped the table. She pushed the bookshelves over and pulled the fine prewar suits from their hangers and smashed the plates on the floor. She ripped apart the old antique books, shredded their pages and broke their spines. Then she sat on the floor and wept.
In a while the door opened and Albert Gaines entered the room. He stepped over the broken bookshelves and around the upturned table and sat on the floor opposite Sarat. He appeared as though from another world, his prewar suit immaculate, untouched by dirt or blood.
“I came as soon as I heard,” he said. “Did your family survive?”
“My mother’s dead, but I can’t find her body,” Sarat said. “My brother’s dead, but I can’t find his body.”
“They call themselves the Twenty-first Indiana,” Gaines said. “They’re a militia, not enlisted, but there’s no doubt the Blue commanders knew what they…”
“Stop talking about them,” Sarat said. “I don’t wanna hear about them anymore. I don’t wanna read about them or memorize their capitals or learn how they did us wrong.”
“Then what do you want to do?” Gaines asked.
“I want to kill them.”
Sarat buried her head in her hands. She never saw the faint smile that, in that moment, crossed her teacher’s lips.
Excerpted from:WAR OFFICE—FINAL COMPENSATION RULING ARCHIVE
Case Number: 091682
Applicant Name: Chestnut, Martina (Deceased/NOK Application)
CASE SUMMARY:
A) Claim Agreement
The Final Compensation Ruling issued by the Condolence Payment Department of the Joint Compensation Office (hereinafter referred to as “Payer”) is issued under the Domestic Claims Act in the case of MARTINA CHESTNUT and 3 dependents (1 FA Male; 2 Pre-FA Female) (hereinafter referred to as “Payee”). The Ruling is accepted by both parties and constitutes final and irrevocable settlement in relation to the incident outlined in Section B. The Ruling and claim payment determination are made at the sole discretion of the Payer and are nonnegotiable.
B) Incident Details
Payee was impacted by an incident at a Red Crescent–administered Mississippi refugee facility (“Camp Patience”). As determined by the Investigation Office, the incident is classified as Class 2—Serious; Contained. Incident Attribution is Other/Undefined.
C) Nature of injuries
Chestnut, Martina (FA Female): Deceased
Chestnut, Simon (FA Male): Displacement; Class 1 Injury (Head)
Chestnut, Dana (Pre-FA Female): Displacement
Chestnut, Sara (Pre-FA Female): Displacement; Class 4 Injury (Left Hand)
D) Payment Schedule
Payee is hereby granted residence allotment (Charity House 027, Lincolnton, Georgia) for Displacement (3 or more). Payee is also granted $5000 for Death. Payee is also granted $2500 for Class 1 Injury. Payee is also granted $100 for Class 4 injury.
E) Release and Withdrawal
This Ruling implies no admission of fault by any arm or agency of the Federal Government (See Appendix A “Gesture of Regret Policy: Terms and Conditions”). The Payee hereby relinquishes any right of recourse in relation to this matter.